From the little experience I had with blogging, I found some things quite essential. Writing occasional parodies is one of them.

Writing parodies once in a while, makes interesting reading, and is quite liked by the subscribers and regular readers of your blog. I believe that atleast one post after some posts pertaining to the niche of your blog shall be a parody. And as is evident, a parody fits into all niches.
When I wrote the first parody on my first blog(which I would not like to state), I found quite a boost in the number of visitors. People like some breaks(as I believe), especially in some monotonous niches, and a parody can be a bridge to the break.A parody can be written on any topic and requires least thought. At any instance, I can enumerate a number of topics to write satires, which are interesting too.

Some benefits of parodies are:

1. Parodies make the readers and subscribers cling to the blog, making long term relationships.
2. They increase the traffic to the blog - I find that blog posts of such kind are liked by people, and mostly, one would find that satires make their way to the home page of digg.com, which suggests the fondness of readers.
3. They lift up the monotonous shadow from some niche topics, providing refreshment to people.
   

You can read thespoof.com and find it yourself, how parodies can effect the blog. TheSpoof is an only - parody blog, and I am a regular reader of it. I have written many parodies, and continue to write them, as I find them quite amusing, and stress relieving.

Microsoft has a big hand in getting justice done to ThePirateBay. What causes this outrage? Some part of it is because nearly all the microsoft games and softwares are out on ThePirateBay.

Games like Mass Effect, Zoo Tycoon 2, etc have been very popular on Torrent sites. And since these are paid games and softwares, and not free ones, Microsoft is having a really hard time coping up.

But the real problem for Microsoft has been the leaking of Source Codes for many of it's Windows Operating Systems, which are obviously copyrighted by Microsoft and a closely guarded secret. There is possibly an inside man who wants Operating System programming to reach the "Common People who cannot pay for Softwares", and has thus leaked the Codes.

What is more annoying is the hardliner way of ThePirateBay who refused the request of Microsoft and did not take any action in removing or banning the torrent. Their rudeness has and will cost them dear. Many other companies have also requested ThePirateBay to remove the torrents from their Servers, but they, like always, give negative and rude answers.

When a torrent is on one torrent site, it is most probable that other sites too take them on their own servers. It may be the Users or the Moderators, a torrent spreads like a wildfire. But the reason why the people are against ThePirateBay is that all the other sites remove the torrents from their databases when asked to but ThePirateBay does not. If they mind their ways and follow the suit, all will be well with them. They need to mind their ways though.

As you might have heard, Barack Obama has got a new purebred Portugese Water Dog, called Bo. Very cute. But is there something special in it's name?

No? Well, I think you might have to reconsider it.

Still nothing? What are the initials of Barack Obama?

Yes. Now it possibly struck you. Isn't it quite a co-incidence, that the dog has the same name as the initials of the president, and it's owner!

The dog has become a celebrity in itself, and there are approvals as well as reproaches among the people over the dog being purebred, and not a shelter dog. But the dog, afterall with thick fur and looks of Teddy Bear is quite appropriate for the First Family, though it's the name that it's owners must think about.

Before telling the ways to get your blog killed, it is necessary to know what is a healthy blog? To make it simple in few words, a healthy blog is a blog that has some quality authority in its niche and has an increasing number of daily visits. Increasing blog traffic is a sign of success and when it starts decreasing, it becomes a good reason for bloggers to panic. Blog traffic, in short, is an indicator of your blog’s overall health and determines whether a blog is living or dead.

Before beginning this post, I would like to mention that this list started out as “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Traffic Killed” and then became “6 Ways to Get Your Blog Traffic Killed” and finally I forced myself to stop at “12 Ways to Get Your Blog Traffic Killed”.

12 Ways to Get Your Blog Traffic Killed

1. Infrequent and erratic posts

Going on a posting frenzy and then waiting for another season, is a surefire way to kill your blog traffic. Posting two or three posts per day and then taking a break for a week or so will make your readers sick. Be it the blog visitors or the search engines, they prefer to see content published on a predictable schedule. To avoid this blog killer, you need to make a commitment to post at least once a week to your blog.

2. Writing blog posts that are ‘out of track‘

A while ago, I subscribed to a SEO blog (which I wouldn’t like to mention here). The reason why I subscribed it was to get latest SEO techniques but after a week of launch, I found that instead of giving SEO techniques, it started focusing on making money online and building good blogs. It’s not that I am not interested in ‘making money online’ and ‘building good blog’ topics but that is not what I subscribed the blog for. Your blog readers have some expectations when they subscribe to your blog. You read a blog because you like its niche. If you do not get that what you prefer, your feelings expressed in a word would be – “Damn!!”

3. Behaving like a TROLL

Troll, in literature, means an obnoxious creature who is dedicated to achieve evil ends. On internet, a ‘Troll’ is a person who posts some content with the aim of stirring up some sort of trouble. The goal of a troll is to stir up a trouble period. Some bloggers, especially new, think that troll like behaviour will bring them readers. Well, it is true that this behaviour can bring in some traffic but the people that come to your blog by your troll like behaviour last as long as you can keep on continuing your shredding activities. In short, this way of driving traffic sucks.

4. You do not understand the value of 10

While this might sound to you a bit odd, but 10 seconds is all that it takes to make a first impression of your blog on your reader. 10 seconds is the time it takes for a visitor to decide whether or not he is going to hang out and read a little more. Too many of plugins, many poorly bloated images or a poorly coded theme can waste that important time and you may lose visitors.

5. Keywords are not your attention seekers

If you ask an A-List blogger that from where he gets most of its blog visitors, he would most probably say – ‘from search engines’. Search engines provide a constant and stable source of visitors to a blog. If you rank high in organic searches, you will be definitely getting good number of visitors.

6. You are not commenting on other blogs

Making pithy and relevant comments on other blogs in your niche is a quick and nice way to boost your blog traffic. Now here is an important point I would like to add. I have told many bloggers to comment on other blogs in their niche and some complaint that they are not seeing any increase in their traffic through commenting. If you are seeing the same results, do make sure to review the comments you are making and/or the blog(s) where you are making comments.

7. You are commenting on Wrong Blogs

I had a friend who repeatedly commented on a blog what he assumed to be a popular one. I have no idea why he thought this blog was popular because the blog had an alexa rank in a range of six millions and had n/a pagerank. OK – I do know why he thought it to be popular. The fact that the owner of the blog was a published author and had a popular book to his name; made my friend feel that the blog was a popular blog. This example is here to understand that you must see that the blog where you are commenting is really that popular and effective to drive traffic to your blog; or else you will be communicating with a blog author who is ‘checked out’ with blogging.

8. You are saving Outgoing Links

While many bloggers think that linking to a page may hurt SEO, you will hurt your readers if you do not give link to relevant pages. Suppose you were reading about a software and after a full 400 words reading you did not even find a link to download or buy the software, wouldn’t that hurt? It will definitely. Likewise, if you do not give out links to relevant pages, your blog readers will find your blogging hard to accept.

9. You are not using Images

If you are blogging without images, you are killing your traffic. I have a friend that owns a blog and the biggest mistake he is doing is not to use images. Before you start argumenting on this topic, let me make clear that I am not talking about bloated images that take much time to load and make your blog heavy-loading. I am talking about professionally developed/created and properly sized images for use on your blog. It is to be remembered that the phrase - “a picture is worth a thousand words” is nowhere more relevant than on the web.

10. You are not plugged in

Let’s face facts –there are some occasions where you must definitely blog about breaking news in your niche. If your blog’s niche is ‘blogging news’ and you are not blogging about World Blogging Expo; it surely means that you are not plugged in. You can be plugged-in by consulting to other blogs in your niche and getting alerts from news.

11. You are not promoting your blog (Blog Marketing)

Your blog is just like any other “product” or “business” and it needs promotion. If you’ve got a blog and you want more traffic (a.k.a. “customers”) you’re going to have to learn to market your blog. Remember, marketing is simply communicating with potential customers (a.k.a. readers) that you’ve got something that they want or need. Yes, marketing is really that simple. If you prefer “spreading the word” to the term “marketing”; then feel free to think of it in those terms. However, ‘marketing’ is NOT a dirty word… it’s just gotten that reputation because of marketers making the mistake of telling just about their product- their product and their product again. When you view marketing your blog as simply a way of letting other people know you’ve got a nice place to hang out and share information on a subject they like, then marketing doesn’t seem quite so “horrid” anymore - does it?

12. It’s all about ME-ME-ME

Now this is what I think as one of the finest traffic killer. You must know, agree and understand – ‘narcissistic rants don’t play well anywhere in social media’. Whether it is blogging or any other social media component, if you find that all you can talk about is ME-ME-ME; then you can expect to get your blog killed quickly.

The 1,336 words you read above completed the “12 Ways to Get Your Blog Traffic Killed” topic. I could have easily made it “1001 Ways to Get Your Blog Traffic Killed” if I would have not stopped myself. But then again, the one of the great things about blogs is the ability to engage your readers in actual two way conversation.

What would you add to the list of “Ways to Get Your Blog Traffic Killed”?

ThePirateBay owners have been sentenced to one year imprisonment, and intend to move to a higher court for an appeal. But their spirit had been undaunted, and the users of their site have mixed feelings. They are sad, as well as filled with rage. They wish to Boycott the ISP's that log their IP's in the Copyright Infringement battle. There have been 5000 new members of the Swedish Pirate Party just one day after the verdict. The users have placed ThePirateBay at the position of Jesus, with their thought that just four people are taking all the pain for the service of all the pirates out there in the World, who use their site (duh!). Out of revenge, the people have stopped buying even the few original CD's and DVD's they earlier bought. Some of their Arguments are (quite ridiculous):

• Has Wikipedia ever had a trial...? They have giant articles about movies and music too.


• You can not be prosecuted if all you are doing is providing a host site for computers to communicate- is msn to go next?

People are gathering money at many places to help ThePirateBay pay the fines which are so evident to be charged from it. But ThePirateBay owners say that they are not going to pay any fines(can it be?).

The point is that all think ThePirateBay is just a file 'sharing' community, just like a ibrary, where people who cannot pay for things go and download them.

People have created sites like

www.piratpartiet.se (swedish) which has links to all the other pirate parties of the world, so that one can support the fight for a free internet. Many have formed communities on facebook to support the site. ThePirateBay T-Shirts have shot their sales up.

What the people don't understand is that software piracy is really a crime, and it's justification is not admissible.

But even then, the people and ThePirateBay have some chances, as you can read here.

I have spent quite a good time working with my Avast Antivirus. It has been taking a good care of my pc and I have got very well aquainted with it. So, here is a very useful information for people who have other antiviruses installed or are about to do it.

Benefits of using Avast Anti-Virus:
• Its updates are very small (of KBs). Whereas the updates of others such as kaspersky,etc are of few MBs.
• Its home edition is totally free.So there is no fear of any sort of piracy.
• It runs in the background and thus the system doesn’t get slow.
• With Avast comes free services like Webshield,Real Time Protection Access,Live Monitering which other anti-virus softwares don’t offer free of cost.

Demerits of using Avast Anti-Virus:
• It increases the booting time of the system.
• The Database of this anti-virus is not very large and hence many of the viruses penetrate its protection barrier.
On the whole I give it three stars out of five.

Recently there have been criminal lawsuits against ThePirateBay owners. But their point is that they just opened an index for the people to upload torrents. If one considers it in such a way, they are completely innocent.Well, it is in such a way. ThePirateBay is simply an index of torrents and nothing more, and it's the users who are the real offenders. The Bit Torrent world is completely an anonymous one. ThePirateBay is just one of the few sites indexing torrents.

There are three stages in the Bit Torrent World:The Uploader, the Torrent indexing site and Trackers, and the Downloader. Which one of them is guilty? Well, all of them. But all have ways and excuses for not being guilty.

1. First comes the Uploader of the torrent. He cannot be caught, as he is usually anonymous. There are many sites, like TorrentPrivacy.com that allow anonymous Torrent searching. So, the IP of the Uploader cannot be logged. Moreover, if logged, and an appeal is made to the torrent site, all that it does (if at all it does) is to ban the Uploader' IP address, so that he cannot upload any new torrents. Does that solve the problem? I don't think so.
   
2. Second comes the Torrent indexing sites, and the Trackers. As I already said, they have a point for themselves. They do not do the piracy themselves, but the users of the sites do that.


3. Third, the downloaders, are too, like the uploaders, anonymous, and they cannot even be banned. Many features, like 'Protocol Encryption', and softwares like PeerGuardian, Protowall, etc make detection through ISP's even more difficult.
   There is even an online Bit Torrent applet (only one that I know- if you know any, please let me know), on BitLet.org that lets you copy the torrent metafile url, and lets you download it online (safe if one hides his IP securely). One can even generate a link to the torrent through this site, to use on his blog or website, and the person can safely call it a "Third Party Link" and dismiss any and all charges.

Thus, to detect and catch the Bit Torrent users is becoming more and more difficult, and they are successfully evading threat. Something needs to be done immediately. But instead of practising piracy, the people shall use free, open source softwares.

What is Qemu?

Qemu is a Processor Emulator, which creates a Virtual pc with the amount of RAM or Hard Disk you allot. You can start your Virtual Computer just by clicking a single file.


Why use it?
You can have more than one computer running at a time, doing many works simultaneously.If you get any errors, or crash the Hard disk of your computer, you can just delete the Hard Disk image and create a new one.You can test any new softwares without crashing your real computer, etc, etc...

Steps for Downloading and Using Qemu:

• Download Qemu
  
  

• Download Kqemu (QEMU Acceleration Module)-Optional:
  
  

• Unzip Qemu and install Kqemu.

• Now, Open Start Menu, select Run and open command prompt by typing cmd.

• Move to the qemu-0.9.0-windows directory (where you unzipped the rar file).In my case it is- C:\Program Files\Qemu\qemu-0.9.0-windows. So I typed cd C:\Program Files\Qemu\qemu-0.9.0-windows
  

• Copy and paste this code in the command prompt, to create a Virtual Hard Disk Drive image.If you have to install Windows XP, create Hard Disk Image with-

qemu-img create -f qcow winxp.img 5G


Where, 5G specifies the amount of space you want to allot to your Virtual Hard Disk(In GB)-you can make it 10G, 20G, and so on.

• Now close the command prompt, and go to the qemu directory through My Computer.
  

• Create a new text file using Notepad (For installing Windows XP.Put this code In a single line, or modify if you wish):
  

qemu.exe -kernel-kqemu -L . -m 512 -hda winxp.img -boot d -soundhw all -localtime -M pc -cdrom //./d:


Where, -m 512 is the amount of RAM you want to allot to your Virtual Computer(here, 512 MB)- you can change it to any value, which is supported by your Operating System, and "d:" is your optical drive's letter.

• Save the text file as qemu-winxp.bat (Or any other name with .bat extension).

• Now start the Virtual pc by double clicking qemu-winxp.bat

• Now start the Virtual pc by double clicking qemu-winxp.bat

• Insert Windows XP cd and proceed with the installation.

• When the installation has completed, edit the batch file you created(here, qemu-winxp.bat),by right-clicking the file and selecting Edit option.Select all the text, and delete it.Now copy and paste this code (just copy and paste, or modify a bit if you wish)-

qemu.exe -kernel-kqemu -L . -m 512 -hda winxp.img -boot c -soundhw all -localtime -M pc -cdrom //./d:


You can observe that there is no change in the original code except one letter. That is "-boot c" instead of "-boot d", as you have to boot from your hard disk drive, and not from your CD drive(you already installed XP).Here again, -m 512 is the amount of RAM you want to allot (here, 512 MB)- you can change it to any value, which is supported by your Operating System, and "d:" is your optical drive's letter.

• Now save this file and close the Text Editor.

• You can run the Virtual XP whenever you want, by clicking on the batch file or on the shortcut you might have created.

Some Tips:

• Enable the Full Screen Mode By Pressing the Shortcut Ctrl+Alt+f.Press it again to go to window mode.
• Click anywhere in the Qemu window to let it grab the mouse pointer.Press Ctrl+Alt to exit grab.
• Never exit Qemu by closing the main window. If you want to exit without shutting down the Virtual Computer, do that by exiting the DOS file running along with Qemu main window.