Vyoma

It is hard enough when one has to travel away from a friend. It would be harder in this case.Take courage from the memories you have had with friend - that is all I can say.

Well, I can say one thing. You sure are doing your job as a Moderator pretty good.

This is what happens yesterday.I get a good present from one of my friend who buys me a game - Half Life: Anthology. It is a package that includes Half-Life, Half-Life Blue Shift, Half-Life Opposing Force, and Counter Strike. I get it home, and I install it on my PC. The PC is not a beast but it is a decent system and I remember Half-Life demo not being very system hungry.It takes few minutes to install, where it first installs the Steam engine and then goes ahead to install the four games. I do not have an internet connection at home, but I should be able to play three titles out of the four. Anyway, it gets installed, and then I try to run, and that is it. I get frustrated.Why?I get the following error window:Steam.exe (main exception): Unable to load steam.dllI search my entire hard disk for the particular DLL and do not find it. I even search it on the Installation CD and do not find it. I call up another of my acquaintance and ask him if he knows a solution.First of all, he laughs at me because I spent bucks on buying a legal copy of the game. Over that he says that he never had such problems with his 'acquired' copy of the game. What should I say? I never accepted to run pirated games because I know the amount of work it goes into building the game.Anyway, I go to the Valve Technical Support Page, register myself and put in a Trouble Ticket. I have not yet got a reply, but I think it is due to the difference in the Time Zone.This has me wondering though....

Ofcourse Jeigh, you would be correct. I did mean that when I said that it effects the activity in Xisto. There is indirect connection or as they say statistically - correlation on a lower percentage. ( Guess I should be making my posts longer, elaborating thing. )

The only reason I can think of my account getting banned (if it does), is because of the history of some traffic through LinkReferral. As I said, I have completely removed it, and the traffic to my site is completely organic (from search engines) or referral(the links in email signatures I send) according to the Google Analytics. Surprisingly, my income (however less that might be) has not actually decreased because of that. As they say, Content really must be the king.I think I should bring down this geocities site too before it causes me more embarrassment. But the only problem is I do not exactly remember the password and such things. Oh boy! It will take quite some effort to wipe that thing off the face of cyber world.

pyost, yes. I think the amount of visitors to your site does affect the credit performance here at Xisto. The credits I have at present at Xisto is around 50s I think. But there was a time when I would have it hovering around 10 and 20. Those were the days when I had got an account at Xisto, and was just using it to learn a bit of PHP and MySQL. And yes, I did learn some CSS. I would host them at here and show it to some of my friends and experiment around. Then, I did not actaully have the drive for credits and I would be lurking at the forums, posting only when I felt I just cannot resist from blabbering. Then, I got hold of a domain, http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/, and started a website at the same account, and my outlook changed. First of all, because I started a live website, the multitudes of problem that I faced increased. I just directed my questions to the talented pool here at the Xisto forums. My credit count wooped from the 10 to 20. I really got the hang of it, and I started to contribute in the fields that I was a bit competant, and got the credit level to around 50 plus. It has been that way for around three months. There had been times when it would dip down to the 50 level mark, when I really got busy with my day job, and I could not contribute here at the forums, but I would come back and find a lot many new topic where I can talk. And it goes up again. But I feel I just cannot get it over that because I find myself a bit hesitant on making posts because it may have a shade of spam. What can I say - it is a kind of forum stage fear. But after a point, if it ever goes above 100 or 200 for me, I do not think then it would really make any difference in my activity here at Xisto. It is becoming like an addiction for me. I just need to contribute here every now and then trying to add to the knowledge base. And I think you should have a look at this thread: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/90519-topic/?findpost=1064350362 Very useful but I just cannot get myself to post like that guy.

Now if you do not want to program and do not want to hire a web designer, then I would suggest you go to some of the free web hosts and then use their own WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors to create a handful of webpages. You could also try Google Pages for the purpose.But if you are really serious about online presense for your business, then I think you should go for a paid hosting, and either learn constructing a website or have it done by someone who know. Putting up business websites on free servers may decrease brand value depending on the business you are in.

Promise me you wont laugh! No seriously - it is pathetic and I feel so stupid now. It looks so shabby, but when I created it - I thought it was pretty decent looking. URL: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ It had only the main page and another page (https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/games.html) hosted at Geocities. Another page was for the RPG character I had that I placed at AngelFire (http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/vyoma/). Please do not laugh. I think Google Adsense were a bit leniant earlier when they were accepting publishers. I got in early and they might not have had much of quality control in place.

Well ELTan, to answer that, you would need to clarify on few things.What is your intent on using any of those software? Only then would we be able to suggest what would be suitable for you.If you intend to create HTML pages that you wish to publish online, then FrontPage would be suited for you.But if you intend to create layouts that are primarily targeted to be published by prink, then Publishing 2003 would suit you.To answer the last question on is there any free software - that, as I said earlier would require for us to know what your purpose is. I belive there are free and open source softwares out there for both the purposes - web publishing and traditional layouting. I am not sure about traditional layouting, but there definetly are many free web page creators to create HTML pages.

I was just wondering here, if resize on the fly using PHP would help the dialup users. I mean, when someone uses PHP to resize the image, and then show it in the preview - then would the user actually require to load the full image? I doubt it because PHP is serverside, and only the resized image would be passed to the user browser. But I may be wrong, and if that is the case, someone will come along and correct me.

Nice to know that you finally got it working.I do not know of anyother site that would help other than Drupal.org itself. They have links to many other related sites. Just go there and snoop around, and I think you could find something useful.For my Drupal driven site, I downloaded a simple theme and with help of seec77, I modified it to what I required.

I think that should be possible. Export the database you created on your personal computer onto a file - you may enable gzip if the file is large. Then, you need to connect to your AwardSpace account, get into the phpMyAdmin and then there is an option to import. Select it and select the file you have exported and see that you check options identical to that when you exported for compatibilty. Using the above method, I have been able to setup database on my personal computer qutie similar to my website database. I know your case is the otherway round, but I do not see why the same solution cannot be used.

One thing though - I do not have the money earned from Google anywhere around 100$ mark. I am somewhere around 25$. (I think I can disclose that without violating the Adsense TOS because one can disclose their gross earnings per day, but not the specific details like Click Through Rate and eCPM and such things).Anyway, I have my account balance somewhere around 25$, and the rate I am going, it is going to take a long way before I get to the 100$ mark. But I think, they sent me a mail because, earlier I had brought my website under scrutiny purposefully because I suspected foul play in the logs. May be that brought in scrutiny from Google or that actually saved my account from being out rightly banned and not warned. Anyway, I did get a mail from them about it. I think it was due to a website I joined called LinkReferral - I have removed all links from there to my sites and according to my logs I do not get any pings from there.So the reason why I got that mail from them is pretty dubious, but I think I should be satisfied that the account is still holding. Talking about the site that got me approved for Adsense - ha! It was some personal site I had setup at Geocities or some thing like that. I do not even know if that site still exists because it has been long since abandoned. (OK. I checked up now, and it exists - yuck! I am ashamed of myself). It generated some dollars out of the Adsense that showed some Diablo item trading site advertisements on a page where I had put down my experience in playing the game. Time changed, I moved on, and the Adsense account remained dormant for quite some time.Then, I started blogging. I started of with one at Blogger, and then had several - and it all had Google Adsense ads. It took quite sometime for me to stabilize, and move to another blog host, and finally have a decent blog (http://www.blogcharm.com/splat/). Of course, I required a page to put all my miscellaneous stuff on the net, and I have been using my Google Pages for that for quite some time now. And for the past few months, I got a domain name (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) for myself, and set up this website that should soon be having quite a handful of articles on various topics using the Xisto account. It has been earning around two dollars every month last three times. (I know - it is pretty low, but as I said before, it does not yet, as of now, have much content).A couple of days back, I got a Google Analytics account. I have been running it for WiseTome, and am collecting some data on it. I get traffic mostly from signatures I leave around, or search engines. I am trying to analyze on the keywords that come in, and try to give more content based on that.

Well, I am not quite sure of how that happens. I mean, say I do put in all the effort to create a quality content page, and then what happens. How would people know it is better than any other in the first place if it did not get visitors from the search engine? I am not sure how the old style SEO took place, but I think one still would need to actively propagate his or her website in order to get noticed by people. Else, how would the in-links follow 'subsequently and automatically'?

OK. Finally, I got to know from some other forum that they had opened the sign ups and I went and signed up. Oddly, they did not send me the invitation as they said they would when I gave the email ID.Anyway, I got hold of the account and I set it up for my website (an article library) that I have setup here at Xisto. It was pretty simple to set up as they had asked to put few lines of codes before the </body> tag on every page.Putting that on every page would have taken quite some time, but thankfully I use Drupal as CMS. All I had to do was go to the index.php, and hunt for the </body> tag, and just insert the code that Google had given before it.The Google Analytics indicated that it had been successfully installed at my site, and that it was gathering data. This had happened about a couple of days before. Now, I log on to it and I am hit with phletora of reports and all sorts of things. I was pretty much used to the Weblizer at the Xisto cPanel, and could catch few terms here and there. But now I am totally blown away by all the statistics and reports that they can give.Something specific that intriuged me was the Bounce Rates. Something about how visitors stayed at my page or they went out. I understood that much but I could not get whether it was good if the rate was more or it was less. There are quite a couple of things that perplexed me.Are there any more users of Google Analytics around here? I would sure like to discuss a few things on how one uses it.

Now that is a really good calculator you pointed out TavoxPeru.I prefer to use 'ems' instead of specific pixel sizes when defining the font-sizes for various blocks in CSS because else, that would keep the design fixed. If someone wants to resize the fonts using their browser option, they are unable to.But if one uses 'em' sizes for the fonts through out the CSS, then that leads to a truly fluid design and a visitor has choices of font-sizes and can choose whichever is comfortable to him.

The point of working with Sub-D is that you need not worry about the resource hogging during the design time. Another reason why one should rather switch off the Sub-D on view port during design time is that it might lead to what is called Messy meshes. After the modelling if the base mesh turns out to be a 'messy mesh' then the following needs to be dealth with: - The UV mapping needs to be tweaked a lot to get a decent result - When rigging for animation, everything gets messed up when binding to the bones.

Ofcourse they can be. My mistake that I did not specify it to be 'average number of words' per page instead of 'number of words' per page. That is a real content heavy site you have and I think it will drive traffic to your site by itself once it gets indexed by search engines. Moreover you use Google Sitemap, and I think that surely will get your pages indexed.Good going.

You got 404 pages of moderate quality (300 words)! And you have not even started your site yet? That is really amazing. You must have worked real hard to get that much of content.Now that I think about it, I think that once you have enough content, I need not worry about directories and such things. Because even with a mere handful of content rich pages, I am getting hits from search engines that are quite relevant.So, I think if you have that 400 pages with quality content, you should be getting pretty decent traffic a couple of days since you lauch your website.

OK. The logo font is fine as a matter of fact. It falls under the category of Decorative fonts, and they go well for logos.Basically there are six types or groups of fonts:- Oldstyle- Modern- Slab Serif- Sans Serif- Script- DecorativeOld style, Modern and Slab Serif are all fonts with serifs. They differ on the types of serif. Example of fonts that fall on these categories are: Goudy, Palantino, Times, Baskerville, Garamond, Bondoni, Fenice, Onyx, Walbaum, Clarendon, Memphis, New Century School Book and many more. These are fonts that go good on print.Sans Serif are more common screen fonts. Examples: Antique Olive, Formata, Folio, Futura, Syntax.Script type of fonts are good for print in invitations and such things. Examples? Arid, Legacy, Cascade, Linoscripte etc.Well, I would not talk about Decorative type of fonts, because they are best for Logos and would require a write up on their own.Now, what type of fonts do I suggest?Well for the main content, go for Verdana, Tahoma or Trebuchet MS (The Sans Serif fonts other than Arial and Helvetica).You can keep the headings and all of the same font as the content but larger and heavier OR you could try some of the Serif fonts. Try any and see that there is a good contrast and balance between content and heading.

Ok pyost, the second link you gave works.I will tell that it is a real great design you have got there. You are a professional in terms of colour selections and layout.But there is one thing I would have changed if I were the author of that site: The font. I would have chosen some other Sans Serif font. In the book 'The Non-Designers Desing Book', Robin Williams says that people have to forget about Times New Roman and Arial/Helvetica for quite some time now to generate a good design. They are good fonts, but trust me, they have been used to death and people are quite used to seeing those fonts. The Times New Roman on print, and Arial or Helvetica on screen. Experiment with any other font - and if I were to give a suggestion, experiment with different Sans Serif fonts.

One of these days, I got another mail from Google that some traffic was coming from places that gave incentives for <- snipped -> I was surprised as to where this has come from, because I have not even a penny to give or anything else to anyone who would click on my ads on my site. Then, I thought back, and thought hard putting pressure on my brain (that is pretty bad at remembering things), and I finally realized that I had put up my site at a link exchange site (Link Referral or something like that). I went straight away and removed it from that place. Incidentally, my already measly earnings dropped to nil. The only reason I think the Google did not out right ban me because I think I had brought to their notice about the earlier fraudulent clicks that got generated at my site. I think, that way, if the Google people know that you really make an effort not to fraud, and then they are considerate. Else, I think they just ask them to take a hike. Anyway, I now have one concern. Can I not even place my sites at relevant directories? How am I supposed to get people see my site? Now, the only traffic I get is through people searching for something and my site popping up in the results. But I think, I should also be considerate on the amount of content one has on the site. I have real less content at the moment. As I said in my Google Pages (the 3rd August entry), Harold Davis has something to say about it. }

Is it just me or are other people getting this message when trying to access the screen shot? I too wanted a unique template for my Drupal driven site, by I just could not do it. I took a pre-made template that was some what like I wanted, and then modified few things to get what I wanted.

Oh! This tread came up from back in time. That really shows how I leave my projects incomplete. There have been many reasons, but I think I will get into it soon. (Recently, I have been studying for Oracle certification - got an OCP finally. Yay!) Anyway, Demonhawk, I am not going for ultra realism. Moderate realism, but a tint of Anime. I do use references when modelling in Blender. As a matter of fact, I did use a anime profile and front picture to do the above model - that is the reason I got the proportions right. Else, I find it hard to get the proportions right, when I do free form in CG. I do get proportions rather OK when I do actual sketching. Anyway, the model is facet for one reason - it is a Sub-D model. That is, it is a Sub-Division based model. (For more information on this, this link should help - http://www.vfxwizard.com/grimoire/).In this process of desiging, one only designs the control cage, and designs it in conformance with the muscle topology. Once that is done, the intermediary polygons are generated during render time, and they can be generated to any level (atleast, theoratically). That way, it reduces the load on the workstation during design time.

OK Quatrax. That answered my questions. I think this thread may be deemed closed.