Swollen Pickles

Raise your hand if you remember the 1980's cartoon Silverhawks... Even though it wasn't the longest running series in history, it still occupies a special place in my heart. As a young fella, I wanted to be able to sprout metal wings and fly. Amateur psychologists can make of that what they will.

For those unfamiliar with Silverhawks first hit TV screens in 1986, and developed by Rankin/Bass as a "space" equivalent of the mega-hit ThunderCats. The series focused on a small band of space police called... SilverHawks. The SilverHawks were a group of part bionic, part human heroes fighting crime and the evil forces of space crime boss MonStar and a whole bunch of far out crazy creatures and bad guys.

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I'm currently investigating a number of options for setting up a basic e-commerce site. My first inclination was to try and push the limits of WordPress. There are a number of shopping cart plugins that I could use to make it happen, however, recently I've discovered another open source e-commerce solution, Magento.

The advantage that Magento appears to have over the WordPress option is that it has been designed specifically with e-commerce in mind. This is a good thing, however, it also means that setting it up, and configuring all the options correctly can take a lot of time.

Magento lets you set up various options for products, ordering options and tax rules.

If you're interested in Magento, you can download it here:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/download

I found this cool tutorial on setting up Magento from scratch which is a must read for anyone considering using it as a shop front CMS.

At the moment I'm leaning toward Magento for my project. My only reservation being, I'm not sure I can find the motivation to pick up yet another CMS...

The first Left 4 Dead first person shooter on the Xbox 360 was a cracker of a game. Stupid, mindless, fun. If the teaser trailer for Left 4 Dead 2 is anything to go by, it looks like its makers have upped the ante in terms of splatter and potential for gore. The apparent introduction of a chainsaw is a master stroke.

Check out the trailer below.

If you're into the zombie survival horror thing, check out The Walking Dead comic series. I've read the first eight trade paper backs (or 48 issues) and it's awesome.

DEAD MAN WALKING 1995 Susan Sarandon Sean Penn NEW

US $4.99

6h 14m

DEAD MAN WALKING SISTER HELEN PREJEAN PB SIGNED

0 Bid

US $10.99

6h 19m

The Walking Dead EXTREMLY RARE OOP

US $18.99

7h 19m

So you spend all day in a stuffy office, it's hot, you're hungry and you need to tell the world all about it. You need to "Tweet" it... but you don't want your boss to bust you on Twitter. Here's a more than handy solution - Spread Tweet.

Basically Spread Tweet allows you to follow Twitter all the while looking as though you are working on an Excel spreadsheet. Brilliant. In developing Spread Tweet, the creator has built the solution to his own question "Wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Twitter tool that looked just like Excel?"

Here's a screen shot of what it looks like running on a Mac.

So if you need to Twitter without the fear of having your boss look over your shoulder, give it a look.

Today I have some late night TV infomercial gold to share with you. If you've already seen this, please feel free to skip straight to the parody version.

For those unfamiliar with the Snuggie, it is an innovative powerhouse of a product, it's a blanket... with sleeves! Glorious. The Snuggie is designed to keep your entire body covered and "cozy" while you still retain the use of your hands. (more...)

Here's an interesting little bit of information I stumbled across while randomly surfing through wikipedia this evening. It relates to World of Warcraft, so nerds can rejoice. For those unfamiliar with the game, your character can pick up diseases and/or curses when battling the enemy. Like in the real world, these things can be a real downer, causing you to perform at less than your best.

A year or two ago, Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, opened the games first 20 player raid dungeon, call Zul'Gurub, as part of patch 1.7. Basically the dungeon saw players taking on tribes of troll who were under the control of the Blood God, Hakkar the Soulflayer. Upon battling Hakkar, the dude with the brutal death metal sounding name, players were tagged with a debuff called "Corrupted Blood", which was a disease that caused the player to have their life sapped over time. The disease could also be passed on to other players that were nearby the infected player. Blizzards intention was that the disease was to only affect players so long as they were inside the dungeon. Unfortunately there appeared to be a bug in the system that allowed the disease to be carried outside of the dungeon, by way of Hunter's pets and Warlock's minions. Before long, corpses littered the World of Warcraft... (more...)

Lately I've been having difficulty finding the time to update all my blogs on a regular basis. There have been a number of activities competing for my time, one of which is the whole regular exercise thing, which has left me less time to work on my blogs. Less time means that I have to learn to work smarter. This has led to me asking myself a question I'm sure many bloggers have asked themselves. What's more important, post frequency or post length?

Obviously there are pro's and con's with both options.

Posting shorter, yet more frequent posts, provides your audience with regular updates, and also means that you have more pages in the bank ready to be crawled and indexed by search engines. On the other hand, shorter posts generally do not provide as much detail, and could be viewed as of lesser value than longer more detailed posts. Do shorter posts give readers the impression of a lack of effort on behalf of the blogger?

Longer, less frequent posts can provide a lot more detail for readers, and get a lot more information across than shorter posts can. They lend themselves to lengthier 'how to' style articles, and could often be seen as more 'useful' or valuable to readers. The fact that they are longer means they also take longer to produce, which could impact on post frequency. Do longer posts give the impression of greater effort?

How important is post frequency? Frequent short posts, or infrequent long posts? Is less more, or more less? Does it make any difference at all?

Time for a poll. Vote well.

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