Yes, surprisingly that’s the name - HeadSprout. If you were to take it literally, it means growing a head. If you are some weird alien without a head, this will be a great site for you to become more human, by growing a head. But for the rest of us humans, this is a site to help youngsters learn to read. What they provide is an interactive program which encourages children to read and to learn through the Internet. So students from school or from home can login to HeadSprout and start the interesting and fun lessons at their own pace. Teachers and parents can also monitor their students or children’s progress. Oh, and HeadSprout guarantees results!

Anyone tried this service before? I mean, it looks like just another one of those online sites which offers stories and reading materials. Nothing special to me. In Singapore, I have seen such programs offered by big commercial schools which cost several thousand dollars and requires like 3 hours per day. I myself thing that such programs are highly ineffective. Sure, it looks like they are offering a lot of materials and lessons (mainly to impress brain-dead Singapore parents who are too busy shopping) but does it work? Will young children be able to concentrate on so many things for such long period of time? I don’t think so. Heck, spending 3 hours on lessons? I doubt that 90% of Singapore parents can even stay awake for 15 minutes, let alone listen to lecturers for 3 long hours.

So please come on, let your children enjoy life for once. Let them play in the sun instead of stuffing them full of books and interactive DVDs or maths quizz or tuition lessons or what other shit so that you can spend your time shopping. I really pity the children nowadays. Singapore parents are probably the worst kind of parents you can find in the entire world. Thus you can look at the next generation of Singaporean young and the society that resulted from it.

It shouldn’t be HeadSprout, but HeartSprout. Singaporeans, especially the parents should all grow a heart and stop being childish and know that parenthood requires some effort.

If you don’t what or who Akismet is, which rock are you living under? We could perhaps join in partnership and sell that piece of rock as a lucky charm or some precious religious object to millions of devout followers. Akismet is a joint effort by the blogging community to stop spam comments. What it does is to create some sort of safety net between you and spammers by sending all comments to their servers for “checking”. So if the comment is found to be spam, it will be tagged as so and you won’t need to bother about it. But if you are a control freak, you can go and manually check each and every comment yourself.

For me, the results have been great. Please see the below screenshot. It is taken today.

It’s only been online for like 1 month or so and it has already blocked 141 spam comments, saving me hours of work to remove them from my Wordpress blog. So, thanks Akismet, I really love you. The time saved by Akismet I had spent getting badly drunk and sleeping more. You should really try this too, especially if you are using blog scripts, as Akismet supports a variety of them scripts. However, if you are a professional blogger, you should buy the commercial license (or the commercial API keys) and help out the community. Of course, poor lowly untalented bloggers like yours truly can use the free API keys.

Ahhh…..the joys of getting sick. I am currently down with a bad case of sore throat, flu and a little fever. And I spent all my time on the bed - sleeping and resting. That’s what is cool about being ill, you get some time off and get re-acquainted with your cozy bed. But of course, you feel like crap and you can’t really sleep or rest at all. My nose gets blocked and I can’t breathe properly, especially when laying down. I wake up feeling worse than before anyway. And when you get up in the hopes of getting something done, you feel like there is a ton of bricks on your shoulders. In my case, it feels like it’s on my head. Luckily, there is not much there. Eating food is even worse. Food tastes bland and it’s very difficult to swallow. I found a brilliant solution to this, wash down your food with a lot of water! It works. I think it works with raw Castor oil as well.

The doctor gave me a solution to “unblock” my nose. Sort of a little bottle with some miracle liquid in it and all you have to do is to apply a few drops on(in) your nose. Well, the problem is you need to do that very often, so instead of trying to sleep, you spend your time applying the solution. I gave up in the end. If only someone thought of an automated system to apply the solution without you having to do anything, you could earn millions!

Well if you are interested, I feel much better than yesterday, thank you for your concern. My legs and back are no longer stiff and my shoulders feel fine now. And best of all, my nose is no longer blocked. I can breathe again. Food still tastes funny but who cares. And yes, I can go back to blogging again. Depending on whether you like pathetic blogs, it could be a good or bad thing.

PS: The raw Castor oil thing above is a joke. DO NOT DRINK IT. It is a laxative. If you have already drank it, please go to the doctor and have your brain checked.

And now you won’t. There is a online service call Remember the Milk and what it does is act as an online organizer and reminder. It’s a place for you to list down your important appointments dates and times, schedules and tasks so that you won’t forget. So if you are someone like me who can’t even remember how to tie his shoes, you should really use this service. However, for it to work you need to remember to login in the first place. So write it down somewhere you can see. Can’t remember the userid and password? Well…I can’t help you there. But you can set it up so that it can send your reminders through Instant Messaging.

Another interesting feature is that it allows you to send reminders to someone else using the same service. So let’s say your wife would like to remind you to pick up your kids from school, all she has to do is to send a reminder “notice” to your account and when you login, you will be “reminded”. Cool feature. Another unique feature is the map location. It allows you to plan the best way to get about completing your tasks by finding the fastest or the easiest route. Not only will you remember, you will be efficient as well.

And all is available for free to the public. I believe this can be a life saver for many. Just think of the hours of nagging you are spared from your very frustrated wife if you forget to get something from the store on your way home. Priceless.

You can call me paranoid and a busybody but I really think that my next door neighbours are aliens. And I don’t think I am making things up. They have shifted from somewhere and have been staying for about a year now and I realized that there is something very weird about them. No, I don’t mean the funny kind of weird. They don’t talk to you except the occasional hellos or goodbyes. Even if you invited them for dinner, they will always refuse. You know, the very secretly kind. And worse, they (all of them) rarely leave their house at all. The children would return home immediately after school. They are a family of six, 2 parents and 4 kids. Of course, this is all an assumption that they are actually kids.

First of all, they don’t sleep. I am serious. Last month when I was doing overtime at my workplace for about a month or so I would come home very late (like midnight or so) and I saw that their lights are always on. And when I leave work very early in the morning, their lights are still on as well. I know what you must be thinking but there are movement about in their house. You can see the humanoid shadows that expands and contacts at will and these shadows will dart around frequently. Nearly every night I will hear some hammering and pounding from next door. Sometimes I would even see flashes of bright light coming from their house.

So I naturally became very curious and started to watch their movements in and out of their house. It seems that once in a while, they would bring back some shiny metal piece. I have no idea where they got it from, but I know it is big. And they do take a lot of effort to hide it under a canvas or something. But once they reach the door, they have to remove the canvas in order to fit into their door and I saw it - shiny metal. Frequently I would see other equipment like radios, various wires, power stuff and so on being delivered to their house too.

So I have come to an conclusion - They are Aliens whom have crash landed and they are now desperately trying to build a space ship and escape from us crazy humans. I mean, if you are living with disgusting humans who can’t even pee properly, won’t you try to build a space ship and flee this planet? I would. I am thinking of offering my skills as an engineer and help them reconstruct their space ship and maybe they will take me along.

I also note that they don’t speak much. Usually they will whistle here and there. I bet that’s how they communicate with each other, using another wavelength which our ears cannot decipher. It’s too bad that I don’t whistle very well.

Before we continue on this post, please visit World of Peter first and read any one of the blog post. What do you think of it? At the time of writing, the first blog post is about Norway - Home of the Vikings. Very good read there. I must say, I am very impressed with the writing style - it’s easy to read and flows very well. And it is important to note that Peter is a first time blog writer and in that, he does a wonderful job.

Anyway, I have several of his works published in my business directory as well if you are interested. There are mainly articles on his travels around Europe and there about. I myself have never been to Europe and thus keen to read more about the countries and it’s cultures there. Europe is so damn diverse, it’s confusing to say the least! Sure, everyone knows a little about the Europe and even it’s history, but reading first hand accounts of people’s travels is more engaging and well, it gives me some “satisfaction”. Hey, who knows, one day I myself might be wandering all around Europe soaking up all the beer there. It’s just too bad it is so far away from where I am living. However me being my charming viking raider self, I wonder how long will it be before Europe on the whole decides to exile me forever? I am pretty sure the English people will not be amused by my witty humor. And once the Germans find out that I have drank all their beer, god knows what will happen to them, especially come October. Now that’s a scary thought.

If you have traveled to Europe before, perhaps you can give us a first hand account of your travels? I would like to hear about your travels, your experiences with the people and the difference in cultures and attitudes. Heck, if you have anything interesting to say, just pile it all on man.

PS: Peter is the brother of Paul le Roux, the administrator of Webwobot Search Engine, who himself has contributed several wonderful articles to our business directory. We love Paul. We also love his beer.

Don’t know what Quick Buck Crew means in Web Directory Geek talk? Well, it means the people who start directories only to make a few quick bucks and then run off into the wind or sell it to another brainless moron. Basically, it means people who are in for the short term with no long term plans to continue in the directory business. Not really a correct term but hey, it’s close and everyone likes it, so why go against the crowd. I believe the term was first coined by the Hulk wannabe Anon from Digitalpoint forums.

This “guide” is written by BritishGuy (also from Digitalpoint forums) and you can read it here. And it is pretty funny. Although I have to say, this guide isn’t exactly for the “Quick Buck Crew”, but more for little kids who own directories. I am not talking about the actual age here. I have met a lot of funny and weird characters in the Digitalpoint directory forum and I have to say, this forum has one of the most childish and immature people from all around the world, some even believe the entire galaxy. People who complain about almost everything, from their scripts to their Paypal accounts to mods which other people use to which crap hole they stretch in the morning. Not surprisingly, the directory subforum in the Digitalpoint forums is the busiest and most active.

But whatever the shit you face in the forum, that forum is still the best source of information for anything related to web directories and the web directory industry. And there are some really friendly people there too. So whether you like it or not, you still need to visit it if you are a directory owner. Good luck to us all.

Everyone hates spam. I bet even spammers themselves hate receiving spam. I mean, what’s worse than going to your office, switch on your computer and wow, 300 email messages and 280 of them spam? And you have to read through all of them just to make sure. Yes, the agony of it all. People selling you those “enhancement” drugs, people telling you to invest in some crappy stock, people informing you that you have just won the lottery and crazy people wanting to give you millions of dollars if you send them 50 bucks through Western Union. Hoot, that’s not what you expect when you started using the email, no? It looks like it’s hell out there and can be very overwhelming, especially for the beginner or the casual user.

But not to worry, there is a site which you should visit - Fight Spam! Here you will learn to find ways to fight those ridiculous spammers head on. You can read up on methods to tackle email spam like not revealing your email address, using a “throw-away” email account for registrations, tracing spammers, which spam filters to use on your email client, how to protect your privacy and so on. This is definitely the source for beginners who want an all-in-one site and find solutions for their spam problem.

And yes, spammers are getting smarter. In fact, they are always one step ahead than most of us, so much so that even the best filters will let at least a few through. But not to worry, we can always stop the slow and dim-witted ones right?

I am posting the big question, do you get any traffic from web directories you submitted your site to? I mean truthfully. I have read in forums that directories do drive traffic to their listings. But are these forumers telling you the truth? Or are they paid to say that? Or it could be they have a relationship with the directory owner and would like to help out by claiming that it DOES drive traffic to their listings? Me thinks the most likely reason is that they are all directory owners and thus complimenting on each other’s directory will certainly help each other’s bottom line. So beware when you hear such compliments. However, with all these being said, web directories can be a great place for you to improve your Search Engine rankings.

And I need to tell you, if you submit your site to general web directories in the hopes that you will get traffic from them, I recommend you to rethink your strategy. I am pretty sure it won’t work. In fact if it works, you will probably be one of the rare few. I would like to ask you another question, do you visit general web directories to look for sites? The likely answer would be “no”. So if you won’t visit a general directory to search for sites, then do you expect others to?

For me, I have several listings in small unknown directories, but I do have a few in big well-known directories. These hardly sent me a trickle of traffic to my site. However, since my website is actually a directory, directory of directories is one of the main drivers of traffic! No, this does not mean that a directory works, it means that niche directories (or niche sites) do work. Search Engines still can’t quite compare to human edited niche directories. Perhaps in 5 years time we will be able to get good search results?

Seriously, is the theme/template of this blog too plain? Or even too dull for your liking? Heck, could it even be too common since it is the default theme for Wordpress? And if so, what kind of themes do you think will suit this blog? Do you like bright coloured themes or dark colour ones? Or you do like those kind of Web2.0 sites with the funky CSS styled look? How about those flowery things? I am asking because I was too lazy to search for a free theme, and so if you have any suggestion, please comment here. And I hope to attract more traffic and if the traffic demands eye-candy, then I am all for it. Yes, some people visit blogs to look at how good looking that particular blog is. Anyway, the theme should be free because I don’t have the money to pay for “professional” theme makers. I am not a cheapskate or anything, I am really a poor bloke.

Well, any suggestion would be greatly appreciated. It’s so confusing, seeing so many Wordpress themes available on the Internet. I sometimes just feel that I shouldn’t even bother. But truthfully, some of these themes are very beautifully done. We sure don’t want to disappoint the creator of the theme by using the default theme. Something like Peter’s Blog - World of Peter.

If you think that I should not change the theme of this blog, please also comment in the blog. I would like to know why you don’t like eye-candy? Do you actually read the contents of the blog? That’s just amazing that someone is reading the blog!