I was planing to run some benchmarks on my website with various settings to find a result that would reduce loading time for my website for every visitor. I had one script and one plugin in mind that I wanted to test. The first one was the Google Analytics script which I used to be able to access site statistics on the Google Analytics website while the second was the wp-cache plugin for Wordpress which cached database requests but required that gz compression was disabled which resulted in a larger html file that was transferred to each visitor.

I finally managed to code the Ghacks Wordpress theme the way that I can release it to the public. The theme is free for everyone who wants to use it as long as the link in the footer to my blog is remaining. The Wordpress theme is optimized to gain great exposure in the most popular search engines as well as monetized perfectly.

I’m very proud to announce that I finally had the time to setup the new custom Ghacks Wordpress theme which you will hopefully like as much as I do. There are still a few minor glitches here and there which I have to take care of but it should be pretty solid as of now.

July has passed pretty quickly for me with two vacations and it was a rather unspectacular month in regards to ghacks as well. My earnings remained pretty stable throughout the month with the usual fluctuation in Adsense earnings. I’m really not sure why the difference between the worst day (Saturday, July 14, 2007 – 2,44% of my Adsense earnings) and the best day (Sunday, July 15, 2007 – 3,97% of my Adsense earnings) was so immense considering that the best day followed the worst day immediately.

The two year anniversary is coming up in less than three months and I would like to create a competition and hand out some goodies on that day. I could do this on my own and probably create a nice competition or I could ask you for your input on the competition and create a great one.

Well I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be on holiday again starting today for the next seven days. I wrote a lot of articles for each day already and try to login at my destination as well but can’t promise that this is going to work out because I really don’t know about Internet access there.

I’m creating and maintaining Internet websites for a very long time and can look back to almost two years of successful blogging here at ghacks. While there is not much that I would change if I had the chance there are a few things that I would definitely made different if I had the chance to go back in the past and act again.

Everton and several other users are publishing their blog earnings every month and I thought that I would do a similar thing with the exception that I will not publish the absolute numbers but only the percentage of what the service is earning. I feel not that comfortable to reveal my earnings in dollars because I feel that it belongs to my private life.

Hej everyone. I’m still in the beautiful capital of Sweden which is a wonderful city even though most Swedes have left for Midsummer. What I really like about Stockholm is that you can reach everything with your feet.

My hotel is just next to T Centralen (Main Station) and it is only a few hundred meters to the Old Town with the King’s palace and many other remarkable buildings. Most stores were closed yesterday which was rather unfortunate.

The Wordpress development team released yet another update of the Wordpress blog script raising the version number to 2.2.1 in the process. This update contains several bug fixes that might have plagued some Wordpress blog owners while others – including myself – did not experience any of the bugs.

The more important part of this update is that it also fixes several security holes making it a required update for every webmaster. The vulnerabilities that have been fixed, they are:

It has been a while since the last competition here at Ghacks and I thought it would be a nice idea to start another one. This one is actually pretty simple and everyone will be able to participate. All I’m asking for is that you stumble and review (just a few words are fine) one or two articles here at Ghacks and let me know about it.

I will then draw five users from all stumbles and send them each $10 to their paypal account. Your chance is doubled if you stumble two sites which is the maximum that I accept. The competition ends in exactly one week from now on on the 9th of June. Make sure you use the contact form to send me the following information:

I read an interesting article written by my friend Everton at this Connected Internet Blog about Blog Housekeeping. He was approached by one of his readers about the subject and Everton decided to change several aspects of his blog because they were either outdated, annoying or no asset for him or his readership.

Since I’m going to introduce a new theme in a couple of days – yeah, consider this the official announcement, hehe – I wanted to make sure that you all feel comfortable with it and that all the “bad” from this theme is not taken over into the new one while all the things that you like are.

There are several ways in which you can support me and my site. I would like to outline all the ones that I can think of. If you know of something else feel free to let me know so that I can add it on this page here. I’m always very fond of any feedback [...]

My friend Everton from Connected Internet told me about his guest author project which is running great and suggested that I should also try and find some guest authors who would like to contribute to my blog regularly. His advices are great most of the time and I have decided to give it another try and look for some guest authors who will write articles for ghacks. Regularly does not mean that you have to post every day but at least once a week would be fine.

Money makes the world go round. I tried to remain true to myself for a very long time but after some initial contacts with Mr. Shepherd from the London office and the money they offered I could no longer reject the offer. I’m therefor announcing that the RIAA has purchased my blog, my domain and my expertise which will now be turned in favor of digital rights management against those unwilling customers who just can’t see what is good for them.

I was looking for translators to translate the content that I’m writing in English to other languages. The response was phenomenal and I could quickly fill spots for Spanish, Italian and German versions of Ghacks. Those sites are online by know and can be accessed by replacing www with the country extension. To be more precise you can access them by clicking the following links: Ghacks ES, Ghacks IT and Ghacks DE.

Since I started blogging two years ago I came upon thousands of essential, ultimate and top freeware lists but only few really had a lasting impact on the internet community. Most are forgotten the next day and everyone heads on to the next list in line. It does not make sense to simply write another essential list, it does however make sense when I’m concentrating this list on freeware and Open source that I have reviewed here at ghacks. I reviewed more than 360 freeware and Open Source products which could be seen as a preselection.

I’m currently using a translator plugin that uses the Google translator to translate my articles from English to other languages. This is however not a perfect solution and it occurred to me that it would be much better if someone proficient in English and a second language would translate my articles to make them available to wider audience.

I’m therefor looking for translators that would like to translate my English articles. I’m especially looking for translators for the following languages: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German and French. Just let me know if you want to translate it into another language, I might be interested as well. I’m not able to pay you directly for the work but you will receive 50% of Adsense revenue that the translated pages generate.

I’m using Wordpress as the blogging software of choice for Ghacks and all of my other blogs. After reading Paul Stamatious article on optimizing CSS for Wordpress I decided to give it a try and see if page loading times would benefit at all from it. I also had to check if the optimization would change the way my blog would be displayed or would throw up errors. I began by analyzing the page loading times of my blog without any optimization. The result for the frontpage was that my blog used 166K and that users with ISDN (128 Kbit) would have to wait 18.55 seconds before my site was fully loaded.

Sunday, the sun is shining and I have to work. Is not life unfair sometimes. I would like to announce that I’m still looking for one or two authors that would like to write regulary for ghacks.net. Regulary means that you should at least write four articles per month for my site. I would share the earnings from that articles page with you – a fair 50/50 share of the earnings. I’m looking for the following:

Native Speaker
Expertise in at least one of the following topics that you would like to write about: technology, gadgets, software, internet, hacking (modchips, internet, workarounds), free stuff (wallpapers, music, etc), gaming related, privacy, anonymity, digital rights, freedom of speech, mobile / pocket pcs..

I thought I compile all the latest changes and new features in one big announcement instead of writing a single article for each of them. I have added two features to ghacks which might be useful to some visitors at least. The first is that I enabled WAP access to ghacks which enables users with mobile devices to read the latest news right from their device.

The second new feature is a print function. It is not working correctly yet but I’m in contact with the author and the issue will be fixed soon. The print function which is available on all single articles pages makes it possible to print the content of the articles without the sidebars.

You might have noticed that I added so called avatars to the comments that you write. I thought it would be nice to personalize ghacks a little bit more and add avatar support. All you need to do to add your own avatar is to visit mybloglog and register for a free account there. This is not only helpful for my site but all sites that support this option. Everton from connected internet uses the same system for example.

It is Sunday again, time for the most interesting posts that I wrote during this week. It was a eventful week, I setup a web proxy server which is currently running in an open beta test. Everyone may use it to connect to blocked websites from the network at work or at his school / university. I need feedback to evaluate the proxy and decided if it should leave beta and be the proxy of choice.

Man is it Sunday already ? It seems that this week passed so fast, maybe because I was ill the last two days and slept a lot. Forced myself to continue my daily rhythm of writing articles which surprisingly worked very well. Without further ado, here are the most interesting articles – based purely on my choice – of the last week.

Today was the last day where people could vote for their favorite website idea and I’m happy to announce the winner of the competition. The winner of the competition is Nick who wanted to create a site for sheet music that made it easy to search the internet for free sheet music integrating all the free sites into one repository that is available to everyone on the internet.

Another week has passed and I always post a list of the most interesting posts that I wrote in this week. I also would like to remind everyone that the voting for the winner of the January competition will end in two days. The winner of the competition will receive a sponsored domain and one year free of hosting. And you decide which idea for a new internet project will win it all.

I’m currently developing a new proxy website which has some major advantages over most proxy websites on the internet. The proxy has no problem to handle logins to websites such as myspace, gmail and other login based systems. It is blazing fast and should be great for everyone.

It is time for the usual weekly round up of interesting articles here at ghacks. I hope you enjoyed the majority of articles that I have written this week, here is the list of the best ones in case you missed them:

I only received a handful of ideas for the January competition. The best idea for a new website would win a free domain name and one year of hosting. I think it is in the best interest of everyone to let you decided who should win the first price.

Another week has passed and it is time for the usual compilation of this weeks most interesting posts, let us start right away:

Wow I’m late. I wanted to write a summary of the most interesting posts on every Sunday but it seems I have missed that goal yesterday which means that I make an exemption and write it today. I promise to do better next week and publish it on Sunday again.

The following announcement is a shameless plug, I’m going to promote the new blog that I have created called DRM Alternatives. You will like the blog if you are fed up with the music industry and think that the relationship between artists and fans should be based on trust instead of mistrust which describes the current relationship.

I just wanted to write a quick reminder to everyone that the January competition is still running. I’m going to sponsor a domain name and one year of hosting for the most promising idea of what you would do with the website. I already received about ten entries to the competition and would like to receive some additional ones.

I have decided to write a short summary of some of the more interesting articles that I wrote on every Sunday from now on. I’m not completely sure if you would like to see such posts here at my site but I think it can be helpful for all the users that access ghacks only on the weekend to check what I have written in the last six days. Please let me know what you think of this kind of posts.

I have decided to give something back to my community (that is you) by offering the lucky winner of the following competition the money to pay for a domain name and one year free of hosting at polurnet. This is not a sponsored contest, I pay everything by myself.

The years seem to pass more quickly. So much has happened this year to my site and myself it is impossible to believe. Ghacks went from a very specialized blog to a widely respected one. The amount of visitors almost tripled this year and I’m really looking forward to 2007 and hope that this trend continues. I never thought that it would be possible that so many people would be interested in what I was writing about but it works.

I was getting some emails lately asking about the plugins that I have installed here at ghacks. I know that many webmasters read my blog and I thought it would be nice to write about the plugins. I also thought to write a little series of articles about setting up a blog with your own domain, please let me know if that sounds interesting enough. I have been using Wordpress since the beginning and find it really easy to administrate.

It seems that currently a blog tagging game is making its rounds and finally reached me thanks to my friend Everton Blair who tagged my blog. Everyone who gets his blog tagged has to write about 5 things that his readers did not know about yet and tag 5 additional blogs afterwards to keep the ball rolling. Here we go, 5 things that you did not know about ghacks:

I just wanted to let everyone know that the comments have been enabled and everyone is able to post comments here at ghacks again. This was caused by a missing ” in one of the many wordpress theme files. Now is the time to to comment if you wanted to comment on articles that have been posted in the last three days.

Many visitors of my site have knowledge in certain fields that excel my knowledge or supplement it. I thought it would be nice to add this knowledge to ghacks by giving the authors an incentive to share it. I’m looking for some authors who would like to write for ghacks on a more or less regular basis and add their knowledge to the growth of the site. This authors would in return receive part of the money earned from their articles.

I decided to install a forum on a temporary basis for now and decided on its fate depending on how it will develop over the course of the coming weeks. I tried to keep it as clean and fast as possible and some of you might be a bit disappointed when they compare the forum software that I have been installing with suits like phpbb or vbulletin.

I’am in a rush, have to play football in about 20 minutes and want to write an article for my baby before I leave. This leaves me in a desperate situation and I thought the best way to do this would be to throw some links at you with articles or websites that I found interesting. All fresh, all from today.

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, dear Ghacks, Happy Birthday to you – Well we made it. When I first started the blog I never thought that it would be this successful but thanks to you it became quickly a well frequented blog with a loyal readership. I hope that you will be as happy with my website as you are know, please promise that you will let me know if something changes that you do not like.

I recently received some emails asking about the kind of hosting that I was using for ghacks.net and I decided that it would be a nice idea to write about it in an article. Ghacks is running on a dedicated server provided by the German company Hetzner with the following details: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ cpu, 2 GB DDR 400 Ram, 2x 160 GB SATA hard drives, unlimited traffic and Suse 10.0 as its operating system.

Today was the first day that I was able to use the internet connection at the hotel to check if my site was up and running and I’am really happy that everything is looking so well. I will be back tomorrow and start updating ghacks again, today I just want to write some impressions about Prague.

I have to make two announcements: I bought a poker blog some days ago and will write interesting poker related articles daily for it. I’am not a poker professional which means I will be writing from my perspective, from someone who likes the thrill and excitement of the game. If you like Poker and play at places like Party Poker or Pokerstars you might pay my blog a visit and hopefully enjoy the content there. You can reach it at 2blogpoker.com.

I’m ready to celebrate the first anniversary of my website in less than four weeks with you. Without you this site would ne nothing, what good is a blog that no one reads, that no one comments on ? I would like to tell you more about yourself, as stupid as it sounds – I took a long glance at my sites stats and will present some interesting figures, believe me.

Yes its that day of the week again. I list the most interesting articles that have been written at my partner sites to give you something to read and the partersites a little boost in traffic.

It was a busy week so the look at my partnersites comes two days later than usual. Hope you don´t mind though. Lets start with a new parter, its gmailtools.com who offer lots of google mail invites on their site, if you want want head over and grab one..

I did this for some reasons and maybe some of your are interested in them. First of all, google hacking is a pretty small niche and I would be able to create just a few articles weekly about it. Therefor I decided to expand the articles section to cover also other types of articles, who have nothing in common but that they are interesting to me, and hopefully for your too.