If you are a fan of the Battlefield series of first person shooter (FPS) games from EA Games, there is a good chance you already own a copy of the latest installment, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, commonly called “BFBC2”. If you purchased the game on Valve’s Steam service there is an excellent chance that you are experiencing dropped connections during a game, or being kicked from a game after 20-30 seconds of play.

This is likely due to the Punkbuster service, the much-maligned anti-cheating add-on that aims to make sure players of Battlefield, and a host of many other games, do not hack or cheat while playing.

Fortunately the fix is rather easy. Read on.

First, if you participated in the BFBC@ Beta, you need to delete the folder where this app was installed. Deleting the local game files from within Steam will no fully accomplish this.

1. Go to c:\program files\steam\steamapps\common.
2. Delete the Battlefield Bad Company 2 Beta folder. There is an older copy of Punkbuster installed here.

Next you need to install an up-to-date copy of Punkbuster, and download the update for BFBC2.

1. Go to http://www.punkbuster.com and download PBSetup.zip.
2. Unzip this, and run PBsetup.exe. Once you’re in Punkbuster, click Add a Game.
3. Select Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from the drop-down list.
4. Do not select the Default Path to the game. Since you purchased on Steam, the path is different.
5. Click the Browse button next to the Path field and browse to c:\program files\steam\steamapps\common\battlefield bad company 2.
6. Click Add Game.
7. In the main Punkbuster window, click Check for Updates. The update should install, and you’re ready to roll.

After following this procedure, my dropped games problem disappeared (knock on wood), although I still have trouble connecting to game servers. This is apparently a problem with the Server Browser within the game, or an issue with overloaded servers, or possibly a combination of both issues.

Note, for those of you with 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista or 7, your paths above will be c:\program files (x86).

Happy gaming!

Nice… To many in the SEO industry, Google is the end-all and be-all for everything related to optimizing websites. Getting on the first page results for your particular keywords on a Google search is the holy grail that all SEO’s seek on a routine basis. For their own websites, and especially those of their clients.

Interesting, Google has done an exhaustive SEO audit of over 100 Google sites, and better yet, has made the report public so that SEO professionals, as well as regular website owners and webmasters, can learn from what they found and improve their own optimization.

Google admits its SEO could use a little work | Web Crawler – CNET News.

Fans of Google Reader (as I am) will love this. For those websites that do not have RSS feeds, you can now create a feed in Google Reader that will track changes to that site – and Reader will notify you when it changes. 

Google Reader Lets You Subscribe to Any Page on the Web

Very cool tool here. A regular folder on your Windows 7 system, when named with a very specific text string at the end, transforms itself into a special Control Panel-like folder with 287 individual settings for Windows. Some of the settings are accessible elsewhere,  but many are accessed only through editing of the Windows Registry.

Understanding Windows 7′s ‘GodMode’ | Beyond Binary – CNET News

Excellent run-through of design permutations and direction for Firefox 4, currently in development. I’m loving the Firefox button concept, shown above, that would house the current text menu. This is similar to the new UI design for Windows apps and Office 2007, and Office 2010.  Many other images are provided.

Windows Theme/UI Update « Chromatic Pixel

As an author (it almost sounds funny saying that) of several incredibly low-traffic blogs, I have been looking at different ways to both increase my readership, by integrating and sharing posts into my miscellaneous social media personas, some general social bookmarking at sites like Delicious, Reddit, and the like, as well as some other general SEO related tasks – to get news about my “little” blogs out there.

I subscribe to a number of Google Alerts, which is really a great tool.  Basically, anything you can search for in Google News, which crawls not only traditional news organization sites as well as blogs, you can setup a custom Alert, and you’ll receive either a summary daily email with those results, or an email as they are crawled – it’s your choice.

I notice some of the same topics that I cover in my little blogs mentioned frequently in the Alerts I have setup, and I’m thinking, I would love to get MY little blog posts listed in Google News as well. Getting posts into Google News can tremendously help drive traffic to a site.

But then I catch this news item, stating that it’s Google’s policy to NOT include single-author blogs in their Google News crawl, whether they be “little” like mine – or even a high-traffic popular blog – is really disappointing. From a quality assurance standpoint, I understand the policy, intended to keep the quality of sites that are included at a sufficiently high level – but it’s disappointing all the same.

Google News Will Not Accept Single Author Blogs

You may have noticed the cool bar at the bottom of Mashable.com, that let’s you drag’n’share images on the page (as shown in the picture above), as well as chat in real-time via AOL Instant Messenger, which is accessed from the same Meebo Bar.

There are other options and configurable menus available once it’s installed, but I haven’t checked those out just yet. You can download plugins for WordPress, Blogger, and other publishing platforms.

Add Chat and Drag & Drop Sharing to Your Site With Meebo Bar

Very cool new feature at Blogger.com. In addition to the current monetization options built-in to the Blogger engine (AdSense and AdSense for Feeds), Blogger now offers a very easy to use tool for integrating Amazon Associate links to your blog posts.

From directly within the Blogger blog editing mode, search and select Amazon.com for products to display related to your post. There is no need to open a second browser tab or window to search for products. For those bloggers who are heavy participants in the Amazon Affiliate program, this could be a huge timesaver. 

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

The latest version, 3.5.6, is just out of beta, and I highly recommend it. It boasts improved Javascript performance (and it wasn’t too shabby to begin with), as well as Firefox’s standard security, performance, and customization options. If you’re using Internet Explorer, Chrome, or any other browser, Firefox is worth a shot.
Firefox Browser | Free ways to customize your Internet

Yet more news in the URL shortener world… A new service coming soon from http://bit.ly, which claims to be the largest URL service around, which will be called bit.ly Pro, and will let users specify their own short URLs to use as a shortener. All of this built on the http://bit.ly framework, with very detailed stats available as well.

No word yet on pricing.

bit.ly blog – Announcing bit.ly Pro