smart computer use?

Ok, so I’ve recently started submitting some articles to articles directories. The main article directories that I have focused on to this point have been GoArticles.com and EzineArticles.com.

I think between those two I have picked the most spammy and one of the least spammy directories, so it’s been interesting to see the differences.

GoArticles.com results

So far I have seen my first article submitted to GoArticles.com picked up by a few blog sites that look like they get their entire content base from GoArticles.com. Interesting. I am hoping that after a while that I can start to get some articles out on some better, more established web sites. But, I suppose I’ll have to go straight to the source (as in submitting directly to targeted web sites) to get that to happen. Who knows though, it’s only been a couple days.

The ease of getting articles live on GoArticles.com is just too appealing, no matter how cheesy and spammy that site might seem.

EzineArticles.com results

At first I had to sit and wait for a few days to see any activity on my EzineArticles.com article submissions. The first article that started to get through their editorial review actually got rejected. The reason was because I was using too high density of a target keyword. I can see their point, but honestly it was very hard to rewrite that article using that particular keyword less, just because of the nature of the article content. Once I had edited the article down to use the keyword less (I thought it was harder to understand after the editing) I re-submitted the article and now it appears that it might get approved.

That was interesting.

Also, my other 3 articles appear to now be passing through the editorial process as well, so I hope to have my first 4 articles on EzineArticles.com shortly.

Fun stuff.

Time to start writing some more articles.

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So… Google now has it’s own mobile phone. The Google G1. Yeah. I guess I’m not really that excited personally. I thought that the iPhone and Blackberry were good enough options for smartphones myself.

So what’s the big deal about the Google G1 phone?

According to the Guardian, the G1 is faster at downloading from the internet. Here’s some other comments about the operating system, which I found to be interesting:

The real difference between the two devices, however, is likely to come from the openness of Google’s operating system, called Android, which enables tech-heads to design ‘widgets’ for the phone. There is a button on the G1 that takes users to an application marketplace (think iTunes without the music) where they can download anything from a virtual compass to a barcode reader that uses the phone’s camera to read barcodes on items and then connects to the internet to find the cheapest price for them.

This seems to be a key point. The possibilities are endless when an open platform is available.

Another common thought that is flying about right now is that the G1 isn’t very visually sleek. From USA Today:

That said, in an era when good looks and fashion count nearly as much as the smarts, especially with consumers, the 5.6-ounce G1 won’t win any beauty contests. The hardware is frankly homely-looking next to an iPhone or one of the newer Research In Motion BlackBerry’s. The device, which is made by HTC, comes in black, white or brown.

If you check out the pictures of the device you’ll probably agree. Also, is it me or does this phone look big?

Well, for now I’ll stick to my Blackberry. This looks interesting nontheless.

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I recently have begun submitting articles to various article directories in an effort drive some more traffic to my various web sites.

I’ve read a lot about the technique of submitting articles to online article directories to help build traffic to web sites, but have never dug into it until this point.

Three Different Article Directory Web Sites

I have chosen to focus initially on 3 different article directory web sites:

1. EzineArticles.com
2. Buzzle.com
3. GoArticles.com

The main reason I picked these three is because they seemed to be three sites that are consistely ranked at the top of other article writers lists

I know that there are a lot more out there, but these are the three that I am going to focus on initially.

It has been interesting to see the difference between these three sites. I was expecting many of the article directory web sites to be similar, but these first three are already showing me that each site does have it’s own unique way of doing things.

EzineArticles.com First Impressions

I went with EzineArticles.com as my first choice. It always seems to be top rated on other lists I have seen and seems to be one of the top article directory sites out there right now.

I signed up for an account and gained access to the site within about a day. EzineArticles.com seems to have pretty strict policies to help prevent spam-type articles. They don’t allow a lot of spammy links in their articles and focus on making you use your “resource box” at the end of the article to good effect.

They also seems to have a very in depth editorial process, with 5 steps to approval clearly outlined.

One of the main things I really liked about EzineArticles when entering my first article was the way that their interface autosaved text very well and overall makes it easy to get your article up to par using their spell checker and word counters.

So… I went ahead and put in 4 articles right away.

It’s been a few days now and I still have yet to see any of my articles move beyond the initial editorial step. This is kinda disconcerting. I do see that they say it might take 7 days to get an article approved, but I would have expected that my articles would have made it past the first editorial step quicker than they have.

I’ve kinda gotten discouraged at this point and am just going to let those articles sit there until something happens.

This slow editorial response is why I quickly moved on to check out a couple other article directories.

Buzzle.com First Impressions

Buzzle.com seems to me to be like more of an online community. I like the ability to add polls, which is kinda cool, and my account got approved within a day (even though they said it could take up to four weeks).

I haven’t tried submitting any articles yet, as I beleive Buzzle.com said that it’s best to not submit articles that have submitted to other web sites.

So… I have decided to hold off on Buzzle for now, at least for a few days, until I can compile some unique articles to submit. Buzzle.com also seems to be a directory for articles and current events related material too, so I might take that into consideration when submitting some articles.

GoArticles.com First Impressions

GoArticles.com appears to the only one of the three that doesn’t have any strict in-article link guidelines or any sort of editorial process whatsoever.

The result of this is that the GoArticles.com article directory seems to be loaded with very spammy articles that are keyword stuffing and over-linking in the articles bodies. The majority of articles I looked at didn’t really even appeal to me as anything that would be worth putting on a web site.

I got signed up for an account and had an article live within one day. It was too easy. The site seems to not really offer many features compared to EzineArticles.com, for example, but it is easy to get articles on GoArticles.com very quickly.

Conclusions

Well… I’ll have to focus on writing some articles now that I can submit to the various sites. I’m thinking that I’ll just have to be patient with EzineArticles.com, and will continue to add some articles every week, hoping that some of them actually start to move through the editorial process eventually.

I’ll probably try to write current events type of content for Buzzle.com, that looks like a good approach for that site.

I’m also thinking that if I submit some good, non-spammy articles to GoArticles.com that I might be able to stand out from the crowd a bit on that site. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve already seemed to have boosted traffic to one on my web sites within only 4 days of submitting an articles to GoArticles.com.

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I live in North Dakota. Winters get very cold and brutal at times. I’m sure if you’ve heard anything about North Dakota you have heard about that.

That’s the story setup…

Here is the quick back story about my old computers.

I have a couple of old desktop computers that I have recently rotated out of use in favor for new desktop computers. Both of the old computers are tower units that built about 5 years ago. I had to just finally rotate them out and replace them with new computers because they just couldn’t keep up with modern applications for me any more.

I would consider both of the old computers to be worth keeping around, however. You just never know when you will get the itch to set up a computer that is a few years old to either play Unreal Tournament GOTY or maybe set up a linux server for a web development playground. At least that is my line of thinking.

So, I put both of the computers out in the garage.

I put them there in hopes that some day I might feel like using them again.

Cold weather and computers

I would like to think that cold weather can have a completely negative effect on computers. I know for a fact that if a computer is going to be turned on or off, it should not be sitting in 20 degree temperatures. The effects of hot-cold changes would wreak havoc on the computer hardware.

But, I would also think that a computer might be completely fine sitting in the cold if it will not be turned on and will only be there for storage.

I am thinking that I will probably take the hard drives out of the two old computers and keep them in the warm confines of my studio. I don’t really think I need anything from the hard drives, but I would like to keep them around and keep them operational if a situation arises where I need a hard drive.

I think that the rest of the computer (motherboard, CPU, RAM, CD drives, tower, power supply, etc.) will be fine sitting in the garage for storage over the winter. Or at least I’ll find out someday if and when I might try to use them again after storing them in the garage over the winter.

Temperature drops and computers

This whole situation also got me thinking about how changing temperatures can be bad for old computers. I had another computer that was from the same 2001 era that these two old computers are from. This particular other computer was being used at the office of the business where I work. It is more than a few years old but was being used as a developers computer (ftp, text editors, and simple non-resource intensive apps were all that it was running).

The heat went out over a particular winter weekend and the temperatures in the office dropped to maybe 40-50 degrees from the usual 70 degree mark.

When I came into the office on Monday morning, that old computer was not running, and the CPU fan and heatsink were hanging out the side of the computer by it’s wires. Hmm… not a good thing I though to myself. Turns out that the CPU fan and heatsink had snapped off of the motherboard, the plastic clips that held the fan and heatsink on the motherboard were broke and there really was no way to fix other than replace the motherboard.

I could only assume that this had happened because of the temperature drop… in combination with the brittle old plastic inside the computer.

Too bad. I kinda liked that old machine. Now it’s cannibalized for parts.

Ah, how the life of an old computer can be ended so quickly.

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I guess you could say that I’m rather new to the Blackberry smartphone craze. Up until I got a Blackberry Curve, I really didn’t use a phone for much more than anything but making phone calls. I have a few months of Blackberry use under my belt now, and I have 4 blackberry apps that I find to be very useful, meaning that I use them frequently to good effect.

Gmail for Mobile

This is the single most usefull Blackberry app for me. I pipe all my email accounts into Gmail and use Gmail as my main email interface. This is because I use 3 different computers on a day to day basis and need to keep my email organized and accessible on a common platfrom from all three computers.

Gmail just makes handling my email so easy.

So… the first thing I did when I got a Blackberry Curve was to download the Gmail for Mobile app that allows me to use Gmail right on my phone. Brilliant!

It helps me to keep on top of my communications while on the go. Good stuff. Plus I like it a lot better than the built in email on the Blackberry Curve.

Google Maps for Mobile

Another Google product? Yes!

Google Maps on a Blackberry smartphone is just flat out useful. I rarely use map services on my computers because I’m kind of an on-the-fly traveler. When I’m out on the go, that is when I need to access map services, and being able to use Google Maps right on my Blackberry is very handy for finding places quickly.

Flickr for Mobile

This little app from Flickr allows me to upload photos right from my phone to my Flickr account. I can add descriptions and tags easily too. This is a useful app mainly because I like to take a lot of random photos with the camera on my Blackberry and then I can just upload them straight to Flickr and move on.

Flickr is nice too because I can set up photo streams on my blogs. What I am easily able to do is this:

1. Take a photo on the Blackberry
2. Upload it to Flickr and tag it properly
3. Watch the photo automatically get put into the photo stream on my blog

Great!

Yahoo Instant Messenger for Mobile

Being a web developer, I have a lot of contacts that are not local who use Yahoo Instand Messenger as a primary way to communicate with me.

Having this little chat app running on my phone allows me to communicate with my Yahoo contacts easily, without needing to be in front of my computer.

It’s very nice to be able to give direction to a programmer on a web project through my phone. It makes me more accessible to the developers and programmers that I work with and allows me to in turn let them work efficiently because they don’t need to sit around and wait for me to get back in front of a computer to chat with them for on-the-fly types of situations.

Bridging the gap

One thing that I noticed about my list is that all my most useful apps are allowing me to mimic actions that I would typically need a computer to do. This just goes to show how smartphones in general are starting to bridge the gap between what computers and phones can be used for.

Interesting.

There’s plenty more

There are a lot more useful Blackberry apps out there, I’m just scratching the surface here with my little 4 point list.

I hope that you might find this information useful, feel free to share any apps that you find useful on a regular basis.

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