Month: August 2010

Getting ready to retire: Internet marketing experiment

Aug 23, 2010 | |

Over the last decade, I’ve occasionally thought about trying to make some money on the Internet (I know, me and two billion other people!), but I never had any success at it and lost interest fairly quickly. Since I have a little bit of free time now, due to being (STILL) unemployed, I decided to give it one more chance. I have a Google Adsense account still sitting around but not doing much; for example, in July it got 192 page impressions and no clicks. Pretty impressive, huh? Of late, I’ve been doing a bit of reading and figuring out what I did wrong before. I’ve decided to take one of my old sites, which has no pagerank but has several pages indexed with Google, and see what I can do with it. (I also have a few other experiments going on, but I won’t mention them for now) The site I’ll be focusing on is Twenties Retirement; I put it together about four years ago but haven’t done anything with it since, and it still have no pagerank. I had some pretty decent information there – actually, a friend whose sister is a financial advisor told me she was sending some of her clients there for information – but the site was pretty ugly, didn’t get updated often, and didn’t have enough backlinks. I didn’t know about the...

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Thinkgeek has the coolest stuff…

Aug 22, 2010 | |

Check this out: Even on sale for $70 ($20 off), it’s too expensive for me, but still…want! Browsing Thinkgeek because I need a new wallet; had wanted one of the stainless steel wallets, but they cost too much so I ended up picking a duct tape wallet instead. I did have a hard time choosing between that and the dot matrix wallet! If Amanda and Raelene hadn’t given us some nice salt and pepper shakers as a wedding gift, I would totally be getting this set: Share on...

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Windows 7 Settings

Aug 19, 2010 | |

So I ran across a cute little trick today that was apparently doing the rounds in January, but I never ran across it. It’s to make it easier to get to all the settings under Windows 7. It works with earlier versions of Windows as well, but apparently will crash 64-bit Vista. What you want to do is create a new folder with the name XXX.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}, where XXX can be whatever you want (I called it “Master Settings”, but the rest of it, from the . to the closing }, should be exactly as written. This is a developer feature built into Windows; if you create a folder with the extension {YYY}, where YYY is a class ID, only the first part of the filename is shown and it does cool stuff. In this case, it gives you a search folder containing all the various controls you’d normally find in assorted folders in the Windows Control Panel. If you’re like me, it can be difficult to remember where everything is. You can use the search to find it, which actually works pretty well, assuming you remember what it’s called, but it’s cool to have all the options available in one place. One thing people have reported is that, should you decide to delete the folder, you might need to start the computer in safe mode. Additionally, while I haven’t...

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Making News or Reporting It?

Aug 18, 2010 | |

News Corp, which owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, recently made a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association. I’ll let that sink in for a second. The owner of Fox News, which republicans see as “fair and balanced” and everyone else who pays attention sees as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican party, is actively putting a large amount of money into attempting to elect Republicans. While it’s not unusual for media countries to support candidates, the donations are generally small and support both parties. For example, in the past year General Electric (which owns NBC) has given $245,000 to the Democratic governors and $205,000 to the Republican governors, while Disney (which owns ABC) donated $20,000 to Republican committees and $11,000 to Democratic committees. News Corp is the only one to give on such a scale. This isn’t the first large donation they’ve made, of course; Murdoch (the owner of News Corp) has previously made a $1 million donation to the California Republican Party. My point? None really…I hold on to a futile hope that if the obvious bias at Fox and News Corp is pointed out often enough, people who still give them any credibility as a news organization might eventually stop doing so. However, I’m not counting on it. Share on...

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Up to 1 year free webhosting at 1&1

Aug 15, 2010 | |

I’ve been using 1&1 webhosting for about a decade now; I got in on a “3 years free” package they were offering and never saw any reason to leave afterwards. I actually ended up upgrading from the basic plan to their $10/month business plan, which includes 3 domains and 250gb of web space, and I have about 30 domains with them. Someone who just wants to hold a small personal site would probably be happy with the beginner plan, which provides 10gb of space for $4 per month. As of last year, all plans offer unlimited bandwidth. One possible issue is that while they provide a reasonable number of mySQL databases (50 with my plan), they are limited to 100MB apiece, which may be restricting for large dynamic sites; I’ve only recently started putting up WordPress sites, so we’ll see if that actually becomes a problem. Anyway, the current promotion is 1 year free for a home account (150gb, 2 domains, $7 per month regular price) or 3 months free for the business or developer accounts. If you’re looking for a new provider, they’re probably worth a look. Share on...

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