Making Tutorials – It Really Is An Art Form

Revisions:
2-19-11: Initial release.

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Finally, this is the time I get to write an article about life and not something tangible like a game or a movie.

So ever since I started the blog back in September 2006, and many years later when I started my Youtube adventure in 2008, I realized that a lot of what I do is about helping people and more specifically, creating content related about tutorials.

As I reflect on what I have done so far, why do I do what I do? Why do I continue to spend time on working on tutorials to share on the Internet, an activity that can easily take more time than focusing on friends, family, work, or myself?  Why spend the time to do it with possibly very little return on “investment”?  Well, the answer may surprise you.

How Does It Feel To Be Cloned, Or Copied? Well, It Sucks!

(Image Source Here)

Ground Breaking Update (2/6/10): Asphaltclips Youtube account was deleted within 2 hours of me sending a personal Youtube message.

(2/7/10):  Sometime between 10:30am and 1:00pm GMT -6, both clone wordpress accounts have been deleted.  See the proof  here and here.

Added new Youtube Video to help put a nail in the coffin. If you are VersatileTaco (and team), you do not want to skip this video. You will enjoy it, guaranteed. – Versatile

It turns out that VersatileTaco is alive. He rejected my Tunngle friend request!

2-9-10:  Youtubers speak out! See one person’s take on cloners.

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Revisions:
2-6-10: Initial release. I am still in disbelief. Expect more to follow.
2-7-10: The Underground has won. Thanks to all. The clone blog and youtube accounts have been deleted. Power comes in numbers.

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I am so pissed today that words cannot express clearly enough how I feel.  Zax from Tunngle sent me a PM today telling me to check out this Versatile “clone” he found on the Internet.  I took a look around, and I am still in utter disbelief.  If you got http://versatile32.wordpress.com/, you will notice that the website is very similar to ours!!!! In fact, the way he did the format and everything is an exact clone of The Underground.

Two Months Later – Life After The Third WordPress Suspension

In the middle of May, our blog was suspended from WordPress, and it all boiled down to the fact that we had some questionable tutorials.  More specifically, I had a guide that showed users how to bypass Steam to play L4D on Garena and Hamachi.  Before the suspension, we got great hits on this site, about 5k views a month easily.  Now we are barely hitting 2K a month.  See below chart to see our history for the past couple months:

Because of the suspension, we took a nosedive for the month of May.  Two months later the stats speak for themselves.  How do we feel?  Well, I can’t speak for the authors, but I can at least speak for myself below.

It is sort of funny what happens when something you love was taken away from you, especially if it was nine long days.   Ever since we came back, I have had new ideas forming in my head.

First of all, my L4D guides have migrated to a different site.  Maybe you seen it?  www.tinyurl.com/l4dguide is the shortcut to see the site.  I expect in the future when L4D 2 comes, the site will be expanded to see that.

Second of all, more time was given to revamp the Sister site at www.tug.cjb.net.   Here articles that are more questionable are put there. It is a friend’s server, so there is no real fear of having it violate a Terms of Service for example.

Thirdly, I’ve started to think differently in terms of how I write.  I have rewritten many PS2 tutorials for example not only to make them clearer, but I have also added a disclaimer to more of my educational tutorials.  We here want to help you learn, but we do not condone piracy or illegal activities.  Remember that.

Oh yes, and who could forget the birth of the Underground Newsletter?  Two newsletters are done, and already we have a sick idea to put into the third one!  We can’t wait to reveal it!

On the side, we  have also started the E-Book project.  So far it looks very good, and maybe over the course of weeks a few sneak peaks will be released?  We’ll see.

As you can see, life is not so bad after all.  I still have a huge community on youtube.  I and Voltaire have a twitter account to keep you guys posted in the case the blog goes down, and a lot of other miscellaneous projects going on.

If you want to become an author or want to submit an article, please do!  We are always looking for new blood.  Other than that, be on the lookout for the next bounce back tutorial since the L4D days. ;0

[Time Saver] Efficiency in Answering Online Comments

Are you a wordpress user?  How about a youtube user?  Do you have comments that just keep on piling every day?  How do you answer everyone while still having free time for yourself and not get carried away checking comments all day long?  Easy, setup a schedule to answer all online related comments at the same time daily, once  a day.

New Awesome Firefox Add-On: ScribeFire

Hey everyone. This is Voltaire. I’m currently writing this post on a new add-on I found: ScribeFire. Essentially, it’s an amazing blog tool which every blogger should use. I am going to assume that this post hits the front page of The Underground as usual. Here is what the tool looks like:

First off, as you will notice, ScribeFire takes up the bottom portion of your current window, but its a static frame, so you can continue to browse without ever leaving the ScribeFire tabs. As such:

ScribeFire allows you to update many blogs quickly. You can update most of them all the time, and for WordPress users, this is an ideal tool. You can easily tag categories, view and edit old entries, and create pages, posts, and drafts. You can even save notes. Also, an interesting feature of ScribeFire is that it has its own tabbing feature, so you can create tabs similiar to Firefox. This easily allows for multitasking.

Just as well, you can easily use the WordPress categories. The default setup of ScribeFire has a panel on the right hand side with 4 tags: Blogs (manage all blogs form here), Entries (view all entries, notes, and pages of the selected blog), categories (check mark all categories for the post), and Options (standard blog options, in this case, WordPress options like timestamp, tags, trackback, etc.)

The functionality of ScribeFire is almost, if not better, than using the standard WordPress writing page. If you are a blogger, this is a great tool for you to fool around and play with.

Voltaire

[TIT] That’s It Tuesday! Issue 2

Hi underground visitors! Welcome to the second issue of TIT, or That’s It Tuesday! Every Tuesday, I, Versatile1, will give you a rant of whats going on in the blog, whats intended for the future, hope, dreams, etc.

So last week was a stellar week. For the last week, we had like 5 straight days in a row of over 1000 views a day. This is awesome, I’d never have dreamt that we would get mad hits. The most popular viewed posts?

People love the alternatives to the Demonator. Hey, I don’t blame you. Demonator was one of a kind. Few days ago we had a new comer on the block, www.demonoidproxy.com It works, so if you want to try something new, do that.

Of course, PS2 mods are always hot, especially how to make your own slide card, and how to make your own PS2 tools for the slimline PS2. Just to let you guys know, my brother has a slim PS2, and he tried the guide on the youtube video and it works perfectly! If you need Swap Magic, you can’t go wrong ordering it from www.estarland.com

The post that brings the most views is and always has been the unwritten IRC tutorial about finding free passwords to adult content. People are either feeling comfortable with posting the need for this tutorial sooner, or some of you guys have no shame when it comes to satisfication. Hey, I don’t blame you. The goal is for the tutorial to come out this month, it is still a question as to when.

Last thing I have been toiling around in my mind past few days is what to do about funding. We are indeed getting clicks on our offsite link for the adsense, and thats awesome. It’s not much (a few bucks), but its a decent start.

I am currently looking into perhaps finding a webhost so the Underground Staff can upload our own wordpress version, and incorporate adsense directly on the blog. You cannot do this for free blogs hosted on WordPress, as this will violate the terms of service.

In the midst of the perfect webhost, I am also trying to find a good url name for this blog. Of course, TheUnderground.com, or .net or whatever is already taken. I was thinking of maybe getting a www.wttu.info (get it?, Welcome to the Underground), but Voltaire think its stupid. Well, I’m going to let the community decide what our new URL should be. So help me out, go to www.godaddy.com and post a comment of what you think the next URL should be. Remember, if it can convey underground, the better!

[Update Oct 16th] A friend has a hosting server, so in the next few days, Voltaire and I will be playing around with the “new” blog. The upside to that is we will be able to incorporate google adsense directly into the blog, and have to rely on a third party website for revenue. The plan is with the money generated from the blog, it will go towards the blog and fund it for hosting and domain name. More detail to come in following days.