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I’ve decided it’s time to move on so I’ve decided to put saveload.org up for sale.
Why am I selling it? I don’t really have time to update it each and every day like it needs to be and I’ve got a couple other ventures in the making that will be better for the pocket book :).
I’ve started a thread on digitalpoint for the sale. If you have any questions or comments feel free to post them here or contact me via a digitalpoint PM.
Cheers!
~TheNerd
My brother-in-law and friend Mike (from DropTheMike.com) has published a short article I wrote for his blog. It’s a post about upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows XP.
I have yet to see the reasoning one would want to upgrade to Vista. I’m not even sure it should be called an upgrade. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s better. Anyway if you want to see what I wrote click here.
Cheers!
~TheNerd
For those of you living under a rock, TWiT is a Netcast (aka Podcast) network created and maintained by the infamous Leo Laporte (formerly of The Screen Savers on TechTV). Some shows on the network include Security Now, Jumping Monkey, this WEEK in TECH, FLOSS Weekly, and more.
If I had the choice to be like any one of these guys it would definitely have to be Steve Gibson. Why would I be like Steve? Well first of he’s pretty darn smart (no offense to the rest of you awesome folks). He is an expert on security, which happens to be an interest of mine and is a great entrepreneur. It’s always been my passion to have my own business that can sustain me and my family.
I’m sure some people would have other things to say about it but whatever. I’m a nerd, I listen to nerds, and I want to be even nerdier :). Hence the nick.
~TheNerd
You know how the original song goes… “99 bottle of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, take one down pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall…”.
That’s the feeling I get now when I’m trying to decide which browser to use. But Just image how fun it is for a webmaster who needs to cater his sites to everyone. It’s a complete nightmare all over again.
Do you remember back in the day when Netscape was big? You almost had to write two versions of your site, one for IE and one for Netscape. Well guess what? It’s even worse now.
With IE8 now in public beta that makes three versions of IE that need to be accounted for, never mind Firefox 1, 2 and 3 (in beta now as well), Apple’s Safari (also in beta), Opera, the iPhone browser, the gazillions of other mobile phone browsers, and lord know what else. It’s got to be a horrible experience.
So what is a webmaster to do? I guess that is really a matter of preference, audience and business requirements. For me the business requirements and null because I’m not the webmaster at my place of work so I could care less but it’s a reality for some. I have a tendency to stick with the current versions of Firefox (Firefox Secrets) and IE for testing compatibility. These two will get you the bulk of your users and, honestly, the rest make up so little most of the time it’s not worth even worrying about. If you are a stickler for web standards you will have to be prepared for more headaches because Firefox doesn’t even follow them all the time.
~TheNerd
Well it’s been a few weeks now since I started running my two proxy websites (squibber and cme) and I must admit that I am as excited as ever. I’m not making a loads of money yet but I can definitely see the potential. I’ve currently brought in right around $20 US (I’m Canadian so it’s even better with the exchange). I know… It’s not much but if you consider the fact that I’m averaging about $1/day over the past week it’s very encouraging.
Still not a gold mine but this $1/day, if it keeps up, will pay my web hosting fees from Hostgator (most of my sites) and Tech Entrance (proxy sites). That’s the magic number to keep me going. I’ll update again in the near future as I, hopefully, start making even more money!
~TheNerd
It’s been a while since I’ve visited the good old Google Hacking Database and I had forgotten about all the neat little things that Google can turn up. I’ve spent the last half hour or so looking at AXIS web cams all around the world. It’s pretty neat to see what you can find and watch. I guess some people don’t care if they are broadcasting to the world but if it were me I’d want to have the cams secured so only those who need to see them can.
Here is a list of a few cameras I found:
Those are just a few of the 145 results returned by Google when using this query.
~TheNerd
That’s right folks. Your’s truly is now an official podcaster. As of today I am co-host of the Haiku Podcast. I’ve been wanting to get into this for quite some time but never had the chance to until a few weeks ago when I was talking to Sikosis (a prominent member of the Haiku community) and he mentioned that he was looking for a co-host.
Needless to say I jumped right on it. It took a while for us to meet up on Skype because he lives in Australia and I live in Canada. There is actually a 14 hour time difference between us. We finally met up a few weeks ago to test the skype connection. It went very well and we decided that I would join in on the next episode. This past Friday was the time to record.
Wow what an interesting experience that was. In all my years here on this lovely planet, I have organized events and stood up in front of crowds of people to speak but nothing really compares to this. I know it’s weird but for some reason the fact that it was being recorded and saved forever somewhere was in the back of my mind the whole time. I did manage to get through it and when Sikosis edited all of my “uhhhs and ummms” out of it, it wasn’t that bad.
I can definitely say (well as long as Sikosis agrees) I will be co-hosting the Haiku Podcast for some time to come. If you want to listen to the episode click here to get to the podcast home page.
Cheers!
~TheNerd
Yup, that’s what I am in to now. Lately I’ve been building and promoting web based proxy sites. When I recently went through a web spaz and decided to update and reformat a lot of my sites I also decided to try and find a use for some domains I had registered but weren’t in use.
After spending a bunch of time surfing around the forums on digitalpoint.com and hearing a bunch of people talking about web proxies, I decided that is what I would use my spare domains for. Some of the folks around digitalpoint.com said that the proxy market was over populated and that it was hard to make money there now. I must say I thought they were wrong so I continued on.
My first proxy (squibber.net) was built with a script called Phproxy. After I had finally got it up and running I realized that the author had given up on the development of it. I figured there wasn’t much use in using a script that wasn’t supported anymore so I went in search of a new one. I stumbled upon some other scripts such as CGI-Proxy, Zelune and Glype. I finally settled on Glype because this script was still under development and had an active community. It was also very easy to install, configure and style (there’s lots of free templates around).
All that was just the first part of what I needed to do to start making money. I then had to find the right PPC networks to run. Adsense is good but I came to find out that their TOS does not allow the use of their ads on proxified pages (the pages viewed after loaded in via the proxy) so I had to find another one. This was to hard because lots of people said that Adbrite was decent for this so I decided, since I was already signed up with Adbrite, to use them on these “proxified” pages.
Now that I had my ads all sorted out I needed to find a way to get people to visit my sites. Since proxy sites aren’t made of content (like a blog would be), it’s not much sense to try and get Google to index it and move up the PageRank scale like one would traditionally do (although it will evently help). I found that there are tons of proxy top sites out there so I went on a mad spree submitting my sites. To my surprise this worked quite well and I went from 0 to ~140 unique views almost overnight.
Since I had pretty much cluttered my pages with reciprocal links I thought it might be time to find another way to promote my sites without having to reciprocate each and every link. That is when I found Web Proxy Talk (a forum based on all things proxy). What a good find this site was. I was able to get answers from a community dedicated to the new niche I was exploring. It’s still a fairly low traffic site but the folks there have been more than helpful and I’ve been able to exchange links, find more top sites, and learn about MySpace bulletins and news groups.
So I bet you are now asking “Are you making any money?”. Well, honestly, not much yet. Come on now, I just started so give it time. One thing I have learned over the years is that making money on the web is not the “get rich quick scheme” that most people think it is. It takes lots of time and effort to get good at it and start bringing in the money (of course that’s what I’m guessing because I’m not there yet).
If you want to start looking into the proxy site business here are some links that will help you out:
Web Proxy Talk
Proxy friendly web hosting from TechEntrance
Domain name registration
Pay Per Click Ads: Adsense & Adbrite
Cheers!
~TheNerd
