Here’s a new series for you: How to make your blog not suck.

First up in the series is plugins. You can easily make your blog not suck and your readers not hate you by getting rid of all of those hundreds of plugins, badges, images, etc all in your sidebar and all around your blog. You should have a billion little things making the page really long and slowing down the load time. When you have a lot of junk in there it slows down browsers and just makes people get angry at you. Plus, it makes your blog suck.

Think about what value these plugins and images offer, and weight that against how much people hate you for them.

A great piece of free software for writing scripts in the standard screenplay or two-column formats is Celtx. It used to be commercial software but they have decided to make it free software.

It has a great feature to share projects between different users online, so multiple people can work on one project. You can also use their Project Central to share your scripts, receive feedback, and get the word out about something you have made.

Check out Celtx and download the latest version.

Instead of buying expensive buckets of chroma key paint you can have a hardware store mix up a bucket by giving them the correct PANTONE code for the color you want. Just give them PANTONE 2735 for a blue screen or PANTONE 354 for a green screen. You could also find similar colored fabric from Wal Mart and use that instead of actual setups.

And remember to light your wall separately from your subject, and light it well!

A friend and I have found the secret behind the success of Mexican restaurants. You know how there are always people at Mexican restaurants? And how they never seem to go out of business, but instead are constantly multiplying? It’s because of the music.

Yes, the Mariachi and Tejano music that is played in Mexican restaurants across the nation is the secret to their great success. We have studied this in depth and have come upon this explanation.

When you are listening to Mariachi and Tejano music you are happy. You will be in a general state of calm and happiness until you stop listening to the music. At that point you will begin to become upset. You will not know why you are upset and try and do all you can to stop it. The only way of course is to listen to more Mariachi or Tejano music.

While you are in the general state of calm and happiness in side the restaurant you are pretty much willing to do anything. Since there is so much food around, you will naturally eat it. The food combines with the music and causes you to feel even happier. You will want to continue eating the food because if you don’t you will start to become unhappy. Thus you will continue eating and eating until you are absolutely stuffed, or the restaurant closes.

After eating in so many Mexican restaurants you begin to come conditioned to the music. If you happen to hear it passing by somewhere or on the radio, your body will start to remember what happens when you hear the music: happiness and food. You will instantly become hungry and need to eat somewhere. It does not matter what kind of food you eat with the music, they work together to make you happy.

Any restaurant can take advantage of this. We have listened to this music while eating food from other restaurants and experienced the same effects. If every restaurant were to play this music they would become more profitable and attract many more customers. Customers would stay to eat longer and they would sell much more food than they do now.

This is a secret that I am now giving away freely. You can increase your restaurant’s profits by simply playing Mariachi or Tejano music in your building. When you become successful, please remember the countless hours of research we put into this and consider sending us some food or gift certificates to your restaurant. (And I am totally serious about this whole post.)