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Embedded YouTube Blocks Popup on Website

By: dragonblogger  //  Category: Internet      //  4 Comments »

Okay I have spent almost two hours trying to figure out how to prevent a YouTube Video on my featured video sidebar from standing on top of my PopUp Domination mailing subscribe box that opens as a popup.

I tried tweaking the Z-index of the plug-in .js file itself as well as various configurations of Z-index on the YouTube embed code but nothing I did would let my PopUp Domination stand in front of the embedded YouTube Video.

It looked like this, which prevented someone from filling out the form in the popup:

image

Finally, I found a solution but it was a pretty ugly solution.

So this is what typical YouTube Embed Code looks like when you copy it from YouTube video directly:

<object width="359" height="227">

<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3pIcGU6Ith0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1">

</param>

<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>

<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3pIcGU6Ith0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="359" height="227">

</embed></object>

Well, I learned that the <embed> tag is not exactly very good HTML and that if you redo the code so you are using just an <object> tag like such:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:360px; height:330px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/3pIcGU6Ith0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1?rel=0">

<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3pIcGU6Ith0&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1?rel=0" />

<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param></object>

Plus you have to add the <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param> and this will cause the YouTube video to work just fine and any popup to take precedence over the YouTube video.  This is a bit inconvenient to do every time and I am hoping that I can figure out how to modify the plugin I am using (or have the developer do it) so that I don’t have to constantly rework my YouTube Embed code whenever I want to add a Google YouTube Video to my WordPress Blog.

In the meantime, changing your YouTube Embed code will allow CSS or Javascript Popup to go in front of your embedded YouTube Video.

-Dragon Blogger



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Why You Shouldn’t Put Things on the Internet

By: Mikazo  //  Category: Uncategorized      //  13 Comments »
It seems these days that anyone and everyone is only too anxious to post what they’re doing at that exact moment on Twitter. Everyone feels the need to fill their Facebook profile with personal information, pictures from last night’s party, and occurrences like the famous Facebook wall fail. http://www.geekologie.com/2009/08/25/facebook-megafail.jpg

Not only are people willing to put their information on the Internet, they’re ready to hook up every conceivable device to the internet, such as toasters, HDTVs, kerosene-powered cheese graters (bonus points if you get that reference), and critical national infrastructure systems.

If you have information or a physical device that you don’t want someone else to have access to, connecting such information or devices to the internet greatly increases the chance someone will see or use it. While it’s true that there are ways to protect your information or devices, nothing is 100% secure in the world of computer and network security. Unless you have a good reason and adequate risk mitigation when putting sensitive information or devices online, simply don’t do it.

ShhhFor example, if you don’t want the fact that you had a few drinks last night or a colourful blog rant in a moment of rage to haunt you in the future, don’t post it online while you still have the control to do so. When information is posted to the internet at large, it is immortalized through the work of countless search engine crawlers, cached on a server somewhere with backup copies, or copied, quoted, stolen, aggregated, translated or otherwise duplicated by who knows who else. Unfair as it is, employers will decide not to hire you based solely on a Google search of all the “cloud-storage” of information on the subject of you. Do you really trust all those privacy policies? What if something happens beyond the control of the policy-maker, such as someone stealing information?

If you’re trying to publish some type of digital work (book, video game, software, movie, etc.) and expect to be paid for it, not 100% of eventual access to your digital work will transfer money through to you. There are almost 2 billion internet users as of 2010, which is 28.7% of the whole world. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

While it’s safe to assume 99% of those people are idiots (a pretty safe bet regarding the internet, from what I’ve seen), that remaining 1% still leaves almost 20 million non-idiots that will undoubtedly find a way to get around whatever kind of protection you have on your digital work, and all it takes is one person to figure it out and distribute it freely, before the “immortalization” occurs as described in the previous paragraph. Just look at Wikileaks lately.

The same goes for physical devices and networks. If one smart guy figures out a way in, he can take control, steal files, etc. and the same rules apply as above. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to me to make even the most marginal control of critical infrastructure systems internet-accessible. Have any of the administrators watched Die Hard 4? Bad things will happen! Put everything critical on its own network and guard that instead. With way fewer access points and exposure, the likelihood of something bad happening is greatly reduced.

The funny part about all of this is that if on the other hand, you WANT something to be on the internet with as much exposure as possible (let’s say a blog for example), it’s actually pretty difficult to climb the popularity ladder. I guess that just proves that life isn’t fair, what can go wrong will go wrong, and what can go right probably won’t without a huge amount of work.

If you enjoyed this post, I try to write regular equally interesting posts at my tech blog, at http://mikazotechblog.blogspot.com

A thank you goes to Justin Germino for letting me guest post on his blog.



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When Should You Give Up on Blogging?

By: dragonblogger  //  Category: blogging      //  25 Comments »

Giving Up by natalicious
Being a successful blogger is like trying to pull weeds in the open Arizona desert, you will clear some patches but you will get bit by cactus along the way. No matter how hard or dedicated you are as a blogger you will go through periods of excitement, frustration and even in some cases “depression” when success waxes and wanes as it does for many blogs online.

Many bloggers exit the market after determining it is just too difficult to carve out a niche, replace your day job or find that it consumes more hours of your time than you get in return. The rest however persevere and know that to really make your mark you must continue to stay the course and hone your strategies, trim the fat and adapt in ways you may not have considered.

So lets talk about the three things you can do to help overcome some blogging plateaus and pitfalls that all but the few lucky bloggers encounter during their blogging ambitions.

Hone Your Strategies

This means it is time to re-evaluate what you are doing for your blog and start prioritizing your time and effort into your site. Take your weekly time you are spending on your blog and break it down into the following categories:

  • Content Writing
  • Promotion
  • Advertising
  • SEO
  • Social Media

Find out how much time you are spending in each category per week and then re-prioritize to focus on spending more time working another category. If you are writing content but not spending at least 30% of your time doing promotion or SEO, then it is time to switch focuses and make sure you shore up your promotional areas.

Trim the Fat

Simply put this means cut out anything and everything that doesn’t give provide you with value for one of the five area’s listed above. Drop any services or programs that bring you less than 5% of your monthly blogging traffic, unless you see potential for some to improve in the near future. Find out which of your blogging topics are most popular and focus on writing content to match your most popular topics, I have found I had to cut content from my own site after seeing much more traffic coming for specific categories and virtually no traffic arriving for others. Part of this is also adapting which is the next bullet.

Triming the fat also includes cutting out time wasters, and this means don’t spend another minute dropping Entrecard Drops, CMF Spikes or other traffic generation methods which require you to “invest time” to send traffic in order to receive traffic. These are typically a losing proposition and only help the most beginning stage blogs that don’t yet have a foothold on search engines or readership.

Adapting

Adapting your blog is perhaps the most prominent and I have seem many bloggers change the focus, theme and structure of their blog in order to attract or retain their audience. This could mean stripping out categories that don’t resonate well with your readers, or experimenting with a new topic or niche altogether and seeing how well it digests with your fans. The internet is ever changing and you sometimes may need to look and see if your Theme is also something that detracts from your audience and I have seen some themes that really take away the enjoyment of reading articles because they are either too distracting or too plain to really stand out.

Trim out all unnecessary plugins, widgets and other items which will slow your site down, lower your PageRank due to the external links and tend to make your blog look more like a personal blog. A facebook fanpage widget is fine, but having a Google FriendConnect, FaceBook, NetworkedBlogs and half a dozen other badges and widgets all running on the same site is distracting for readers. Pick one clear service you want them to join you on and stick with it, it is hard to pander six services to “follow your blog” and expect your readers to choose any but one or two of the six.

In Summary

The answer to the question “When Should You Give up on Blogging?” is Never. Because you can always adapt, change your strategies and test new methods to reaching an audience. The older and longer lived a website/blog is on the Internet the better for the site, and even if it takes you three or four years to start increasing your blog audience you will always have time to continue when you can. Never stop innovating and if you start to lose the passion and drive for blogging dig down deep and find out why you wanted to blog in the first place and reach for inspirations that will help fuel your passion again.

Only the truly passionate bloggers stand the test of time and you can see how they have risen and shine above the rest.

-Dragon Blogger



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Charter Communications Ultimate Service Bundle

By: dragonblogger  //  Category: Consumerism      //  No Comments »

Everyone who lives in a service area for Charter Communications is luckier than I am, because on black friday you can sign up for the Charter Communications Ultimate Service Bundle. I have not found a better online and telecommunications package bundle anywhere out there from any of Charter’s competitors.

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This one bundle package includes:

  • 10mb internet connection for your computer
  • Digital Home, Charter HD, Sports View, Digital View, HBO/Cinemax, Starz/Encore and Showtime/The Movie Channel for your Television
  • And Unlimited Calling for your Phone:

This for $165.97 per month and if you sign up, you will get a $250 gift card just for purchasing the ultimate bundle, which basically gives you some extra holiday shopping money or you can go out and buy something nice.

In addition to the $250 gift card, you will be entered in a sweepstakes to win an Xbox 360, if you are lucky you could be a winner, I know I don’t have one yet.

If I lived in a Charter Service area I would be on this deal like a bee drawn to honey because I pay almost $150 in Satellite TV and Internet right now, and I don’t have 1/3 of the features that this bundle deal offers. Plus I really could use the $250 gift card right now.

I encourage anyone to visit Charter Communications and see if you live in their service area, add up your phone bill, internet bill and satellite or cable bill. If your three bills add up to more than $165.97 per month then you need to sign up for this service, this deal includes premium movie packages, so you really can’t beat that price. We are talking about HD package as well. Compare wisely and you will see there is no better offer out there, and you can get the $250 gift card just in time for the holidays.

I feel there is no better deal out there and I have 3 different providers each for my phone, television and broadband right now, and they almost add up to more than this deal, I don’t even get HD Television or Premium Movie Channels either.

-Dragon Blogger

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