I just created a new website for Worksheets site. I am in the process of moving all the worksheet’s I created for another site over there but I have to regenerate every worksheet with a new copyright. So far I have just have some Math Worksheets posted but will soon have the rest posted. It’s a very similar design to my others because I obviously am not very creative but it’s simple and functional…not to mention fast.
Security Now!
I’m excited, my ISP just increased my upload speed. It’s long overdue and I am absolutely loving it. Wave Broadband was average or slightly above average compared with other offerings in our area for their price, but compared with what the customers need, they were very short. Internet service providers have been very slow in keeping up with customer demands because of their desire to micro-manage their networks. Download speeds continued to increase while upload speeds increase very little even though more and more people are uploading large amounts of pictures and videos to sites like flickr, youtube and myspace. Wave has been very stable, above average customer service and now excellent Download and Upload speeds.
If you’re in the Puget Sound area where wave seems to have the majority of their customers, you should seriously consider going with Wave Broadband instead of services like Qwest or Verizon.
Introduction
My brother, sister and myself were all home schooled and now that my nephew is almost 6 my sister is also considering homeschooling him. I thought I would see what kind of information is on the internet and behold I found tons of stuff on cluttered sites with tons of outdated links.
The Solution
Seeing so much information but hard to actually reach because they are buried amidst tons of Google Ad’s I decided to put together a directory of some sorts that is uncluttered. Of course I want to make some money for my time and to do that you need to attract visitors. The solution is I created a site, registered the long descriptive domain name and began posting information as I found it. The style is simple, provide an excerpt of the actual article with a link directly to the article. I thought about taking time to design something but being lazy and uncreative I settled on a default template of a great CMS called sNews.
The problem & What I’ve done
So, the problem is search engines like Google are very good at recognizing original content from copied content and because 99.9% of all my content is simply excepts I was not ranking high and therefore not getting visitors. So I needed to create some original content, and I did that, and in the end it was a lot of fun. Because I’ve been studying Algebra and Calculus, math was on my mind and then you mix that with my recent attempts to become more proficient in PHP, the solution I came up with was to create Math Worksheets and use PHP to generate the actual problems and answers.
The beauty of using programming to generate this stuff is the power to do a lot of work with little effort. Loops allow us to do something over and over until a given condition is false and so this made it easy to make 1 worksheet and 1 answer sheet and then repeat it over and over to get a large set of problems. I created about 30 different types of math worksheets like, addition, subtraction, multiplication, addition of fractions, etc.. For each type of problem I created 50 worksheets/answer key’s so that works out to about 30,000 problems total with little to no effort. The fun was in figuring out the logic to actually solve the problem and display the results.
If you want to see the site or the Math Handouts I created just visit the insanely long descriptive site called freehomeschoolresources.info and yes I know it’s long but it works well because of the key words and the .info was used because I was cheap and Godaddy was having a sale on them for $1.99.
Note: Since the creation of this list better solutions are now available. When I created this hostfile list there weren’t any good free solutions to blocking adult sites…but now you can get a free and more comprehensive solution by using Opendns.org for your dns server and it allows you to create a free account and then block adult sites. It works very well and it’s free so you should use that instead and leave your hostfile for blocking adware/spyware sites.
About 1 year ago I began working on a host file that would contain porn sites for the purpose of blocking them. This has been done for years now to block things like ads and spyware but no one has been willing to work on one for adult/porn sites.
To make this work all you have to do is go to C:\WINNT\system32\drivers and open the hostfile with notepad or any text editor. It’s important to note that this file does not have and extension. You can rename it so it has a .txt to make it easier to open but remember to remove the extension when your done. Currently the list contains over 16,000 porn host names. In other words, zachwingo.info and www.zachwingo.info are considered two different host names so you will see two entries for almost all domains. To see the list follow this link to the Host File
Well, I was messing around in Photoshop when I needed a background for something I was working on so I made my own. They aren’t all that special but here are a few below. For the full list see the Backgrounds Gallery
