This is a quick update but as you all know that I have joined Entrecard since July, but after paying a little attention towards it, I finally had a bit of success and learned a few things. But first, the most important thing is :

If you drop for others, others will drop for you!

I’ll recommend reading that ten times because that is the only way you can ‘ever’ hope of getting drops from entrecard else even after purchasing several advertisements through Entrecard you’ll just end up with a handful of drops! My current drop back rate is 81.6%, which I am calling drop-back rate because I hardly get drops from advertisements placed. If you think that getting such a drop back rate is very easy then you’re purely mistaken, I started with dropping 300 Entrecards a day with only 50-60 drop backs. Currently my average daily drops are about 190 - 230, depending on the frequency of my droppers coming online.

However, you have to analyse your drop backs and use them evenly. This does seem easy but it is just a little difficult. The main problem that I’m still facing with Entrecard is the high bounce rate of the visitors that it sends to me, bounce rate is the percentage of people who left your website after they arrived on the landing page without navigating any further and bounce rate from entrecard is out the roof. Once I’m done with that, I’ll let you all know how to get the most out of entrecard by spending least time on it  (I’m saying that because I sat dropping cards for more than 3 hours daily). I spend less than 90 minutes now and also read some articles and repond to them, keeping the spirit of entrecard alive rather than acting like a entrecard-dropping robot [bzzt]!

First of all, if you do not know what LHC is, then you must be living in a planet like Neptune because it has been on the ‘buzz’ on earth for a long time now. Anyways, The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing beams of protons or lead ions, each moving at approximately 99.999999% of the speed of light. It has a lot to do with Physics, and it’s operation would tell more about the unknown particle ‘Higgs Boson’ and the Standard Model.

As I was saying, the experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year, which will be distributed over the LHC Computing Grid. The LHC Computing Grid is a distribution network designed to handle the massive amount of data that will be produced by the Large Hadron Collider. The data stream from the detectors provides approximately 300 GB/s, which is filtered for ‘interesting events’, resulting in a “raw data” stream of about 300 MB/s.

300 MB/s is about 600 times my current internet speed, i.e. 512 KBps. With this you can download 37.5 MB every second and a movie for download would take only 19 seconds, you can imagine the storage yourself! I can think how many websites I could potentially block by over-loading their servers and I’d be more like a King of the Internet! This is only a little about the LHC Computing Grid, what would you do if you had such a huge network of data transfer?

In my previous article about the Virus Attack or shall I say the torrent attack, I got multiple requests regarding what should be considered to find the best torrents and not being attacked by a virus. I have been through this and ever since I developed a few set of rules for every torrent that I downloaded and I did find the best torrents ever since, here are those 5 rules:

1. The most important thing is to check the date when the torrent was added, make sure that the torrent is at least 5 days old, because if it is a virus it may taske upto 3 days for it to be discovered as a virus and cleaned from the system.
2. Read the comments, and do not fall for it if there are as less as 3 comments. Usually if it is a virus, the person who made it can add 3 comments from different accounts just to make people believe in it. People usually tell in comments about the torrent, for example they’ll tell you if it is a virus.
3. The ratio between seeders and leechers is a very important aspect. Make sure that the ratio of seeders to leechers is somewhere around 5 : 4 or something similar to that. In case 1 if there are a lot more seeders than leechers then you can consider yourself to be wasting time to set it to downloading as you would not get any downloading speed, in Case 2 if there are five time more seeders than the leechers, then there is something fishy as hackers know how to easily fake the seeders count, if you’re not very good in mathematical ratios then check the Seeder Leecher Ratio Calculator and enter either the seeder or leecher of a torrent and it will tell you the suitable amount of the other one.
4. Use a good Torrent Engine and always search for the same torrent in all of them as it will help you find the best one, I recommend the Torrent Engines listed below as they are the most reliable ones:
   1. btjunkie
   2. Pirate Bay
   3. Mini Nova
5. Download torrents from famous users. Anonymous users usually put torrents of malicious softwares, for example if you want to download latest english movies you should search for the movies by aXXo or KLAXXON. It is best not to download torrents from guest and anonymous users.

I follow these 5 steps and have found the right torrents ever since, and this not only finds the right torrent but also protects you from Virus Torrents, and trust me you don’t want to be attacked by one!

It is a well-known fact that 9/10th of your downloading while browsing is of pictures and the bigger their size is the more bandwidth will be used for both the Client and the Server. Recently I checked out Ken’s Blog where he showed the fruit of his 17 years of hard work in building a Lamborghini Countach following a life-long dream. Now a story like this would grab heaps of Spikey traffic to the website in minutes, and it actually did. It did so to such an extent that the extra traffic cost him $957 because of a limited bandwidth account for which he normally paid $8.

Now, others may take out various reasons for this overage bill, but I’d give just two reasons:

1. The hosting package had a pretty low bandwidth transfer, i.e. 300 GB per month.
2. Most images on the website are not optimized and are more than 1 MB per image(Approximately)

The front page has three of these pictures which means any visitor to the front page would have to simply download more than 3.2 MB to see the Home Page, despite the fact that for such interesting content people always view other pages. A dial-up user with a speed of 56K would have to wait 9 Minutes to view the home page. Whereas, if the same pictures were optimized more than 1.5 MB per visitor could be saved. Now probably Ken and people like him do not know how to optimize a picture, so know I’ll show you how to optimize a picture for use on a website/blog, you just can’t put a picture that you just took from your camera on the website. I’ll be using a picture from Ken’s home page for this.

It is very simple, but you need to have Adobe Photoshop for this which is a professional software used for editing and making new pictures and graphics. Once you have opened it, press Ctrl+O and select the picture you want to optimize. Once the picture is opened go to File > Save For Web or press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S, then you shall be able to get to the screen below and click on the picture below to know what to do next:

A simple test on one of his images, below are 2 links the first to the original image, and the second to the same image which was optimized by me, the difference is of 1.13 MB which is a lot:

1. Original Image ( Size = 1362KBs)
2. Optimized Image ( Size = 122KBs )

View both images, and decide for yourself if you can spot any difference between the two, as there wasn’t even a reduction in the size. It is not only for Ken but some other bloggers also upload their picutres in raw state, so it is better that you follow these easy steps and save your bandwidth. So do yourself and your reader a favor.

*This information and image from Ken’s blog was taken on 7th November and current display may differ.

Well if you’re still running the BlogRush widget on your blog then better take it off because BlogRush is all out now. The first time I applied to BlogRush and started using it, it was working fine and getting me some traffic but soon I noticed thousands of credits were gathering up and not used, I smelled something fishy in the system and took off the widget, that was about 2 months ago and never heard of BlogRush ever since then and even before that the big bloggers had taken it off. Last week, John Reese wrote about the whole thing on his blog explaining the flaws and the mistakes that led to the downfall of Blogrush as well as emailed all the members.

Why it was a loss for all Small Bloggers

The whole blogrush project cost John Reese a loss of $500,000. But being one of the internet’s big marketing king, it wasn’t a very big one for him. Without doubt, the concept behind the whole project was immatchable and cannot even be compared to Entrecard. The reason being is that using BlogRush people actually want to read the article’s link they click and are not intending to run away, whereas at Entrecard most droppers come only for clicking the ‘drop’ link and normally the bounce rate is about 85% which is pathetic and if entrecard is your blog’s sole traffic source then you’re getting no where. This was a way small bloggers could et good and reliable traffic to their blogs. Well, what else can we bloggers do but be in with every fad, share your experience with BlogRush as it is not disappointing for all.