In a Roundabout Way...

I will be moving to a new apartment soon. What does this have to do with Nooruu you ask? Well, I will be posting a review of ATT's DSL Direct service after I have it turned on (and several other things, actually). Plus, once I have moving out of the way (going on almost three weeks preparation/moving) I will have more time to write. I also plan to resume work on my other two (possible three if I can get domain issues resolved, but that's another issue) websites/blogs.

Oh, and now the new blog is officially online, and it only took me two weeks to finally get it transferred to Godaddy. A word of advice: don't buy your domains from your hosting provider. Ever. I have been affected by issues regarding this twice, and it's not fun. If nothing else, at least don't order your domain name from Hostnine or Hostultra. :)

What a Disaster

Call me stupid for thinking the transfer of my domain name would be smooth, but I don't think that that was asking much. I've been waiting for two weeks for nooruu's domain to be transferred to GoDaddy so I can use it with Blogger. However, HostNine doesn't have an automated system in place so I've had to wait for a person to be there for each step of the way. It took six days just to get the transfer secret, and now that that's done there's no way to accept the transfer. I simply have to wait five days then hope all goes well.... it's great. I will never be purchasing a domain through HostNine ever again.

Let Us Not Serve You

I moved Nooruu from a privately hosted Wordpress blog to Blogger three days ago. Before I did that, I opened a ticket with Hostnine to get the domain secret so I could transfer my domain name. I'm in the process of transferring the domain to Godaddy so I can use a CNAME record without going through a 3rd party (and the domain expires in less than 60 days anyway). That was three days ago. Hostnine's slogan is "Let Us Serve You". I'm tried to... Here we are and I still don't have my domain secret and have no reply from Hostnine. I think this is extremely lousy and unprofessional on their part and if I do not hear something from them by Monday, look forward to some interesting posts.

All You Can Eat Music, Just Five Bucks

Several weeks ago I posted how I loved the online music service Lala. And, I still do. But, I've found a better service. The new Napster service, which is only five bucks per month. I actually would go as far as saying it's better than iTunes right now.

Not only does Napster let you stream unlimited music to your computer each month, it also lets you download five DRM-free MP3 tracks per month. Which basically means, you're buying the same five tracks plus getting unlimited streaming at no extra charge. You can only put the 5 MP3s on your iPod though. And, I can't find the Napster ToGo plans on their site anymore so I'm not even sure that you can use the new $5 service with a "Plays For Sure" device anymore. If you're in front of your computer a lot (office, etc.) this is a great deal.

June: So Many Changes

I'm starting a once monthly (possibly more frequently, monthly is a just a base line) posting that is kinda an update as to whats going on behind the scenes at nooruu. I feel this is a lacking part of the blog and needs to be addressed.

Nooruu has moved from Wordpress to Blogger (yeah, I know that sounds retarded). I weighed my options and decided that for what I do and use, Blogger is much easier to use and simpler and more than meets my needs. I don't have to worry about hosting, updates, plugins, etc.

There's been alot of holes in posting lately due to all of the things I have going on at the moment. For one, I'm' not available to access a computer at all times like I was, but this should change within a few weeks. Secondly, I'll be starting college soon and have been busy with that. And, my main job also has been requiring more out of me lately that normally.

Building Your Backlinks

As most webmasters know, a higher pagerank = more relevant traffic to your website. More relevant backlinks to your website = a higher pagerank. But, how does one go about getting these links? Personally, I have a few places I visit to obtain backlinks to my websites. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that building pagerank takes a lot of time and can take hundreds of backlinks before you see any results (because of how Google indexes and ranks pages/links).

Also, if your website is new, it is even harder to increase its pagerank. While Google doesn’t usually give this information out as it’s essentally a trade secret, I have found this to be true on my own personal websites and so have countless other webmasters. Essentially, if your site is new it’s blacklisted temporarily.

To begin building backlinks to your website, I recommend visiting the URL’s below for resources on this. Bear in mind, more relevant sites with higher pageranks have a more positive effect on your sites pagerank and sites that are blacklisted themselves have a negative effect on your pagerank, not all links are counted equally:

1. Info Vilesilencer Forums
2. Link Market
3. Monster Link Swap
4. LinksBulletin

This is simply a reference list. You can find plenty of other places online by simply Googling “Link Exchange”. Just try to avoid sites that want you to buy something first unless it’s a one-way text link or a service to get your link on many other sites quickly.

Resize Your Wordpress Thumbnails

I used to use a plugin for Wordpress called “Imagemanager” to resize my images when I uploaded them. I want all my images to be a certain size to make the sit look neat, and have done this for a while. However, a few months ago Imagemanager’s development was stopped and it quit working with the latest version of Wordpress. But, I found Scissors. I actually now prefer it due to it’s simplicity and very discreet integration with Wordpress’ own file manager. I use it to resize the thumbnails on all of my blogs and add watermarks to one of them. As a matter of fact, I used it to resize the Wordpress logo used in this post.