I finished up modifications to whats-hot-weekly.com. There is now a drop-down list which lets the users choose their country. This is all handled with eBay site IDs. Categories are still being stored in a MySQL database locally on the server. This make the menus function much better. I’ve already noticed many people in the UK, Canada, Spain, France, and Australia are using the site. Currently the site is averaging over 100 unique visitors per day. This isn’t great but it’s nice to have even that many people interested in your work.
Author: Randy
Free Candy Sample – Jelly Belly
I’ve always liked candy and one of my (and one of Ronald Reagan’s) favorite candies is Jelly Bellies. They are great. There are so many different flavors. Plum is my favorite. There’s one suggestion I have for eating Jelly Bellies. Always eat one at a time, unless you are combining the different flavors to create an intentional flavor. For instance, you could create a cream soda float by combining cream soda and vanilla. There are actually recipes for this.
If you’ve never tried them before, do one at a time. You can get a free sample of Jelly Bellies here.
Really cool online auction idea
At this point, most people have heard of eBay. A high percentage of them have probably signed up for an eBay account and have made a purchase on the online auction site. EBay has been the defacto online auction site for years. Through those years many other auction sites have tried to get some of that market share with little luck. Most just didn’t have the right marketing. After all marketing is a major factor in whether a site succeeds or not. One can have the best site on the internet, and if no one knows anything about it, it’ll never rank well on search engines or become a high traffic site.
Sometimes there are ideas that just can’t be ignored, even if they have suffered from poor marketing. This is especially true for one of the coolest sites I’ve come across recently. It is a great idea and already there are many sites trying to copy the idea. The idea is simple really, but it is ingenious. This site is an auction site that works slightly different. It is possible to win items and end up paying pennies on the dollar for the item’s worth. As an example, a Macbook which normally sells for around $1300 could sale for $200 bucks.
What’s the catch?
Well, the catch is all in the way you bid on the items. It’s more of a competition. It’s actually pretty addictive. Bids are incremented by a certain amount. There are regular auctions and penny auctions. The regular auctions increment by a larger amount, while penny auctions go up a penny every time someone bids. Any time a person bids, it costs them a certain amount of money. I believe the current going rate is around 75 cents per bid. When they bid, the current bid price goes up a certain amount and they become the high bidder. These auctions are also timed, but every time a person bids, it adds a little more time to the auction. So if one waits till the last second to place a bid, hoping to be the last bidder, the time goes up and a bunch of other people jump on board.
Now it doesn’t go on like this indefinitely. There is a permanent end time for auctions as well. This is pretty easy when you understand what’s going on.
It is very possible to get a great deal on something on this site. I’ve seen items go for 10% of the retail cost with the bidder only spending about ten bucks for bids. There are TV’s, game systems, laptops, and many other things that get auctioned there at amazing prices. Check it out here!!
Updating Whats-hot-weekly
My task for this morning is to add additional site codes to whats-hot-weekly.com. It’s not an easy task. At least, it isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. All of the categories are pulled from a database that I refresh every so often. The database only contains the categories for the US eBay site. This is where it gets hairy because I wasn’t aware before now that the other countries used didn’t categories. So, now my task is to add all the categories so I can implement the additional sites.
This is going to take a while. The US along takes around half an hour. There are many other sites. I’ve recreated the database adding a field to record the site_id. Next I’ll run my scripts to populate the database with API calls. After I populate the database for the US, I’ll switch the site codes manually and add the next site. I would automate this but I would rather monitor it anyway so I thought I may as well do it manually.
The big issue that will come up later is currencies. I’ll have to adjust for that. I’ll also have to recreate the same code on the static version of the site.
While I wait for the database to refresh, the old site is still running as normal. I have a development environment that is a working copy of the production environment. I’ll make the switch there, then simply move it over to production from there. There should be exactly no downtime to the site. I hope.
The best projectors for the money
I’ve owned a few projectors. I love to have a 120 inch screen on my wall. It makes a great home theater experience. I look at a 60 inch screen and think it’s small. My kids are spoiled. They have this huge projection screen for their games and Disney movies. Projectors are great.
My current projector does 1080p, so my Blu-ray movies look great and all our games do as well. There is a problem with owning a projector however. Lamps don’t last very long. Now, as an aside, my current projector has been using the same bulb for over 2 years and it’s well over 4,000 hours. That’s double the length of time it is supposed to get. I still have the replacement lamp on a shelf here, waiting to be put in.
Lamps cost up to $400 for projectors. That can get expensive if you use the projector a lot. I just recently happened upon this deal at powerpointprojectors.net however. It’s a CRT projector worth over $45,000 retail, selling for $3,000. It’s an unbelievable deal. The projector was ordered by the US military for use in a helicopter simulator. This type of projector is extremely expensive for a few reasons. One, they are native 1080P hi definition projectors. Two, they use three lenses one for each color (Red, Green, Blue). Three, they have a bench life of over 100,000 hours. That means you don’t have to replace the bulb for many years. This isn’t even including the quality of these things. They are amazing, and for $3,000 you can’t buy a better projector. Actually, you probably can’t buy a better projector for anything less than $20k.
Just How Relevant is Google
We have all come to expect good things from Google. In fact, many of us have come to believe that Google is the best at everything they do. This is especially true with their original application, their search. For the past few years Google has ruled the search market. It got there by making the most relevant search results appear every time a user executed a search.
Those days may be over. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend that Google isn’t giving very relevant content. I don’t think I’m alone, and I have a pretty good idea why we are getting such bad results. It’s not entirely Google’s fault. There are many “white hat” and “black hat” search engine optimizations that are being used to manipulate the results. Marketers are trying to draw content to their sites. That’s how they make money after all. SEO has been used ever since the first search engine. If you check this page, Google just seems to be lagging behind in making their algorithms detect unwanted SEO.
This isn’t to say that those marketers are doing something wrong exactly. It’s just that most of them are concentrating on Google. Google is, after all, the most popular search engine. They know what works to get ranked on Google, so they do it. They do a lot of it. This skews Google’s search results, but doesn’t necessarily effect Yahoo search results because Yahoo uses different algorithms to determine where a result ranks.
Google also is notorious for de-indexing RELEVANT sites by mistake. For instance, this site seems to have been de-indexed, and I’ve not been attempting to SEO this site much at all. It could be due to my use of a WordPress plugin called All-in-one SEO pack, though that really shouldn’t have anything to do with it either.
Here is my single example that has been perplexing me for a month or so:
Once upon a time, there was a script for the XChat IRC client, called “XLack”. This script is my favorite system information script for XChat. I’ve used it for probably 4 or 5 years. The home site for the script used to be xlack.tk. This was where everyone would go to download it. That site is now a parked domain. It has been that way for close to a year. If you search google for “Xlack”, xlack.tk is still the number one site. It is no longer relevant at all. It’s a parked domain. In fact, if one tries to find a site from which to download the xlack script, one finds that there are none listed on Google.com.
Now take that same search over to yahoo.com. A simple search for “xlack download” gives you this site, which has the relevant download link of the actual script. Yahoo.com provides more relevant results. Try it on any of your search and see if you don’t get better results from Yahoo or even Live.com. I guarantee you’ll have more success from them these days than you do Google.
Cade’s Cove Cavendish
After quitting my job, I decided to start smoking a pipe. No, I didn’t start smoking the wacky tabaccy. I had quit smoking cigarettes in September (13th 2008). I’m completely quit. I don’t want to smoke cigarettes, but I do want to do something like it. I think it has to do with keeping your hands occupied or relieving stress, because smoking a pipe does both and I feel a lot better since I took it up.
Now, I don’t inhale the smoke. I just “puff” on the pipe. I know I still get some of the nicotine from the smoke but at least I’m not getting the harmful effects on my lungs. I’m sure there is some danger from the pipe smoke but the stress relief outweighs the risks completely.
With all that in mind, I have a great suggestion to anyone who is reading my little blog. Cade’s Cove Cavendish is absolutely the best pipe tobacco you can get. The only place to get it is the Gatlinburlier which is a tobacco shop in Gatlinburg, TN. If you are a pipe smoker (the tobacco sort), you HAVE to try it. You can get it online at http://gatlinburlier.com. I don’t make a dime from that link, so don’t think this is some kind of scam. That’s honestly THE best pipe tobacco I’ve ever tried. If you have suggestions for the best pipe tobacco or think that your pipe tobacco is better. I’d love to try it and give a review. Until that time, “Cade’s Cove Cavendish” is the best.
Automated twitter status updates
Once you have a following on Twitter, it’s easy to gather a little extra traffic to your site from it. To help automate the process, I make use of Twitter’s API and a Linux command line. I create some cron jobs to update my status using curl. This is pretty simple to do and may be helpful for people with a Linux box and the need to advertise something.
The curl command is structured as follows:
curl -u username:password -d status="My new status message" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
Now it’s important to note that for the automated crons the returned xml isn’t really needed. You can also use this in the programming language of choice to fetch the xml and make use of it. You can also get JSON results by changing the end from .xml to .json.
So, once you have the code, all you have to do is create the cron jobs in Linux. Edit the crontab with crontab -e
Your default editor should open your cron. Here is an example showing how to create the cron job:
5 * * * * curl -username:password -d status="My Message" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
That cron job would run at 5 minutes after the hour, every hour, every day. This is, however, not a good idea because your account will not last long 🙂
Programming ideas
I’m not a very good programmer. I think the biggest reason for that is that I’ve not had enough practice at it. I’ve written plenty of apps and web sites but most were very simple. My latest app, whats-hot-weekly.com is actually a simplified version of another app I wrote that is located at givemeaniche.com. There are many differences between the two apps even though they basically do the same thing. The exception to this being that givemeaniche actually shows the most searched for terms as well as the most watched items. If you’re like me, just hire a professional web developer.
The hardest part of it all is coming up with new ideas for serious work projects. I have a few but being a solo developer, designer, etc means that I’ll have to put some time into them. Any ideas for apps and websites would be much appreciated.
Twitter and me
I first tried twitter about a month ago. I wasn’t very impressed, at the time. I have this theory that we are actually going backward in usefulness on the web. Back in the 90’s we had web apps that did a lot more than twitter, yet twitter is supposed to be sooooo amazing.
Well it is. Here’s the thing. As the internet get more and more crowded, certain things become more and more popular. Marketing is getting extremely popular on the internet. That’s not to say that marketing hasn’t been popular on the internet for many years. It’s just getting exponentially more popular. Twitter is a marketers dream. Facebook is another that works great for marketers. After all marketing and social media presence is a major factor in whether a site succeeds or not. One can have the best site on the internet, and if no one knows anything about it.
You see, these apps are just less robust versions of old forum software. They are also meant to grab a larger audience where forums are meant for a smaller niche. This broad audience and simplistic design make these apps extremely useful for advertising. Unfortunately, the normal user will see less functionality from these apps than software from 15 years ago. Those users won’t understand this, however, because they have never been exposed to that older technology. They just know that all of their family is on facebook or myspace. So they join the sites and start getting bombarded with new advertisements.
If you are smart, you’ll jump on the marketing bandwagon soon. There’s a lot of money in it.