Turk Hit Box » General

Is Facebook next on Turkish Internet Ban?

Turk Hit Box — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:02:59 +0000

Starting with youtube, Turkish Government is continueing to ban access to mainstream websites. These bans include Dailymotion, Wordpress.com and the latest addition, blogger.com (or blogspot.com). If we look at these sites, they are all web 2.0 trend community sites where people can express their thoughts freely.

They all got banned because some individual went to the court about what people wrote about him or her and won the case. Turkish government suggests that all these websites set up a local page like Youtube Turkey that is moderated regularly.

Well, let me tell you two reasons why facebook is going to get banned in Turkey:

On February, a soccer league referee filed a case against facebook.com after the game between soccer rivals Beşiktaş and Fenerbahçe (both Turkish teams are trying hard to get the league title).
A Turkish boy set up a poll asking how he should kill his mother. After the end of the poll, he murdered his mom and “packaged” her in little bags.

I love facebook, and I would really sad to let it go. Seeing the number of java and ajax scripts running on facebook, it would probably be impossible to access through online proxy. On the other hand, some Turkish webmasters were spamming SERP using newly registered blogspot or blogger sites to get the number 1 spot on a given keyword. Likewise, if facebook gets banned, some local facebook-clones will get their share of the friend-network sites.

I can’t imagine if Google gets banned!

Guess Who’s on Google 2001 index?

Turk Hit Box — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:57:40 +0000

Because of its 10th birthday, Google has created a nostalgic search page searching through the 2001 index. For example, if you search for Youtube or Facebook, it does not bring any results since they were created after 2001.

However, if you make a search for “turkhitbox.com” , you will get a result, which is like … awesome! I highly suggest that you visit Google 2001 search page and check if you are there. I bet some of you can make some interesting analyses.

via: Webrazzi

Sorry for the wait, changed servers

Turk Hit Box — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:10:09 +0000

Due to increasing number of visitors to my websites, my current server was unable to keep up with the CPU load. At first I thought it was komiksozler.net (website I bought recently) causing the trouble, but after talking to the server administrator, I learnt that the server was already running at maximum capacity without komiksozler.net.

Old Server:

Pentium D 3.0Ghz
1 Gb Ram

New Server:

Core2Duo E6700 2.66Ghz
2 Gb Ram (Edit: added 1 more GB )

The new server has brand new parts and since its dual core, it can handle more than twice the work load. And I am only paying $20 more than $150/month that I was paying for the old server. I hope you guys are getting faster load times right now. I hope the new DNS settings settle down in the next 2-3 days and the transfer will be complete.

Can you reach your Blogging Dream?

Turk Hit Box — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:48:57 +0000

Everyone has a dream when setting up a new blog. I personally want exposure and everything should follow afterwards. I sure would like to be Richard MacManus, the author of Read/Write Web. He lives his dream by running the 15th most popular blog in Technorati. He has an RSS subscriber count of 90551 as of today. He lives my dream and here is how I will reach him:

Being Polylingual: Eventhough both blogs are written in English, I promote my blog on variety of societies. Since I can speak Turkish, Italian (a little), German & English, I can submit my articles or promote my services in different authority sites of different languages. I know that your searched for “blog directories” in Google, but have your searched for its Italian term?
King of the backyard: Its hard to become that unique person everyon is talking about in the blogosphere. Opportunities are dimishing. I would rather be a known person in the village then being nobody in the city. This is why I will aim to get publicity using Turkish newspapers. Getting your blog featured on any newspaper will easily guarantee +500 rss readers, and getting featured only brings more offers from other newspapers & magazines.
I am relaxed: Eventhough I have a much smaller audience, I never need to fill a quota. My readers won’t criticize me when I don’t make posts. This isn’t a uptight blog. I am trying new, innovative ideas and I am not following others. You won’t see me making a post about Facebook getting sold, since about a million other blogs have already written about it.
I don’t need the money: More people jump of the “make money online” wagon everyday. This is mostly because of their initial excitement of easy money. This is why they eventually lose their interest since after a while, a job of low revenue has a no meaning for them. In my situation, I don’t need this blog to make money. I, ofcourse, want it to generate income, but this blog doesn’t depend on it.
Connections: Your connections to others are what actually define you as a person. This is why I am working hard to make my connections strong with worthy bloggers. I do have the connections outside the Internet world, but in Internet, its a whole different story.
Offer your services for free: I think this is the most important bit. Free = traffic. By publishing my themes and photoshop brushes, I am actually offering free services to visitors of this blog. I suggest that if you have a relatively new blog, you should somehow find a way to promote your services by offering them for free.

Hope you liked this post. I don’t usually make lists or write long posts, but I really wanted to express my feelings this time.

Cow is HACKED!

Turk Hit Box — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:53:35 +0000

John Chow.com wannabe John Cow.com got hacked today. The page redirects to “http://johncow.com/hacked/” The hackers want $100 (only that much?). I guess they expect $100 from everyone visiting John Cow. Or is it just a game played by John Cow to get his visitors’ money? Here is a screenshot of their cool hacked page:

The PayPal account is registered to “cownapper@johncow.com” and the payment info says “free the cow“.

Well of course there is the other possibility that he is trying to get more backlinks. I would say this is an incredible linkbait, and would explain the 24 hour limit.

UPDATE: Appearently, Cow wasn’t hacked at all as some of you have guessed.

So you switched to Feedburner RSS

Turk Hit Box — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 15:58:01 +0000

You have signed up for Feedburner. Changed your RSS feed to Full Feed RSS and built a large crowd of RSS readers on your site.Then you place the counter on your site to show off. But what have you forgotten to do? You wouldn’t believe how many popular probloggers make this simple mistake! I guess even probloggers make mistakes sometimes..

Wordpress uses a simple php script to call for the RSS url for your blog:

RSS Feed” href=”” />

Well, you need to change the RSS feed url on that line after you have changed to Feedburner RSS service. You might be showing of a lot less on your feedburner counter.

Here is a list of well-known probloggers who have made this simple mistake:

By the way, keep visiting my blog since I am going to be releasing my first wordpress theme. Its an elegant black & white template called Ali Nazik with custom icons. Here ’s a preview:

PS (a little note to John Chow) : Talk about link baiting

Turk Hit Box joins the Blog Ocean

Turk Hit Box — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:31:46 +0000

As of this post, Turk Hit Box finally joins the ocean of blogs in today’s internet! You can find more about me on the About Turk Hit Box page.