Dust is one of those things you simply can’t avoid. It happens and often. You could be the biggest neat freak in the world and you’ll still get dust.

Here are a few tips to keep your computer as dust-free as possible so it lasts longer. Continued

You’ve got a blog and you’re putting a good amount of effort into it. You’re writing away, posting articles and doing what you can to get some readership.

The problem is that nobody is reading your blog. It seems no matter what you do you’re not gaining any traffic. And you know you’re writing good stuff.

What do you do?

Follow the five stupidly easy steps below and watch the traffic roll in.

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Generally speaking, buying computer hardware online is always cheaper than the store. The reason for this is because you skip out on tax, the middleman and so on.

However there is some tech hardware that you should never buy online if at all possible no matter how much you’d save.

Monitors

When purchasing any monitor online there is always the possibility it won’t work when you receive it. Or it will work but have things wrong with it. A classic example of this is the "dead pixel policy" many online retailers impose. NewEgg for example states you must have at least 8 dead pixels else they absolutely will not accept a return for any LCD monitor sold.

The vast majority of in-store retailers on the other hand will accept a return no-questions-asked – even if you just didn’t like it. However watch out for "restocking fees".

Keyboards

If you plan on spending any more than $20 on a computer keyboard, buy it in a store. You are going to see – and moreover feel – things with the keyboard you that you can’t experience online via a product photo gallery.

Mice

Yes you will spend about $10 more for any mouse you buy in a store. However there’s only one reason you do this – the return policy.

Most modern-day mice come with blister-pack style packaging even inside a box. Ridiculous? Yes. But true. At least when you purchase from a store you can bring it back with the packaging all messed up (you have to just to open the !@#$%@ thing) if it doesn’t work or you don’t like it.

Any networking gear

Of all the computer stuff I’ve purchased over the years, personal experience has taught me never to buy any networking hardware online because it has the highest probability of arriving DOA. This includes modems, routers, cabling, hubs, switches, etc.

Sound systems

The obvious reasons you don’t want to buy this stuff online is because:

1. It’s bulky.
2. You can’t hear it before you buy it (unless a friend or neighbor has it and you heard it there first).
3. Return shipping costs will be high if you have to send it back and the retailer makes you pay to ship (which a lot of them do).

While it’s true we see a ton of innovation on the internet (it’s what drives it to begin with) there’s been some stuff that was just nothing but a miserable failure from the word go.

Here’s 5 of them. Some are old, some current.

WebRing

The concept: To "join" web sites together in a circular structure (the "ring")

The reality: A bunch of crappy web sites that don’t relate to each other at all desperately trying to whore each other out for the sole purpose of generating web traffic.

WebRing actually still exists and it still sucks. Granted, this was one of the first attempts to connect web sites with common interests, but it ended up being nothing but a big ball of fail.

Tag cloud

A tag cloud is a "weighted list" of a jumble of words where visually bigger words are discussed more while smaller words are discussed less. See examples here.

The concept: Visually bigger words (like bike instead of bike) mean people are talking about that particular whatever-it-is more often.

The reality: These words when clicked lead to articles/sites/pages that usually have nothing to do with that word whatsoever – OR – the words presented are so unbelievably generic that it never leads to any useful you were looking for.

The tag cloud is one of those Web 2.0 things that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if you have it enabled on your personal blog or use a big-site way of doing it because tag clouds suck.

LinkExchange

This, much like WebRing, was a failed attempt at connecting web sites with similar interests by putting "badges" somewhere in your web page/site. The only difference is that it was more corporate and required cash.

It didn’t work.

Microsoft bought this, realized it sucked and changed it to be part of Microsoft Office Live. In its current form it has absolutely zero resemblance (thank God) to the old LinkExchange.

Badges

The original "internet button" was a 88×31 graphic.

Remember these? 

In the Web 2.0 version this was made smaller into an 80×15 "badge".

Badges look like this:

For whatever reason someone thought it was good that with ever-increasing resolutions on computer monitors to make graphics smaller and harder to read.

Stupid? Yes.

"Splash" pages

This is more of a web usability thing than anything else but it bears mentioning because it still happens today.

"Splash" pages, a.k.a. the "skipintro", is some dopey Flash-based "introduction" to a web site. This has been widely panned on web pages like Web Pages That Suck because it serves absolutely no purpose other than to annoy people. It’s not "cool" or "hip" or anything like that whatsoever.

If you have your own web site, I have three words of advice for you concerning the intro page: Don’t do it.