Author Archive for Jeff Villafranca

Jeff is a 21 22-year old curmudgeon, slacker, grammar whore, technology agnostic and resident pundit on anything & everything. He plays Bioshock on the Xbox 360 'til kingdom come and loves Eastwood City like home, frittering away with an oat bar, cranberry juice and free Wi-fi. Check out his personal blog, teknostik.com

Jul | 10 | 2007

The CAPTCHA has been pwnd!

Posted by Jeff as Spam, Blogging News, Blogging Tools So, you think CAPTCHAs would cut your spam comments in half? Well, think again. Just a little over a year after Google let loose audio CAPTCHAs (the most common implementation of which is an accessibility icon next to visual, or image CAPTCHA, that play a recording of a series of numbers and/or letters, dumbed down by some background noise) to the brewing security-conscious public, it appears that this, too, has been defeated. Security company BitDefender reports identifying a new Trojan, dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, taking over and zombify-ing machines, using unsuspecting users' computers to generate Yahoo! and Hotmail ...

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Jun | 27 | 2007

A few reminders on third-party Image Hosting

Posted by Jeff as Images, Tips, Blogging Tools, Design Features If you have a blog that's hosted in Wordpress.com, or Blogspot, or any other free* service, or if you have unlimited resources, that is, truckloads of money to pay for all that uncapped web space, you may be least likely concerned about the gigabytes that images can easily consume from what you have arranged with your webhost of choice. The rest of us common men with an inkling of what saving both gigabytes of allocation and the bandwidth needed to pump out all those images may consider hosting these on a separate service, or outsourcing to a third-party image hosting ...

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Jun | 14 | 2007

Live blogging, or boot-legging?

Posted by Jeff as Opinion, Blogging News From Digg: Courier-Journal field reporter Brian Bennett was kicked out of the stadium in the middle of an NCAA baseball super-regional (the fifth inning, to be exact) for live blogging last Sunday (GMT-4? I'm bad at time zones. Use this instead and look for "America/Louisville") the high-energy match between University of Lousville and Oklahoma State, KY. To their defense, the University of Louisville says a note was sent out condemning any "live representation of the game", under which live blogging the university insists falls under, yet Bennett and his colleagues pushed with it anyway. Bennett's press treatment therefore ...

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Jun | 12 | 2007

Template Designers Get Ready: Safari 3 for Windows is coming

Posted by Jeff as Blogging News, Design Talk about getting your head in the game. As if testing on two browsers is not enough (or three, for Opera, so stop writing that email now! I get flamed enough already, thank you), Apple sets loose its flagship browser onto Windows machines in WWDC07 in an effort to what can be interpreted as a move to increase awareness of the Apple experience. Or, in El Jobso's own words, "giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell". In case you lost track already, here's a quick review at what we have now: the Gecko engine (utilized by ...

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May | 30 | 2007

Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents

Posted by Jeff as Terminology I love it when news like this gets the front page every now and then; it encourages people to look further into the story and its repercussions in their own goings-on. In the bloggers' case, this means understanding what a copyright, a trademark, or a patent can do for your write-ups and original images, audio and video. Most people confuse one with the other, so I'll take a shot at helping most of us who aren't very legalese, and to those who'd rather not scour through pages-long entries from Wikipedia: I'll start with the easiest one - the copyright. A ...

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May | 22 | 2007

Lowdown on the technical aspects of design

Posted by Jeff as Tips, Design, Featured Articles, Design Features Clearly, I'm asking for trouble here by laying down a list of what is regarded as good design. Hopefully though, this does not turn out like O'Reilly's Bloggers' Code of Conduct which he later took back: Proper use of fonts - as a general rule, no more than three font families are to be used on a single page. Too similar fonts make for a staid feel, while over-using fonts is gaudy. (This one I remember from my elementary Journalism class) Font families - unlike in print media, the use of serifs (Garamond, Times New Roman, Cambria) and sans-serifs (Arial, Tahoma, Calibri) are ...

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May | 19 | 2007

PRESENCE is the new black

Posted by Jeff as Linking, Opinion, Syndication, Community Building To have the blogger's mindset is to analyze and think about the best ways to present, initiate and encourage discussion on ideas that may first appear as irrelevant together and not worth thinking over. In the months I started pushing web content, I unconsciously developed a rather anal-retentive process as to which ideas make their way into my writing - both offline and online - that involves going through three levels: micro-blogging (Twitter), something I'll call draft-blogging (Tumblr - then it becomes tumblelogging), and then there's the full-fledged personal blog. It's nice to leaves small traces of your celebrity ...

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Design and Themes

Is Your Blog W3C Compliant?

Last night I checked my personal blog’s code hoping I can proudly display the W3C Validated Button. Since I use Blogger and do not really do anything to clean up the code (beyond adding Alt-tags to the images I embed) I wasn’t surprised at all to find that my blog contained lots of errors - […]
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Software and Widgets

Wordpress Plug-ins

If you blog using Wordpress and can’t do something that you want done like adding Sphere-related content at the end of your blog posts you might be surprised to find out that there are already plug-ins available that make it happen.
To find good Wordpress plug-ins all you need to do is search for “wordpress […]
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A Friend In Need

I’m helping out my friends from the UA&P - IShareHappiness Blog Team.
Whenever you feel pessimistic, angry, troubled, frustrated, and depressed – what have you – you need someone to talk to. Someone who could help you be more optimistic and help make you feel that there is hope. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to someone […]
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Monetization

Making Money Through Consumer Generated Ads

As I mentioned in my previous post today I will be suggesting some ways you can still profit by joining programs such as Pay Per Post and yet ensure that your readers don’t get turned off.
In my opinion the only way to really do this is by making sure that your blog entries stay […]
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Marketing and Search Optimization

The Blogger’s Guide to SEO

One of the best holistic guide to optimising a blog is Aaron Wall’s Blogger’s Guide to SEO. It is not the most in-depth guide but it covers all the basics (and a bit more) and is written in a such a way that even newbies in SEO will definitely understand. The guide also links out […]
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