Talk Price
Money making adventures and miscellaneous ramblings…

The majority of tech-savvy people out there understand that there are many ways to get songs online with little-to-no-effort. For free. However, the VAST MAJORITY of these are either;1) Illegal - LimeWire/Torents/Kazaa, etc. are all pretty illegal to download music from, unless it’s non-copyrighted (so unless you’re interested in classical music, or unsigned bands, you CAN get caught. I know there are proxies and stuff you can do to hide your identity, but it’s still illegal. What about ripping from YouTube? It’s almost impossible to get caught, but it takes the usage of a third-party plugin, risks getting caught (or a virus on your computer), and usually leads to pretty bad audio quality.
2) Limited - If it’s legal, that means the company has signed an agreement with the Record Label owning certain songs, and then offerse them for free download. This is decent if you’re into ONE band A LOT, but it’s not so great if you’re going for variety.
3) Incompatible - Some services out there (such as the ones we’ve reviewed earlier, like last.fm and musicovery, give listeners access to a large variety of songs, but they don’t allow very good downloads. Even if they do allow downloads, they usually (try to) require you to get an external player. Sure, there are codec packs out there you can get that let you listen to these in whatever player you’d like, and download it to your MP3 player, this requires some effort.

If you’re a safety-minded, compatibility-oriented person looking for a lot of variety, there are tons of online music services offering downloads. The two main types of these services are;
1) Subscription based - These services, like Napster, require you to pay a certain monthly, weekly, or yearly fee, and then claim to offer you unlimited free downloads during the time of your subscription. The benefits of this is that USUALLY, they’ll offer you truly unlimited tracks, and are usually relatively cheap. The problem is, it’s hard to find a “catch” and usually don’t let you put the tracks on whatever MP3 player you’d like without an external plug-in. Services like these, if reliable enough, are great for people who LOVE music, and want to get as many songs as possible. Another problem is, usually these services delete the files from your computer after your subscription runs out.
2) Per-song paying - These are, somehow, BY FAR the more popular pay-based music stores. The most popular is probably iTunes, which costs $.99 per track, and offers a ton of variety. But iTunes uses their own AAC codec, which limits the usage of their songs with other media players with more features (such as, just as an example, Windows Media Player). Luckily, there are programers out there who work to fix that. iTunes only allows you to use their music with your an Apple iPod (unless you download another program), creating a mini-monopoly.

That’s pretty much how the VAST majority of online music services function. Stay tuned for a post which will talk about two potentially revolutionary services; Yahoo Music Unlimited, and iTunes Total.

The prank is extremely funny and shows just how much Sarah is full of herself. It’s clear that she knows nothing about foreign policy since she fails to know the name of the prime minister of Canada a country closer to her home in Alaska then to any other US state.

We would like to remind you to get out and vote tomorrow no matter who your candidate of choice is.

Yesterday,  John McCain did a skit on SNL to try to get a final push before election day. He along with Tina Fey (as Sarah Palin), referenced Obama’s infomercial which aired on 3 major networks this Wednesday, and used this as an oppurtunity to get air time of his own. He openly stated that the Republican party was broke, and called himself a true maverick for being a Republican with no cash. Feel free to watch the video below.

I was playing around with Firefox today and found a neat little trick that I think will make all of our lives much easier when it comes to highlighting.

Okay so say you are viewing a site that has lots of little section with text in it (I am using a proxy listings site as my example).

Normally, dragging your mouse from one point to another would get everything in between. This prevents you from highlighting one perticular column or row without getting everything else that’s on the side.

However, I realized that there is a simple trick that lets you highlight only the row/column/or perticular sections that you want to highlight. Instead of just clicking and dragging, you hold down the Ctrl key and click and drag over the row you want, the column you want, or just click and chose which exact areas you want to highlight (as you can see in the following picture). Then as always, you simply Control+C to copy as you would normally.

In this case when pasting, it would turn out the following information:

__

That’s right folks, it seems as though Google, in the footsteps of Yahoo, has finally opted to join the OpenID revolution. This means that you can use your Gmail username and password on sites with OpenID. I assume that in the coming months, more and more will start accepting this global system, one that sites such as Plaxo.com already use.

My question is what will happen, if people two sites such as Yahoo and Gmail both want to use their usernames and passwords on a site accepting the OpenID system, but who both have the same usernames. I realize that now they probably won’t allow people to register names that have been used in the system, but what about duplicated that already exist? Anyways it just one of the many small issues that OpenID will have to work out, but the idea of one centralized system controlling all accounts would make all of our lives just that much easier. I’m definitely looking forward to the day we’ll be able to use the same username and password on every major website on the internet. Boy, that sure would be a change of pace!

Read the full story at TechCrunch…

Making an audio file on your website able to stream instead of only able to be downloaded is much easier then you would think. Here is a simple step by step guide on how to do it with an embed Windows Media Player.

1. Open up a text editor such as NotePad.

2. Inside the text document, put the exact URL of the audio file on the first line (only works for the MP3 or WMA audio extensions).

EX: http://www.domain.com/music/song.mp3 or
http://www.domain.com/music/song.wma

Note: In order to have it stream more then one song, just put another song on a new line as many times as you want as it will stream them in that order.

EX:
http://www.domain.com/music/song1.mp3
http://www.domain.com/music/song2.wma
http://www.domain.com/music/song3.mp3

3. Save the text file as a .m3u file.

EX: song.m3u

4. Once you have created your m3u playlist, make sure that you put the music file(s) and the m3u file in the same folder. In this case, they would both need to be in the “/music/” folder.

5. Finally, insert this cross-browser Media Player embed code into the webpage.

<OBJECT ID="MediaPlayer1" CLASSID="CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95" CODEBASE="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab# Version=5,1,52,701" STANDBY="Loading Microsoft Windows® Media Player components..." TYPE="application/x-oleobject" width="280" height="46">
<param name="fileName" value="http://www.domain.com/music/music.m3u“>
<param name=”animationatStart” value=”true”>
<param name=”transparentatStart” value=”true”>
<param name=”autoStart” value=”true“>
<param name=”showControls” value=”true”>
<param name=”Volume” value=”-300“>
<embed type=”application/x-mplayer2″ pluginspage=”http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/” src=”http://www.domain.com/music/music.m3u” name=”MediaPlayer1″ width=280 height=46 autostart=1 showcontrols=1 volume=-300>
</OBJECT>

Note: All of the blue fields are those which can be changed. The value for volume “-300″ is mid-ranged. If you change it, you need to change it for both values.

Anyone who has done research on how to get their website ranked knows that SEO is key. A major part of SEO is getting backlinks. Now many people get discouraged because some backlinks take a lot of time to get, and people therefore get lazy with their sites and eventually give up. Luckily, there’s an upside to this and that is DoFollow Blogs.

DoFollow Blogs

These blogs are readily available on the internet and are some of the easiest backlinks to get. You simply write a comment, put in your name, and in the url box you put in your website. It is extremely simple and doesn’t take much time. When doing this though, please actually read the post and write a comment that is relevant and at least two sentences long.

You can find lists of these blogs by simply Googling “DoFollow Blogs”.

Don’t Spam

While I do appreciate those who want to get their site ranked, I extremely dislike those that spam. Not only is spamming bad for the blogesphere, but if a few people do this on one site, it is extremely likely that the blog owner will NoFollow his blog and then all that work is wasted. Also, most comments these days are moderated before available on the site.

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I leave you with this information, so go and get some backlinks people!

A good friend of mine created this ad for the Obama campaign.

As you’ll notice from my experimental blog ForestCentral, the ads are extremely relevant to the content. This is because the content continuously uses the keyword “tree” or “forest”. You want to make sure that you don’t go overboard, because Google often looks at the density of your keywords (that is how many times it is used is relation to other words), and isn’t kind to sites that use have a high density

It is also important to specifically something perticular in that keyword. My post “Tree Trimming for Beginners” is a good example of this. In the larger category “trees”, it more locally targets “trimming”. This goes along with the theme of my blog, yet also brings in traffic and more diverse ads to my blog.