This blog has finished its run and will now move to a more prominent location. Since there are many sites linking to older posts, the posts will stay up for the time being. Comments will eventually be disabled for all posts until the move is completed by June 2008.  You will be able to visit this blog in its new location at http://bumped.org. The other half of this blog that deals with topics specific to Myspace, Facebook, and AIM Profiles will be located at http://bumped.org/stylinprofile and will be launched officially in Mid march. StylinProfile will cover basic and advanced topics and tutorials for social networking sites, as well as widgets that can be used on such sites. The site will also cover more complex operations and profile editing based on demand and time. Companies that pertain specifically to flash widgets that would be most likely used by the "myspace generation" will most likely be posted at StylinProfile.

So after months of funny, odd, and strange front page messages on minorcris.net’s homepage, including at one point advertising free PS3s. Minorcrisis has relaunched as mp3space. Enjoy increased bandwith as members now receive 30GB Monthly transfers, 100mb of space, and 10mb max file sizes.

CLIQ is a social network site for bloggers. A blogger can join ONE group to be apart of. The groups might have a common theme, like bloggers from Portland, or bloggers who talk about cooking. Once you join the group, all your blog posts will be automatically joined with your peers and together they will combine to form a super blog! Well not exactly a super blog but you’ll just see different entries from different people within your group. So if your visitors wanted to look at other blogs that for example, talk about cooking, they can then click on an entry and visit that page.

CLIQ doesn’t have much users yet, so there isn’t much use for it right now if your starting your own group. Finding other groups within your interest might be a little difficult since most of them are private. Other times the blogs you find might not really interest you but you can join the group anyway and hope that others will join eventually.

Hopefully CLIQ might work for you in attracting visitors to your site, as Mybloglog and BlogCatalog only links people to your profile.

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We’ve seen many different online music stores, but it appears one site has finally figured out how to remove all the annoying aspects and integrate every feature and function into one page. Clickgroove has begun the web 2.0 interface of music shopping.

The left side bar features selections for new music, charts, labels, and genres. You can click on each one of them to sort the music listings. The magic begines once you click on an artist. With some really crafty ajax scripts, the page on the right loads by itself without any apparent loading of the whole entire page. At the top features your playlist which you can select and play any preview of a song. The music continues playing even if you backspace and visit a previous page from before. This would be such a welcome addition for the music store, the fact that we can browse other music listings while continuously listening to music makes it much more pleasant and much more useful. Need I remind you that there are NO POPUPS to listen to the music! 

The only suggestion for Clickgroove woule be to add a social element to the site. Similar to the review system emusic has on all of its albums. Plus we should be able to add all tracks within an album to the playlist. But for now, everything is alright.

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Puricute is the new site on the block offering cute picture frames for all to see. The site is very well designed and neat. It should be able capture the young female, or more specifically, capture the asian audiences very quickly. 

Puricute provides users with a very simple interface to create their picture frame. First you upload your photo and choose the various stamps and frames to add. You can insert animals and cute cakes into your picture, then send them out to friends or blog. The site also hosts a gallery where you can view other puricute photos created by others.

How cute is too cute?

Puricute unfortunately doesn’t stand itself apart from other glitter sites. There isn’t any robust features that can make it compete with blingee. You can only undo stamps in the order that you add them. We would like to see it where you can delete a stamp by clicking on it. Also you can’t insert your own user created stamps. This seriosuly puts it behind other glitter apps.

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Minorcrisis may be down, but there are more sites out there that will handle your storage for hotlinking MP3s. There are some facebook applications that lets you place a music player in your profile. So if you want to add cool music to your profile, you gotta start uploading.

FileNanny

File Nanny joins the block with the most easy to use storage section. After you upload your file, every single song is stored within the My files area. Click on Share and you’ll get the direct link to the song.

Limitations:

Bandwith: 5GB
Upload Size: 500mb each

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Hotlink Files

Hotlink Files does just what it intended. Pretty much it hotlinks all your files. It uses the same interface as snapdrive so you should be familiar with it. You have to register in order to upload mp3s. After you upload the files, click Just the Direct URLs at the top.

Limitations:

Bandwith: 4GB
Upload Size: 50mb each

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FileXoom

FileXoom is another hotlinking site, however it seems to be suffering problems during testing, so hopefully one day it will be up and running, so keep this in the back of your head until another site goes down. In our tests, sometimes filexoom failed to redirect us to our files. It also got confused when we uploaded Mp3s. In their faq, it says the limit is 100MB, but when we upload mp3s it says the limit is 2mb, far below maximum required. This might great for images but very bad for music. Fortunately it has the highest bandwith per month making it a great deal for small files.

Limitations:

Bandwith: 20GB
Upload Size: 2mb each

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MinorCrisis has mysteriously vanished from the internet. It has now relaunched as mp3space. Months ago, it all started when an Apache server message was displayed, MP3 links still worked but the site was pratically useless. Now all MP3s hosted on the site are gone. I don’t really know if there was a DMCA filed against them, even if that did happen, the website would redirect to a suspension page of their host. If you would like some alternatives to Minorcrisis, read 3 other places to hotlink mp3s or maybe you want 5 more places to hotlink mp3s.

During the MTV VMAs, there will be an ad slot for Taco Bell featuring a winner of the "Create your Gizmoz TV Me" contest.  Contest winners will also recieve a Taco Bell $250 gift certificate. So be sure to catch the spot tomorrow, and congrats to all those who made it.

Since Gizmoz release to the public, users have been creating their own videos on Youtube, mostly using celebrity faces and animals. Some of these videos have been featured on the Youtube’s Most Viewed Today. Popular ones depict George Bush and his arch nemesis Osama Ben Laden.

So lets say you want to change a few things in your Myspace layout, and you don’t feel like visiting lovemyflash to copy and paste the whole code again. Some lovemyflash layout codes come with extra settings you can change within its URL. They are found after the "lovemyflash.swf" text. You may see lovemyflash.swf appear multiple times, this means that you have to change both codes afterwards in order to stay consistant. So lets take a look at an example code to make more sense of this.

data="http://www.lovemyflash.com/lovemyflash.swf?
layoutID=39&myurl=123456&ColorVR1=0x129DDD&ColorVR2=0xCC0000&CustomButton=Heart&themeID=82">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never" />
  <param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" />
  <param name="movie" value="http://www.lovemyflash.com/lovemyflash.swf?
layoutID=39&myurl=123456&ColorVR1=0x129DDD&ColorVR2=0xCC0000&CustomButton=Heart&themeID=82" />

Lots of things going on here, but you can find this in your About Me Section. You can see that lovemyflash.swf shows up twice in this layout. The part you need to pay attention to is the ColorVR1, and the ColorVR2, which are both highlighted in Blue. Those are the color HTML values, you can change these colors by typing in a color code at those locations. You must make sure that ColorVR1 says the same color value for both parts, and Color VR2 says the same color Value for both parts. 

In the example above, it show ColorVR1=0×129DDD twice, and ColorVR2=0xCC0000 twice. Now you want to choose your own colors so first you should head over to this Color Website. You will see a ball and a bunch of colors you can slide to, Slide the ball and the arrow to chose your color. The HTML color value will show up in a white box above the slider arrow. This is what you will need when you place the color in your layout.

After you select a color, highlight the whole box, and right click and press CTRL+C. Go back to your Myspace Code and insert those colors into your layout. In the example below the colors I chose for ColorVr1 is 333333 and ColorVR2 is stil CC0000

data="http://www.lovemyflash.com/lovemyflash.swf?
layoutID=39&myurl=123456&ColorVR1=0x333333&ColorVR2=0xCC0000&CustomButton=Star&themeID=82">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="never" />
  <param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" />
  <param name="movie" value="http://www.lovemyflash.com/lovemyflash.swf?
layoutID=39&myurl=123456&ColorVR1=0x333333&ColorVR2=0xCC0000&CustomButton=Star&themeID=82" />

There you have it! Now you have just learned how to edit the code on your own. Guess what else you can chage?

data="http://www.lovemyflash.com/lovemyflash.swf?
layoutID=39&myurl=123456&ColorVR1=0×333333&ColorVR2=0xCC0000&CustomButton=Star&themeID=82">

The word Star tells the layout to show a picture of a star when you put your mouse over a number. You can change the word Star to the word Heart and it will show a picture of a heart instead. Remember since lovemyflash.swf shows up twice, you’ll have to change the word Star twice in order for it to work.

Pazoen is yet another site glitter site, trying to take over the throne of Blingee. It’s main focus is to add glitter stamps and text to your photos. Pazoen doesn’t really add anything new and interesting to the multitude of glitter sites out there. The generic interface has the usual tools of adding graphics, resizing stamps, and adding text. Typing glitter text was its most robust feature and was pretty easy to do.

Similar to Blingee, it has a badge feature that allows you to add graphics from other sites into your bag. With your bag you can paste these stamps into the photos you are editing. However, uploading a custom stamp was not working at the time of this review and only leads to a blank page. At the embed screen you will get a very clean embed code, which we recommend that all image hosting sites abide to. There is also a flash version of your picture which doesn’t really add to the quality of the image compared to the gif version.

There are many bugs lurking around the site, some might be frustrating towards new visitors. If you finish your picture and click "Start over with the same graphic", your subsequent end result isn’t saved. For some reason only the previously saved work appears, it seems that you’ll have to re-upload the same picture again to make this bug go away. Another pet peeve is the missing delete button. If you want to remove a stamp, you’ll have to keep pressing "undo" it until its gone. If you added a lot of glitter and want to remove something you did at the beginning, you’d have to move the stamp off the screen. We also noticed that the animation of the stamps were much slower when you completed the image. So far Pazoen feels a bit unfinished and has a long way to go before it can be at the top of its game. If other glitter sites are too hard for you or you just want an alternative, try Pazoen out for a change.

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