Xatal

Hands down my favorite part of WordPress is how easily expandable it is through plugins. The big open source community creates all sorts of useful plugins to help expand WordPress from the great blogging software that it is into something incredible.

I use all sorts of plugins on Xatal, and since I’ve been blogging, I’ve steadily found certain plugins to be especially useful for a variety of different tasks. Here are 30 of the best WordPress plugins and how I’ve put them to work: Keep reading »

RateMyProfessors is a quick way to guess what to expect

When it comes time to pick your college classes, RateMyProfessors becomes a famous name on college campuses as students frantically look up professors, reading reviews and checking ratings. www.RateMyProfessors.com has become a quick way to find out what to expect from a professor you have never heard of before.

But is the information accurate? Is RateMyProfessors.com a reliable way to evaluate a professor beforehand?

From my experiences yes, but you need to know what to look for. Keep reading »

We’re all familiar with Google Suggest, that wonderful box that pops up as you type in your search on Google and suggests what you might be searching for. It can help save you the trouble of typing out a long sentence, but I’ve found it’s a lot more useful for humor than anything else.

A lot of searches are pretty reasonable, but in most batches, there’s that one weird one that just makes you think, “who the hell searches for that?!”:

It’s really surprising to see the things people actually search for, but believe it or not, these are real. I spent some time typing in different common phrases to see just what Google searches were suggested. The results were pretty entertaining…

* These might be a bit offensive on a variety of levels, you’ve been warned.

Keep reading »

Twitter receives a lot of buzz

In the techno-world, it’s hard to go a day without hearing Twitter mentioned in some way — how revolutionary it is, a company’s twitter name, and so forth.

I’m taking a college class about Web 2.0, and recently a guest speaker spoke about Twitter, which spawned a large discussion about the site. We came to agree on four points:

It hasn’t caught on with the younger generation.

Most college students still stick mainly to Facebook. Those who do use Twitter use it in addition to Facebook or as a separate means of networking. Twitter is not a big thing with students, and few really mention it. A lot of the media overestimates its appeal to the younger generation, and instead adults are more caught up with tweeting. Keep reading »

At least once a day, every blogger will check his stats. How many page views have there been? What posts are the most popular? Where is my traffic coming from? How many subscribers do I have? A large amount of traffic is a big contributor to feeling successful as a blogger — you know you’ve done something right if a lot of people are reading what you write.

Does monitoring statistics cause us to blog for the wrong reasons?

The problem is, so many bloggers make traffic their entire focus. All over the Internet, there are tons of posts detailing good techniques to increase the number of people who read your blog. As Ben at Frogstr points out, when bloggers decide to change their style and focus just to receive more page views, a lot of the originality of a blog is lost in the process. Even though the blog will cater more to a general audience, the niche audience the author may have originally started out trying to attract may drift away and lose interest.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve realized that the secret to maintaining your originality is to simply stop monitoring statistics. Keep reading »

As we come closer and closer to the time when many colleges start to inform applicants of whether or not they were accepted, you’re likely to start stressing more and more over the future.

Sure, you’ve done all you can up to this point, and it’s just a waiting game, but there’s always going to be that nervousness of if you got into your schools or if (God forbid) everything went haywire.

I’ve been looking around online to try to find websites to help answer that very same question for my girlfriend. I’ve found two very helpful sites:

Keep reading »

One thing I’ve been loving lately about my college is that we have wireless Internet at most places on campus. This has shown to be intensely useful, whether for casually browsing Facebook while in class or as a tool to study somewhere other than my room.

Back home, we only use wireless Internet, and I’ve grown very fond of moving my laptop from room to room, rather than limiting me to one desk in the house. Using wireless Internet is great.

However, I’ve found that there are some trade-offs when I choose wireless over Ethernet:

Keep reading »

The famous Control level is playable in multiplayer now

For fans of the classic N64 first-person shooter GoldenEye, a modern version of it has been released!

If you have any games using Valve’s “Source” engine, then you can play GoldenEye Source, a modern version of it.

For the main page of the game, check here. You can see more screenshots and other info about the game there.

The online play is pretty fun, although a bit frustrating. I’m used to games with crosshairs in the middle of the screen, so trying to aim without any crosshairs can be a bit tough. However, it’s easy enough to hold a button to aim your gun.

A lot of the original GoldenEye maps aren’t meant for that many people, but they hold up pretty well. The game plans to feature all of the original one-player levels as maps. The online play is definitely more fast-paced than the N64 counterpart, and with the added advantage that you don’t have to worry about screenwatchers.

Seeing as the game is basically free — provided you have a Source game — it’s definitely worth at least trying out. I doubt it will ever catch on as the next big thing,  but it’s great for the nostalgia.