Today I decided to implement a few new new features to Jon-Kingsbury.com by creating an Album and Resume page:
Album:
Pictures from the past couple of years which include:
-Trip to Rome, Italy 2005
-New England Dragway
-1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass
-2006 Harley Sportster Custom 1200cc
Resume:
-My currently updated resume
Please do comment some of my pictures in the Album!
Enjoy!!
It’s official, www.umlforums.com is now officially open for free registration to all University of Massachusetts Lowell students!
What came about the idea of a UML discussion forum? Well, just last week I had a chat with my roommate about the future of www.expertiseforums.com We both agreed that ExpertiseForums was a good idea, but there is just too much competition and work involved to get that discussion forum going.. The software alone costs roughly $300, and it was just useless as I had no ambition for the forum. So we brainstormed a bit until we finally came up with the idea of a discussion forum for all UMass Lowell students.
After registering www.umlforums.com and selling www.expertiseforums.com, ideas just kept popping in my head. One particular idea that may be of great interest to UML students is the thought of having an online marketplace to simplify used-book sales. Buying new books on campus could amount to over $400 easily/per semester. By having a discussion forum as a resource, we could all save some serious money simply by selling/swapping books online.
Some other possible future additions could include a database for off-campus housing, albums/gallery, and many more..
This is surely going to be an interesting project!
Just recently, I noticed the United States is now all green indicating visitors from all 50 states to Defending the Truth (in the past month) Every Monday, the staff of Defending the Truth receives an e-mail with detailed information listing the web sites Visitor rates, Traffic sources, Content analysis, and Goals in graphs/text. These stats are provided to us thanks to the new and improved Google Analytics program. I encourage those who have not enrolled to definitely take into consideration the free Google Analytics program as you will be amazed with the detailed statistics regarding your web site.
Below is an image of the entire globe. Beige indicates no visitors, Light green indicates a small number of visitors, and dark green indicates many visitors from a specific country. Click on the image below for an enlarged view:
Upon selecting a country, you can zoom in to see which states have sent x number of visitors:
That’s not all…Check out California when I zoom into that state:
Now with these detailed statistics, I’ve been submitting Defending the Truth to directories and search engines of states and other countries of which in the past have sent no visitors. After doing so, I was able to achieve my goals in receiving visitors from every state in the United States.
My next goal.., achieve visitors from every country to Defending the Truth!
It’s very painful to hear all over the news the Democrat’s and the Republican’s race to the White House. In 2008, we will likely only have 2 to 4 candidates to choose from, which are good odds that the candidate who will win the election, could be just another disaster for America.
Currently, the Democrat’s and the Republican’s are working hard to find their best candidate. However, on both sides of the fence, the candidates are very close among popularity ratings within their own party.
Now here is the problem. Since America is divided amongst the Democrat’s and Republican’s, (well yeah and the few bright ones who are Independent or unspecified) this will truthfully leave us with only 2 candidates to choose from (as the third or fourth likely have no hope). Why not give the American people the opportunity to choose among lets say 6 candidates? Or even more? For example, 2 Republican candidates, 2 Democrat candidates, and 2 Independent candidates? You may ask why I would suggest something like this; well surely you do remember the elections back in 2004! We had to choose between two idiots! We only chose the candidate who seemed to be less dumb.
If we were allowed to choose among 6, or even 12 candidates, I feel that overall the American people would be much more comfortable and relaxed with the coming elections. The odds would be improved that there actually could be a candidate, or two on the ballot that may actually have a brain.
Today is the first day I came across www.hostingreviewsbyusers.com
In all honesty, I wish I had stumbled across their web site in the past before I whipped out the credit card. Currently I am hosted with www.wirenine.com and I am very pleased with the performance and services. I wrote a nice positive review for WireNine and not two hours later, received a thank you e-mail from Joel and Ben.
HostingReviewsbyUsers has a network of domain names based on the name of the hosting company being reviewed, and a central domain which collects all the data.
For example:
WireNine.com –> WireNineReviews.com
iPowerWeb.com –> iPowerWebReviews.com
One thing that struck me as relevant was the amount of negative reviews left for iPowerWeb. iPowerWeb was my first host and I was very pleased with their services (don’t laugh yet, continue reading). Yet let the reviews speak for themselves…A couple of years back, they were getting an enormous amount of increased clients and sales.. The problem with this was a large reduction in server performance (overloading) and a very long wait time for tech-support (sometimes 1-2 days) due to all of the downtime I was experiencing. So, I spent about a good month searching for a very reliable host instead of jumping too quickly into another “poor” host. I thankfully found www.wirenine.com and I will never turn back. Since day 1, I have been 100% pleased with their services. Now if you visit wireninereviews.com, you will notice that they only have positive reviews..go figure. 
Back to my point…I would like to thank Joel and Bill for their innovative idea in setting up a review system based on the most common hosts found on the Internet. If you visit any any the web site of any hosting company, you will only find “positive” reviews. Thanks to HostingReviewsbyUsers.com, you will find only true positive or negative reviews given about a specific hosting company. This is a great way for people to easily and quickly find a reliable host.
Thank you Joel and Ben!
DtT, which is the acronym for Defending The Truth, has engaged in some new ideas of which you may have noticed in my last blog posting. In this posting, I would like to focus on the new “Interviews” idea for the political web site.
This new feature will bring to the members and visitors of DtT different aspects of the web site which are not primarily forum based. The idea behind this new feature concludes interviewing the members of DtT along with displaying the interviews on a static page. This will be a great way of getting to know the members politically and socially.
Tadpole256, a moderator at DtT, thankfully volunteered for the position to conduct the interviews. He has chosen myself to be the first interviewed, which can be seen here:
Interviews – Jonathan Kingsbury
Tadpole256′s next interview will be onthefence, another moderator at DtT. I think his attitude of interviewing the staff members first is a smart move as it will allow the members to get a better understanding of the staff at DtT. He will then most likely focus his interviews towards the active members of the web site who have been with DtT for the longest time, most postings, and so on.
Tadpole256 is also greatly interested in voiced interviews. Although I do not really enjoy hearing myself on any type of recordings, I think this is a great way to build a closer connection with the members. Even though I only know a couple of members personally, I feel that the new interviews and voiced interviews will help all of us to get to know eachother much better..as if we have met in person.
Under 2 weeks ago, I made some rigorous changes to my political debate community, www.defendingthetruth.com
Some of the new additions made to the web site include:
-Articles revisions
-Member Interviews
-Politician Reviews
-DtTunes (mp3 jukebox)
-Complete re-design
I think it was definitely time for a complete overhaul as the 2008 elections are approaching. Before the updates were made, the atmosphere of the web site was mostly focused on a political forum. I wanted to give the members more features to play with, along with a cleaner, more user-friendly look. The old design was much too plain and it was in need of a desperate change.I threw in around 40 hours of work into the new site. I am proud of the results and I hope that the members are enjoying the new features. Free speech will now be expanded to not only in a debate fashion on the political forums, but now in a way where members can submit Political Articles and Politician Reviews. Submitting Articles and Reviews will be a great way to reach out to a larger audience.
Please visit www.defendingthetruth.com to check out the new look and features.
Enjoy!
Well, it looks like quite a lot of web sites received a Page Rank update today! Thankfully, all of my web sites have received an increase in Page Rank.
DefendingTheTruth.com
Old PageRank: 4
New PageRank: 5
Age: 2+ Years
ExpertiseForums.com
Old PageRank: 0
New PageRank: 3
Age: 4 Months
Jon-Kingsbury.com
Old PageRank: 0
New PageRank: 4
Age: 2 Months
A couple of years ago, I mentioned the name Mitt Romney on my web site as a possible candidacy for President in 2008. www.defendingthetruth.com is a well established political community that I have created back in January of 2005. Today, the community is very active with valued members across the entire globe.
When I first mentioned Mitt Romney’s name, most of the members were not sure as to who Mitt Romney was. They might have known that he was the Governor of Massachusetts, but his successes in life were all left unknown. Since Mitt Romney’s decision to run for President in 2008, he has become widely known on my web site, on the Internet, and across the globe. Now I do not feel that this is due to the media alone, but his innovative and unique strategies in reaching out to everyone via the Internet.
If you search on Google for Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or any other candidates, you will retrieve a list of web sites including their personal campaign web pages. The difference between those candidates and Mitt Romney, is the unique strategy I have noticed that Mitt Romney is taking to reach out to the public.
What is the difference? One word, “YouTube” YouTube is a very popular broadcasting service which allows anyone free registration to gain access to and post random videos whether it be personal, television, comedy, and so on. Mitt Romney was smart enough to adopt this feature by advertising his campaigns on YouTube, posting videos as he reaches out to a global audience. His videos help explain to the people what he stands for, the problems currently faced in America, and how he would make a good President in fixing these problems.
If you watch many of his videos, you will capture the word “innovation” from many of his speeches. I feel that this word is a strong point in his campaign as he has used innovation to help solve the many problems that has been brought to his attention during his lifetime (investment in Staples, Winter Olympics, Debt to Surplus in Massachusetts, Healthcare for all in Massachusetts, and so on..)
Watch his latest video posted on YouTube below:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=c70pGVmh5IE
As you can see, he is reaching out to a global audience on YouTube by asking them what they feel America’s single greatest challenge is. In just 4 days alone, his video has received close to 300,000 views! Sure you can run expensive campaign ads via the media, but this strategy is much cheaper as it allows you to connect with millions of people via the Internet. What I see in the media are just ad campaigns used as a scare tactics or attacks based on the other candidate. What I see on the Internet is more of a connection between the candidate and the viewers.
Mitt Romney’s name is receiving more attention thanks to his innovative and unique strategies in reaching out to the people. He may very well be the next President of the United States of America.
Today I received a lot of goodies in the mail. A brand new MSI motherboard, AMD Dual Core 3800+ Processor, 250GB SATA Hard Drive, 2GB DDR ram, 256 nVidia 7600 GT graphics card, and a bunch of other stuff. It was time to build a good performing system to replace my old system I built in 2001.
Tonight I did a fresh install of the Windows Vista Business Operating System on the primary 250GB Maxtor Hard Drive. Everything was running smoothly until I encountered another problem with Windows Vista. After shutting down the computer to install my old 160GB PATA Hard Drive (transfer files), Windows Vista would no longer boot. Instead I am left with a nice “Non-system disk or disk error” message. Now you may be asking if I had set the jumper settings correctly, or the boot sequence in BIOS…well of course!
I then figured it would be best to return to the original way I had everything set up, so I removed the old Hard Drive…no luck. So what to do next? I threw in the Windows Vista install CD and selected the “repair” feature after booting off of the CD. The repair feature instantly recognized that the master boot record was damaged, and it fixed the problem accordingly. After a fresh restart, Windows Vista booted fine.
Now I still needed to get my old Application Data files off of the old hard drive, so I reconnected the hard drive to the motherboard and yet again, “Non-system disk or disk error” JUST GREAT! Yet again, I had to throw in the Vista install CD to repair the master boot record, and now my computer boots fine with both hard drives connected.
I have never experienced a problem like this when i was running Windows XP, or the earlier versions of Windows, as I have moved hard drives around in the past. So in conclusion, if you ever need to throw in another hard drive while you are running Windows Vista, you might experience a problem similar to this. Just giving you a heads up.