Saturday, April 30, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Rankmaniac 2011 statistics
Hey guys, it's amazing to think that it has been two weeks since this project has started. I never expected this much traffic for the website that I whipped up to post random stuff I find on the internet. As some might guess from the title of this post, the Rankmaniac 2011 competition ends tomorrow. It's a bit relieving to have it all be done with! The listings can be somewhat psychopathic and arbitrary at times which makes this quite frustrating.
I've fervently been trying to scrounge up posts that people would find interesting as well these past few days but it seems like it's somewhat for naught as coming into the final stretch we're not on the top spot. Some of the practice behind Google's search results do not make sense. The TA's baseline websites have not been updated since they were created and these sites are still on top! That makes absolutely no sense.
For this post, I'll have the listings for various statistics and grades that our website has gotten using the analytics package that comes with blogger sites. Here's a cool milestone I saw from yesterday:
Woo! It's really hard to believe that this page has been viewed over a thousand times! Shout outs to Elaine for helping to advertise this site a lot :). The overall view statistics are as follows:
It's neat to see the spikes for the days in which we advertise the site on facebook. Sorry for the spam guys! I guess facebook is definitely a great way to spread things! Though I did get a few complaints for the spam :(. Here are the statistics for the people that have visited this site:
It's not a big thing to find out that most of the people are from the US. I do wonder how we have 6 visits from Malaysia and a few from Europe scattered here though! Weird stuff. Also there are some browsers that I have never even heard of that people are using these days. Crazy crazy! Last but not least, the ad revenue gained from the site:
Wowza! $19.25! How ridiculous is that? Too bad we can't cash any of this out until we hit $100 though! This definitely makes me want to keep on blogging and earn money from doing something that's enjoyable.
Cool, thanks for sticking with us till the end of Rankmaniac 2011. I'm going to let this post be the last one for now until the competition is officially over tomorrow. Wish us luck yo!
Edit: One more statistic, check out the posts that got the most hits:
This current post has the most clicks! And in second place is the Starcraft video. There definitely is a big correlation between the number of people that view a particular post and the number of people that link to the post from Facebook. Also, the pages that Elaine links to get more views that the pages that I personally link to. I guess she's way more popular than I am!
I've fervently been trying to scrounge up posts that people would find interesting as well these past few days but it seems like it's somewhat for naught as coming into the final stretch we're not on the top spot. Some of the practice behind Google's search results do not make sense. The TA's baseline websites have not been updated since they were created and these sites are still on top! That makes absolutely no sense.
For this post, I'll have the listings for various statistics and grades that our website has gotten using the analytics package that comes with blogger sites. Here's a cool milestone I saw from yesterday:
Woo! It's really hard to believe that this page has been viewed over a thousand times! Shout outs to Elaine for helping to advertise this site a lot :). The overall view statistics are as follows:
It's neat to see the spikes for the days in which we advertise the site on facebook. Sorry for the spam guys! I guess facebook is definitely a great way to spread things! Though I did get a few complaints for the spam :(. Here are the statistics for the people that have visited this site:
It's not a big thing to find out that most of the people are from the US. I do wonder how we have 6 visits from Malaysia and a few from Europe scattered here though! Weird stuff. Also there are some browsers that I have never even heard of that people are using these days. Crazy crazy! Last but not least, the ad revenue gained from the site:
Wowza! $19.25! How ridiculous is that? Too bad we can't cash any of this out until we hit $100 though! This definitely makes me want to keep on blogging and earn money from doing something that's enjoyable.
Cool, thanks for sticking with us till the end of Rankmaniac 2011. I'm going to let this post be the last one for now until the competition is officially over tomorrow. Wish us luck yo!
Edit: One more statistic, check out the posts that got the most hits:
This current post has the most clicks! And in second place is the Starcraft video. There definitely is a big correlation between the number of people that view a particular post and the number of people that link to the post from Facebook. Also, the pages that Elaine links to get more views that the pages that I personally link to. I guess she's way more popular than I am!
Obama's 2012 budget proposal
Wah quick post. This is very interesting and news that everybody should see: Obama's 2012 budget proposal!
The total proposal is worth $3.7 trillion. A big portion of that money is being put into research for clean energy and the budgets of many national research institutions are going to be dramatically increased. Crazy stuff! This will definitely benefit the future generations as this type of research is exactly what we need right now.
What I'm personally looking forward to is the huge increase in the amount given to education. This completely differs from what the Republicans in the House of Representatives were proposing for the continuation of 2011. There will be big boosts to NSF amongst other grants. Great for all sorts of collegiate students.
I feel as though Obama is taking a very good measure with these changes in pushing for a more research and education based budget... It's not passed yet so only one can speculate on the differences. We must note that the federal debt is as big as ever and I'm not sure if this budget is going to help it. Obama's vision is good, but how will it all pan out?
Source
The total proposal is worth $3.7 trillion. A big portion of that money is being put into research for clean energy and the budgets of many national research institutions are going to be dramatically increased. Crazy stuff! This will definitely benefit the future generations as this type of research is exactly what we need right now.
What I'm personally looking forward to is the huge increase in the amount given to education. This completely differs from what the Republicans in the House of Representatives were proposing for the continuation of 2011. There will be big boosts to NSF amongst other grants. Great for all sorts of collegiate students.
I feel as though Obama is taking a very good measure with these changes in pushing for a more research and education based budget... It's not passed yet so only one can speculate on the differences. We must note that the federal debt is as big as ever and I'm not sure if this budget is going to help it. Obama's vision is good, but how will it all pan out?
Source
Fan made video game movies!
Hey guys! A few days ago my friends and I were surfing around youtube looking for fun things to watch. We decided to spot over a few fan made video game movie trailers. I'd like to say that the production value on some of these are absolutely stunning. They also adhere much more to the storyline of the video game itself. So here they are for your viewing pleasure for those that haven't seen them before.
Here's one that's been pretty popular about Pokemon. It got a big uproar in the beginning when the only thing released was a big scrappy rendition of this fan made production. People ended up thinking that this was a real Pokemon movie! The only think I can't get over is how uncute pikachu is.
Following this are two Half-Life 2 productions. The first one is called Escape from City 17. Pretty good stuff. The surroundings look nice and realistic. One video has already been made in the series (the one shown here) but part two is nowhere to be found! 99% of the part 2 searches on youtube end up being 20 seconds long or rickrolls. Fun stuff:
Here's another Half-Life 2 short film. I feel that this one is better than the prior but also follows the video game less closely. Combine soldiers don't have swords! And I don't think resistance fighters would know capoeira. But whatever it's cool, has atmosphere, and is very well produced.
Alrighty, last one of the batch. Probably the best one too. It's made with actual movie stars and a bit of a budget but otherwise still relatively small project. It's about Mortal Kombat! The action is super gritty and much more down to earth than the craziness in the games. It is a complete reboot of the series and has actually been slated to become a real production! It's great but not for the faint of heart.
So after watching all of these, we had the question: why couldn't big name movie studios do something of this quality? These are FAN made with very little money or backing of any sort. All of these look fricktastically epic! While studio movies like Dragonball Evolution ended up being a stinking pile o' manure. I honestly don't know. Either way, I just hope these fans can keep making such epic productions.
Here's one that's been pretty popular about Pokemon. It got a big uproar in the beginning when the only thing released was a big scrappy rendition of this fan made production. People ended up thinking that this was a real Pokemon movie! The only think I can't get over is how uncute pikachu is.
Following this are two Half-Life 2 productions. The first one is called Escape from City 17. Pretty good stuff. The surroundings look nice and realistic. One video has already been made in the series (the one shown here) but part two is nowhere to be found! 99% of the part 2 searches on youtube end up being 20 seconds long or rickrolls. Fun stuff:
Here's another Half-Life 2 short film. I feel that this one is better than the prior but also follows the video game less closely. Combine soldiers don't have swords! And I don't think resistance fighters would know capoeira. But whatever it's cool, has atmosphere, and is very well produced.
Alrighty, last one of the batch. Probably the best one too. It's made with actual movie stars and a bit of a budget but otherwise still relatively small project. It's about Mortal Kombat! The action is super gritty and much more down to earth than the craziness in the games. It is a complete reboot of the series and has actually been slated to become a real production! It's great but not for the faint of heart.
So after watching all of these, we had the question: why couldn't big name movie studios do something of this quality? These are FAN made with very little money or backing of any sort. All of these look fricktastically epic! While studio movies like Dragonball Evolution ended up being a stinking pile o' manure. I honestly don't know. Either way, I just hope these fans can keep making such epic productions.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Status update
Hey guys, thanks for the continued support for our Rankmaniac 2011 site. We're going strong into the final stretch right now. As some of you might have noticed this website has a few advertisements on them. What has been interesting is how the advertisements have been progressing.
At the beginning, the adverts were directly representing SEO (search engine optimization) and SERP (search engine results page). This is most likely because Google has already learned and seen the Rankmaniac query from the two projects that have preceded it. What's fun about that?
What we have managed to do is change the advertisements from these specific targets over to something thats different depending on the post (sorry guys, no pictures since I wasn't thinking far ahead for this). Since Zack posted a "buy new computer"-ish style entry, our ads have been for games and online gaming. Back when I posted the funny ancestry tree a while back, the ads changed over to ones for people who want to look for their family past.
Isn't that too easy Google? Are your ads really just mimicking the posts that we have? Maybe that's true. We'll find out. I'll do an experiment on this and post it later. As a fun fact we've gotten 11$ worth of ads for these two weeks of keeping the site up.
Otherwise, keep up the support! We are almost there.
At the beginning, the adverts were directly representing SEO (search engine optimization) and SERP (search engine results page). This is most likely because Google has already learned and seen the Rankmaniac query from the two projects that have preceded it. What's fun about that?
What we have managed to do is change the advertisements from these specific targets over to something thats different depending on the post (sorry guys, no pictures since I wasn't thinking far ahead for this). Since Zack posted a "buy new computer"-ish style entry, our ads have been for games and online gaming. Back when I posted the funny ancestry tree a while back, the ads changed over to ones for people who want to look for their family past.
Isn't that too easy Google? Are your ads really just mimicking the posts that we have? Maybe that's true. We'll find out. I'll do an experiment on this and post it later. As a fun fact we've gotten 11$ worth of ads for these two weeks of keeping the site up.
Otherwise, keep up the support! We are almost there.
Federal spending cuts financial aid
Fun stuff. Federal spending has never been a favorite topic of mine. Lots of politicians are single minded in doing what they can to get paid more or re-elected. It's an unfortunate truth in a capitalistic world where the corporations secretly deal in the background.
As many people know, the United States has a sizable debt piled on due to the recent wars we've fought. The House Republicans want to cut back on spending right now and have drafted up a spending bill for the remainder of 2011. What's the kicker? They are cutting down on the Pell Grant that provides financial aid to students such as myself and grants towards science research by 15%.
Such a cut would lower the amount of aid that the most needy people could get by nearly 850$. This would cause over 1.5 million students to be ineligible for this form of financial aid! I feel this is a terrible idea for a place to have spending cuts. Education is one of the most important parts of our society today. In order to preserve the future of our country, we need to keep the citizens educated and give them the necessary skills to tackle problems.
Surely if we spend billions of dollars fighting a downhill war, there must be some way to cover the few millions of dollars that would be saved by cutting such an important bill right?
Source
Also, for kicks, here's Representative Anthony Weiner (New York 9th district) calling out the Republicans for violating their own rules. I guess not all Democrats are spineless eh?
As many people know, the United States has a sizable debt piled on due to the recent wars we've fought. The House Republicans want to cut back on spending right now and have drafted up a spending bill for the remainder of 2011. What's the kicker? They are cutting down on the Pell Grant that provides financial aid to students such as myself and grants towards science research by 15%.
Such a cut would lower the amount of aid that the most needy people could get by nearly 850$. This would cause over 1.5 million students to be ineligible for this form of financial aid! I feel this is a terrible idea for a place to have spending cuts. Education is one of the most important parts of our society today. In order to preserve the future of our country, we need to keep the citizens educated and give them the necessary skills to tackle problems.
Surely if we spend billions of dollars fighting a downhill war, there must be some way to cover the few millions of dollars that would be saved by cutting such an important bill right?
Source
Also, for kicks, here's Representative Anthony Weiner (New York 9th district) calling out the Republicans for violating their own rules. I guess not all Democrats are spineless eh?
Looking to get a new computer?
Look no further! Anandtech is here to save the day. They have released a budget buyers guide (desktop computers under 750$). The will have guides for the high priced market segments when the Intel 6-Series chipset bug gets worked out.
If you're a gamer you'll definitely want to check out the page on GPU upgrades, or maybe wait for the more expensive build guides to come out.
Also check out how the author spelled his name wrong!
-Zack
If you're a gamer you'll definitely want to check out the page on GPU upgrades, or maybe wait for the more expensive build guides to come out.
Also check out how the author spelled his name wrong!
-Zack
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