rvalkass

Have a look at Project Wonderful. You can set it up so you individually screen all adverts, so you can make sure they are ones you want to appear on your site and fit in with your site's theme. If you turn an advert away it won't run on your site but obviously you won't get any money either! There are also a few different sizes of adverts you can pick to display. Remember that you're not going to find a service that lets you advertise in whatever sizes you want - there are standard sizes that most people stick to, so you'll want to use those. You also have the option of only allowing text ads or text and image ads for each ad block on your site. The main difference from a normal ad network is that you are paid for the time an advert is shown on your site, not for the number of clicks or impressions. There's a good explanation of how this works on the Project Wonderful site. Take a look and give it a try.

Do you know why wrapping it in towels would work? All I can see it doing is making the problem much much worse... The chips inside generate huge amounts of heat, but with the vents covered with towels that hot air has nowhere to go. You'd just heat up the inside of the XBox to a very high temperature (way above the normal operating temperature) which would damage the machine. Any information as to why this works, and what exactly you're doing, would be appreciated.

I've had a few of these fall into my spam folder over the years. Both GMail and Thunderbird pick them up as spam and get rid of them. I also get the odd similar PM. I haven't spotted any real correlation in the IP addresses though, which makes it difficult to block them before they send the messages. And, as BH says, it could be a real person sat there copy and pasting these messages (as they'd have to click the link to send an email to you, as your address is hidden in your profile) so blocking them would just cause them to create a new account and use another proxy server. Unfortunately that's the reality of it. Most of the spam I see comes from accounts that have only made that one spam post and nothing else. They seem to create new accounts each time with different proxy servers, so blocking becomes difficult. Still, we do our best

Please, people: dispose of your waste responsibly! Don't take your packaging materials, strap them to a rocket and launch them into the inner solar system at high velocity into a solar orbit. http://www.fox46charlotte.com/ (My only complaint with that article being that according to Americans, Warwick is near London when it is in fact near Birmingham...)

Whether you believe it's right to smoke marijuana or not, the law is still the law - you don't get a choice in the matter I'm always amazed when people are surprised when they get caught doing something they knew they shouldn't have been doing - if you knew it was illegal, why do it? Just seems stupid to me... Basically, they've informed the police of what you've done and what evidence they have. It is then generally up to the police to decide what to do about it, if anything at all. As you're in the US I'm not sure what the process is like or whether it is something that would appear on any criminal records checks run against you.

I changed my network from Vodafone to O2 a while back, and wondered exactly the same - was there some way to put a new version of the software on the phone so that I could get rid of Vodafone's stuff? The answer I got was a resounding "no". The best I could do was force the phone to reset it's firmware completely. However, this kept some remnants of the menace of Vodafone, such as a menu item. It seems like the OS is written to some read-only memory (at least in my phone) so there is no way to replace it. If anyone has had any success otherwise, let us know.

Do you mean "Is Xisto run from a VPS?" or "Can you get a VPS from Xisto?" Xisto isn't run from a VPS but from a number of physical servers in a datacentre in the US (if I remember correctly). OpaQue obviously knows a lot more about it than I do As for getting a VPS from Xisto, you can. They start at $20 per month (which you can use your myCENTs to pay for). That gets you 192MB RAM (256MB burstable), 11GB drive space and 300GB bandwidth per month. The highest package is $59 per month with bigger and better everything There's more information about VPS hosting in the Billing centre. You can also speak to the sales team via the Billing page to ask any specific questions about particular packages or features.

To get your warning reduced just show that you've taken on board what it says. So, in your case, make posts that are your own rather than copying them from elsewhere. If you do copy anything, put it in Quote tags. Give it a week or two and we'll look at your warning - if you're following the rules it'll get reduced. If I see a member making good posts, but with a warning, I always have a look at when and why they got the warnings. If it's been a while and they're making good posts then I'll reduce their warning. Some people seem to think that doing nothing and just waiting will get your warning reduced - it won't. You need to actively show that you've taken notice of the warning.

I don't want to turn this into a debate on filtering, but consider the flip side and the problems caused. When I was at school the Internet connection was filtered through a proxy server. This was fine for blocking games websites, social networking sites, etc. However, it also used a keyword filter which caused no end of problems. For example, in History lessons (and in Politics ones) it was necessary for students to research topics such as fascism, the Nazi party and the Hitler youth. All blocked by the filter, which meant people couldn't get on with their work. The same applied to terms dealing with abortion, drug abuse, cloning and the like - all necessary research topics in Philosophy and Ethics class. While the principles of filtering are good, the execution is lousy in every circumstance I have ever seen it used and it therefore becomes necessary to bypass the system at times. I believe it would work on sites that are being blocked based on a keyword list of content rather than the URL (or at least that worked at my old school) because the proxy server/filtering software wouldn't be able to read the content of the page, and therefore wouldn't be able to filter it. *CHEERS* I could not agree with you more!

If you've never programmed before then I strongly recommend getting a good book from your local library/bookshop that will teach you the basic ideas behind programming and the basics of the particular programming language the book deals with. The reason I recommend going and buying the book in person rather than online is that everyone learns in different ways, and it is very hard to tell when ordering a book from an online shop whether the tone and style of the text will be helpful to you. There is nothing worse than picking up a textbook written in a style that just doesn't work for you, and assuming you can't go near that topic ever again. Look at different books, see how each one teaches - do they have example code? exercises for you to do? are there answers to those exercises? - and also check how they start out - read the first few pages and check it starts at the right level for you. There are some notes from my University which may be of use to you. They deal with programming in C from a beginners perspective (ie. no prior programming knowledge) using XCode on the Mac. As I believe you use a Mac, this should make this information extra useful for you.

Just because something is popular (like MicrosoftTM OfficeTM) doesn't mean it is the best option. Personal choice is very much a part of the decision for most people, and they like to go with whatever is familiar. For most people this means using Microsoft products, which is a great shame. If people were taught ICT in schools, for example, with OpenOffice then I'm sure plenty of people would demand its use. I also don't see how MicrosoftTM justify the huge price tag for Office when OpenOffice is free. It's sheer greed and not something I'd ever feel comfortable supporting myself. I'm not profit-oriented in my daily life but I try to donate what I can to useful piece of free software that I make use of pretty much every day. I would hope that businesses using free software for profit would donate something back to that project in some way, although there will always be those who don't. I don't see how stronger copyright laws would be an advantage to anyone. Invision and vBulletin seem to be surviving OK despite the wealth of free versions. The difference is in the level of support you receive. I imagine one of the main reasons IPB is used here at Xisto is because of the support you get from Invision which is vital when your business relies upon it.

Nothing wrong. You just need to make 5 posts in sections that have a post count before your myCENTs get calculated for the first time. At the moment you've only made 3 posts, so make a couple more, wait a little while and your myCENTs will get calculated. After that they are calculated more often - sometimes as soon as you make a post. Once you've got 100 they get converted into $1 in your billing account.

You'll need to upload it yourself, but it works perfectly well. This site I wrote using Zend, although it is a fairly simplistic use of the framework.

Only IE seems to have conditional comments, from what I am aware of and have researched. I've found two methods for conditional CSS in Konqueror, linked below, but neither of them are ideal and seem a bit 'hacky', even compared to conditional CSS comments. http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/ http://www.conditional-css.com/

Invision still have a team of paid programmers, as do vBulletin. There are free platforms to run social networking sites, yet Facespace and Mybook and whatever they're called still employ plenty of programmers. The key is that programmers are often paid to write specialised software for a company - something they can't get anywhere else and no-one else has a need for. There will always be a demand for that, and one that free software distributed online would never fill - why write software that may only be relevant to a dozen people when you could write software that's useful to hundreds or thousands? Paid programmers also have fixed deadlines, a fixed scope and can work full-time, whereas those volunteering on open-source project are often just working in spare time at the evenings and weekends, and work on whatever interests them. Most people I know do their own DIY. It hasn't killed the construction industry. Some of the more complex stuff I just don't have the skills or knowledge for, so I get a plumber/electrician/carpenter/whoever in to do it. It doesn't kill the industry at all.

The design is looking good. There are a few spacing and padding issues in Konqueror that I'm taking a look at - hopefully they're fairly simple fixes.I agree that the buttons on the left hand side probably need a little more to make them stand out a bit more. If we could find 3 colours that work well with the background and the orange then we could use one each of those colours for the buttons, although that could look a bit too busy and cluttered.

I've reduced the spacing and increased the sizes of the boxes to use the available space. Abstract but with impact was exactly what I was thinking for the banner, but I'm not sure what other ideas are floating around out there for it. The buttons were placeholders. I did it late last night and didn't work out the CSS to make them do what we wanted them to Should be fixed on the latest version. I'm slightly concerned that the RSS feed claims to have been updated this morning, yet is showing content from 2008. If RSS data will form the content for the site then it is vital that it's actually correct and up-to-date, otherwise it will make the site look like no-one has updated it for 2 years. The padding and margins are all subject to change. Take a look at the page now and see if that's any better. At the moment the whole design is fixed width, as I didn't think any of the content really required a fluid layout. I've added some slightly more useful example data so we have an idea of how much text we can fit where. As far as I know, no browsers actually support CSS3's border-radius property, although Mozilla and Webkit have their own versions of it. For the moment I have added those to the site, although I would much rather have a solution that worked across all browsers. Until CSS3 is adopted by major browsers this is something I haven't looked into, so any solutions that work cross-browser are welcome. At the moment I'm rounding everything, but if we only want certain corners rounded then that's not a problem. Update I've uploaded a new version of the page. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I'm proud you guys all voted me as most helpful member I'm also about as geeky as you can get so I guess I deserve that one :DAny chance of the award graphics for our sigs SM?

The graphics forum. General Xisto news is often more related to myCENTs, hosting changes, etc. and therefore isn't really that interesting to people who have found the graphics site and are interested in that part of the forums. Makes sense. However, that would result in older topics with recent replies never appearing in the list, despite the fact they may still be active. Perhaps using latest replies, but providing a link to the first post in the topic rather than the most recent post? A small banner would certainly provide the most space for the content and seems like a good idea. I didn't exactly do my sketch to perfect scale A design on the right hand side should be fairly generic. On the site at the moment we have an image of a character that has nothing to do with graphics or the site, which seems slightly odd. An abstract, generic image would work well, or some form of composite image. Not sure. After posting it I came to the same conclusion that the current SOTW should be placed above the previous winner. It's a minor change that doesn't affect the layout. I intended to draw the right column (the SOTW boxes) slightly wider but I didn't quite leave myself enough space It's our narrow A4 paper I tell you! Thinking about the widths, how about 25% : 25% : 50% or would that be giving too much bias to the SOTW column and make the text hard to fit in the central one? Update I've moved away from pen and paper into the HTML phase, and have crafted a quick prototype of the layout I proposed, along with truefusion's changes, just to see the size and position of the boxes. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ The text (and colours!) will all be changed - it's all just placeholders to check the positioning of everything and see if it's an idea people want to pursue. Let me know.

Seems will still have permissions problems with attachments added my moderators then. Here's a copy on ImageShack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Weird_Al%22_Yankovic

This is what I was thinking along the lines of (excuse the fact it's rubbish, you can't read my scrawl and it's in blue biro...)The important things are clear and above the fold, and the site layout isn't cluttered. Anyway, just an idea.

Hi Emily, welcome to Xisto If you want to start a website here then you will need to create an account on the billing site using the same email address you used for your forum account. You will then earn myCENTs for your posts, which get deposited in your billing account to spend on hosting and domains The longer and better written your posts, the more myCENTs you earn and the quicker you can get your website up and running.

If the RSS feeds will form the content for the site then I think the index page should feature the latest 2/3 items from each feed (News, SOTW, etc.) if they have teaser text, or more if we just have titles. Links to a few archive sections could then just link back to the relevant forum section. The RSS content draws people in, and shows the site is active (especially if we could get some AJAX to update the page live with the latest topics/posts) while a few select archive links send people to the forums where hopefully they'll stay. While this is somewhat similar to the current design, I'm thinking about something more streamline and minimalist in terms of navigation. Something to bear in mind with using the RSS content is that topic titles, descriptions and post content will become vital to the site. Extra care will need to be taken to ensure the site ends up with correctly spelled, correctly formatted content. Everyone is pretty good at it anyway, but it's just something to bear in mind. A small number of items from each feed with a small teaser would probably work best, especially if the page ends up with a few different feeds on it. Hopefully that will hit the careful balance between providing the user with enough information to be interested but not so much they get overwhelmed, Good idea. It certainly needs to be more prominent than the other links on the page. A large, clear user-friendly button to show off your work. It'll depend on the overall page layout, but it's a vital element to making it a success. The gallery doesn't just contain stuff for the graphics section of the forums (I have review photographs and things for example) which would look somewhat odd on the GFXTrap site. I'm also not sure how easy the gallery is to interface with to get the images from it, but that's something that can be worked out. +1 for that colour scheme. I don't think the blue needs more saturation - those colours work very well together as they are.

GMT and UTC are both exactly the same (GMT+00:00). If UTC and BST were used then at most a one hour difference would be observed, but the minutes would remain accurate. The fact that there is a 5:30 difference would suggest a correct time zone of India/Sri Lanka. According to most reports this is due to, once again, Microsoft getting something wrong. The hardware clock (the one on your motherboard) is supposed to be written in the UTC time zone, and read as that. The operating system then applies any changes to get it into your time zone. However, Windows gets this wrong and always writes the time in your local time zone. To fix the issue you need to make Ubuntu also write the time incorrectly, as Microsoft don't have any way to fix their mistake in their OS. If you open /etc/default/rcS in a text editor, you should find a line like this: # Set UTC=yes if your system clock is set to UTC (GMT), and UTC=no if not.UTC=yes Change it to say: # Set UTC=yes if your system clock is set to UTC (GMT), and UTC=no if not.UTC=no

With this change still applied: Myth: Busted methinks. It just doesn't make sense that changing the serial ports would have any effect whatsoever on your Internet connection.