Clicks and Bits

With two kids under 2 years old, we’ve started planning for their futures. My wife and I think it is important to make sure a college fund is set up for each of them and to instill upon them personal finance habits that will hopefully keep them from making some of the mistakes we made growing up.

On my feed reader lately:

Get Rich Slowly
The Simple Dollar
Conquer Your Debt

On a related note, I ran across a personal finance application for the Mac today: Cha-Ching. It shows some promise of eventually giving the only real application for the Mac, the horribly bug-ridden Quicken, a run for their money. It is currently in beta (0.4 release) but they are running special pricing of $14.95 to fund future development. Purchasers during the special beta pricing will receive free updates forever. I bought mine and I’d suggest others do the same if your in market for such a program.

Movie: Miami Vice (Unrated Director’s Cut)
My Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Where to start? Overall, Miami Vice the film captured the theme of the TV show very well. Reading some of the reviews at the time of the theatrical release, I think most people tend to forget that the TV show did have a dark tone to it, yet some of reviewers seemed to think the movie lacked enough action to be an action flick and toiled too long in darkness to be a serious drama. Writer/Director Michael Mann seemed to take the brunt of the criticism with comparisons to his other works.

If I can find fault with the Miami Vice, Jaime Foxx was obviously restrained in his roll at Tubbs - which given what he has been able to do on screen in other films was disappointing. Colin Farrell was decent in his roll as Crockett, but the supporting cast really brought the film to life.

I’ve watched Miami Vice twice now and will admit that the second time through did improve the viewing. If you caught it in the theaters and were on the fence, I’d recommend giving it a second look. With repeat viewability being part of my score, it added the .5 to my rating which would have otherwise been a 3.

I researched for months before jumping in on this 42″ Plasma TV from Panasonic. The 2006 is the same model - in a different case - that received a best buy rating from Consumer Reports in 2005. The picture is stunning and the wide range of visibility provided by Plasma screens fits our living room perfectly.

The settings out of the box are a bit muted for normal viewing, but thanks to PlasmaTVBuyingGuide.com, the following fixed things up beautifully:

Picture Mode: Standard
Picture: +22
Brightness: +8
Color: -1
Tint: -4
Sharpness: -14
Color Temperature: Warm

Best of all, Amazon has this set at $1299as of this writing.

“If you don’t do it this year, you will be one year older when you do.”
-Warren Miller

Movie: Superman Returns (DVD - Widescreen Edition)
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Superman Returns gives a valiant effort to match the original Superman movies. The original Superman and Superman II with the late Christopher Reeves are classics, but I’d put peg Superman Returns right up there with them.

There was a bit of a lull early in the movie setting up Lex Luthor’s plot with Lois Lane on the trail of the blackout but the pace quickly picks up.

Since this is the first movie I’ve posted on Clicks and Bits, my rating is based on a subjective combination of Entertainment Value, Repeat Viewing Factor, Plot Continuity, and Basic Production Quality. My name isn’t Roger Ebert or Richard Roeper and my Rating may not be an indicator of how good a movie really is.

boddit.com is a site that finds the best deals from the bargain hunting web sites.

One of the sites I write for regularly has a rather large visitor base, 5k daily uniques to the site and over 2k rss feed subscribers. We’ve always published a full article feed for the convenience of our readers but in the last year we have constantly battled splogs - spam blogs who exist only to aggregate others’ feeds for monetization purposes.

We’ve experimented with few different tactics, but lately have settled on “poisoning” the feed with blatant copyright information with links back to our site and requests to inform us if they find our feed on a non-approved site:

© 2006 thesiteinquestion.com. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at may be guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@thesiteinquestion.com so we can take the appropriate legal action.

While it may be a minor inconvenience to our subscribers reading our feed in their own feed reader, it amounts to 2-3 lines of text following some white space at the end of each post and should be fairly unobtrusive.

Another tactic we’ve tried in the past is stuffing hidden links in our feed. Taking a page out of the link-spamming technique of including a hidded div and creating keyword rich links to domains that feed into affiliate programs. While this was highly successful in creating backlinks to sites (blackhat SEO Tip to think about), many of the web-based feed readers were running into display problems with the hidden div (namely bloglines.com). We’ve since discontinued the practice until we can perfect a way to avoid the display issues.

I hate splogs.

A friend asked me what WordPress Plugin I use in a typical install. For your enjoyment:

Feedburner Plugin
Feedburner Feed Replacement which forwards all feed traffic to your Feedburner feed without the need to mess with your .htaccess file.

Google Sitemaps
Now that Yahoo and MSN have agreed to start using the XML-based sitemap structure implemented by Google, most sites will benefit from creating a Sitemap file.

WordPress Database Backup
Included in the default installation of 2.x and up. Backup, Backup, Backup. I run nightly backups of all the Wordpress-based sites I’m involved with and dump them to a dedicated gmail account.

Optimal Title
If you have any interest in getting traffic to your site from search engines, use Optimal Title. Google has a nasty habit of dropping pages from a basic WordPress installation into their supplemental index because of the way WordPress titles pages. Using Optimal Title to list the entry title followed by the blog name is one way to avoid the supplemental mess.

Spam Karma 2
There are Akismet fans and Spam Karma fans. Spam Karma is more than adequate for the sites I’m involved with. Akismet is included by default and the ultra-paranoid will have no problems running both together.

Statcounter for Wordpress
Statcounter for WP drops the Statcounter tracking code in the footer of all pages in your site. Best of all, it is a text box-based append so you could also use this to add whatever tracking program you use - not just Statcounter.

Related Entries
Related Entries encourages stickiness by adding related links to previous entries in your posts.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
UTW is the “multi-headed hydra of a plugin.” Tags have become ever so popular and with UTW you can tag your entries, keep things organized, or include the AJAXy search box which is also included.

There are few others I use a on regular basis, but the above represent my most often used. Your mileage may vary.

Hilarious advertising parody tied into cheesy 70’s porn flick. Reach & Frequency was a video produced by the now-defunct agency, Elvis & Bonaparte, for the Portland Ad Federation Rosie awards back around 1999/2000. I thought it was lost to the ages, but it recently resurfaced.

I’m running a search experiment for the following term, sprayflex. I’ve targeted a brand name with only about 1100 search results on Google. (see sprayflex starting SERPS).