January 25, 2016

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?


November 25, 2015

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!

October 7, 2015

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

August 18, 2015

VBScript / VB Syntax Highlighting in Sublime Text

Did you ever feel like programming that quick Excel macro in Sublime Text, but you couldn't because it doesn't recognize VB syntax out of the box? (Not that I like that much to program Excel macros, but you gotta do what you gotta do!) Well, thanks to this plugin, you can now enjoy Sublime Text for any of your VB / VBA / VBScript endeavors.

GitHub | VBScript package for Sublime Text

Download it, extract it inside your Sublime Text plugin directory, remove -master from the extracted folder's name, fire up Sublime Text and you're up and running!

Just when I thought Sublime Text couldn't get any better!

August 1, 2015

Fix Sublime Text 2 Scroll Lag

Is Sublime Text your favorite text editor yet? Make sure you check it out right away, it's awesome:

Sublime Text: The text editor you'll fall in love with

Depending what OS you're using, your computer's performance and likely a few other factors, you might notice that there's a slight lag when scrolling using the mouse wheel in Sublime Text. Here's what you have to do in order to fix it.

1. Click Preferences, Settings - Default

2. Search for "scroll_speed" and set it to 0. (It's usually set to 1.5 by default. )
3. Save and close the settings file.

By disabling smooth scrolling, we get rid of the slight mouse wheel scrolling lag we experienced until now.