Gabriel Harper’s Blog

Google’s homepage is looking fairly normal lately with the classic logo, but Google is now displaying a short message about Doodle 4 Google which reads “Over 16,000 children drew doodles for Google’s homepage. Vote for the one that will appear here.” So now it’s our turn to decide what shows up on Google’s homepage! Not only that but make some kid’s day (erm… week? month? life?) by getting their sketch displayed on Google.com.

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Jelsoft just released vBulletin 3.7.0 Gold on April 29th, right alongside the new vBulletin price changes. Good timing on their behalf, because now there is even more motivation to upgrade those licenses and buy some new ones! Starting immediately vBulletin license owners will be able to access vBulletin 3.7.0 from the member’s area.

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Jelsoft just announced a bunch of changes in their pricing scheme. They must have read my blog about whether vBSEO is worth the money and decided they could charge more! While not a huge increase, it’s enough to make me shake my head as I now run several vBulletin forums. That’s the nature of business though, and hopefully Jelsoft will continue to improve their software and make use of all that extra cash.

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I’m taking the plunge with vBSEO on Fury-Tech Forums. $149 for vBSEO is almost twice as expensive as a leased vBulletin license, so like many vBulletin owners I’m tentative to say the least. To make things worse, they want $117 to remove vBSEO branding from your forum. On the bright side of things, I should have a reliable SEO solution for vBulletin - where Jelsoft is really lacking in my opinion.

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Ready to spice up your Google homepage with some great art? Today we are greeted with Google’s latest homepage promoting iGoogle Artist Themes. Today’s Google logo sports art work by Jeff Koons as an example of the possibilities using iGoogle Artist Themes. Below the logo reads “What happens when great art mixes with your homepage?” iGoogle Artist Themes. And where would be without a nice screenshot to show off the new iGoogle Artist homepage?

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It has been quite a while since I was forced to shut down Fury-Tech Forums due to SPAM and lack of moderation. Many know Fury-Tech as a mix of heated debates over hardware and even more heated debates over politics and religion. Often leading to personal injury or harm or death or suffocation. (The previous statement is untrue in most countries). But needless to say, many victims fell to the wrath that is Fury-Tech.

Which is why it brings me great joy to announce once again that Fury-Tech Forums is back in with a much needed upgrade. Aesthetically speaking we have a little more to do. But the software itself is a major improvement over the SPAM honeypot that was phpBB. So get your arse to the new tech forums and tell me what you think.

More fun in the Webmaster world of updates. Jelsoft today announced vBulletin 3.6.10, including various backported bugfixes from 3.7.0 but primarily to fix a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) in vBulletin 3.6.9.

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Even if you don’t celebrate Earth Day, Google does. And you’re sure to be enticed by a completely free screenshot of them doing it! We already celebrated Earth Hour with Google, so let’s move on to bigger and better things with Earth Day!

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I just read about the new version of Cpanel / WHM that is supposed to use much less memory on Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Aside from the obvious benefit of freeing up resources and improving performance and capacity, cPanel also points out the benefits of being more eco-friendly than standard cPanel releases. I’m not sure how efficiently cPanel VPS Optimized translates into less energy consumption, but I’ll just take their word for it. This is exciting news for me, because I run many domains hosted on multiple VPS with cPanel/WHM.

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Google has a tradition of doing zany things to their logo and Web site for holidays and other important events. Today Google greets us with a shockingly dark page and states “We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn…”. Google provides a little more detail, going on to say this is “… a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour“.

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