Wireless Products

Wireless Phones have been getting lots of attention lately, especially the new iPhone from Apple. They are expected to be releasing it in the next month or so. I'm curious to know if it's going to be better then windows mobile phones. I enjoy mine because I can listen to music, watch movies and more, I doubt the iPhone is going to beat it on it's initial release.

Mint Grafix Blog is Live

My friend Alex of Mint Grafix finally has his blog live. He's been working on it a little bit, obviously he's done some nice graphics for it. His first couple of posts are already fast becomming a resource, with links to valuable designer sites, for logos, menus, flash and more.

Definately keep an eye on this blog for more good things to come.

CNN.com - What war with Iran would look like - Sep 17, 2006

[I think that the Bush administration's crap about Iran developing nuke's is a bunch of crap. North Korea already has several, and is also in it's axis of evil, but you don't you don't see any actions taking place there.]

Read more at www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/...

My Day Off

It's nice getting to have a day off once in a while. Today I'm spending it actually doing personal computer work, such as blogging or coding my Amazon project. Last night I returned some books to Barnes and Noble. It was burning be up that I spent $88 on two books, and the same books brand new on Amazon I could have gotten for $45 and $30 used.

Its almost not worth going out to the store anymore. Everything is so much cheaper online anyways. Plus you don't have to drive and waste your gas.

I'm going to try to be lazy for today, but that almost never works out. I'm too much of a work-a-holic.

Infinite Stupidity

Today some jerk which will remain anonymous (Randy Charles Morin), tried to harass me about a blog I have. Just going on and on. I think he was upset because I told him to f-off. What a big baby. I'll have to send him a special package of baby wipes and similac.

PuReWebDev

This isn't just another ajax based word processor. It's the future of webapplications as we know it.

Building My Links

It's funny how on MSN, I've got tons of links showing up and only a few on Google for LiveWebShop.com . I've been using a few different websites to find decent link partners. Seems to be paying off, since I've got over a thousand in less then a few months. I hope that I can build up even more.

I want to get my pagerank up, since that will determine the amount of traffic I can expect. When I first launched the site I was getting about 500-600 visitors a day, that's dropped dramtically, and I need to get it back up. Anyways, time to go put in work.

Getting Googlized

Today I went and got fully Google'd up. I'd been downloading a few of their plugins into my browser, and a few items from the Google pack, but today I dove into Google Desktop. I do like the tools. It's pretty slick and makes things alot easier for what I already do, however, I wish there was a boss or wife mode, that would quickly do away with some items. For example, by default it shows a snippet of incomming emails. This might not be a problem for many of you, but when your wife is sitting at the computer next to you, and spam emails start comming in with their lets just say exotic titles, it can lead to a very nasty "what was that" conversation.

I'm surprised there wasn't a blogger snippet to allow users to blog from their desktop. No problem, I use Elicit anyways, so I'm already blogging from my desktop, but I'm not opposed to doing it the Google way. I'm working on getting my Google certification and have had an Adwords pro account for a short time now, so while exploring I came acrossed Adwords Editor today. Very nice. Seems like they've got most of the features in place that you could ask for. Whats very nice is it's download and post ability, so that you could potential download your account metrics, work offline, and later post your changes.

I didn't know that Google desktop was going to come with a media player. It's pretty sweet, but I still prefer my Music Match Jukebox. I just came to realize that Yahoo bought this company just a little over a year ago. This surprised me, because I'd been using Music Match since about version 3.

I think another reason that inspired me to use Google Desktop is because Google actually knows how to make software. Too bad they don't have their own OS built from something like Red Hat (wipping drool from face). I've been using Gmail and few other Google Services like Adsense and Adwords, so going to Google Desktop was only natural. I'm looking forward to Google Writely, the Microsoft Word crusher. More later, gonna plug back into the Matrix now.

Starting To Learn Ajax

I was checking out some this Ajax book, didn't know if it was going to have what I need. I've been getting quite a few of my books online lately. I never used to before, but since my time is getting busier and busier, it's only natural for me to start getting a few things over the web.

In anycase,  I want to start to learn Ajax, since it appears to be the way things are headed these day. I think a combination of php and ajax might take me towards the almighty web 2.0 or semantic web that I keep hearing about.

Building Links

I was checking out similar site to mine. I exchanged links, and ended up on link page number 65. That really sucks. I need to be on page one of those links. I guess all of those link pages help to build up some pretty decent pagerank. I'll keep working on mine.

Google's FireFox Extensions

I'm really enjoying all of Google's FireFox extentions. They really make my web browser much more pleasurable. I think the best one of them is the Google Browser Sync. The last several years have been spent always trying to save my favorites and get things the same on my work and home computers. That is a challange no more. I think I'm going to buy some books so I can learn to create an extension or two myself.

I made a post on my Amazon Web Services blog earlier today. It had nothing to do the Google FireFox Extensions, but definately worth a look as always.

Weird Google Traffic Patterns

Very strangly, after receiving more visitors to my site in one day, I receive the biggest traffic drop. I've been working on my new site www.livewebshop.com. Funny thing is that I haven't made any changes this week, I'd been too busy. Seems like every keyword I was well placed for, fell off the map too.

I hope this is just a fluke, because yesterday I had over 500 unique visitors from Google alone, and today 14. Not sure what the deal is, but it's certainly a cruel trick.

I guess these are the important pages I care about:

Apparel - Apparel from LiveWebShop.com
Baby Stuff - Baby Stuff from LiveWebShop.com
Beauty - Beauty Products from LiveWebShop.com
Books - Books from LiveWebShop.com
Classical Music - Listen to and purchase Classical Music
DVD - Buy dvds online
Electronics - Find electronics online.
Gourmet Foods - Enjoy Gourmet Foods, everything from Seafood & Caviar to fine cheese and Chocolates.
Personal Health Care - Get all your personal health care products online.
Jewelry - Our jewelry store combines the best of the gold and diamond districts.
Kitchen and Housewares - Everything from your favorite stores like Bed Bath n Beyond
Magazines - All your favorite magazines in one convienient place.
Music - Get your music online at the LiveWebShop.com , everything from hard to find, top 100 and more.
Office Products - Get all of your office products and supplies online. We have more products than Office Depot and Staples combined.
Outdoor Living - Do you love the great outdoors? We have everything from Lawn & Garden Tools to Patio Furniture
PC Hardware - Build your own computer using our hugh selection of pc hardware.
Photo - Are you a photographer or amature one? We have all your photography supplies online. From cameras and film to digital media supplies.
Software - Software with a smile. Downloads and boxed packages available. Large library of software utilities, games and more.
Sporting Goods - For the great outdoors man, we have all your sporting goods covered. Our online store saves you a trip to the Sports Authority.
Tools and Hardware - With top brandname tools like Craftsman, Dewalt, Stanley and more. we are your choice for tools and hardware.
Video Games - Get the latest video games, strategy guides, reviews and more at LiveWebShop.com
Wireless - Getting a cell phone hasn\'t been easier. We have better prices then your local shops and a much larger selection. We carry all providers.

Lets pray that my traffic comes back up. I'll hold a vigil tonight with some candles, and some chants, lol.

Testing Out Google Sitemaps

I just created an automated method to produce Google sitemaps for LiveWebShop.com , hopefully it'll help Google learn about new pages a little easier. I'm scared that I actually have more pages in my site, then in my sitemap. I'd hate for Google to stop crawling my site in the traditional way and only rely on the sitemap.

In anycase, I'm using the method that Google has suggested on their site. I'm excited to see what if any benefit it'll give me. I just put in a new Automotive store on the site, so I want all of those product pages to get picked up as quickly as possible. I'll let you know if it worked as designed. So fax my indexing is comming along really good, got about 36,600 pages indexed so far. Only a few million more to go.

Google Checkout, Doomsday for Paypal

Google has finally released their long anticipated online payment service called Google Checkout. While Google has quitely downplayed the notion that it will be competing against Pay Pal, the dust has finally settled. Once again, Google has changed the landscape of the internet and how we do things online.  

I can imagine that right about now Pay Pal employees are all cashing in their stock options.

It's gonna be pretty pityful the way that Pay Pal will probably be seen as a relic of modern history in just a short matter of time. I can already see it now, Ebay using Google Checkout, lol, what a riot. While I can't predict exactly when it will happen, you can believe there will be an online battle for the rights to be king of online payment services. I'm wondering how much Pay Pal's stock will drop, and how fast.

PuReWebDev - Books - DVDs - Electronics - Pc Hardware

Remote Amazon Carts

I've just developed a nice little Amazon Remote Cart plugin for ASM2. That application, while excellent didn't come with it's own shopping cart, at least the developer wasn't offering it for free. Now the many sites that don't already have true shopping cart functionality with item update and checkout features using ASM2 can easily drop in my plugin. If you want to view it in action, check out LiveWebShop.com I'll be working on it more as time passes. I think I'll see if there is more demand for it. It's not a bad little start. Version 0.1 is fresh off of my Zend ide.

If you need support or assistance getting the plugin installed, check out the technology forums on www.pureehosting.com . If any other developers want to hook up and take this further, please feel to contact me.

My Amazon Cart

I finally finished putting in a shopping cart for www.livewebshop.com/ , it took me a little time to do. Problem was I was busy with work, and then I wasted time trying to use a php class someone else had created. It was much faster to just develop one myself.

Now that the cart is done, I shall see if I start getting any checkouts. I'm still surprised by the speed at which you can develop with Amazon's Web Services Api. It's beautiful.

Remote Amazon Shopping Cart

I've been noticing much better usage of the aws amazon remote shopping cart. I have one on AWSWebshop.com and it's been doing it's job rather well. Just the other day I sold over $400 dollars worth of knives from the kicthen department. I thought that was pretty cool.

I always enjoy when people use things that I work on. I still have to pretty it up some though, I think the presentation might be creating more abandoned carts then I'd like. I'm gonna have to send some retard to pickup all the empty carts in the parking lot, lol. It'd be nice if Amazon had some aws podcasts.

You know what's starting to suck more and more everyday, I'm trying to reseach something online, learn something new I can do with php, and I get all this ruby on rails crap popping up everywhere. These children are out of control and must be punished. I think it's nothing but a bunch of autogenerated code for aZzh01es. But that's just my opinion : )

I've come acrossed a promissing piece of code in here, but unfortunately, I've still got questions. More questions then answers, so I'm not going to have my remote cart for LiveWebShop.com this weekend like I wanted.

I'm gonna go see if I can find a good Amazon podcast, maybe learn something new.

The Office Move

This week has been very interesting, I got to setup a new TalkSwitch I was tired out of my mind after running Cat5 cable last Saturday. I'm glad the weekend is finally here, so, I can take somewhat of a break, I still have a chore to do over the weekend however, but it's only swapping out a motherboard and that's it.

Just created a new site

Just added another site into my little portfolio of web real estate. It's LiveWebShop.com , It's another site built for the Amazon associates program. It uses web services as well. I like the idea of being able to

make money

while relaxing.

This new site is pretty cool because it does fairly decent job of seperating functionality from design. There is a smarty template system being used, and some very fast code. I've got to put in an add-to-cart feature and a wishlist and mailing list integration.

The new site sports a blog theme and very seo friendly enhancements, including urls and pagination with sorting capability. It's just a start honestly, but I do have to hook up the graphics a little better. I'll post more shortly.

New Servers

I'll probably be in charge of setting up new servers in a datacenter near us, I've been thinking Dell servers:

Server (computing), a computer that provides services to other computers, or the software that runs on it

However, I've always enjoying my own computer systems. It's nothing to grab a few hard drives, memory, cpu's, motherboards and get crackin.

On the other hand, time is limited, keeping cost in check, vendor support, and partnerships are important. I especially like the fact that Dell is creating jobs for American workers.

Ahead of Plan: Dell Is Hiring More Workers, Adding Server Production Line at Winston-Salem Plant

on servers ," Dell explained. Simpson said building servers in the Triad "was something we certainly had thought about. As the plant ramped up, we decided it was a good idea."

I personally prefer to do business with companies that don't do all this outsourcing nonsense. If I ever have to call a company to do business with, and I hear anyone of middle eastern decent, you better believe I'm going to be spending my dollars elsewhere.

Lil Wayne Concert

I went to see Lil Wayne in concert last night at the Hard Rock in Universal Orlando.

The concert was awesome. I almost never go to concerts, but to see Lil Wayne, I made an exception.

Lil' Wayne hits the road (AP via Yahoo! News)

At 23 years old, Lil' Wayne has already coined a few indelible phrases. Few artists can claim the cultural impact of "bling bling," let alone "drop it like it's hot."

Here's a collection of Lil wayne and his work.

Another Great Game

I just bought the game a new game, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 3: Advanced Warfighter.

It's a pretty good game. I think the game caters to several groups, the one that just wants to blow stuff up, and the other group that wants to plan intelligently, how to blow stuff up, lol.

I'll post more about the game as I get further into it.

Search Engines Crashed My Server

Today has been pretty interesting. Early in the morning my server basically over loaded until all of the services crashed, including ssh. This is crazy as hell, but I'm not kidding when I say that 800+ Yahoo web crawlers like ( lj602050.inktomisearch.com ip 72.30.132.224 ) pounded on my server until all services died : (

I had to reboot my server and I had over 140 days up. My hosting clients can attest to that. On a positive note, I think that my technology site is getting pretty popular with the search engines. I just can't wait for more traffic. This big index or deep indexing was the first time that a search engine has done a crawl of that magnitude on my site, but I guess you'd have to do that to index millions of pages = )~

It was pretty obvious to me that I'm gonna have to step up to a dual xeon server. Preferably with hyper-threading technology. That's what I use for my production work systems.

My Web Services Empire

Slowly but surely my dream of fully automated recurring revenue from webservices, mainly Amazon Associates and Google Adsense are being realized. I've been setting up new projects such as my amazon web shop awswebshop.com.

The beauty is that when I'm at work, sleep, driving, shopping, my sites are driving sales and clicks. Definately, a beautiful thing. I've started getting some search engine traffic this week also, which is excellent. I've been doing some seo work to the new sites and was expecting to start seeing something soon.

On my technology site I sell a fair amount of books and dvds, so I'm hoping this newer site fully optimized from the start will kick some ass right from the gate.

The google adwords campaign I've setup has been a godsend. I'm making almost $1.30 for my amazon associates account for each $0.20 of google adwords ppc. Not on all keywords mind you, but a few of them. I'm still testing it out, but if all goes well, I could do this on a much larger scale.

I've got alot of work ahead of me if I'm going to get everything I'm trying to done. I want to add more features into my shops, that will hopefully make them more attractive. Mailinglists are also going to help out. Return visitors are always a good thing. I'll post again shortly with more non-sense.

PuReWebDev

Network Saturdays

This weekend I was at a client location, setting up some nice network upgrades. Setup a new domain, new antivirus, new remote control software and some two new uninterupted power supplies. It took over eight hours and that was mainly because of all the configuration work, and running up and down to each workstation repeatedly.

When everything was said and done, the systems all had new ip addresses, new dns server, domain controller, and a damn near upgrade on everything. Needless to say I was pretty tired when I finished. I ate McDonald's for lunch, even though I'd just seen the movie Super Size Me the night before. I really didn't want to eat McDonald's after seeing that movie. I'm a computer programmer already, I don't need anything else to make me fat.

PuReWebDev

New GigaBlash Search Results

One of my sites was just crawled by a GigaBlast search engine. It hasn't made the main stream and it already knows who to about the top technology keywords to, I linked to the page: GigaBlast Results for Information Technology Community

I liked the results already.

PuReWebDev

Good books for Amazon Associates

I've was just taking a look around and found what looked to be a pretty decent book on Amazon Hacks

 

I haven't read the whole thing myself, but just the topics covered:

How to use Amazon.com as a Web surfer, Web site publisher, and software developer. Detailed coverage goes to advanced product search techniques, managing the characteristics associated with your Amazon login, selling through Amazon Auctions and zShops, and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API for Perl, PHP, and Python.

I figured that between this one and this other book I saw, I'd be in pretty decent shape. 

Amazon Aws and Modrewrite

While search on google blogs, came acrossed this blog post:

Amazon AWS

The even offer an API to hook directly into their database of products. Commercial and open source software allows to build websites around the Amazon.com AWS API. The main problem with these sites is usually that they show dynamic URLs.

Which is a reason that you might want to use mod_rewrite.

 

Anyways, I've been working hard on my new little Amazon Web Shop. It's comming around pretty good. I love the fact that I can offer pretty much everything amazon offers. My next step is going to be working on a wish list I think.

Building An Amazon Web Shop with Amazon Web Services

After spending a long time planning and 2 days of actual execution I've created my new Amazon Web Shop. It's at www.awswebshop.com or www.amazonwebshop.com if that's easier for you to remember. The site uses amazon web service technology to deliver fresh product content directly from Amazon's massive product database.

I'm going to be building in a price comparison tool, wishlist, and date reminder for Birthdays and anniversaries. I think it's pretty cool working with PHP, MySQL, XML. At the same time I've been working to make the shop search engine friendly. I'll write more shortly.


PuReWebDev

Being The Problem Solver

Lots of people don't realize that when you are an information technology professional, nearly your entire day consists of problem solving. People come to you to look for answers, and they need them quick. It's important to be connected, so that people can access information as quickly as possible. This is one of the reasons I've got a PDA phone. Can you say putty in my pocket, LOL.

When I was a student, I thought that being a systems administrator would be glamorous. I always looked up to them for being super smart, and always knowing what to do. As a systems administrator myself, I come to realize that my job is far from glamorous. Many times it requires comming in on your day off, staying late, tons and tons of reading, and a heart dedicated to doing this kind of work.

Information technology professionals can enjoy the fact that your job today is not your job tomorrow. What I mean by that, is that technology changes so quickly on a day to day basis that the things you are working on today are going to be tomorrow's ancient history. So it is exciting to get to work on new things, which means that you shouldn't live and die by one routine. For my, it's a learning cycle. I learn the hot technology, support it, implement it, and move on to the next big thing when it gets outdated.

For me, there isn't anything like computers. It's such a hugh industry, with so much to do, that I can't see how anyone would get bored. Don't ask my girlfriend though if computers are boring. She'd probably tell you yes, and then go play Enemy Territory on her PC for hours, LOL.

Part of being a problem solver is having lots of good communication skills. Many times the people you are supporting are in remote locations, even in other countries. It's important to be a good listener. Listening is going to save you time, and save your company money. You've got to sweat the details, if you don't you'll miss that one important thing that the user did just before the system crashed.

Just as listening is important, the ability to give instruction to other people is also important. If you think that you are going to be a sys admin and stay in a dark room with just a PC, then you've got another thing comming. I'm still trying to find that job, and I've been doing this since '97. You are going to have to give instruction and guidance to end users (yuck). If you are like me, then maintaining your patience when the end user doubles his search box as an address bar is going to be your main challenge.

Chances are, you'll be working side by side with managers and company executives. This has lots of positive and negative things associated. One positive is that you work directly with the people that can make things happen, purchases, strategies, policies. A negative effect is probably having to be highly available, very quick on your toes, and being responsible for not just yourself, but probably for all the computer systems that the staff uses. Trust me, you don't want to have a department sitting on it's hands because the network went down. Your boss probably won't like that very much, considering all the money that still needs to be paid to employees that can't work.

Hopefully this post here will give you some insight into the day to day of a problem solver aka systems administrator. If you are into computer technology, please check out my information technology community.

My Productive Work Day

Today has been a great day. I got a lot of the small things that I wanted to do, out of the way. I fixed a few cron jobs, changed to a new backup schedule, deleted some old accounts, moved some code, and a few other small little things that I kept procrastinating about.

I also found the time to help a few new clients get started. All in all, it's been a pretty rewarding day. I was also surprised to see I was doing well in all my pay per click campaigns. I manage Adwords for several clients, and also run Google Adsense on my sites too. It's lots of work, but also lots of fun. With the adsense running on my network of sites, it's nice to see the clicks comming through.

A quick top command reassures me that I'm still a pretty decent administrator

22:18:32 up 87 days, 9:40, 1 user, load average: 0.61, 0.72, 0.77

The last time one of my Linux servers was rebooted was when a datacenter tech mistakenly rebooted my server when his monitoring software malfunctioned and thought my box went down. It still pisses me off because I already had almost 300 days of uptime. I still love my datacenter, fastservers.net because they do have my back incase something were to go wrong. Now, that tech did feel embarrassed after he'd rebooted my server, but he does have my respect because he was cool enough to upgrade my Def Con service level. That was very nice of him.

Damn, as if my day wasn't already great, a new Fire Fox entension upgrade fixed my flash support. Now I'm grinning, lol. I guess I should finish this blog post before something bad does happen. The time.... it's always working against me.

My New RSS Network

I've been working on my rss news network. Just launched three new sites in one month. Four if I count this blog. I've been coding a news aggregation system. I'd like to build up a few more sites. Hopefully I can add lots of cool features. Right now I've just got the basics in place, but shortly there will be tons of easily browsable content.

If anyone is interested in checking it out, I did the following three new sites. Adsense News Adsense-News.com is all about organizing news, guides and information about google adsense. I know there's lot of google adsense resource sites out there, but this is one more. I really think that Adsense has been a breakthru program that truly changes the economic balance for the small time webmaster like myself. Google adsense is a great program, which is the reason I created my next site Yahoo Publisher Network News yahooypnnews.com - It wouldn't be fair if I just made a site for adsense, when YPN is also an excellent program. Yahoo YPN is a relatively new program, and therefore there isn't lots of places to get decent information about it (problem solved). I figured that I'd probably be one of the very first sites dedicated to Yahoo Publisher Network. In the future, when this blog post is logged by a million rss aggregators and makes it's way to you, you can look it up for me and let me know if I was really the first.

Lastly I created the rss clearinghouse rssclearinghouse.com . The rss clearinghouse is about bringing everyone's news to one central location, where if I find the time, everything could be organized and easily searchable. I intend to create features such as feed mix, and custom feeds from multiple locations. It's pretty sweet being able to have that much uncensored news all in one shot. Very refreshing. If you have any recommendations, I'd definately invite you to post a reply.