Parallels has agreed in honor of the 1st birthday of x86Virtualization to offer a Free $15.00 iTunes gift card to anyone who purchases Parallels Desktop for the Mac between now and December 27th. If you are looking for Parallels Workstation, they are going to throw in a free copy of Compressor Workstation with every purchase of workstation. Visit Parallels for these Special Exclusive Offers from x86Virtualization.com

This has been a big year, 1 year ago today the domain was registered and a simple blog with big dreams was setup. It like all great things started out slowly, and has gained a considerable momentum ever since. The site has taken off slowly, with some great milestones, including the 200 Feedburner subscribers and 1000 visitors in a single day.

There are a few companies I would like to thank for making this all possible, in no particular order:
Wordpress.org, for building the best opensource blog platform. Site: http://www.wordpress.org/
Godaddy.com, for providing rock solid hosting and support for x86. Site: http://www.GoDaddy.com/

Google.com, for providing a ton of a quality traffic and visitors, Site: http://www.Google.com/

These are few services, which are free or almost free which I have used over the past year:
Stumbleupon, great way to get people to see new posts Site: http://www.StumbleUpon.com/
MyBlogLog, easy way to build up a community around x86, Site: http://www.mybloglog.com/ (Note: Bought by Yahoo)
Feedburner, easiest way of keeping track of feed readers, Site: http://www.feedburner.com/ (Note: Bought by Google)
Google Analytics, quick simple site visitor tracking, Site: http://www.google.com/analytics/

These are a few services which have made this blog monetarily worthwhile:
Google Adsense, Commission Junction, Text Link Ads, Review Me, Linkshare, Regnow.com

Here are a Few figures from the past year:

Akismet has protected your site from 42,349 spam comments.

New and Improved Virtualization Videos Section Powered by Youtube.com

Now with better organization, more videos and details descriptions of each video.

After having the video section in disarray since the beginning it was time to look into the page and clean it up and add more content. The previous page had fewer then 10 videos on it, now with well organized categories we are able to display dozens of videos without confusion.

Check out the videos in the following categories, more to be added soon:

• Linux Virtualization Videos
• Microsoft Virtualization Videos
• Parallels Virtualization Videos
• Sun Microsystems Virtualization Videos
• VMware Virtualization Videos

If there is a missing video or any additional categories you would like added, just drop a comment on this post.

Thanks,
x86Virtualization.com

I’m very proud to announce that I have crossed the 200 mark for feed subscribers. This gives me even more motivation to keep bringing the unique quality content which you have come to expect from http://x86Virtualization.com/. If you aren’t subscribe to the feed you can either add the feed to any of the following great services. Or if you would like to receive them via e-mail or add the feed to a news reader program use the links in the top left corner of the website.

Use Any of these links to add this feed to your favorite news reader:

If you have ever used Belarc Advisor be careful. Recently people have discovered that Google has started to index the result pages. This doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realize that your windows product key is listed in among the results. If you have used the product recently you may want to search your domain and see if there are any of your result pages index on the web.

This is been a huge Public Relations time for Intel, 3 huge companies have announced switching to and or back to Intel CPU’s over the past year.

So, the question is why. The magic number is 4. Both AMD and Intel are pushing their quad core cpu’s. AMD’s Barcelona is consider a true quad core cpu. Intel’s quad core is argued that it isn’t a true quad core, because it is technically 2 duo cores on the same die.

Lets look at the count:

Companies switching to or including AMD:

1. Dell, site:www.dell.com
Companies switching to or including Intel:

1. Google, site:www.google.com
2. Apple, site:www.apple.com
3. Sun Microsystems, site:www.sun.com
What does this mean? AMD has made announcements about their chips being faster for virtualization. According to ZDNet: (Read Complete Article)

Barcelona has specific features to deal with some of those performance issues, Ben Sander, a principal member of AMD’s technical design staff, said in a speech on Tuesday at the Fall Processor Forum.

AMD and Intel are vying for share in the x86 server market. Intel’s Xeon chips were the first to provide some hardware support of virtualisation, but AMD’s newest processors now also support it.

Sources:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37230

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39285641,00.htm

http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-6153431.html

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,61984834,00.htm

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1225351.html

Here is a complete run down on how I got this blog listed, using all clean, legal, white hat methods in under 72 hours on Google.

I purchased this domain on 12/1, and by mid day on 12/3 I already had content and traffic directly from Google.com. What is the trick?

1. let Google know you exist. visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and sign up your site.
1. upload the confirmation file into the web directory, get verified
2. Install Wordpress, current version 2.0.5 directly from http://www.wordpress.org/
3. Start downloading needed plugings:
1. AddMySite (AMS)
2. Google Sitemaps
3. Google Analyticator
4. DiggClick
5. Jerome’s Keywords
6. Jerome’s Keywords: Related Posts
7. Meta Tag Generator 1.1
8. Sociable
4. Install and activate All plugins
1. Add My Site is a nice collection of links to social websites (requires template modification)
2. Google sitemaps requires write permission to a local directory to store sitemap files
3. Google Analyticator requires a free analytics account.
4. DiggClick is quick and painless, makes people want to digg your articles
5. Possible the key to this whole process is choosing good keywords
6. Once you have these keywords you can create really simple keyword swarms
7. Meta Tag is a nice feature to randomize the meta headers a little for each article
8. More links to those fun social sites
5. Now that you have the blog ready, use it.
1. Write a simple article with instructions on how to do something which has a wide fan base, such as setting up wordpress for seo optimization
2. Add a few more articles and pages to give your blog some body
3. Add even more, don’t forget to use a nice template
6. Digg away, Always digg your articles.
1. By digging your articles it gets them out there very quickly and easy.
2. Try digging in the early AM, there is less articles and more chance for your to get seen, since digg is flushed on a daily basis
7. Don’t forget, to make this worthwhile you need to do two things, either have content people will return back to, or have ads people will click on while at your site. So just drop on some simple ads, banners to other sites of yours or adsense what ever you want to do.

I haven’t listed all of the tricks, there is more customization I did to wordpress to make it more SEO friendly, but this is enough for now to get even a blog novice started.

Enjoy and let me know how things work out for you.