If you’re using a php accelerator, in particular, if you’re using APC PHP Accelerator, your Wordpress Blog can receive a distinct performance boost. Since Wordpress uses PHP with a mySQL backbone, optimizing PHP and/or mySQL will result in a faster Wordpress Blog.

PHP Accelerators

• A PHP Accelerator focuses on optimizing PHP by caching the compiled output of PHP code. In other words, when using a PHP Accelerator, a page using PHP code does not need to recomple on every page request — just when something in the code changes. This saves CPU time, and helps a server to render information faster.

I came across an interesting PHP file that uses APC as the backend for the WP Object Cache v0.2. On this website, I’m using v0.2.1. To be honest, I have not done a file comparison between v0.2 and v0.2.1 in order to see the differences — all I know is that v0.2.1 works on this site with the latest version of APC, v3.0.19.

Remember to view the information contained in the file. It says, “Install this file to wp-content/object-cache.php”

I recommend enabling the number of mySQL queries before installing this APC Plugin for Wordpress. This code might be useful for this purpose:

<p style=”margin:0;padding:0;”><?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.mysql.com/”>mySQL</a> queries executed in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.</p>

What you should see is a reduction of the number of mySQL queries when your blog page/post is refreshed. Of course, all of this assumes that you have the Query Cache enabled in mySQL.

MySQL’s my.cnf

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
skip-locking
skip-innodb

back_log                 = 50
connect_timeout          = 1000
concurrent_insert        = 4
interactive_timeout      = 1000
join_buffer              = 3M
join_buffer_size         = 3M
key_buffer               = 192M
log_slow_queries         = /var/log/mysqld.slow.log
long_query_time          = 1
low_priority_updates     = 1
max_allowed_packet       = 1M
max_connect_errors       = 15
max_connections          = 150
max_heap_table_size      = 128M
max_tmp_tables           = 1024
max_user_connections     = 150
myisam_sort_buffer_size  = 128M
net_buffer_length        = 16k
query_alloc_block_size   = 16384
query_cache_limit        = 2M
query_cache_min_res_unit = 1k
query_cache_size         = 48M
query_cache_type         = 1
query_prealloc_size      = 64M
read_buffer_size         = 2M
read_rnd_buffer_size     = 4M
record_buffer            = 3M
server-id                = 1
skip-bdb
skip-innodb
sort_buffer_size         = 2M
table_cache              = 1024
thread_concurrency       = 4
thread_cache             = 128M
thread_cache_size        = 40
thread_stack             = 128K
tmp_table_size           = 128M
wait_timeout             = 60

WordPress’s wp-config.php

define(’WP_CACHE’, true);
define(’CACHE_EXPIRATION_TIME’, 900);

Post from: Online Shopping Network

A Non-Traditional Wordpress Tuning Guide Part III

I went ahead and forwarded the email to spo...@paypal.com to be on the safe side. I also reported the destination website address that provides the .PDF file to Paypal.

This might end up being another scam & phishing email. Therefore I recommend that each person reading this entry perform their own due diligence on this matter. Below is a copy and paste of the email that I received.

Using domain tools revealed that the domain mentioned in this email, steelesettlement.com, was created on August 1, 2008.

There are several other websites that are questioning the same email.

• Paypal thread on Pure Talk Forum
• Paypal thread on The Digital Point Forums
• Paypal thread on the eBay Forums

Steele et al. v. PayPal, Inc. et al., Civil Action No. 1:05-CV-01720 (ILG)(VVP)

Notice from Federal Court. Please Read.

You may be eligible to receive a benefit from a class action settlement if you funded a PayPal transaction using a source other than your credit card between February 1, 2004 and the present.

A federal court has directed that this notice be sent to inform you of a proposed class action settlement. Records show that you may be eligible to receive a benefit under the proposed settlement.

The settlement will resolve a lawsuit against eBay Inc. and PayPal, Inc. (collectively, “Defendants”) involving claims arising out of representations in the PayPal User Agreement regarding PayPal’s policies and practices for responding to refund requests from those customers who pay for transactions through PayPal using funds from funding sources other than credit cards. Under the settlement, Defendants have agreed to establish a settlement fund of $3.5 million to pay claims to potential class members. The proposed Class is defined as:

All U.S. based PayPal account holders who funded a PayPal transaction after February 1, 2004, using a source other than a credit card: (i) who subsequently requested a reversal of the transaction through PayPal’s prevailing Buyer Complaint Policy and/or Buyer Protection Policy (collectively, “Policies”); (ii) who did not receive a refund equal to 100% of their transaction payment in response to such request from PayPal or their bank; and (iii) who, through the timely submission of a Claim Form under oath, attest to a reasonable and good faith belief that they would have received a full reversal of such payment had they used a valid credit card in their possession at the time of the subject transaction to fund the payment and filed a timely chargeback request with their credit card issuing bank. Excluded from the Class are any judicial officer to whom this Litigation is assigned; PayPal, eBay and any of its affiliates; any current or former employees, officers, or directors of PayPal or eBay; any Persons currently residing outside of the United States; and, all Persons who timely and validly request exclusion from the Class pursuant to the Notice.

To see if you are a Class Member and to obtain full notice of the Settlement, the required procedures, the deadlines, your obligations, and your options, you must visit www.steelesettlement.com. This email is only a brief summary of the full notice that is posted on the website.

If you are an eligible Settlement Class Member, you have rights, obligations, and options under the proposed settlement. You have until December 14, 2008 to file your Claim Form and Certification Form. Your legal rights are affected whether you act or not.

1.     Submit The Claim Form And The Certification Form By Mail

This is the only way to get a settlement payment. You must: (1) print and fill out the Claim Form and return it by mail to the address provided on the Claim Form; and (2) print the Certification Page of your Claim Form, sign it, and return it by mail to the address provided on the Claim Form. Your Claim Form and signed Certification Page must be mailed and postmarked no later than December 14, 2008. For more information on these deadlines, the Effective Date of the settlement, the Claim Form procedures, and the settlement benefit, you must visit www.steelesettlement.com.

2.     Exclude Yourself – Opt Out of the Settlement

If you do not want to remain a member of the Class and participate in the Amended Settlement, then you may exclude yourself (opt-out) from the Class by mailing or delivering (email is not permitted) your written request. Your original, signed request for exclusion must be RECEIVED on or before October 31, 2008 and mailed to the following address:

PayPal/Steele Class Action Settlement
c/o The Garden City Group, Inc.
P.O. Box 9309
Dublin, OH 43017-4209

Your request for exclusion must contain your name and address, be signed by you, and include the reference “Steele et al. v. PayPal, Inc. et al., Civil Action No. 1:05-CV-01720.” If you exclude yourself from the Class, you will not participate in the Amended Settlement and will not receive any payment from the Amended Settlement.

3.     Object

Write to the Court about why you do not like the settlement. Your objection must be filed with the Clerk of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn Main Office, 225 Cadman Plaza East, Brooklyn, New York 11201, no later than October 31, 2008. Pursuant to the Court’s Order, you may not be heard on or entitled to contest the Court’s decision unless you have filed written objections no later than October 31, 2008. A hearing (”Settlement Hearing”) shall be held before Hon. I Leo Glasser on November 17, 2008 at 10:00 a.m. at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Courtroom 8B South, 225 Cadman Plaza East, Brooklyn, New York 11201.

4.     Do Nothing

You will automatically be included in the Settlement Class and give up your right to be part of any other lawsuit about the claims in this case, but you will not be eligible to receive a settlement benefit unless you submit a Claim Form.

To get complete information about the proposed Settlement, the required procedures, the deadlines, your obligations, and your options, you must visit www.steelesettlement.com.

Please do not contact PayPal, or PayPal’s customer support about this Notice, or the Settlement. Instead, you must visit www.steelesettlement.com for complete information about the proposed Settlement, the required procedures, the deadlines, your obligations, and your options.

Please do not reply to this message. We are unable to respond to inquiries sent in reply to this email. To contact us, please access the official settlement website at www.steelesettlement.com.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Class Action Suit Against Paypal?

Source: NASA.

Top 10 Movie titles touting the cleanest and sharpest video image on Blu-Ray

• Ratatouille
• Cars
• Meet the Robinsons
• I, Robot
• Pirates of the Caribbean - At World’s End
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• Chicken Little
• Open Season
• The Wild
• Man on Fire

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Blu Ray Rebates, Movies, and Deals

Believe it or not, having an RSS feed might lower the number of listed pages from your blog in the Search Engine Results Page. Why? The answer rests in two words: duplicate content. When a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!, encounters your blog, it sees both the content from the particular blog post itself and the content from the RSS feed for the corresponding blog post. Essentially, the search engine is seeing similar content in two different places on the same domain. Each of these places, RSS and the blog page, competes for placement within the search engine results page (SERPs). While it is not a negative thing to offer readers an RSS feed, offering the search engines an RSS feed without adequate instructions will result in lowering the number of indexed posts.

How do I fix duplicate content from my RSS feeds?

Fixing duplicate content coming from RSS is quite easy. The Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin offers the ability to tell the search engines not to index RSS feeds. Human beings will still be able to see that an RSS feed is available when visiting your site. And even though the search engines will also see that RSS has been made available, they will not index RSS information. Thus your site will not be competing against itself to have a listing in the SERPs.

What about the All in One Seo Pack?

It is important to know how <meta robots=”" /> is being implemented throughout a site. While the All in One SEO Pack helps to prevent duplicate content in addition to providing useful <title></title> ,<meta description=”" /> , <meta keywords=”" /> information, it does not yet offer the ability to control what the RSS Feeds are doing. The All in One SEO Pack and the Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin offer similar features in some areas, while they differ in other areas.

• I would recommend using the All in One SEO Pack for features pertaining to description, title, and keywords. In other words, the strength of the All in One SEO Pack rests in telling the search engines “how” it presents your blog information to the search engines.
• The Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin is better suited for performing noindex and general clean-up functions. The strength of this plugin rests in telling the search engines “what” can presented from your site in the results page.

Case Study

I often visit Google in order to see how many of my personal blog posts it has indexed to the SERPs.

• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ashop-network.org%2Fblog%2F&btnG=Google+SearchbtnG=Google+Search

Beginning few days ago, the number of blog entries was decreasing. One day, the number of entries was 8, and the next day, the number would slip down to 5. The day after, the number would increase to 9, then slip down again to 4 the following day. While I understand that Google enjoys shuffling their SERPs, I found it odd that much of the unique content from my blog was not indexed at all. In addition, what had once been indexed was not showing up anymore.

After installing the Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin, however, I noticed that the number of blog entries that Google had indexed began to rise. Unless otherwise noted, the search engines will index all pages found, and will follow the links on those pages.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Your RSS Might Be Considered Duplicate Content

Interpersonal relationships are social associations, connections, or affiliations between two or more people. They vary in differing levels of intimacy and sharing, implying the discovery or establishment of common ground, and may be centered around something(s) shared in common.

A common mistake in relationships

The most common mistake made in relationships is the mistake of “assumption.” The mistake of assumption refers to the belief that one’s perception perfectly aligns with reality. Rather than understanding that one co-creates their own reality, the mistake of assumption reflects the belief that understanding occurs in one direction, i.e., something or someone exterior to myself communicates information to me, and I process that information without contaminating it with elements from my own personal point of view. During the mistake of assumption, reality writes itself to my consciousness without interference or assistance.

To flesh this out, let’s use a situational example. Let’s suppose that you’re at a party with your girlfriend. After a few minutes of mingling, you notice that she is across the room talking to some other guy. You don’t know this other guy too well. She whispers something to him, and they laugh together. Even though she’s told you before that she has no interest in anyone else, you begin to wonder why she’s talking to him in the first place. She appears to be captivated to the point that she ignores the happenings around her. You begin to feel jealous.

Making sense of assumption

How does it make sense that jealousy, rather than happiness or indifference, surfaced in this example? Given what you saw, and given what you know, you might suspect that something nefarious is afoot. However, what if she was asking this other guy for some advice about what she should get for your birthday? In other words, what if the whole point of talking to the other guy was to make surprise birthday preparations for you? Does it still make sense to respond to the situation with jealousy?

From the party to everything else

In the above example, emotional response depended upon the context of events. Whereas incomplete information led to jealousy, knowing the whole picture led to a different emotion. But this is more than a knowledge and information issue. What are the conditions of possibility that made feeling jealousy, rather than another emotion, real? The situation, the “objective” reality, isn’t enough to determine emotional response — there must be a person co-creating the meaning along with the perceived situation. The one who perceives jealousy must be standing in the world in such a way that jealousy reveals itself as the likely candidate.

The Mistake of Assumption in Relationships (Condensed Version)

1. Others share my values.
2. Others know what I mean.
3. My point of view is always right.

Reminders to combat the mistake of assumption

1. My point of view does not happen in a vacuum; it happens against the background of all my prior experiences. In addition, anticipation and expectation can influence my point of view.
2. Since others are likely to have different experiences, their point of view is necessarily different from mine. Agreement and compromise occur in relation to dialogue and communication.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

The Mistake of Assumption in Relationships

Social Bookmarking is the practice of an individual or a group of people submitting a particular website to an online community in order for others to evaluate the content of the website. While popular social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon and Digg, have the ability to create a short term internet buzz, their existence rests in reducing websites into the internet version of a sound bite. Sometimes a good sound bite will capture the essence of the message; a poor sound bite is forgotten several minutes, if not seconds, after initial exposure.

The quality of the traffic from social bookmarking appears to reflect this sound bite model. As one forum poster noted, “The goals of a social networking audience [are to obtain] immediate psychological stimulation for almost no work” (Sitepoint Forums). This statement suggests that social bookmarking sites offer immediate gratification. Another poster in this thread observed:

“Let’s say for example you get a front-page placement on Digg. You’ll receive thousands of visitors, but with the nature of their community you’ll get very few return and next to no one clicking your ads, whilst you’ve lost gigs of bandwidth. Stumbleupon works in the same way, with users coming to you once only to click the button again to head elsewhere.” (Sitepoint Forums).

Social Bookmarking is Depressing

How depressing. From these two statement, it seems that social bookmarking sites: [1.] send people who are unwilling to click on the advertisements, and [2.] either drain or tie up a server’s finite resources. One reason for the increasing popularity of social bookmarking sites is the ease in which people process website “snippets.” I would imagine that this is akin to reading Cliff’s Notes in lieu of the actual book.

What are the disadvantages of social bookmarking?

• Since social bookmarking relies on human beings, rather than on statistical algorithms, to rank content, there is an increased possibility of manipulating and over inflating the popularity of a particular website. In fact, there are some individuals out there who offer to bookmark a site in exchange for a fee.
• It would appear that people who frequent social bookmarking sites tend to spend less time on the sites that they do visit, and as a result, it is less likely that they will continue to interact with the sites that are visited.
• Increasing competition with other webmasters also using social bookmarking in order to receive traffic to their own sites.

What are the advantages of social bookmarking?

• Human traffic from bookmarking services is better than no traffic at all. There is always a chance that 1% of the visitors will perform some sort of website interaction, e.g., leave a blog comment, click a Yahoo! or Google advertisement, purchase a product, refer a friend, or return at some point in the future.
  • It would be interesting to find the correlation between: [1.] those people visiting a website through social bookmarking site, and [2.] the conversion of this social traffic into sales or clicks on Google advertisements.
• Another benefit of traffic from social bookmarking sites is the grass roots exposure and the establishment of band name recognition.

At the end of the day, traffic from social bookmarking services has various meanings and implications for different webmasters. Some webmasters loathe the traffic because of its taxing effects on the webserver. Other webmasters love and crave the attention and buzz that this traffic brings, regardless of its duration. And finally, there are other webmasters who do not care. Even though the “sound bite effect” propagated from social bookmarking sites is short lived, there is a chance that authority websites will pick up on those sites receiving the most attention and will write up a blog post or a product review.

In conclusion, social bookmarking takes little time to do. And depending upon the particular goal of the traffic, some webmasters might make more of an effort than others to do it. However, the attention to social bookmarking should never be greater than the attention devoted to creating fresh content.

If the content isn’t created, then how can it get bookmarked?

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Is Social Bookmarking Worth the Hassle?

We begin by reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Design and content guidelines

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
   • This means that Google looks at the content that it finds in terms of a hierarchy. In other words, Google arranges and interprets the information it finds on a scale ranging from “Most Important” to “Least Important.” Rather than let the search engine take a guess regarding the importance of the content that it finds, it is possible to tell the search engines, in no uncertain terms, this hierarchical importance. The title tag is either a one word, a one short phrase, or a one short sentence summary of the content on the rest of page. The meta description tag reinforces and compliments the title tag by fleshing out the goal, main idea, or purpose of the content. Not only do the <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3> tags reveal the sequential hierarchy of the page, content and links found at the beginning of a page are considered more important than content and links found at the end of the page. A well constructed website for search engines is also a well constructed site for humans. Most people read from top to bottom, and from left to right. Therefore, it makes sense that the search engines will assign sequential importance along the same manner that humans read.
2. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
   1. Point number one suggested “hierarchical links,” and now point number two recommends no more than 100 “navigational links” on a single page. In other words, one of the hierarchical links should point to the page where the navigational links are found! Where more than 100 links must exist for the purposes of navigation, the use of a tree structure is implied. While point of main emphasis happens within the <h1></h1> tag, the tree structure occurs within the <ul></ul>, <li></li> tags.
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
   • Information rich also means keyword rich. Remember that keywords and keyphrases are what human beings input into search engines with the expectation that the results are both meaningful and useful in relation to their keyword or keyphrase. These keywords or keyphrases ought to be further fleshed out when the human being lands on the content page from the search engine results page.
4. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
   • Creating a “keyword rich” site does not mean creating a site that uses “keyword stuffing.” Keyword Stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. In keyword stuffing, the keyword or keyphrase is found many times within the content, and adds no meaningful value to the content. The keyword or keyphrase occurs with much redundancy and exists for its own sake; the redundancy does not add further clarity or accuracy to the content.
5. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
   • While the search engines cannot read images, they can read how the images are described and referenced within the ALT and TITLE attribute. In the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog about Using ALT Attributes Smartly, Google references W3C recommendations:

   ALT: This attribute specifies a link to a long description of the image. This description should supplement the short description provided using the alt attribute.

   TITLE: This attribute offers advisory information about the element for which it is set.

   In another related point, since Google references W3C guidelines, then it is an obvious point that W3C guidelines should be followed as much as possible during the construction, design, and layout phases of a website. This means that all, if not most, .html pages should pass HTML Validation. And if CSS is going to be used, the style sheet should pass CSS Validation. Remember, the clarity and accuracy that Google wants pertains not only the content, but it also pertains to the presentation and coding of that content.

6. Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
   • Google is being redundant for a reason. According to a post on SEOBook, it was discovered that “Google currently places negligible, if any, weight on link titles.” However, the author continues on and asks a pertinent question: “Does the image alt text carry more weight?” His response: “In a word, yes.” Moreover, the Search Engine Optimization Journal reports, “The alt tag is almost the only clue search engines have for ranking images.” It makes sense, then, to use the img alt attribute whenever possible.
7. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
   • Correct Html? Some sites that fail HTML and CSS validation rank rather well in the search engines results pages (SERPs). I’m thinking here of Amazon.com. Amazon.com fails with 1822 errors! Nonetheless, passing HTML and CSS validation adds to a site’s clarity from a search engine’s perspective. The degree to which proper validation adds to this clarity is not certain at this time. Also uncertain is whether or not the search engines penalize sites failing to validate their HTML and CSS.
   • Broken links ought to return a status code of 404, not found. For a lumerical list of HTTP status codes and their meaning, consult a HTTP Status Codes Checker.
8. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
   • Well, in an interview between a website and the Googlebot, it has been revealed that Google understands dynamic links.
9. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
   • Google is politely telling reputable sites and soon-to-be reputable sites not to send their URL to a link farm.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Google’s Top 9 SEO Basics

While no one, save Google’s Engineers, has access to the structure to the programming of Google’s search engine technology, we can garner useful information from those whom Google employs. These people make descriptive blog posts through their addressing of webmaster comments, questions, and concerns. Matt Cutts is such a person. In addition to Matt Cutts, Google has its own team of bloggers who communicate information through the Official Google Blog.

While there is no silver bullet revealed, we can walk away with some powerful inferences about the programming of Google’s search engine technology. In a summation post that I found titled, ”
Technologies behind Google ranking,” quite of bit of additional information can be learned — if we read and interpret between the lines of what is actually being said.

In particular, Google says that “Synonyms are the foundation of our query understanding work,” and that “Another technology we use in our ranking system is concept identification.” These two quotations ought to reveal that article spinning will not work. Think about it. If Google has encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauruses at its disposal, then one can assume that they can generate a list of word substitutions for the content that it finds. Some words in a spun article will remain the same while other words in the article will be substited for words that have the same essential meaning. In other words, article spinning will not circumvent Google’s Duplicate Content Penalty. While the number of backlinks to a site will increase through article spinning, their individual and collective value will be lessened.

However, while Google has access to encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauruses, it still treasures original content. In other words, Google cannot anticipate the rich diversity of word combinations just because it has access to all individual word definitions and their variants. Google cannot say, “I know the content of every website in existence because I know every possible word that can be used.” To this end, a human mind must transcribe thoughts into words under the guiding principle of a main idea — and this is what Google treasures. Google seeks to understand the movement of the human mind by finding statistical relationships between the particular words used to communicate ideas. This statistical relationship, in my mind, is evaluated against the background of what Google already possess — dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, and grammar books.

And this brings me to my next point: grammar. Have you ever wondered why Google ranks journalism sites at the top of its search engine results pages (SERPs)? My hypothesis is that in addition to devouring new content, Google rates the “taste” of the new content it finds. Content using good grammar and punctuation “tastes” better than content using poor grammar and poor punctuation. If Google seeks to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” then grammatically correct content might be interpreted as being more useful than grammatically incorrect content with all other variants being equal. In its Webmaster Guidelines, Google recommends that webmasters “create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” While we do not know how Google evaluates clarity and accuracy, we know that these are things that Google will be looking for when it encounters new content. Therefore, take a moment to reflect about which elements both add to and detract from clarity and accuracy. Elements such as grammar and punction dance in harmony with font size and font color on a website with good content. When this is done correctly, another one of Google’s axioms is satisfied: Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

In essence, I believe that the programmers of Google’s powerful search engine are attempting to endow Google with artificial intelligence. To this end, I can assume that Google is using statistical methods to assign a numerical value to the “power” or “strength” of page’s content. And while the formula for these  statistical methods will not be disclosed, we can make good hypothesises regarding which practices will result in a stronger statistical relationships. Gammar, punctuation, average word length, synonyms, content presentation, the number of backlinks & an analysis of the content from those backlinks that adds to or detracts from relational value, contribute to the strength and originality of new content.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

My Theory about Google’s Search Algorithm

Music categories include: Music Packs, Ambient, Breakbeat, Classical, Chill-Out, Corporate, Drum and Bass, Electronica, Experimental, Funk, Garage, Hip Hop, House, Jazz, New Age, Rock, Pop, Trance, and World Beat.

Sound categories include: Game Sounds, Cartoon Sounds, Sound Packs, Interface Sounds, Transitions & Movement, Buttons & Menus, Nature Sounds, Domestic Sounds, Urban Sounds, Industrial Sounds, Futuristic Sounds, and Human Sounds.

ABOUT FLASHDEN / AUDIOJUNGLE

At FlashDen you can buy and sell royalty-free stock files for use in Adobe Flash projects. Files sell for between 1 and 40 dollars depending on the complexity, quality and use of the file. Anyone is free to sign up for an account and begin trading or purchasing files.

The site is home to a bustling community of Flash designers, developers and devotees. At FlashDen we like to say that it is this community who really owns the site and we do our best to make sure they get the most out of it through programs to generate income, interactivity, news, competitions and whatever else we can dream up.

Additionally FlashDen is eager to grow and support not only FlashDen users but Flash users everywhere. We do this by supporting community projects, competitions and initiatives. If you have something you think would benefit the Flash community, get in touch!

Since this site offers Royalty Free Music, you can be sure you will not infringe on copyrights when creating videos for YouTube. Their website offers a nice user interface, and it is possible to fund an account with as little as $20.00 USD through Paypal or through a credit card. People seeking royalty free images from iStockphoto should already be accustomed to paying a small fee in order to use Royalty Free items that do not infringe on copyrights.

On AudioJungle’s website, it is possible to hear a sample of music which is found to be interesting. “Hear it before you buy it,” in other words. However, in order to prevent people from grabbing audio tracks without paying for them, all samples will have a voice saying “Flashden” every few seconds. Naturally, this audio watermark is removed when the file in question is purchased.

I cannot brag enough about this website. Within the first few seconds of finding this website through Google, I deposited $20.00 and bought several songs. I came across a few songs made by Stefan Gustafsson, also known as “Solidbeats,” and was throughly impressed with what I heard. There’s some serious talent here, and while the site is still growing, the bar for the quality of songs released is very high indeed.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Royalty Free Music for YouTube Videos

The Digital Point Forums advertises itself as a “Search Engine Optimization and Marketing forum.” It is one of many such websites where webmasters go to learn new techniques about raising the visibility level of their personal websites to the search engines. There are a combination of new members and experienced members who market their information and services to those wishing to learn about search engine optimization. In addition, the forum is divided into areas where on-topic discussions and financial transactions take place.

There have been several other blog posts made about Digital Point:

1. Is Digital Point Forum a Spammers Haven?
2. Make Money Online With Digital Point Forums
3. Digital Point Forums Review

I have only one serious complaint about this forum. Rather, my complaint is not directed toward the forum itself, nor toward its fundamental mission of making information available. My complaint is directed to numerous members of this website who attempt to scam and to defraud other members.

Most scams on the digital point forum will take advantage of those seeking to purchase services with the hope that the result of the purchase will be an increased search engine presence of their website. Indeed, most scams have taken place in the services section of the forum. Most scammers will have a low post count on the forum as well as a low itrader. In addition, most scammers accept Paypal as a form of payment for their services. However, Paypal does not issue refunds for the failure to deliver services or for failure to deliver digital products.

According to Paypal’s Extended Buyer Protection Policy:

Item Qualification Requirements. The item sold must be a tangible, physical item or good which can be shipped. All other items are ineligible for coverage under Extended Buyer Protection with PayPal Credit, including but not limited to intangible goods, services, quasi-cash, gift certificates, and downloadable or streaming content. Motor vehicles (including cars, boats, and planes), and Live Auctions will not be covered. In addition, items prohibited in the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy are ineligible for coverage. If an item does not meet the above requirements, it is ineligible for coverage under Extended Buyer Protection with PayPal Credit.

Therefore, a well executed scam will promise the delivery of some kind of service to be accomplished immediately or in a few days, weeks, or months. And the scam will use paypal as the method of payment. The promised goods and services, and their results, will not be delivered, and paypal will not issue a refund. The scammer will usually have a low post count as well as a low itrader count.

Since it appears that there are those who are all too eager to accept payment before services are rendered, it would make better sense if a percentage of the final cost were accepted in order to begin performing services. However, I believe that it would be even better if payment was surrendered only after completion and verification of the services performed. But upon further reflection, the tables of fraud would be reversed — rather than the seller frauding the buyer, the buyer will be frauding the seller. And while this would give fraudulent buyers a taste of their own medicine, the problem of fraud would still exist.

How else could the issue of fraud be combated?

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Has the Digital Point Forums become a hotbed for scammers?

1. Tuning Wordpress for Speed
2. 4+1 Ways To Speed Up WordPress With Caching
3. Optimizing performance for WordPress
4. Guide To Optimizing WordPress Servers
5. Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours
6. Optimizing WordPress for High Volume Traffic
7. Diggproof & Speed up Your Wordpress Blog
8. 5 Ways To Increase The Loading Speed Of A WordPress Blog

Tweaking PHP is done through the use of a PHP Accelerator and through customizing the PHP.INI file. Now, there are several PHP Accelerators available — but which one offers the faster performance and the most stability? I’ll leave that for you to decide. There are several topics regarding benchmarking of the various accelerators.

1. Benchmarking PHP accelerators
2. PHP Accelerators
3. PHP Accelerators : APC vs Zend vs XCache with Zend Framework
4. Install eAccelerator to Optimize PHP performance
5. Adventures with WP-Cache2 & APC

What I use on my dedicated server is APC PHP Accelerator. In order to install APC, please read a post on vBulletin that details how to install APC. Inside PHP.INI, I have set the variables to the following:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Dynamic Extensions ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

extension = apc.so
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 256
apc.ttl = 7200
apc.user_ttl = 7200
apc.gc_ttl = 7200
apc.mmap_file_mask = /tmp/apc.XXXXXX
apc.enable_cli = 1
apc.num_files_hint = 2500
apc.stat = 1
apc.filters = wp-cache-config

Regarding tuning and optimizing mySQL, there have also been several blog posts made. Of course, some blogs have covered tuning PHP along with tuning mySQL. Basically, the file that contains all the tweakable variables is my.cnf. Both tuning-primer and mysqlsla can offer insight into slow mySQL queries. Read their documentation, download them, and install them.

1. Tuning / Optimizing my.cnf file for MySQL
2. Example my.cnf files
3. Tweaking MySQL Server
4. mySQL Performance Forums

Please keep in mind, that the my.cnf is always a work in progress.

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
skip-locking
skip-innodb
back_log = 50
query_cache_limit = 3M
query_cache_size = 64M
query_cache_type = 1
interactive_timeout = 100
wait_timeout = 15
connect_timeout = 10000
interactive_timeout = 25
thread_cache_size = 1024
join_buffer = 3M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 3096K
max_connect_errors = 10
thread_concurrency = 4
server-id = 1
key_buffer = 192M
max_allowed_packet = 32M
thread_stack = 128K
thread_cache = 3096
read_buffer_size = 3096K
sort_buffer_size = 3096K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 48M
key_buffer_size = 192M
net_buffer_length = 16k
max_tmp_tables = 512
table_cache = 1536
max_connections = 150
log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysqld.slow.log
long_query_time = 1
tmp_table_size = 64M
max_heap_table_size = 64M
query_cache_min_res_unit = 1
low_priority_updates = 1
concurrent_insert = 2
record_buffer = 3M
[safe_mysqld]
open_files_limit=7092
[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet=64M
max_allowed_packet=64M
[mysql]
no-auto-rehash
[isamchk]
key_buffer=48M
sort_buffer=48M
read_buffer=24
write_buffer=24M
[myisamchk]
key_buffer=48M
sort_buffer=48M
read_buffer=24M
write_buffer=24M
[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout

Tuning Apache is done primarily through the httpd.conf file. I have included an example copy of my tweaked and tuned httpd.conf file — a SMALL beginning section of it. I wouldn’t recommend copying and pasting it; however, after inspecting it, if you find something useful — then feel free to use sections of it.

<Directory “/”>
Options All
AllowOverride All
Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

</Directory>

<Directory “/usr/local/apache/htdocs”>
Options Includes Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

</Directory>

# Prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being viewed by web clients

<Files ~ “^error_log$”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Satisfy All
</Files>

<Files “^\.ht”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

# Protect files
<Files ~ “^(.*)\.(inc|inc\.php|tpl|sql)$”>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Files>

# Protect directories
<Files ~ “^(backup|aom|images|design|files|images|include|lang|libs(/.+)?|temp(/.+)?|templates(/.+)?|javascripts(/.+)?)$”>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Files>

<IfModule log_config_module>
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\”" combined
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b” common

CustomLog “logs/access_log” common

<IfModule logio_module>
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\” %I %O” combinedio

</IfModule>

</IfModule>

<IfModule alias_module>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ “/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/”

</IfModule>

<Directory “/usr/local/apache/cgi-bin”>
AllowOverride None
Options None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

</Directory>

<IfModule mime_module>
TypesConfig conf/mime.types
AddType application/x-compress .Z
AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz

</IfModule>

#######################
# Optimizations #
#######################

HostnameLookups Off
ServerSignature Off
ServerTokens ProductOnly

Timeout 120
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 2

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 10
MinSpareServers 10
MaxSpareServers 15
ServerLimit 150
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 500
</IfModule>

Header unset Pragma
FileETag None
Header unset ETag

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

# Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)
<FilesMatch “\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”>
ExpiresDefault A29030400
Header append Cache-Control “public”
</FilesMatch>

# Set up caching on media files for 1 week
<FilesMatch “\.(gif|jpe?g|png|swf)$”>
ExpiresDefault A604800
Header append Cache-Control “public, must-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>

# Set up cache on media files for 3 days
<FilesMatch “\.(css|js|txt)$”>
ExpiresDefault “access plus 3 days”
Header append Cache-Control “public, must-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>

# Set up 2 Hour caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch “\.(xml|html|htm)$”>
ExpiresDefault A7200
Header append Cache-Control “public, must-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>

# Force no caching for dynamic files
<FilesMatch “\.(php|cgi|pl)$”>
ExpiresActive Off
Header set Cache-Control “private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform”
Header set Pragma “no-cache”
</FilesMatch>

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

######################

Post from: Online Shopping Network

A Non-Traditional Wordpress Tuning Guide - Part II

Before getting into the details, let’s talk about hosting. The reason why we’re talking about hosting first is because the physical hosting environment will set forth the limitations of the blogging platform. In other words, your blog is only to be as fast as the hardware that it is running on & the network that it is connected to. If you’re hoping to create a popular blog by running it from an old computer inside your closet using your dial-up connection, you’re going to be disappointed… not because the content is bad, but because the blog will only be as responsive as its slowest hardware component.

There are several levels of web hosting

Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting.

Shared web hosting service: one’s Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.

Virtual Dedicated Server: dividing a server into virtual servers, where each user feels like they’re on their own dedicated server, but they’re actually sharing a server with many other users. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. This is also known as a virtual private server or VPS.

Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.

The kind of web hosting that is chosen depends upon several factors including cost, hard disk space, and bandwidth. Most novices, unsure or unaware of how to make money with their blog, will begin with the most cost effective solution. (Take a look at Thinkhost @ $7.95/month.) However, some people want dedicated hosting. (Take a look at DedicatedBox. The owner regularly updates his hosting thread on the Simple Machines Forum website.)

There are those, on the other hand, who have little to no familiarity with the Wordpress blogging platform. I would recommend that these people create a free account on the Wordpress site. In this manner, you can perform experiments and get a general idea about the world of blogging without any financial obligation. The downside to this free alternative is that the degree of personal customization is severely restricted. For example, the name of your blog will be restricted to an available subdomain on the wordpress domain, and you will not be able to install plugins or take advantage of affiliate programs such as Google’s Adsense.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

A Non-Traditional Wordpress Tuning Guide - Part I

Jerry Baker has written numerous books about using organic methods for lawn & garden enhancement. The most important tool for content delivery is the hose end sprayer. This sprayer allows all of the liquid organic compounds to mix with the water from the water hose at a pre-determined rate. Jerry recommends using a 20 gallon hose-end sprayer. (See more of Jerry Baker’s Gardening Books & Gardening Dvds)

Product Description
Gilmore Gardening Innovation Professional Hose-End Sprayer No Pre-Mixing Needed Brass Mixing Head - 16 mixing ratios. Sprays up to 100 gallons. - Heavy duty zinc handle. - Built-in anti-siphon prevents back-flow. - 3 easy steps. Fill bottle. Set Dial. Spray. - Mixes from 1 teaspoon to 10 tablespoons per gallon. - Unused chemical can be returned to original container. - Operates on water pressure 40 to 60 PSI. **Note, Orders of 10 or more for this item require Special Accommodations requiring additional days to ship and are not refundable.

Now before you go off and spray everything into oblivion, I would recommend that you check out Jerry’s Blog and a few of his books. For example, Jerry talked about the importance of using the right dish washing liquid:

Dishwashing Soap 101

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Whenever you’re shopping for dishwashing liquid to use in your yard or garden, make sure you choose a brand that’s made with pure, mild soap. Avoid any product that contains detergents or degreasing agents. They can harm your grass (or any other plants that they touch). And whatever you do, avoid all products that boast their antibacterial prowess. Not only will they damage your greenery, but they’ll also kill off good bacteria along with the bad – and that can cause big trouble.

There is one exception to this rule, and that is when the soapy solution will not come in contact with valuable plants. If you’re aiming to destroy weeds, clean inanimate objects, or kill pests that you’ve removed from your plants, feel free to use any kind of soap or detergent you have on hand – and make the “medicine” as strong as you like.

Organic Recipes

All-Season Green-Up Tonic

1 can of beer
1 cup of ammonia
1/2 cup of dish washing liquid
1/2 cup of liquid lawn food
1/2 cup molasses or corn syrup

Instructions: Mix all of the ingredients in a bucket, and pour into your 20 gallon hose-end sprayer. Apply to everything in your yard to the point or run-off every 3 weeks, in the morning, throughout the growing season.

All-Season Clean-Up Tonic

1 cup of dishwashing liquid,
1 cup of antiseptic mouthwash, and
1 cup of tobacco tea*

* Tobacco Tea ::  To make tobacco tea, place half a handful of chewing tobacco in an old nylon stocking, and soak it in a gallon of hot water until the mixture is dark brown.

Instructions ::  Mix all of the ingredients in your 20 gallon hose-end sprayer, filling the balance of the sprayer jar with warm water. Apply to your entire yard to the point of run-off every 2 weeks, in the evening, to discourage insects and prevent disease.

Browse our online store dedicated to Green Power & Green Living.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Organic Tonics for Lawncare, Gardening, and Pest Control

RSS feeds are a great and non-intrusive way to tell both people and search engines about the changing content of your website. If you’re using Wordpress, then a “Ping” is sent to the site ping-o-matic when new content is published. This is the default configuration. However, there are some who manually add a list of sites to ping in lieu of using Ping-O-Matic alone. There are others, like myself, who opt to do something different.

Using Feedburner

Let feedburner do the pinging for you. Since Google acquired Feedburner, using Feedburner to do all the pinging leg work makes the most sense. This can be done using the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin for wordpress.

Rather than having your standalone Wordpress site handle all of your RSS traffic, you can offload this task by giving it to feedburner. Feedburner can be configured to send Pings to Ping-O-Matic and more.

Sites that Feedburner Pings

1. Technorati
2. MyYahoo!
3. Bloglines
4. Newsgator
5. Google Blog Search Pinging Service
6. Ping-O-Matic

In addition, Feedburner can be configured to Ping 5 additional services.

1. Weblogs.com
2. Blogdigger
3. Syndic8
4. Alexa
5. Snap
6. Icerocket
7. Tailrank
8. Blog Buzz Machine
9. Feedblitz
10. Bloggarkivet
11. Blogblogs
12. Bloggrevyen
13. Feed Crier
14. Moreover

After installing the feedburner plugin, in Wordpress v2.5.1, changing the pinging service is easily done at the bottom of the Settings -> Writing page.

Change :

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

To :

http://ping.feedburner.com

You can also add your feedburner RSS feed to a couple of search engines. For more information on this, consult Tips for New Bloggers.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

RSS Feed Submission

Submit your site to Google
Submit your blog to Google Blog Search
Submit your site to Yahoo!
Submit your site to MSN

In addition, the search engines like sitemaps. Wordpress has a nice plugin that generates a Google compliant sitemap. If you’re not using a blog, then you can use a paid ($19.99) .PHP script to generate a sitemap consisting of an unlimited number of links. The free version of this same script limits the size of a sitemap to 500 links.

Getting the word out about your sitemap

Once the sitemap is generated, it is highly recommended to tell the search engines about its presence. This can be done automatically! In order to do this, amend the robots.txt file to point to the sitemap’s location. As an example, I have included some information from this site’s robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 20

Sitemap: http://www.shop-network.org/sitemap-1.xml.gz
Sitemap: http://www.shop-network.org/sitemap-2.xml.gz

You’ll notice that I’ve bolded a couple of search engine instructions. Since each reputable search engine that visits a site complies with the robots.txt standard, you can be assured that including sitemap information in the robots.txt file will get your URLs noticed. You’ll also notice that I have two sitemaps, and that I have Gzipped each of them. This is because Google limits the number of URLs in an individual sitemap to 50,000. In addition, Google limits the size of the sitemaps it accepts to 10MB in size. For sites with many urls, compressing the sitemap saves bandwidth.

To add another layer of search engine visibility, tell Google about your sitemap through the Google Webmaster Interface and tell Yahoo! about your sitemap though the Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Read our blog post about RSS Feed Submission.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Search Engine Submission

In many cities it is not uncommon to see shoppers lined up hours before stores with big sales open. Once inside, the stores shoppers often rush and grab, as many stores have only a few of the big draw items. Electronics and popular toys are often the most sought-after items and may be sharply discounted. Because of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, many choose to stay home and avoid the hectic shopping experience. The local media often will cover the event, mentioning how early the shoppers began lining up at various stores and providing video of the shoppers standing in line and later leaving with their purchased items. Traditionally Black Friday sales were intended for those shopping for Christmas gifts. For some particularly popular items, some people shop at these sales in order to get deep discounts on items they can then resell, typically online.

This excerpt from Wikipedia paints a typical scenario for the Black Friday Shopper. In addition, I would remind people about the waiting outside in cold weather, the rushing into the store and being trampled by other people, and the quantity purchasing limitations imposed by the retailer as an act of “fairness” as a few reasons why some people avoid this shopping day.

Even though it’s far easier to shop online in order to avoid the inevitable hoopla & drama that comes from dealing with other people, sometimes there are great deals to be had … sometimes you must charge the battlefield. If you’re one of the brave souls, read on.

1. Obtain a newspaper. If you already have a newspaper subscription, then wake up early on Thanksgiving Day and bring your newspaper inside. While grocery stores and convenience stores sell daily newspapers, they tend to disappear — fast. This leaves desperate would-be shoppers little choice than to grab the newspaper from your front lawn. Call it silly. Call it desperate. But it happens.
2. Browse through the paper to find interesting items. Retailers tend to spend more money inserting full page ads and providing additional door-buster information.  In addition, retailers provide their opening time for the day after Thanksgiving, and they tend to give purchasing and quantity limitations.
3. Make a list & collaborate with friends and family. Take a pair of scissors and cut out the ads that have gotten your attention. Glue the cut outs to a piece of paper in the order of desirability. Collaborate with family and friends when there are two items of equal desirability being sold at two or more different locations.
4. Browse the online version of retail stores for special deals. Since supply and demand applies both to internet stores and to traditional retail outlets, have an idea of what you want to buy, where it is being sold, and when it goes on sale. Even with internet stores, it is commonplace to have special items sell out within a matter of seconds or minutes. Be prepared or be prepared to wait.

Don’t be afraid to consult Google.

For reference, here is Amazon.com’s Black Friday 2007 page.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Tips for Black Friday Shopping

To help make finding quick gift ideas easier, a Best Seller page has been added. What this page offers is a small graphic of the particular bestsellers from each shopping category. Hovering your mouse over an image reveals some product information as well as the item’s ranking (#1, #2, etc.). Actually clicking on an image will reveal product availability, current pricing, as well as customer reviews. However, the best feature of this page is that it provides a quick overview of both new and enduring popular items as determined by the overall volume sold. The Bestseller page saves time.

In other words, a quick gift idea might come from the most popular items that other people have been purchasing. Those who fail to do their shopping online will have to wait to be told this year’s hot item from newspapers, television shows, and advertisement fliers. However, those who perform their shopping online will know what’s popular in a few seconds.

Post from: Online Shopping Network

Quick Gift Ideas

The incandescent bulb is an energy hog. Just 5 percent of the electricity it uses goes to light the bulb; the other 95 percent is heat. Improving light output and lowering heat output would reduce demand for electricity from coal-fired power plants, which emit carbon dioxide. CO2, most climate scientists say, is the single largest contributor to global warming.

Lowering energy consumption one household at a time seems a daunting task. However, replacing less efficient incandescent bulbs with more efficient bulbs seems the easiest place to begin reducing consumption. Because banning of the incandescent light bulb is inevitable, it is both prudent and cost efficient to buy a green bulb.

According to the Energy Star Government Website:

If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.

Now imagine the savings if every light bulb in every American house was replaced with and upgraded to compact fluorescent light (CFL). While there are numerous other strategies for going green, such as avoiding excessive automotive idling, avoiding hard braking, and speeding, replacing the lights in one’s own household would appear to the easiest manner to contribute to American Energy Independence.

Shop: Energy Star Qualified Products

Post from: Online Shopping Network