News and Guides » 2009 » January

Last couple of weeks we worked a lot. These days we have scheduled a complete link exam, for all the links from our directory. We are reevaluating the quality of all the sites listed in our directory, we are removing old or expiring domains, or sites that haven’t been updated for some time. The process is really slow because we have to evaluate the quality of each site listed, but the result would be that all the bad neighbourhoods will be erased from our site. Quite an achievement, isn’t it?

We are also making some changes to the category structure.  There are now more specific subcategories and we also merged some of the main categories into niche subcategories which better serve the hierarchical search function of our site.

We have changed the options for featured plans. While we still maintain some other directories, we have removed the plans which contained a relation between them and My Green Corner, as we would like to keep My Green Corner as a solely unique resource.  I would like to point out that these changes do not affect the featured links that are already in our directory in any way, as the other sites, as well as MGC, continue to be online and the terms of agreement are respected by our company. We just do not offer these options any more, we have transformed our plans into others which we believe that are more adequate to our site and better match the quality goals we have set for ourselves.

One the other actions we have taken lately is removing some external links to our directory. We had some paid links to our index in the past. This looks really unnecessary now, but in the past, there were a few rules against this practice and there wasn’t any official point of view in this matter. We have removed all the paid links and contacted all the webmasters that linked to our site from pages that wheren’t related to our resource and kindly asked to remove our links. It took months of work to contact every webmaster, and although not all have removed the links to our place, we are very confident that we now have a good link profile.

I consider all these are necessary because I would like to make a re-inclusion request to Google on 14th February (my birthday). My Green Corner was partially hit by a -50 penalty in June, 2008 and since then, things haven’t been like they used to be. I consider My Green Corner as one of the top free web directories for a lot of reasons and I would like to reinstate its position. My Green Corner is not just a free meaningless web directory. We provide top services like search engine optimization, we allow webmasters to submit their wordpress themes to our theme viewer (which has almost reached 2700 themes) or to sell their templates on our wp market. They can also release css templates for free in our css template section, add new articles to our index, read the latest industry news on our blog or use our free phpld templates to start a new directory.

Until then, best wishes,

Dugu

I must say I play tennis in summer, I sky in winter, I enjoy table tennis, I swim and I play basket occasionally.

I don’t know what other people feel, but for me, it was always hard to play soccer. I always knew how to “hit the ball”, I love scoring, I love running and I always am a team player. Although I’m not perfect, I give a lot on the field. The hard part is getting accepted by the others which played before you and, at the moment of your appearance, think that “you are lacking some motion qualities”.

In my group, there where always better soccer players then me. I guess the tricky part is finding people at the same level with you. Some of my friends played this sport while they where kids and now they are very good at it. It is safe to say that a sport learned in childhood is easily performed later. I reason that after a certain age, it is kinda impossible to learn how to play a sport and actually be good at it.

I always wanted to be a professional soccer player, but I guess this will happen in another lifetime. I’m not much of a supporter and I don’t have a favorite team, but I watch almost every game in which our national team plays. And I love to see on TV those crazy fights between English supporters. I guess this sport becomes passion there.

Although a while ago I didn’t had the opportunity (all my friends where so lazy when coming to this), I play soccer every Tuesday and Thursday. Performing a sport regularly is entertaining and also does a lot of good to your body. I noticed that I react faster now, I don’t get tired so often after little effort and I do become better at it.

If you are spending to much time on computer, you might want to consider playing a sport. Everything needs to be done within its time and with no exageration.

Best wishes,

Dugu

This year I have started my Ph. D in mobile robots. My theme is “Constructing a Cognitive Robot for flexible industrial cells”. At my university, our lab enjoys the presence of 6 Amigobots, a P3-AT at P3-DX a Powerbot and a Parolbot (which at this time isn’t functional because of the battery which seems to be dead). In fact, I am pretty much certain that the University acquired the hole production line of Mobile Robots Company, a small business based in US.

Personally, I love Powerbot because it has great power (good name, Powerbot), good stability and my favorite, a 6 DOF (degree of flexibility) arm.

Although all the robots are great in terms of hardware, I’m not very found of the software provided by this company. At the time speaking, my main task is to emulate an interface which will alow working with the Powercube arm in 3D space. There are many cinematic algos on this topic, but Mobile robots  INC. didn’t bothered to emulate either one of them and supplied the arm with only simple degree rotation instructions, so although my theme is not close related, I still got to stick my hands in this.

I found some related work on IEEE site, ACM portal and on SOURCEFORGE - the player project. Hopefully, this will conclude in a driver for Player, but I am really waiting for the Windows version of this free software to be released. I will soon participate to my first conferences in robotic field and guys, be sure, I will wear my MY GREEN CORNER t-shirt there. Also, if all goes well, I will be posting my work results on this blog and keep you informed on my achievements.

I would like to welcome any one of you that has similar interests to post comments, and contact me using the contact page.

Have a great day.

1. Go to a SEO/SEM conference. Meet new people, socialize, make friends and prosper.

2. Make a new successful site. IMO, every web master should start a new site at least once a year. The web is breathing, don’t be static or lazy.

3.  Set a limit for the time you spend in front of your computer. NO more than 8h/day!!!

4. STOP checking your stats every couple of hours.

5. Don’t be mean to other webmasters, help them if you can, remember what Justin says: What goes around turns around.

6. No Google on Sunday morning!

7. Eat 3 times per day. And I’m not talking about your nails.

8. Make a party on your birthday. A real one. I hope you still have to resistant friends that love you even if you talk nonsense about your virtual assets.

9. For the younger ones: School comes first! For the elders: Good habits come first!

10. Set a financial target. Then make 10 times more.

Although we have released our new css templates section a while ago, I found now some spare time to proper introduce it. Just like in our wp theme viewer (which by the way, has reached over 2500 free wp themes), we are now offering the opportunity to any web designer to release free css templates. The platform is very similar with the ones used on wpmarket and on the theme viewer. Users don’t need an account to download templates, but need to be registered in order to upload template. There are some requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to pass the upload process, you can read all about these and the rest of the Terms Of this Service on this page: http://csstemplates.mygreencorner.com/?page_id=2.

Also, please read Google’s policy on sponsored links (it was made for wordpress themes but I am really sure this also applies to CSS templates). We do not encourage this technique, if you upload a template with sponsored links, please take a second and consider the consequences.

We will release a pack of 10 CSS templates, to start things off. Stay tuned, more will be added each month.