Archive

Paid posts are an easy way for bloggers to make money or for advertisers to get links, reviews, and customers. You know how when you watch your favorite TV show and they zoom in on the car so you can see what model it is, or they hold up a can of soda so you can see what brand it is? Paid posts are like that, for a blog.

As a blogger paid posts can be a good source of income. If your site has a high Google PR, Alexa Rating, or other score, such as those that some of the paid to blog sites employ, you can make a decent income. To start off with, you might make $5 for a paid post. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Fairly quickly, and sometimes right away, you should be making $10-$20 for a paid post. A really high traffic site can make significantly more.

As an advertiser paid posts can be an easy way to increase your exposure. You offer a little money for paid posts and then you get several bloggers looking at your site. Many of these bloggers will look around, maybe read some of what you have to say, and then decide that it is not right for their blog. Others will write about it and you will pay them a small fee and you will get some great buzz off of it.

Google seems to not like paid posts. They have set up their system so that those who write too many paid posts loose their PR. They say that if causes problems for their search engines. Some of the pay to post sites allow you to use no-follow links, which will help with this issue, but most do not. You should think about how this will effect you before you decide to do it. Many say that PR is a useless metric, others use it for a lot of advertising, so it is a decision only you can make and a discussion for another post.

Over the next few weeks I will be discussing paid posts more and how they can be useful and how they can be detrimental. I hope you will follow the series. To watch the series, follow my paid posts tag.

Just a quick note to say happy new your. May your 2009 be blessed.

Lord, please bless all my readers and help them to know joy and love.

I've been checking out a new search engine called Scour. Competing with Google is going to be a hard battle, but Scour has a few things going for it that I think can make it a little better than Google.

First off, they are social. I can go up there, check out a website and then comment on it in the Scour system. As I comment or vote for sites they move up or down the list, depending on the vote. This allows spam to be moved down the list and good sites to move up the list. Unlike other social media sites, the listed sites are not just limited to those that sign up. Like Google, every site is listed in the engine.

Since there are not yet very many votes or comments in the Scour system, they need to have something else in the background to help with the searching. They also need this in order to cope with sites that have the same number of votes. If people start using it, it could grow, allowing us to have a say in the search results is a good thing.

Many people do not need encouragement to be involved with social media. It is just fun to do. Scour does give some encouragement though, in the form of points. These points can then be turned in for money. Unless you search a LOT, and add a LOT of votes and comments, this builds up very slowly. In the few days I've been playing with it, including installing their Firefox search bar, I've earned about 200 points. I only need 6300 more to get a $25 prepaid visa card. However, they also give insentives to get me to get you to sign up. If you sign up with one of the links on this page, I get a 25% bonus of any points you earn. Don't worry, you don't pay them to me, they are in addition to what you get.

Another thing that makes Scour nice is that they give you Google, Yahoo! and Live results as well, so you can check all four sources to get the best results for you. Some times one source just does not have the results you want, so another source is useful.

Now, for the flaws in the system:

Spammers can vote up their stuff. Right now, being a new engine, a spammer can come in and vote their sites up. I'm not a spammer, but I voted for my sites. In the long run, this will not be a bad thing, if there are a lot of voters, then a few people voting poorly will not hurt the system. In the short run this will make it hard to get great results. They can easily overcome this by allowing people to vote for the voters. This will allow people to vote others up and down, giving more or less weight to their votes.

Those points. The points are nice, but they can also cheapen the system. Are they really needed? And can you let others know how many points you have? If you can brag about the points you have earned, showing a ranking of the highest earners, then you are going to get some vain people (admit it, most of us are a little vain) who want to see their names in the lists who will be voting in order to get on the list.

JavaScript and PHP do not play well together. JavaScript is client side, PHP server side. This makes it difficult to get things to play together. One way to get them to play together, is to have your PHP script build your JavaScript. Now, what if you need to have an external JavaScript file get some stuff from your database and run some things in PHP? Something like this widget:

This is a widget that I wrote. It pulls a list from a database and then displays it. I want people on other websites to be able to display it, so I need a way for them to include it on their site. To do that, I use the <script> tag:


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://contestfarm.com/scripts/cf/rand_contest.php?style=2&uid=1"></script>


I want you to notice a couple of things that are different about this than normal JavaScript includes. First, notice that the file extension is .php, not .js. If I called it .js, then it would not run as a PHP file, and I need it to run as PHP. Second, notice that I included two variables. This allows us to pass variables, just like you would in any PHP script.

OK. Not that we have the hosting site set to call it, how do we make it display something? Well, if I was doing it in HTML/PHP it would have code something like:


echo "<a href='" . $url . "'>" . $title . "</a>";


This is all fine and dandy, if I am calling it as a PHP script, but I'm calling it as a JavaScript. Since it is JavaScript, it does not know the HTML tags as commands, so the script fails. We need to make it JavaScript, so we have to add in a document.write. Now, this line gets longer and more confusing. We have to remember to close the HTML tag, we have to close the JavaScript command, and we have to close the PHP command. This is what we end up with:


echo "document.write(\"<a href='" . $url . "'>" . $title . "</a>)\";";


In PHP, you can stop your PHP script and display some HTML. ie:


?>
<a href="http://shabamdevelopment.com">Shabam Development Rocks
//more php here


We can do something like this, but remember, that we are doing JavaScript, so we can't bail out, use HTML and then go back. We can bail out of the PHP, but not the JavaScript. We still need the document.write. This will work:


?>
document.write('<a href="http://shabamdevelopment.com">Shabam Development Rocks');
//more php here


One last thing. We have to set the header of our file to be JavaScript. At the top of the page include a header, like this:


<? Header('Content-Type: application/x-javascript')?>


So now lets put it all together.

In the hosting page:


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://contestfarm.com/scripts/cf/rand_contest.php?style=2&uid=1"></script>


In the script:

<? Header('Content-Type: application/x-javascript')?>
document.write('<a href="http://shabamdevelopment.com">Shabam Development Rocks');
//more php here


Don't you hate it when people blog about not blogging? I know I do. It is a useless post. If you are not going to blog, just don't blog. I don't care that your not blogging, I don't care why. I'm sure your wart removal surgery is keeping you from blogging, I'm glad your daughters new husband is recovering well. Whatever your reason you can't blog, just don't. On the other hand, if you are going to take the time to actually write a blog, write something useful.

We are all out looking for useful blogs, right? We go to tech blogs to read reviews, get ideas, etc. We don't go to tech blogs to read about not being able to blog because you were helping your mother mow the grass on the roof of her garage. We go to gardening blogs to read information on finding purple sweet potatoes and planting a 12 month garden, not to read about not being able to blog because your computer died and you had to fix it.

Now that I've ranted about how annoying it is to blog about not blogging, I just wanted to say that I realize I've not written much in a few months. I've also looked at my stats recently and seen that I'm getting a lot of traffic for a site I'm not really maintaining. I've also received a few nice comments from people saying that they appreciate some of the guides I've created. I'll do my best to add more guides to the site. Thanks for all the nice comments too. I hope to be able to be a little more active in the coming months.

Google PageRank is sooooo.... how to put this politely... stupid. We need a high page rank in order to make money with our web sites, but unless you are using one of the methods that Google allows they will slam you page rank, marking you as a "bad neighborhood". They don't allow you to sell links to other sites. This means no paid articles, no back links, no links to advertisers at all, unless you use rel="nofollow".

What if you mistype the nofollow link? Forget to add it? What if you create a blog roll of all your favorite sites? All these things can cause Google to tag you. Is it fair for them to tag you as a bad neighborhood because you choose to sell links on your site? How does that damage the system? I've done several Google searches on how this can damage the system and all I can find is a lame excuse that it alters the search results. Basically, those that can pay to have their name out there would rank higher in the results than those that don't.

All right, I can understand how that might be a bad thing, but let's consider it for a moment. Isn't buying advertising normal? Isn't that how businesses have built up their businesses? We all know Sony, Pepsi, Ford, Microsoft, etc. Why? Because they make better products than others? No, it is because they advertise better. Just because Google made it without advertising, does not mean that it is not a normal part of the world.

Even without allowing the links, those that can afford it are going to rank higher than those, like me, that can't. If you can afford the time, or to pay someone for their time, you can get millions of links in short order. Links that you don't have to pay for. Paid links are just a easier way of doing the same thing.

It also makes it very hard for those of us trying to make a little extra income to make it. We have to be so careful of how we allow advertisers to use our space of we loose our rank. All right, maybe I'm just bitter over having lost my rank on one of my sites, but it is frustrating. I worked hard on that site, trying to make a few bucks. I have a few users who enjoy it and come back regularly. It is doing all right. But Google comes along and decides that the links that I have (yes, some, but not all, were paid links) make me a bad neighborhood. I loose my rank and along with it some money I was earning off a few links. (with no PR, they no longer want to link to me).

Project Wonderful is an advertising medium in which they function on a "infinate auction". This means that the publisher places the ad space on their site and the advertiser bids, at say $0.05 per day. Another advertiser then comes along and bids at $0.08 per day. The first advertiser was displayed for the 4 hours 48 minutes they were up and are charged $0.01 for the time they were up. The next advertiser then takes over at $0.08 per day. If another advertiser comes along then they price can go up again. If an advertiser drops, the price goes down.

As a publisher, I say it is not that great. There were days I was making $0.20 per day. I was happy with that (although not jumping up and down). Now I'm making about $0.02 per day. Not worth the real estate. I've never added it to this blog, so I don't how well it will work here, but judging from my experience there, I'd say I will not become a publisher with another site. You do have a lot of control over what you show, which is nice. If you don't like an ad, you don't have to show it. You can cancel them or you can require all ads to be moderated. The problem with moderation is that you must take the time to moderate.

If you are a really new blog and want to have some advertising right away, Project Wonderful might work for you, but they do have an age requirement. Adsense and Commission Junction are great if people click or buy products, but some sites work better with pay per period or pay per impression advertising. In order to use PPM, you need to have a site that gets thousands of visitors a month (a day with some products) so Project Wonderful is a way to get started before you are qualified for PPM advertising.

However, as an advertiser, as I said, the rates a very reasonable. Too inexpensive to make it worth it to me as a publisher, but great for me as an advertiser. Their system is not the easiest to navigate, but has a lot of reporting and searching functions that make it easy to build and manage your campain. As an advertiser, I suggest giveing it a try.

If you read this blog you may have noticed that I have not been posting much lately. My sustainability blog is my main focus. I often have tech related things to write about and will continue to do so when I have time, but I really need to focus on one project right now.

Yes, I realize this is a fluff post. That is why I am keeping it short. Enjoy.

When developing web sites, there are some tools that developers find invaluable in their development efforts. When working on web sites, I develop in Firefox, because of the wonderful ability to use ad-ons with it. These tools make it so much easier to find bugs and to make things work the way I want them to. Below are my favorites.

1. Web Developer: I've been using this tool for years now. It is a collection of a bunch of tools all in one location and allows you to see outlines of various blocks, information about different elements, and so much more. I highly recommend having it available if you do any web development work.
2. Firebug: This is my new favorite tool. It is a debugging tool that allows you to inspect various aspects of a web page. You can then make changes to the site live, such as changing, adding, or removing CSS or HTML code to see how it will affect the site.

   It also has several tools that can be added on that you might find useful. These are the three I use:

   • YSlow: Yahoo has some specifications they list for making a fast loading web site. This will give you a list of why a site might be running slowly. You can then choose which to change to make it run faster. Yes there are websites that do this, but having it in the console is nice.
   • FireCookie: Allows you to inspect, add, delete and change cookies on a site. If you are working with cookies, this tool makes troubleshooting so much easier.
   • FirePHP: My sites are all PHP based. With this tool, I add a little code to my site and then the PHP log is send to the Firebug Console for me to read. A real time saver.
3. ColorZilla: A simple color picker tool. If you need to know what the color is, just turn it on, mouse over and look at the status bar. It will display RGB, HTML # notation, and what element is setting the color. Will pick anything on the page, including within images.
4. HTTPFox: This is a new tool for me, but I like it. I turn it on and it allows me to see the HTTP Headers live. It only collects data when you tell it to, so the data does not get overwhelming. Now there is no guessing at what data is being posted or what headers are being interpreted. It also does cookies, so you might not need the FireCookie extension.
5. MeasureIt: This cool tool allows you to measure an area. You click to turn it on and then click and drag to measure the region and it returns width and height. Simple, yet useful.
6. SeoQuake: This is an extra. Not really a developer tool, but many times you also need to think about SEO as you work. This tool allows you to see, all on one bar, the Google PageRank, Google Index, Yahoo Links and Link Domain, MSN Index, Alexa Rank, Site Age (using WayBack Machine) and more. You can add other extensions to it as well.

If you have not gathered it from my other posts, I love Open Source. Not just because I'm too frugal (I like that word better than cheap) to pay a bunch of money for programs, but because it is often better, or at least as good as the for pay versions. Even though I love open source programs, I have come to realize that many do not know what it is. In several conversations with techs and programmers, it has become quite clear to me over the years that many people in the high tech industry to not know what this standard is. Today I will break down what open source is, how it is beneficial to users, and why programmers should program open source tools. At the end I will list some of the most popular open source products and their commercial equivalents.

What is Open Source?

The simplest way to define open source is to say that it is a license put on a program where the source is open to everyone. I've heard it said that there are two types of free. There is the free in that you can use it for free. In programming, this is often called "freeware". Then there is free as in freedom. This is open source. You are not just free to use it, you are free to change it. You can take the program, and the source code for it, change it, repackage it and let others use it. Read the complete definition here.

Why Should I Use Open Source?

It's Free. You don't have to pay for it, ever. Nothing, not a dime. No restrictions on when and where you can use it without paying.

There are a World of Programmers. You are not relying on the programmers working for the company who writes the software to come out with bug fixes and updates. Anyone can do it. You can then download them and run the patches to get your version to do the same. Of course, you want to make sure it is coming from a trusted source, but many of these fixes are sent to the package maintainer (a fancy term for the main contact who is in charge of the program) and included in the next version. This means that there might be thousands of people working on these programs to get them ready for you to use, instead of the few, or maybe dozens, that are paid to work on them when you buy commercial versions.

They Work as Well as the Commercial Version, if Not Better. This blanket statement is often true, but not always. Sometimes the commercial version is better, but often the open source one is. They might have different parts of them that work better than the commercial versions, but open source competes with the commercial versions very well. They just don't have a big marketing division to get you to buy them.

You Can Open the Commercial Versions Documents. Just because a document was created in a commercial program does not mean that you need that program to open the documents. Most of the open source versions allow you to open and save in the commercial programs formats. There are exceptions to this rule, so be sure to check out the program to see if it will do what you need.

Will Open Source Work for My Business?

Does your business like to save money? Does your tech support know how to support the tools, or are they willing to learn? Is your staff willing and able to learn the new software? If you can answer yes to these questions, then it will work for you. The tools do not work exactly the same, and some tools are not as good as commercial versions, but if you can find the tools you need in open source, you can save some money. Like with any change, you will need to train your staff. Don't just install it and tell them to use it. Teach them how and you will get a better response and it will work better for them and you. If you don't train them, then they will want to go back to what they already know.

Why Should I Program In Open Source?

Get Others to Code With You. In The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric Raymond describes open source as a bazaar where programmers with differing agenda are all working on the same thing from different points of view. If you are working on a program and want others to help, open source is a good way to achieve this goal.

Build Loyalty. As a business, you can gain a lot of loyalty quickly by building in open source. Your developers will have a sense of ownership because they are working to develop it in their way, instead of the companies way.

It Is Less Expensive. As a business you only have to pay your core developers. Other developers will come on board with their own agenda and make your product better. You don't have to pay them.

Good Way To Learn. It is a good way for a newbie programmer to learn more about the trade. You can read the code others have written and make minor changes. If you are working on a good project, they will have a list of things that need to be done. You can pick one that is at or just above your skill level and go to work on it. In this way, you are working on a large project that you might not normally get to work on, but you are keeping it at a level that you can do on your own.

Sense of Community. Since you are working with a large group of programmers, there is a sense of community in working with all the programmers and learning from each other.

Can I sell open source? Yes. You can sell and make money from open source programs. But so can anyone else. If you write a program and license it open source, you are allowing anyone to look at your code, change it, and sell it, if they like. It is hard to make a business work with an open source business model, but several have.

Open Source List

Commercial Program - Open Source Competitor
Microsoft Windows - Linux. There are many versions of Linux. Check out Distro Watch as they will give you lots of information about the various versions right as they come out. You can even run Windows programs under the WINE emulator.
Microsoft Office - Open Office. Open Office will open all MS Office documents and save in their formats.
Internet Explorer - FireFox. Many of us use Firefox instead of IE, but not everyone knows that it is open source.
Internet Information Server - Apache Web Server. Apache is a great web server. It has a huge market share and does a great job.
Adobe Photshop - The GIMP. The first non-Microsoft commercial product on the list. The GIMP is great, but there are some things about Photoshop that make it a little better, but unless you are using it nearly every day, it may not be worth the $650 retail price tag. Some places sell it for $500 or less, but it is very expensive anyway.
Quicken - GNUCash. ok. This one is no competition. Quicken is hands down the best here. It is not really expensive and has way better tools. I think that people are afraid of working on financial stuff without the backing that intuit has. There are too many things you could screw up for people. There are no good alternatives in the open source world.
Audio Editing - Audacity. I don't actually know a commercial version that competes with Audacity. Of course, I'm not an audio expert either, but if you do a little audio work, Audacity is the way to go.
Many other products exist, but these are the ones I use regularly. I have two computers, and one has no commercial software on it. The other I'm making dual boot, because there are times when I need to test in Windows. I will then have some commercial software on one boot partition (the software that comes with Windows). For a more complete list of Open Source programs, check out Wikipedia's list