Abdussamad's blogspace

Paper consumption is increasing.

Shirazi of chowrangi.com has an interesting article about computers and paper consumption. He argues that increasing use of computers and web publishing will result in the reduction of paper consumption and hence be good for the environment.

However the statistics that he has presented reflect the very opposite:

Estimate show that paper consumption has trebled during the last thirty years, and given the present trends, it is likely to double by 2010 that is a big cause of concerns because it is linked with seismic environmental problems, from deforestation through industrial pollution to waste.

There can be many reasons for this increase in paper consumption. It could well be argued that the world population has increased and that is the chief cause of this increasing demand for paper.

I recently discovered the "markup: smarty" event plugin in spartacus! It allows you to add smarty tags in your entries and sidebar html nuggets. I installed it and am using smarty tags within an HTML nugget sidebar plugin to selectively display links in the sidebar.

Some of the links are supposed to display sitewide while others are homepage only. Using smarty in the HTML nugget allows me to display them correctly:

InFormEnter is a firefox extension that allows you to quickly enter text into a form field. Once installed it shows an icon against every form field. Clicking on that icon displays a menu containing previously saved text snippets that you can enter into the form field with a single click. It also displays the option to add to the menu any content that you have manually typed into the form field.

InFormEnter is a firefox extension that allows you to easily add predefined text snippets to any web form.

InFormEnter is simple to use and makes it easy to fill out forms by storing commonly used values like your name or email address. You can use it to quickly fill out website registration forms, directory submission forms or any other commonly used form on the Internet. InFormEnter also allows you to create seperate profiles of text snippets.

I am using google adsense on a few of my sites and I have learned a thing or two about how to make a decent amount from it:

• Blending in is key: This is a widely cited tip but it is worth repeating. It is important that your adsense ads blend in with the rest of your site. Among the things you can do are:
  • Make the ad border colour the same as the page background colour. This way the ad doesn't appear as a separate block but as part of your content.
  • The links in the ad should have the same colour as the links on your site.
  • Similarly the ad background and text colour should match those of your site
• Less is more: Google allows you to place multiple ad units on a single page but it is best if you stick to just one. This is because if there is just one ad unit Google will place the highest paying ads in it. This will improve your earnings per click or CPC.
• Location, Location, Location: Since you have just one ad unit to work with you should place it very carefully. The best way to do this is to wrap your content around your ad unit. I also find that positioning your ads in the middle of your webpage draws the most eyeballs and clicks.

A simple free program that I often use is ontop. On top makes a window always stay on top of other windows. This is useful if you want to copy things from one window to another or if you want to look at two documents simultaneously.

Ontop works very easily. You run it either manually or place a shortcut to it in your start menu startup folder and it will run on windows startup. When running ontop displays a small icon in the system tray. Using it is very simple. Just right click on a window title bar and you'll see the new option "Always on top". Click on that and your window will never be buried. Click it again to make it function like all other windows.

Download ontop (21 KB)

Author's site (strangely empty)