Over the last little bit a few visitors to MaxPower have let me know about a couple important issues / problems. This is my chance to thank them in a public manner:

Drunkey Love creator Kevin Wetzels alerted me to someone that had copied an entire post of mine, reposted it on their own site, and claimed it as their own original work. For shame. Kevin is a talented graphic artist and has created a great set of free icons (Drunky Love) as well as a very beautiful WordPress theme. Check out both at his website, Drunkey Love. Thanks Kevin!

Matt Oakes sent me an email to let me know that a page I had on MaxPower was now mysteriously disappeared. Turns out, somehow, it became marked as a private. I never noticed a problem because I could see the page fine (as I was logged in). Anyway, problem solved! Matt is a talented Javascript programmer who write plugins that use the jQuery library. I think his Catfish plugin is particularly intriguing. Thanks Matt!

Mosts posts you see on MaxPower have been crafted over a number of days (possibly even weeks). Sometimes the research takes a long time to complete, sometimes not. Still other times I just don’t want to write anymore on a subject and never end up publishing the post. What follows is a brief overeview of some of the stories that never got published and that I’m sick of seeing in the ‘Drafts’ pile. Consider the two shorts stories that follow kind of like blooging bloopers (except no laugh track). » Read the rest of the entry..

Today, Don Lapre, or one of his agents, or somebody representing him, left two spam comments on MaxPower. I’ve never heard of Don Lapre before today, but thats because I don’t watch infomercials. Apparently, Don Lapre is the king of infomercials having made millions from them during the 90’s. I’m not sure why Don would need to spam MaxPower, but he did. I could tell they were spam because A) both comments were exactly the same, and, B) one of the posts he commented on is clearly marked as as spam bait (Spam this please (no, not you)). Here is a sample from the spam harvesting post he commented on: » Read the rest of the entry..

With the rampant rise of plagiarism, lawsuits, and just the general state of affairs around the blogosphere it seems that sooner rather than later, every blog should put up a Legal Notice / Terms of Use page. A Legal Notice page for your blog is like alarm company stickers on the windows of your house, they doesn’t really do anything other than alert visitors that you mean business. Professional burglars are still going to break in and steal things just as unscrupulous Internet visitors / scrapers continue to repost your content with their ads. At least you are giving the bad guys the heads up that you are serious about your work.

My current legal notice is copied from Elliott Back (by his permission). I changed the name and website in the text of the notice and added my own little blurb about RSS use and the theme that provides the look of this website (sawchuk). Once written the way I liked, I then published Legal Notice as a WordPress page (instead of a regular post).

Now, its all fine and dandy that the Legal Notice had been published, but I wanted it to be visible at the bottom of every page ever published on MaxPower.ca. I wrote a quick plugin to do the job and I thought that maybe others would find it interesting as well. So here is a quick how to / how it works:

» Read the rest of the entry..

The first Thanksgiving Day in Canada after Confederation was observed on April 5, 1872 to celebrate the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness. Before then, thanksgiving days were observed beginning in 1799 but did not occur every year. Starting in 1879 Thanksgiving Day was observed every year but the date was proclaimed annually and changed year to year. The theme of the Thanksgiving holiday also changed year to year to reflect an important event to be thankful for. In the early years it was for an abundant harvest and occasionally for a special anniversary. After the First World War it was for Armistice Day, while more recently and including today it has been a day of general thanksgiving. [source]

Today Canadians celebrate the harvest with thanksgiving on the second Monday in October. Happy Thanksgiving all.

Most people don’t celebrate a first birthday at the two and three quarters year mark, but I thought that since we’ve already missed two real birthdays, any excuse to eat cake is a good one. I would hope that we could celebrate this tremendous achievement of keeping a website alive and healthy for nearly three years. Come and introduce yourself, say hi, share a story, a joke, birthday wishes, whatever. The beer is cold and the tunes are good.

How It Started

MaxPower started from the idea that MaxPower was a great name, and that there were only so many great names out there. MaxPower was borne partly out of the idea of having such a great name, and partly out of learning about the web. You may be familiar with an episode of the Simpsons which featured Max Power, an alter ego of Homer Simpson.

Max Power was dynamic, decisive, uncompromising, and most importantly, stupid. See youtube.

Max Power: Kids, there’s three ways to do things. The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!
Bart: Isn’t that the wrong way?
Max Power: Yeah, but faster!

MaxPower the website was started with the same spirit of dynamic, decisive, and stupidity. One of the very first things published on MaxPower was pictures of the Worlds Biggest Special K, which I owned. It sure wasn’t dynamic, but it was a bold decisive claim about something stupid. I found it in my cereal one morning, it was about five square inches big. I kept it in its own special Pelican case but it broke when I moved across the continent. Sadly any pictures I had of it have disapeared into the web ether. And I learned a valuable lesson, backup your photos of over-sized breakfast particles.

Next up, MaxPower hosted the definitive list of the Top 10 Dirtiest ACDC Songs. Clearly, if ACDC doesn’t embody the ideals of dynamic, decisive, uncompromising, and stupid than nothing does. MaxPower continued to publish the absurdly stupid and inane. Consider the approach we have taken on the deep and complex issue of sphincter bleaching. To this day MaxPower ranks very highly for the term sphincter bleaching and sphincter bleaching pictures. I always take pleasure in seeing creeps arrive at MaxPower looking for pictures of bleached white bums. Fools.

Maturity: Like Fine Wine and Century Eggs

Perhaps with maturity comes a relinquishment of childish and stupid thoughts and posts. Sad really, but writing strange sendups about people who get their bums bleached (and the people who look for information on it) or simply posting the humorous nature of ACDC lyrics has been left behind as MaxPower turned 2.

Since then, MaxPower has published a series of WordPress Plugins that are more popular than ever could be hoped for. These plugins have been downloaded over 5000 times. Not bad for a guy with ZERO programming education.

MaxPower has also recently started to explore issues of SEO, Adsense, and splogging. As well, my post on Free Icons was such a success that it now covers all the costs associated with running a website — that is all I could have ever hoped for.

The Future

People like yourself keep me blogging on a regular basis. I wholeheartedly enjoy reaching out and making challenging someone to laugh, think, or helping them solve a problem. Perhaps this is why MaxPower has recently seen a big surge in the numbers of RSS subscribers, welcome RSSers!

I will always provide full feeds without ads. However, while having subscribers and visitors is nice, I would really like to see more interaction with people on a regular basis. I would encourage you to, every once and awhile, minimize your RSS aggregator and leave a comment, idea, suggestion or criticism. MaxPower does not believe in nofollow, so your comments at MaxPower actually do count for something.

Come and introduce yourself, say hi, share a story, a joke, birthday wishes, whatever. This is a birthday celebration, and all my birthdays have music. This is what I’ll be listening to. Thanks for a great 2.75 years, and here is to 2.75 more. Damn few like us, and they’re all dead.

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The following post is inspired by the request at problogger.net for articles surounding the theme, “Blogging Goals.” In last weeks episode, I used Frank Lloyd Wright’s quotes as inspiration on the topic ‘effective blogging.’ This week, I’ll use another one of his quotes to start into the topic ‘blogging goals’ where I will argue that an important goal for any blogger is to avoid automation which ensures originality and prevents the loss of precious ‘blogging mojo’. » Read the rest of the entry..

The following is a piece of spam I received today. Due to the anti spam set up I use here at MaxPower, I am sure that this comment was hand written by a real human. It was posted on my social bookmarking page. In it Charles asks some good questions. Here we go:

Hello

I just got an email about an ebook download(for sale) about how to profit from bookmark sites.
But, before i go rushing to link up, I must ask what a website needs to be, before it is seen as a winner. I realise writing an article which is informative and useful before it can get bookmarked.

How about the site itself, should it have certain requirement before being considered?.

I would like a review from you if possible to see if my site might be seen as being good or adequate.

I am in need of some traffic and how to go about doing the right things to achieve it through bookmaker sites. It is difficult to get an idea of how to make it more exciting to visitors in an article.

Your honest opinions will be much apreciated

I hope I am not asking too much

charles

Here is my reply: » Read the rest of the entry..