Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓
May 4th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized
I still don’t seem to be finding much time for this ‘ole blog, but I have made time today because I have a cautionary tale to tell. It’s not about writing, or what book I have read or am intending to read. It is not about anything spooky either, so it’s not the kind of thing that you might expect from a Blog From The Darkside, but today’s post might be of interest to anyone who has a blog or website of their own. Just as long as they have some knowledge of html, that is. I don’t know if you are aware of this, but if you go to any webpage and then click the file menu on your browser and select ‘view source’ a second page will open that shows the html for the page. If you are not familiar with such things you will just be looking at a page full of text, if you are though, at least some of what you see should make sense to you.
Last night I decided to add a news feed to the footer of this blog and when I went into the footer file I found hundreds of outgoing links had been added to it (and I mean hundreds), along with the instruction to hide them. Visitors to this blog would be unaware of them. More startlingly, so was I and it’s my blooming blog. Alarm bells started to go off in my head and I opened up my browser, visited the blog and had a look at the source. It was not just the footer that had been altered, so had the header: more and more and more outgoing links, all of which were hidden. I actually have no idea how this was achieved, but I have been very busy changing passwords and, of course, removing all of these nasty links. But why was this done? That’s easy. Somebody wanted to get lots of free links into their sites and to the sites that pay them as an affiliate. It’s an underhand tactic and it makes me angry, but I shall be checking the page sources of all of my sites more closely and more often from now on.
I only mention this here now because if it can happen to me, it can happen to you too, so if you know how to do so, it might be worthwhile checking your own pages every now and again. The search engines frown on hidden links and when there are as many as I found it is always possible that they could cause the site to be dropped from the search engine altogether for spamming them. And anyway, why should anyone else benefit from someone else’s work?
April 25th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized
Icame across this short film, narrated by Vincent Price. It’s rather entertaining.
HERE IS THE LINK
I tried to imbed the video, but it didn’t work. Sorry 
April 16th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Spooky Stuff, Uncategorized
Well, I thought I’d better do a post today. What’s the point of having a blog if I never write any posts? I have been writing of course, just not here. I never seem to have anything interesting to say these days. I have put together a new website though, so I suppose I might as well mention that. It’s not about writing, it’s about Ouija boards and it contains lots and lots of videos to watch about—can you guess?—Ouija boards. To be quite honest I am flabbergasted how many videos there are about this. It seems that there are an awful lot of Ouija board stories posted on YouTube. I am sure that some of the videos that are claimed to be about real Ouija board experiences are about as real as the tooth fairy, but some of them make interesting viewing. Anyway I’ve called the site Weird Ouijas and if you want to check it out you can find it HERE.
Just for the record, I never mess with Ouijas myself. I think they are dangerous. Looking at the amount of interest there seems to be in them though, I seem to be in the minority as far as that is concerned.
March 20th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Spooky Stuff, Uncategorized
I’m not sure what the reasoning is behind this, but apparantly Steven Spielberg is busy developing a new social network where people will be able to get together online and share tales of their experiences with the supernatural and/or extraterrestrial. If you want to read a little more about this HERE IS A LINK
March 13th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized
Often, when I am reading newsletters and such, I come across what look like an interesting link. So I follow then link, but realize that I don’t have time to read the article, or, in the case of a video, to watch it. What I do instead is save the webpage with the intention of visiting it again later. Sometimes it is a lot later. Sometimes not at all (organized kind of a guy aren’t I?)
Yesterday I made a little time for some catching up and watched a rather poignant Harlan Ellison video. The video isn’t very long and in it Harlan talks about how angry he gets about people who want to use a writer’s work without paying them for it. It is quite interesting and it is easy to see that this a subject that he feels very strongly about. If you are interested you can watch the video by clicking HERE
March 10th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized, Writing
Last April I wrote a post about a new magazine called Noctem Aeternus. It offered 10c a word for accepted work and that’s not bad, especially for a free magazine.
I just got an email today that states that the first issue will also be the last issue. It’s a pity, but I can’t say that I am surprised. New markets usually up their rates when they become established and 10c a word is quite a lot to offer when your product is unknown and untested.
February 28th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized, Writing
Well, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Did you notice? Did you miss me?
I’ve been busy with a few things one of which was the second draught of this novel thingummy-jig that I have been trying to write. I’ve finished that now. Draught two ran to 54 000 words. I can’t even remember what draught one’s word count was, but I think it was about the same. I took few things out, but I added a few as well. I think I might start draught three in a day or two. Still lots to do on it, I’m afraid.
February 28th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized
Thanks to some recent health issues, I don’t have the stamina to keep up with all my many online projects, and thus have to scale back on some websites. For the immediate future, ZombieMart.net will have to go on hiatus. But please stay subscribed to the RSS feed so you won’t miss news [...]
February 11th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized
I have just found out that my story
The Survivor has been accepted for the summer issue of
The Rose & Thorn Literary E-zine. It will be in the science fiction category, but it does have elements of horror in it as well.
February 10th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized
I recently downloaded the free DivX player because I was curious to see what the quality was like if I watched something that had been recorded in the DivX format. I was pretty impressed. When I downloaded the player a few other things came with it. One of them was an internet shortcut for Stage6. I visited the site and was equally impressed. There is a lot there including a lot of horror movies and TV shows.
I was surprised to find that someone had uploaded the Hammer film The Gorgon. The Gorgon is a hard film to get hold of these days. Certainly, neither Amazon.com nor Amazon.co.uk include it in their catalogue. Anyway, there the film was in its entirety and I downloaded it. I have only seen it once before and would have probably been in my teens at the time. It was great to see it again and I thought I would post the link on my blog. I know this won’t interest everyone, but for those of you who do enjoy a little hammer in your horror just CLICK HERE
January 28th, 2008 — From The Feeds, Uncategorized
My laptop has been getting a lot slower over the past few months and it has been rather annoying. I have Norton Antivirus installed and I swear by it, for stopping viruses. It is not so good when it comes to spyware though, and so I have also installed a specialist spyware remover and it is also very good and regular scans have improved the performance of my computer. I also added a registry cleaner. It also helped. Then I removed all of the unnecessary programs from the machine’s start-up menu. I saw a difference after I did that too.
After all of this my laptop was running a lot better. Except when I was surfing the web. I have always used Internet Explorer, but I was finding that, even working offline, it took a very long time to open up. Working online was a nightmare! I had to sit and wait ages for pages to open and, at times, felt like picking up the computer and throwing it at the wall. It was so frustrating. I experimented a bit and found that if I ran Explorer without the add-ons it was a little faster. But not nearly fast enough.
A couple of days ago I downloaded the Firefox browser. It seems to be a lot better. It certainly opens up and runs faster. In fact I just added on the Google Toolbar and it still runs faster than Internet Explorer. The Google Toolbar has a page rank indicator included, and I find it a useful tool. When I ran Internet Explorer without add ons that meant no Google Toolbar and so I was in the dark about page rank and there are times that I need to know what the page rank of a page is, and what sites link to it and when it was last spidered etc.
Once I had Firefox installed one of the first things that I did was to visit my own site A Passion For Horror. I built the site myself and at the time I was aware that webpages can show up differently on different browsers. Because of this webmasters should always check to see how their sites appear in the various main browsers. I knew this, but I never bothered checking (call me dufus). When I did check I got a shock. My site looked crap. None of the pictures of books showed up in the book review section. Neither did any of the DVD covers in the DVD Review section. The talking skulls were missing from the top of every page and so was the line of dripping blood. I was most disappointed in the Public Domain Movies section. For every film I had taken screenshots, turned them into thumbnails and then ran them down the side of the review, like a little filmstrip. The pages had shown fine in Internet Explorer, but none of it showed in Firefox. Only the descriptions from inside the alt tags showed. It was a real mess.
None of this was the fault of the Firefox Browser. The fault was all my own. I can’t afford the prices of Dreamweaver and Frontpage and so I use a cheap What You See Is What You Get Editor (WYSIWYG). My editor works to a point, but it does not build the best of pages. Because of this I have to open up every finished page and alter the HTML where there is a problem. Until now I had missed one or two problem areas, just because Internet Explorer seems to be a little more forgiving of sloppy coding.
Anyway I have had to edit about 150 pages. It was hard work but now my site looks and Displays fine in Firefox.
All of this got me curious and so I downloaded and installed a couple of other web browsers: Opera and Netscape.
My site displays fine in Netscape. It is also okay in Opera, except that the frames pull to the left on every page. I am not going to worry about it though because it would take me too long to figure out what part of the code is causing the problem and it is only a small problem.
I am going to use Firefox from now on because I like it the best. Opera does seem slightly faster though. I liked the picture that displays when Netscape opens up (a ships steering wheel set against the stars), and it is seems to be faster than Internet Explorer, but there is nothing about it that made me prefer it to Firefox. Also AOL, who own Netscape, seem to be phasing it out and there will shortly be no more support for it.
I’m not slagging off Internet Explorer here. I have used it for years. All I am saying is that I had a problem and by changing to another browser I solved the problem. Of the three browsers that I tried it actually came bottom of my list. Firefox was my proffered choice, as I have just said, but had there not been a fiery fox to go with I would have probably gone with Opera.
Anyway, if this post proves to be useful to anyone who is slow surfing then, I am glad for that. Slow surfing sucks.
Wikipedia has a rather interesting article about web browsers, if you want to you can read it by clicking HERE. The article also contains a list of available browsers along with statistics about how much of the market they have etc. Internet Explorer is still, it would seem, the preferred choice of most people.
October 12th, 2007 — Uncategorized
August 26th, 2007 — Uncategorized
Welcome to Horror Hype, by blog about all things Horror related. I plan to do reviews of Horror films, books, games and more along with aggregating feeds from other bloggers. Enjoy.
August 25th, 2007 — Uncategorized
August 24th, 2007 — Uncategorized
Recommend another foreign horror movie.
Paul Corupe - Canuxploitation
Netherlands
I’m going to go with Dick Maas’ moderately effective stab at elevator horror, The Lift, a curiosuly unseen Dutch effort. I first spotted it for sale in a used video store, and I couldn’t resist the amazing tagline: “Take the stairs…take the stairs! For God’s sake, take the [...]
