What we have got for you today is a video that we stumbled upon not very long ago. We liked this video and we just couldn’t resist bringing it to you.  It is a hard to believe magic trick, where Chris Angel (magician) swallows a coin signed by a lady and …….. Well, see for yourself. We have got two versions of the video, one from YouTube and the other one from Metacafe.

So what do you feel were there videos faked (if you think so we would love to know why?) or were these videos just phenomenal pieces of magic? Take some time out to share what you guys feel. We will keep our opinion secret until then.

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For the month of August, we would be running a little contest of our own. If you win this cute little contest we would be offering you a month of absolutely free advertising at JohnyCow.com. There are 6 such spots. In addition to this there would be 5 prizes of 500 Entrecard credits each i.e. there are 11 prizes to be won in total.

If we can find a sponsor we would be adding the number of prizes as well. All the updates can be viewed in the competition page of the site.

If you want to join in as sponsor, feel free to contact us at john[@]johnycow.com . Every prize sponsor will have a say in choosing the best entry.

Why Advertise on JohnYcow.com?

There are quite a few reasons that can answer this question.

1. Why not? Where else would you find a month of free advertising?
2. We are on target for the goals we set for JohnyCow.com. At the blog restart we were targeting an Alexa rank of one million by the end of this month (we were 6.5 million at the restart). We have already reached the 2 million mark and with 3 more updates still remaining in the month we are all set to achieve our target.
3. Our one week average rank at Alexa is about 227k, which is not bad considering we have restarted only 7 days back (for the same period Alexa rankings of johncow.com stands at 491k which is almost double than what we have achieved in the entire week )

We are ready Johny; now tell us how to enter?

Here is how you can enter the contest.

There is only one way of entering the contest and that is to comment on this post. But here is the cache, in the comment you will have to describe in the funniest way possible why you deserve this free advertising opportunity. The funniest and the most deserving of all the entries would be chosen and if there are more than 6 such entries, we would be using lottery system to determine the winners. The 5 Entrecard credit winners will be chosen from all the entries (except those who win the Ad spots) through a lottery system.

Rules:

1. None of the sponsors can participate in the contest.
2. Only one entry per person is allowed. You are allowed to comment as many times as you like but in that case you will have to notify us which one should be treated as your only entry.
3. The contest will start on July 19, 2008 and will run till July 30, 2008. The winners list would be published on July 31, 2008.
4. The advertisements would be displayed on the site for a period of one month from August 1, 2008 to August 31, 2008.
5. The site that you are looking to advertise should not have any objectionable content.
6. All the links would be No follow.
7. You are free to popularize the contest but you would not be awarded any additional credits for that.
8. Please be creative in your comments, don’t just try to copy and paste text from different sources.

By now you would have understood everything about the contest, so we return back to where we started from. We would keep our story extremely short.

The horror story………

It was July 17, 2008 and the clock was ticking 3 PM when it all began. It was completely dark as far as one could possible see and heavy rainfall only compounded the situation. The darkness over shadowed light in such a manner that even at 1500 hrs nobody in the world could possibly differentiate between day and night. The power outage didn’t help a bit too. Within a matter of half an hour the situation grew from bad to worse. All this while we were sitting on our couch and wondering what in the hell has brought such a drastic change. All we could hear was the noise of windows and door striking against each other and then with a bang, suddenly everything went silent……….

What the crap? Come out of this. All these imaginative things happen only in movies and in the cartoons (our favorite one is Johnny Bravo). In all this crap that you just read the only thing that could be called as similar to our real story is the date and that is July 17, 2008. Here is what actually happened.We wasted the entire day doing absolutely nothing and when it was about time to start working on the day’s post, a wild thought came to our mind. The thought wasn’t wild in itself but the timing wasn’t something that could be called perfect.

We decided to change our web host from Bluehost to Hostgator (just because it is the best web hosting provider out there). Once we were done with name server change and all those technical stuff (we are non technical cows), we expected the site to get back and sort of load quicker but probably the things aren’t supposed to be the way you expect them to be.

The site never came up and by the time we realized that we were in a complete mess it was too late in the night. So we decided to sleep over it, only to find it in a worse state in the morning. The backup we saved wasn’t really working and it took us 23 tries to get it uploaded. However we didn’t stop trying and finally after about 30 hours of struggle (remember we are non technical cows) we were able to bring back the site in its earlier form.

Well the site opens much quicker now and is prepared to take huge chunks of traffic at once. That was our cute little horror story.

What do you think about the contest?  Do make it a point to tell us.

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The competition (or the COWpetition) is nearing its end in few hours time and by now it is pretty much clear that who is going to come out as a winner. Therefore today we would love to reflect back on the competitive spirit in which all this was done. We have found out a video that would be just the perfect fit for this. The video is fairly easy to understand and with a little common sense you would be able to identify our Cow and Conn.

But let us warn you beforehand, the winner in this video shouldn’t be taken as a winner in the actual COWpetition. After all it’s not over until it’s truly over, right.

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This one has got more features and is more efficient than Brecker .More features = more headaches for us  and so we will be maintaining a safe distance from it. But for you guys we did give it a try on our other blogs and we understand there are some pretty cool features in it.

Going with the real definition of an upgrade (Take old bugs out, put new ones in), Wordpress developers have been able to fix about 194 bugs in this upgrade.

Some of the major additions made in Wordpress 2.6 are….

1. Wiki Style Editing (Post Revisions and restore to previous posts).
2. You can now easily drag and drop the galleries (got to be the coolest one)
3. Image Captions have been activated so that images can now have captions below them.
4. Bulk Management of Plugins.
5. Theme preview feature
6. Come on, what are you waiting for. Go and check it out for yourselves. You don’t want us to be telling you everything.

Anyways go through this video for more ….

You can download Wordpress 2.6 here and see the number of downloads here.

Some other plugins that might help you in future:

1. Wordpress-automatic-upgrade plugin ( download )
2. One click installer plugin (download)

Did you like the WP 2.6? Don’t forget to tell us…

Now let’s shift our focus to the post that we did yesterday about the John Cow WP theme being freely available for download. We can still see the Theme uploaded on the guy’s server, though we have moved up in Google ranking for the keywords we tried out yesterday.

Anyways, we were kind of expecting a reaction from the new John Cow but we haven’t still heard anything from his side. May be he doesn’t have the rights for the theme.

Enjoy Wordpress 2.6 till we meet again.

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Don’t believe us, have a look at the proof we have got and then decide for yourself. But before you get there just take some time to go through the rest of the post……

How we got there…
Serendipity is what they call it. Don’t go searching for the dictionary, it means discovery by chance. Sir Alexander Fleming had the opportunity to come face to face with it and so did we….

What actually happened was that we were banging our heads to find a theme that would suit our blog outlay and purpose. Somehow it happened to us and we Googled for milk it theme and we were somewhat shocked to see the results. JohnCow was not number 1 on the search results (he was there all the time, at least for these keywords). Anxiety made us to follow the link and so we did. We were redirected to a site having some information about theme and a download link. We followed the link and were redirected to Ziddu.com (a file sharing site that pays its users $.001 for every unique download that they give the lead to).

We don’t need to tell the procedure after this.

Google Search Result

Redirected page

Download Link

 Final download

These things are bound to happen in the future as well and therefore we would rather suggest New John Cow to either lower the price of the theme (or just allow a free download) and to gift us a Milk it theme  ( Though We know he is not going to do that  ).
After all this drama we still await the reaction of New John Cow.

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In these six months while we were enjoying our holidays, so many things have changed. We would take our time out and have a look at what has changed since we last met in February.

First things first, John Cow has changed ownership and we have an all new John Cow (whom we don’t even know at this point of time, but we think we would have answer to this question in 10 days time) running the blog. We haven’t had the time to analyze all these developments but what we did figure out in the last few days is that JohnCow.com is more organized and more focused now. There are lots more contests going on at John Cow these days (A new contest starts before the previous one ends), obviously to get in some traffic. We wonder what would the new owner have paid for Johncow.com (it shouldn’t be what Bob asked for i.e. $ 50k. Come on, cows don’t sell for that much )

Wordpress is 2.5.1 now (WP 2.4 never came though). They call it Brecker. Brecker has got somewhat better look and far better administrative panel (everything seems to be more organized) but we really doubt its efficiency when it comes to business. Well people say it is more secure than its previous versions; we are yet to test this though.

Mozilla is 3.0 now and we have our hands full of it at the moment. We would discuss it sometime later.

We are PR1 now but we are way down in Alexa trends. We climbed up a ladder in PR rankings, thanks to all the people who linked back to us. We would like to go a bit higher in the next update, which is tipped to be taking place by the end of this month. As far as Alexa is concerned we have fallen from 84K to about 6.5 million now (That’s pretty bad ). But that is bound to get better as we get all our visitors back all our visitors. We are targeting Alexa ranking of about 1 million at the end of this month and we think that is perfectly achievable.

What changes are proposed at Johnycow.com?

Not many actually, except that we are on the lookout for a new theme for our website and we have a little contest of our own going for this as well. We would be shelling out 500 entrecards to the person who suggests us the best free theme available (we will wait a bit more to get our own patented JohnyCow theme ). We would more than happily accept donations in form of premium themes (especially if it is from the new John Cow).

We would also be going do follow from today onwards and would also be adding some more plugins to get the best for our readers and commentators.

If you have any other suggestions for us, we would happily take them as well. The best suggestion we get through this would also get 500 entrecards as a gift.

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1. Our holidays in January .
2. Our holidays since February.

We know most of you won’t be really accepting this excuse but we will try our best to explain it.

The January holidays explained

We felt that, after three weeks of hardcore blogging, we needed some time off and so before we could trouble our gray matter, to decide in favor or against it, we grabbed the opportunity. We enjoyed some wonderful days, doing things other than blogging (bungee jumping being best of them).

The February holidays explained

After about a month we returned to restart our blogging adventure and wrote a post, but were pulled back by the bungee rope of holidays. We redid everything that we tried out in January holidays and enjoyed until we finally got bored of them.

So why the hell are we back?

Well we have a simple explanation for this one. Our fingers were missing the keyboard keys, our eyes were missing the monitor and all together we were missing our PC. Hmmm… one more thing that we missed was our readers, their funny comments and their critical suggestions. This is what, we are back for.

Jokes apart, we actually ran out of money.

When are the next holidays scheduled?

Hmmm……, that’s a tough one. What we can say for sure is that they aren’t scheduled anywhere in the near future, at least not in the next two months. We would try to post as often as possible, probably thrice or four times a week. Even if we decide to go for a holiday we would tell you in advance and we would arrange for some guest posts. Guess what, on this great occasion of our return, Google has gifted us with a PR 1 (He is so damn frugal ). We are quite pleased with this effort of Google and decided to gift him with a mention in our post (no links for him ).

Any ways, feel free to comment and link to this post, we will meet you tomorrow.

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3 Days to Relaunch this blog again. Means we will be back in 3 Days.

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So Let’s get off this debate of who is a worst blogger and who is good blogger, we should concentrate on single thing that I am back and this is a very Good News for Blogging Community as till today you all were missing on two blogger’s and both were cow’s but as both have returned so It should be very clear that you will get more blogging fun with day’s to pass by.

What we did all these days ? MMMMM Let me start from beginning from 15th January to 26 January I was gone for a wedding in the family , and from 27th January I was enjoying holidays with my family members in Village. So what I did was , I got bored without my laptop, no internet connection , no mobile. I was pretty much sure that I would be getting many mails during my off from the blogging thing. Oh yes I got around 450 mails from various sources, and coming from Holiday’s I got myself a New Nokia-6500 Slide Phone to start off the season in a new style. So those who thought I would be gone were absolutely wrong and now that I have returned I think it would be nice if you can visit my blog and check the cool things I am going to do with my blogging experience in the near future.

Ahhh I am not so famous as John Cow which is shown in his feed increase which went from 1050 to 1300 due to his unavailability from blogging since the last month , mine has not increased as I have not checked them till today. I would be checking them by the end of this month and I am sure I would get around 20 new subscribers .. Nice and Steady Start for a New COW

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