For those who are trying to make money blogging this is a good list of alternatives to Adsense advertising, there are a few on here I’ve not heard of.  The list is pretty comprehensive, 84 different advertising solutions that I’m pretty sure one will fit your needs.  Take a look at it here.

Now I found an interesting set of articles posted here in regards to using Wordpress as a CMS.  Its very interesting that I happen to find this today of all days because I’ve been figuring out the best approach to a new site I’m working on.

The new site isn’t going to be a blog in the normal sense, but more of a collection of ASP.Net 3rd party user controls etc.  I was contemplating what platform to use for it, right now its setup to use Drupal but I don’t know if I like it enough to warrant using it, now honestly for something like this new site it would be a good idea to honestly write my own site from scratch, but I don’t have the time at this point to do that, so I’ll have to go with a 3rd part solution, now after looking through the articles I mention above it seems I might be able to achieve at least some of that with Wordpress.

Now of course right now my time is limited, so my new site isn’t going to appear over night, but give me a few weeks and hopefully you’ll get to see it in its full glory.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, cms, ASP.net

So it seems my blog is 8 days out of date on Technorati right now and I’m not sure why it would suddenly stop being indexed when it was fine up until then. The funny thing is I’ve updated this blog every day for the most part since then and even to the point when I’ve updated it more than once a day, some days I’ll post 2 or 3 articles. Anyway I’ve emailed them but yet to hear a word out of anyone over there, I have heard they are having some issues so I’ll be patient and keep trying, but I would like my blog to be indexed, especally as I started adding Technorati tags earlier this week.

Technorati Tags: technorati

Now I’ve been using a computer for a long time and I know what I like. The one thing that drives me a little nuts is that sometimes you see software that is so poorly written you wonder why it was realized. A lot of that exists in the freeware world, the ironic thing is open source is usually pretty damn good, where as closed source freeware can just be plain terrible.

Now I’m very picky when it comes to software and a firm believer in first impressions, if I’m not impressed with the UI, I’m unlikely to care about the functionality, now I’m not a UI snob, because I use Linux all the time and I prefer to do all my stuff via the command line, but when I’m using a Windows App I like it to look good and function well, if it don’t look good, chances are it doesn’t function as well as it could either. I’ve come across a lot of software that fits into these categories, I just wish people would take the time to write a better UI, or make it fairly good on the eyes.

For example the UI with VLC is not the best, but its simple and effective, but its not garish and ugly like some UI’s I’ve seen. If you suck at UI design don’t try and make funky color buttons and toolbars and stuff, go with simple until you can get someone to do a good job for you.

Technorati Tags: freeware, opensource, bad UI, good UI, vlc

So I am a big fan of the Gentoo Linux distribution.  I’ve been using it now daily for over 4 years.  Now I’ve used it many different ways, I currently use it for my Firewall/Gateway machine for my local LAN, I also use it for my MythTV box, and I’ve also used it on the desktop.  Now I have had issues using Linux as a whole on the desktop, I just don’t like it, it doesn’t have the software that I like and doesn’t come with the tools that I use, now I’m sure lots of Linux advocates out there will shoot me down and say that there is plenty of good stuff out there that’s free. 

Anyway that’s for another post, however here are a few good links for those who want to try out Gentoo :

• Gentoo Official Home
• Gentoo Community Portal
• Gentoo Community News
• Official Gentoo Wiki

Take a look and give it a try, I recommend it, and its getting easier and easier to use.

Technorati Tags: gentoo, linux

So I figured I would follow up with my experience with Blog Exchanges and how they don’t work and why I probably will never use them again.

A little introduction, I found out about a few blog exchanges through a friend who has their own blog, I decided hey that’s a good idea, and signed up for a couple of them, blogmad and blogexplosion.  Now blogmad verified my blog first, and so I started surfing the other blogs in there to earn credits, however I soon discovered the other blogs were not what I wanted to read, mostly about politics or topics I had no interest in.  I’m tech head, a geek, so politics and fluffy cutesy stuff is not my thing, I want geek, gadgets, cool toys etc.  So of course I just waited out my 30 seconds and clicked on.  I did this a lot, I think my last stats on blogmad was I viewed over 450 blogs.  Now I earnt my credits and watch the traffic come in, and go out just as quick, I was getting traffic that well honestly wasn’t worth the effort.

If you think about the 450 blogs I surfed and I had to wait 30 seconds for each one, that’s 225 minutes or just under 4 hours.  Now that’s just 4 hours spent surfing through blogs I didn’t want to read, that’s a lot of time, especially when you’re a busy individual as it is.  The thing was what did I gain from those 4 hours of surfing, very little.   Out of the few hundred visitors I had during the period I probably kept a maximum of 5.  Yup, you all know who you are and I thank you for reading my blog.

Now I did the same with blogexplosion and came to the same conclusion with exactly the same results, spent hours surfing other people’s blogs to earn credits to end up with people surfing my blog and not staying longer than their mandatory 30 seconds.  So I decided to quit with the blog exchanges and I’m glad I did.  Not only was it a huge waste of time, but for the time spent I got very little to nothing back, now I thought I could do my own blog exchange much better, but also realized it would be the same, generally people want a quick solution to bring traffic to their blog, and blog exchanges use that to their advantage, however in the small print it should say, the traffic you receive will not be desirable traffic.

Now fast forward to this week and I’ve noticed a very interesting trend.  I posted a list on problogger.net last week that helped generate some traffic as well as some linkage, so I’ve noticed a few hits from that, not a lot mind, which is fine.  My biggest source of traffic right now is Google, that’s right, it seems my articles get picked up on Google and some folks honestly visit through Google, for example yesterday over 50% of my traffic was from Google, now that’s not bad in my opinion, my next goal is to figure out why Technocrati thinks my blog hasn’t been updated in 7 days, even though I update it daily, its really annoying and I’ve submitted 2 support tickets already about it.

So the moral of this story, don’t waste your time with blog exchanges unless you have hours of spare time where you can just sit in front of a computer.  The better thing is to comment, post good content and hopefully over time the search engines will find you, Technocrati will find you, and if you’re really really lucky, you’ll right something that will show up on Fark or boingboing.

Technorati Tags: blog exchanges, google, traffic

So I’m browsing through Digg like I do now every morning it seems to find good stuff to post about and this came to my attention and all I can say is its fantastic, the artwork is amazing.  I myself have no artistic talent, I traded it in for geek talent, figuring that being a geek would be more profitable in the long run, especially as being alive is generally a good thing for a geek, where an artist is only truly appreciated when they are dead.

Star Wars Last Supper

So it seems that everyone raves on about Firefox and its extensions, I know I’m a big culprit for that too, but don’t forget its cousin Thunderbird that fantastic mail client that I use at work and at home. 

Richard Frank at tectonic wrote a good article about 5 Thunderbird extensions that are going to be pretty useful in your day to day emailing.

So I subscribe to the RSS feed for Make:Blog, its damn cool, and lots of interesting stuff gets posted. I would love to be able to spend the time and money to make and mod some things, but right now I’ll have to make do with just looking at some of the cool things people do.

Now on to the bizarre, this one showed up this morning and well its just far out there, its a USB powered BBQ, yes you heard me correctly, take a look and let me know what you think. The site is in Japanese I think, but I’m not 100% sure, but you don’t need to read it to see it, as they say a picture is worth a 1000 words.

So I’ve decided to give IE7 a try, I’m installing it on my laptop at work since well its for work and I don’t care too much if it breaks something, its not like I have to fix it . I figured I’d install it to see how my site looks, and also help at Yvonne at nektros.com with her CSS problems too. It seems that IE7 has some issues with CSS that Firefox and Opera etc don’t. I had similar problems with this site in IE6 and wonder if those problems still occur with IE7, if not then I think I can fix the problems that Yvonne is indeed having.

I’ve used IE7 before, but its been a while, and honestly I doubt I’ll use it for my main browser, I just love Firefox too much, and some of the extensions available for it are just great for my line of work.

Technorati Tags: ie7, Microsoft, Internet Explorer, nektros, CSS