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Have you ever come across a website or comment that was written in another language that you wished you could read? Well, if you’re anything like me you typically have no idea what language the site is written in. Luckily Google Translate will automatically detect the language of a phrase or website and translate it for you.

Just paste the URL or the phrase to translate, select auto-detect, and you can read the page in your native language. Trust me, though, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to understand it!

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I’ve been doing freelance work for some time now. It’s generally a very smooth process. I send them a quote. They pay 50% upfront. I complete the work in a timely fashion, turn the product over to them for final testing, and then they pay me the remainder of the balance.

I’ve been happy with all my clients, until recently. A client hired me to customize and tweak 7 blogs he owned. We agreed upon an hourly rate and he payed a two-hour security deposit upfront. The customizations only took a few days and any time I asked a question he answered very promptly. He was friendly, and nice to work for. He even talked about…

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I’ve never been much of a photographer, but a few months ago I bought a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (due to the pleading of my wife). It’s a pre-professional grade 10.1 megapixel camera that takes amazing photos. Of course, we just kept it on automatic and used it like all our other cameras.

Well this past week my wife and I sat down with my brother-in-law who taught us some great photography techniques. I don’t usually post personal images, but these two were too good to pass up. Both of these images were taken on my digital camera by my wife. None of them have been edited or doctored in anyway (aside from being resized).

Spelling my name…

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I have a problem: I am a Microsoft Windows user. But it’s not my fault, I was born that way. The first computer I remember using seriously (for more than a game of Menace on my AmigaOS) had Windows 3.1 installed. I have Windows XP on my laptop, Windows Vista on my PC, and Windows Mobile on my phone. Heck, my next refrigerator will probably have “Diet Windows” installed. But at least I recognize that I have a problem.

You see, I tried breaking the mold. That’s right, I cheated on Windows. I installed Ubuntu Linux. Although I had guilty feelings just thinking about it, I was determined to break the bond of corporate tyranny and join the…

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Getting comments from users on blog posts is a very rewarding experience for bloggers. Often bloggers want to encourage comments by giving something back to those that comments. On Simply Basic I keep track of the months “Top Commenters” in the sidebar, rewarding commenters who contribute the most. Another common reward method is to make your blog “dofollow.” This means that links have ther “nofollow” tags removed and that the links help their search engine rankings.

The nofollow versus dofollow topic is a heated debate. I used to be a dofollow blogger but changed after I noticed a large increase in worthless spammy comments.

The other day when I was browsing through a freelance website I noticed something that was…

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Email’s back up. Disregard the below message. Just to let everyone know, I’m working on getting Google Apps to host my emails rather then my current web service due to some errors sending to some domains. If you try to send me an email and it gets sent back, wait a bit and try again. It should all be resolved here in a little bit.

If it is urgent, sent it to kolbert.john [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks for being understanding! I’m anxious to get it back up as well.