Reasons Why Your Forum Shouldn't Have a Blog Section

Back in the days when vBulletin was popular, every clever forum admin would buy the vB Blog addon to allow their members to have their own personal blog inside the community.

That was indeed clever in 2008, but what about in 2016? Should you provide your forum members with a place to have their blog, within your community?

I'm not so sure anymore, here's why.

Rubular: A Regular Expression Editor

I didn't have to fiddle with a regular expression in ages, so tonight I had a hard time figuring out how to extract precise parts of a string in Python.

http://rubular.com/

Thanks to this online editor, I was able to work my way through it quite easily.

Which Type of Forum Admin Are You?

Taking care of an online community is no small task, especially on the long run. That's why you gotta be up to the challenge as a forum admin. While some us prefer to lurk in the shadow and let their forum evolve on its own, others are going to be part of the community, just like any other member.

It's pretty easy these days to start a community and make it somewhat active. But are you going to be able to keep up with it and make it happy and active for the years to come? It's likely that after the honeymoon is over, your overall behavior and presence as an admin will change. Perhaps it already has...

Which type of forum admin are you?

50 Vintage Web Ad Banners

Check out the link below to take a look at old banner ads from the late 90s.

VC&G | 50 Vintage Web Ads

Time sure flies! Back then we didn't have fancy ad-blockers or anything. It was quite normal to have such ugly flashing banners all around the pages we were visiting. Good old days!

Dealing With iOS9 Ad Blockers on Your Ad Sponsored Blog

A good article posted on Igor Kromin's blog, a blog I visit from time to time. Thought I'd share it here.

A new release of iOS always brings in new features and its share of troubles and this time it hasn't been any different. Since the iOS 9 release date on the 16th of September, Apple made available its content blocker API to developers. This brought out a deluge of ad blocker apps on the App Store, with some topping the charts within moments of release. This may be a welcome addition to many people, but something that many miss is how this hurts those sites and blogs that rely on advertising revenue to pay for their hosting fees. 

So I got to thinking about how to deal with this. I've seen comments stating that content providers should just suck it up and find alternative ways of generating revenue. I'm sorry, but this is the kind of argument that a zealot preacher would sermonise - all talk about how it should be without solid examples or direction about the 'better ways'. I would argue that for a casual blog, ads are the only real viable source of revenue.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to deal with this situation. The only thing I could come up with was to appeal the the readers' sense of decency by supplying a message when an ad does not load.

Read more:
Dealing with iOS9 ad blockers on your ad sponsored blog