Reaper-X » Personal

My deepest condolences to all the earthquake victims in Padang

Reaper-X — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:12:14 +0000

Just in case you didn’t know, there was actually a powerful earthquake hits Padang, Indonesia yesterday (and also two days ago). And according to Wikipedia page

The 2009 Padang earthquake occurred just off the southern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The major shock hit at 17:16:10 local time on September 30, 2009 (10:16:10 UTC, September 30). It registered a moment magnitude of 7.6 making it similar in size to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1935 Quetta earthquake, the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. The epicenter was 45 kilometres (28 mi) west-northwest of Padang, Sumatra, and 220 kilometres (140 mi) southwest of Pekanbaru, Sumatra. At least 1100 people were killed as a result, with thousands more trapped in collapsed buildings.

A second earthquake, which measured 6.6 Mw, struck the province of Jambi in central Sumatra, 08:52:29 local time on 1 October 2009 at a depth of 15 kilometres (9.3 mi), about 46 kilometres south-east of Sungaipenuh. It is not yet clear whether the two events are related.

And by posting this i’d like to send my deepest condolences to all the victims affected by yesterday earthquake that happen in Padang, Indonesia and hope that such disaster will never happen again

p.s in case you didn’t know this also, actually one month ago Bandung (and also several other cities as well) also got hits by powerful earthquake, and obviously i’m experiencing that powerful earthquake (but Thanks God, i’m still alive)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Personal

Site redesign finished

Reaper-X — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:18:33 +0000

Okay so finally my site get redesigned for about the 4th times if i recall it correctly lol, and hopefully this time the design looks much nicer compared to the old design. And obviously since i’m not a designer (and can’t use photoshop either or any other graphic editing tools) so i think compared to a design made by a designer this new layout is nothing (and obviously the color scheme used is going to be a lot better than this). Although i think this design looks good compared to before, but everyone has their own opinion … but anyway, let’s keep that aside shall we? because by posting this, i just want to highlights the most important things that has been changed

1. Unlike the previous comment system, the new comment support Threaded comment which means you can reply directly to the previous commenter and your reply will be shown directly below it
2. The new comment system now displayed in descending order, and so … new comment will be displayed first while the old comment displayed last
3. The Contact page now using Recaptcha … to (perhaps) reduce the spam delivered to my inbox (i’m sorry for this, because i’ve been receiving lots of spam to my inbox lately)
4. Utilize CoralCDN completely to serve static files such as images to reduce load (although this is just a small site and i rarely use images, but hey it’s still better right? than serving everything from this small vps) :D …

As for the other things, well … since i’m using various free icons from the web, and also with the help from my friend on creating that cursed rounded corner (so it’ll looks web 2.0–ish … at least that’s what they think), i’m going to create a separate page to give them a proper credits :)

With the above said, and redesigning site is also finished … now i can continue on writing new post :D … and my next post would be using CoralCDN to save your bandwidth and … also resources perhaps :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Personal

Sourceforge SVN don’t like slow connection?

Reaper-X — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 09:35:32 +0000

I’m not sure whether anyone else who are currently stuck with a slow connection speed also get An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host message whenever you tried to retrieve a big file (svn update / checkout) from Sourceforge SVN Repository over the last few weeks or is it just me who get that message?

So far:

– I’ve tried updating the subversion client on my machine to 1.5.3 (command line version) and still i get the same message
– Change the svn address to http instead of https to get more speed and still nothing
– Doing a fresh checkout instead of upgrade just in case that’s the source of the problem and the result is still same

And finally ….

I have tried searching around the web for the solution but still haven’t found anything useful (i thought that perhaps i need to tweak something on the client side despite the error message says the connection was forcibly closed by the remote host simply because i can fetch the file to my server without problem … but well this server connection speed can’t be compared to my connection speed)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Personal

My Google Pagerank just dropped

Reaper-X — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:07:32 +0000

It seems that i didn’t pay enough attention at all to check the pagerank value of this site because i just noticed that this site PR (Google Pagerank) dropped from 5 to 4 today after reading various website that says their site Google Pagerank dropped, lol

Back then Google assigned a PR 5 to this site early this year in January 2007 when there was a Google Pagerank Export update going on, but it seems that this site no longer receive that PR 5 again since last month update (October 2007)

Based on what i’ve read on various web sites (such as Techcrunch and Andybeard), most of the sites that lose their pagerank usually caused by selling text link ads on their web site (via direct advertising or third party broker such as text link ads). But i’m 99% sure that this site doesn’t sell any link and all links placed on this site are genuine (back then i have 1 – 3 text link ads placed on some post but since i never earn money from it, i’ve removed it since looong time ago) and just in case you didn’t know a lot of them are complaining because of this issue, and probably because they think if they lose their pagerank they’ll lose their traffic too or my best guess is they complain that if their site pagerank dropped they can’t sell text link ads anymore because of their low pagerank value

So what might be the source of the problem that caused this site pagerank to be dropped ? the only thing i can guess is that most of the site that link to this site gets their pagerank value dropped by Google, because i never bought any link on another website, never sell links (except for once but that’s a loong time ago but i never make any money from it because i coulnd’t reach the minimum payout and that’s why i choose to removed it)

But does this site lose it’s traffic ? … Thanks God … the answer is no, in fact this site traffic for October 2007 increased by 150,183 in pageviews and also gets an increased in terms of returning visitors compared to previous month (September) ! and here’s a screenshot just in case you want to see it directly (using my Google Analytics account because Google analytics often give you the lowest results compared to other site tracking service, for example my wordpress.com stats tracking account, though there’re no big differences between it … because my wordpress.com account says this site receives 353,278 views for October 2007)

October 2007 Site Statistic :

So the question is … should you worry about your pagerank ? … the answer is of course depend on whether you are using your site pagerank to earn you some money by selling text link ads or not :) but of course if your site loses it’s traffic because of pagerank drop that’s another story, but i always believe that if you put your site visitors above anything else, eventually you’ll see the result of your hard work :)

At last just in case you didn’t know (based on what i saw that most people seems to forget about this because all they do is just blaming the recent Google Pagerank update / export) …

Actually pagerank value gets updated more often than you think before you can see the actual value / exported data in Google Toolbar (if you are using this) or in any other site that offers pagerank checking or various seo tools that is updated 3 months or probably more which mean the pagerank value you saw is different from the pagerank value that is stored in internal Google machines … just as Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) said :

I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users (see the question below for more details on the timing).

0x87485B96 | Tags : Personal, Website

Why you shouldn’t trust screenshots showing online earning report

Reaper-X — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:57:05 +0000

Wondering why you shouldn’t trust any screenshot (note: screenshot is not a photo of you with your check of course) that shows you a screenshot about someone else earning report (in this case online income report) … such as from their affiliate earnings report, adsense report, etc ? The answer is simply because they can always create a fake screenshot about their online earning report ;)

Want to see an example ? Here’s of what a perfect adsense report look like

Now if only there’s someone that could achieve that perfect score :P

The commonly used technique to create a fake screenshot is simply by saving the webpage they’re currently viewing and later they’ll edit the source code manually and then they just need to open their newly edited webpage and then fake the address bar so they’re showing the correct url for their online report and finally take a screenshot showing their big online income (in most case, i often saw people prefer not to show their address bar directly, so i don’t think it’s necessary for you to show the address bar) :P

But what if you’re using Mozilla Firefox as your primary Internet Browser ? then you can use the Firebug extension to simplify things without saving that page locally first as shown on below image, or you can also use Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox

0x87485B96 | Tags : Making Money, Personal

Microformats for casual / normal internet surfer, useful or useless ?

Reaper-X — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:06:24 +0000

I’ve been thinking on using Microformats on this blog for a while after reading Lorelle’s post about this topic on her blog. Although implementing microformats on wordpress theme can be considered as an easy task, but i’m just wondering whether using microformats on this blog is really that useful, considering most of this site visitors can be considered as normal internet surfer. Other than that, currently enabling microformats on your website doesn’t really give you benefit from the SEO point of view (and SEO is important to drive people to your site via search engine)

Based from what i’ve read so far, it seems that currently Search Engine doesn’t really care whether you use microformats on your site or not, and like most of you already know that most casual or normal internet users use search engine to find your site. And when i’m saying about search engine they just using normal search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, and some small search engine (although those big 4, plays the important part on driving traffic to your site) …

Well, I’m afraid to say that this answer is very simple. Currently microformats affect SEO the same way content on your website affects it. From a web crawlers perspective there is currently no distinguishing factor between a microformat and standard content on your website. Why is this? Well, microformats are composed of common XHTML attributes and tags of information that are used in a standardized way, therefore engines such as Google and Yahoo treat it as exactly that, standard information.

Though it may change in the future …

So the question is … do microformats useful for normal internet surfer who’s not using Del.icio.us, know nothing about Digg or similar website ? i dont think so …

0x87485B96 | Tags : Opinion, Personal

Google slow to load …

Reaper-X — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:25:13 +0000

Just when i thought i’m the only person who’s experiencing this problem, someone create a new thread over at Digital Point forums saying that he’s also experiencing slow loading problem when accessing various Google services such as Adsense, GMail, Adwords or the Google Search itself

All the Google features such as GMail, Adwords, Adsense, and just plain old Google Search have been lagging a little more than usual for me. Google has something going on. I think soon Google will surprise us with a bunch of new features. Just be patient all you PR fanatics! Can you say algorythm update!

With the exception that i don’t think there’s PR Update going on … i just think that there’re some network issues somewhere. Other than that i also noticed a slow loading time when accessing my adsense account page or searching the web using Google although i don’t really have problem with the GMail or Adwords simply because i don’t use it (well i’m using Google hosted email and using POP3 to retrieve all emails)

I don’t know if it’s just me or does anyone else who visited this site also experience delay especially at the Javascript part which is comes from the Google CSE, but recently i’ve been thinking on moving the Javascript over to this site … but i’m not sure whether if it’s going to break Google rules or not (i know that this vps is nothing compared to the Google server, but it just bothering me because whenever i try to access this site, i always see some delay when loading the Google CSE Javascript code)

Forum Discussion over at DigitalPoint

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Journal, Personal

Indonesian paypal users now can withdraw funds too

Reaper-X — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:48:44 +0000

I just noticed today that paypal now allowed Indonesian paypal users to receive money using their paypal account (previously Paypal can only be used to send money only)

While this can be considered as good news especially to those who’s participating in online business (read: making money online), but if it’s for me … i’m still not sure if i can use that withdraw function yet

Based from the description on Paypal website, they says that you’ll need US Bank account in order to withdraw funds from your paypal account, and when they says a US Bank account, a bank account located in United States :(

As you can see from the above image, the country name can’t be changed … so that mean the withdraw paypal funds to US Bank option can still be considered as useless as for now (at least for me)

But what about the withdraw to credit card option ? … since i’m still not sure whether i can use my credit card to receive funds from my paypal account or not … i can’t really talk to much about it … my best option for now is to contact my local bank where i get my credit card, and ask them directly about it

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, Opinion, Personal

Sorry folks … i’m back to using summary feeds …

Reaper-X — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:08:16 +0000

So today i just found out that some of my popular articles got scrapped again by other website, and what makes it worse is … that scrapper website is stealing this site article (although they put a link back to this site) but … with a nofollow tag attached to the link ! and of course they also use adsense to monetize their site

To be honest i do not have problem with automated content scrapper (read my site terms of use), as long as they give me credits and in this case by simply putting a link back here without the nofollow tag … simple isn’t it ?

Using automated scrapper tools, and combining it with the nofollow tag is just the same as stealing the article without giving the author a single credit plus without doing any work at all, if this site is at the same level as other big website then i don’t have problem with it simply because many people know the original source of the article (but most people simply won’t bother to click on it)

But things i hate most is … they try to monetize their site by placing adsense ads all over their page and don’t even bother to give the original author a credit

I guess that’s all for today rants, i’m going back to use the summary feeds only …

0x87485B96 | Tags : Journal, Opinion, Personal

What’s wrong with Akismet ?

Reaper-X — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:21:34 +0000

I just don’t understand … how come i’m as the owner of this blog / website get marked as spam whenever i tried to reply to the comment(s) posted by this site visitors …

Another case is … when i’m trying to test posting a comment to my own local server which is obviously can’t be accessed by anyone, by simply using Test as nickname, with test@test.com as it’s email address and http://test.com as the url address .. it’s still being marked as spam ! and with 192.168.3.1 as it’s ip address !

At first i thought that the ip address that i’m currently using (i’m on dynamic ip address) already marked as spammers ip by akismet, but if local ip address gets marked as spam, i’m sure there’s something more to it (like user agent detection, referer, etc)

I know that you can mark yourself as not spam, so that Akismet can learn to fix it’s mistake … but perhaps it’d be better if Akismet check if the user already logged-in or has administrative privilege and automatically bypassing the spam checking mechanism for that user

Perhaps … it’s just me … but after getting marked as spam and need to unmark myself for about 4 – 5 times today, and that’s not including yesterday … i feel kinda bored about it … beside when i gets marked as spam, i didn’t put any links on my comment

0x87485B96 | Tags : Opinion, Personal, Wordpress