Free Templates Providers

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

So today I came across a great site I wanted to share with all of you: FreeTemplatesProviders.com. They have a number of links up on their site for pages that provide free templates for download. I happen to like this sort of thing, as it certainly makes my day a whole lot easier when I have a good template to work from. (c:

Another site you might want to sneak a glance at for free website templates (if you’re as into this stuff as I am, of course) is FindMyTemplates.com. They have a number of good templates available for download, too.

But most of all, I really want you to check out our free templates. That’s right, we here at Omnistar post new free templates monthly on our site. It’s just another great service we provide.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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BREAKING: Google announces war on subdomains

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

BREAKING NEWS:

At pubcon, Matt Cutts of Google just announced that they will start limiting search results to two subdomains for any one web search. This is a drastic revision, and may very well affect your site, possibly very negatively. Thankfully, the announcement specifically stated that the changes would be rolled out only in the next couple of weeks, so you still have time to prepare.

What This Means

In the past, search engine results have treated subdomains as though they were different sites. If your company is QWERTY, Inc., for example, and you sell widgets and fizzsnaps, then you might use widgets.qwerty.com as your widgets site, and fizzsnaps.qwerty.com as your fizzsnaps site. In this way, you could keep using the same branding for all your sites by using the same domain, but use different sites for each product.

But now, that logic has been perverted by google’s recent announcement, because now, no matter what the search is, your domain can at most occupy two slots on any search engine result. Which means a search on “qwerty”, for example, would at most show the www subdomain and your most popular other subdomain. Other slots will go to other people’s sites.

Even worse is if you do not own your own domain, but are just renting out a subdomain–now, for any given search, you are almost GUARANTEED not to get into the search results AT ALL.

How To Make Sure Your Site Does Not Take a Hit

If you are currently relying on subdomains for the different departments of your site, now is a good time to start thinking about setting up different domains for each of your departments. Do not abandon your old sites, especially if you have long term seo investment already in them, but start up new sites with unique one-page content on each, that links strongly back to your old domains. Once these pages reach sufficient pagerank, they should be able to replace the positions that you will have lost from Google’s drastic change.

If, however, you unfortunately are hosting your site under a mere subdomain, then this is the call for you to get your own domain. When this new policy rolls into place (Matt Cutts said it would be “in the next couple of weeks”), your site will be effectively dropped from all search engine results, period. The only way to fix this, unfortunately, is to get your own domain.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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Are tasers safe?

TASERs have been in the news a lot recently. A student was tasered at John Kerry's speech just a few months ago, and more recently an Oakland cop killed someone with a taser. Then there's the Vancouver guy who was tasered to death in the airport, and in the UK, one man actually burst into flames after he was shot with a taser. He died, too, of course.
Perhaps even more frightening is the Georgia police that unnecessarily tasered a man four times in 40 seconds killing him. Seeing such unnecessary tasering just makes one's stomach churn. Especially when you realize it is everywhere, even when someone is just stopped for a speeding ticket.
The issue, of course, is that because it is considered nonlethal, police seem more apt to utilize it in a situation. But with all these recent deaths, one starts to wonder if it really is nonlethal. That's why the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the UK decided to do a study specifically to find out how harmful tasers really are.
Because the cause of death from electric shock generally seems to be a problem with the heart, the researchers focused in on the possibility of cardiac arrhythmia occurring with the use of M26 and X26 commercial tasers. They chose guinea pig hearts to test on, due to the similarity of its electrocardiographic-wave configurations in comparison to human hearts.
The results were surprising for me, though I suppose that's only because I was unfamiliar with similar findings from the past. The current densities of both devices had to be increased by at least a factor of 60 before erratic heartbeats were seen. In other words, tasers are safe when used properly.
There is apparently a wide safety margin between the intensity of a taser strike and the level at which a human heart would beat irregularly. The research team did, however, warn that "consumption of alcohol or some drugs, or an existing heart condition" might "reduce this safety margin in some individuals".
"I have many concerns about TASERs, but the induction of a cardiac arrhythmia appears to be less of a problem," stated Brad Roth, associate professor in the department of physics at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. So it remains to be seen why, exactly, so many taser deaths have occurred recently.
Perhaps it just in misusing them that the problems occur? But even if someone is tased four times in forty seconds, how does that compare to the finding that tasers are sixty times too weak to cause irregular heartbeats? These are very unclear questions, and I certainly don't have any answers.
What do you guys think?
Update: PhysicsWorld has an article on today's study, and also I was informed that the UN now considers tasers as torture.

19 Planes Virtually Destroyed In US Skies

The administration likes to say that they're doing a great job with homeland security, since no significant attacks have been made on US soil since 9/11. But today that story has been proved to be nothing horseshit.
The GAO released a report today that detailed how teams at 19 different airports were able to smuggle bomb parts and liquid explosives right past security to get onto the planes. These bombs were built out of $150 worth of materials commonly available at hardware stores, and a video they showed in session with congress today showed just how powerful such an explosion would be. (I will upload the cspan footage onto youtube shortly and post it here.) I think it was clear to all who watched that the resulting explosion could easily destroy any plane it went off in, although TSA chief Kip Hawley just had to point out that since such an explosion has not been tested inside a plane, "no one really knows" what would happen if it went off in mid-flight. (I guess they'll have to check Mythbusters for that one.)
While it is clearly troubling that in 19 attempts, 19 successes were had, perhaps it will be even more troubling to realize that when they saw how easy it was to get through, they tried AGAIN, but this time triggered the special screening to see what would happen. They STILL got through in 19 out of 19 tries.
But believe it or not, this is not the worst part.
The worst part is that last year, the GAO did the same exact thing and got the same exact results. There has been no improvement in the intervening year, even though last time, Congress told the TSA to train their people to protect against this threat. TSA chief Hawley insists that "as of right now, our airports are safe. We have fixed the problem", yet immediately afterward, the GAO official (sorry, but I didn't catch his name) retorted that "we used the same exact methods we did last year, and had absolutely no problems getting through", though he admitted he also used new techniques in some cases and additionally smuggled in liquid explosives, which they didn't do in last year's exercise.
What this means, in a nutshell, is that we apparently can't guard against this stuff. This problem was brought to the attention of Homeland Security and its TSA division last year, and were told to at least fix this breach, yet a year later, no progress has been made. It remains obvious, therefore, that no progress can be made, since I refuse to believe that these people actually want security to be so easily broken.
The simple fact, then, is that anytime terrorists want to, they can blow up passenger planes in American airspace. With all that this gov't has tried to do to limit such threats, nothing has worked. The fact that we haven't had a major terrorist attack recently, I then conclude, is not because of hotshots behind the scenes who are taking out the badguys Bond-style, but rather because the would-be terrorists simply haven't yet had the willpower to see such plans through. If they did, then numerous planes would already have been destroyed.
Or do you think I'm being too harsh? What do you guys think?
Update: Summary of the GAO report is available at their website. Also, apparently CNN did a short piece on this as well.

What is Ajax?

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

AJAX is one of those things that every webmaster needs to know about. In today’s e-commerce world, every move toward making a site easier to navigate and interact with is a big plus, and using AJAX is one method of doing just that.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML–in english, that just means that xml and javascript are being used on a page to load content asynchronously with the rest of the page. In other words, a webpage that has an ajax component can fully load and remain static even while the ajax component is still processing data between the user and the server.

The beauty of AJAX is that it allows a user to do things without requiring the entire page to reload. This makes it a powerful way of improving the speed and functionality of your site. But, perhaps more importantly, it makes your site seem more professional. As end-users, we are so used to seeing interactivity cause page refreshes that whenever we interact with a page and it doesn’t refresh, that by itself can make it feel professional.

And yet, strangely enough, AJAX is not some complicated new technology. It’s just a new way of processing information, and its power, though perhaps more psychological than anything else (saving page loads isn’t that big a deal, when you stop and think about it) is sufficient to make it a staple of all the new web 2.0 technologies.

Writing AJAX into your site is not difficult if you’re already familiar with javascript. In most cases, a good webmaster will be able to integrate AJAX into a site without too much technical trouble. (A good tutorial on writing AJAX is available here.) The hard part is not writing the code; it’s recognizing which parts of your site should integrate AJAX.

Try to find an interactive part of your site that would not lose functionality by making it just a small box on your main page. For some, this might be a link to subscribe to your newsletter; although if you are marketing a product, you should keep in mind that a ‘subscription confirmed’ page is not fluff, but is an important and viable marketing stategy. Another idea might be to integrate a sales presentation on your site if you have a product to sell, or a virtual home tour, if you are a realtor. Although these functions could also be done in flash, AJAX is preferable because of standards. Nearly everyone has javascript available. Also, flash loads much more slowly, since the entire program has to be uploaded before it can even begin.

As you can see, AJAX is a powerful tool that webmasters can use to increase the speed, functionality, and professionalism of their site. I hope that these ideas will convince you to start working on implemenmting AJAX on your own site. Oh, and if any of you care to share, please post any examples of AJAX you’ve used on your website in the comments. (c;

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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