Programming Coffee

I ran across this article that discusses why Google would possibly be offering up such a great service without a means to capitalize from it. They note that it’s similar to Google having “a tight grip on an empty sack”, and that even though it is *empty* right now (no money directly being made from Google News), that inevitably other competitors will want that “empty sack”.

My thoughts? Why does Google need to make money off a product to legitimize it? I like Google. I think they provide the best search engine available. All of their extra services (Google Maps, Google Suggest, Google News, Gmail, etc) just give more credibility to Google. Besides, I’m sure Google has made a ton of money from Google News (indirectly).

I have been running Google AdSense for almost 1 full year now. I haven’t really done it to make any money, but to learn about Google AdSense, and to get my feet wet in advertising. Just a couple days ago, I received my 14th click… ever. With close to 2500 total impressions, this puts me at .6% CTR.

Where are my ads placed? I have one where WordPressDash is located, and another one at my Online Christmas Gift List site. They are both 1-ad units, and receive a very small amount of traffic (as noted by the impressions).

Now that I’ve made my first $1 from Google, I think I have $99 more to go before they will throw a check my way. What’s the rush you ask? There are other webmasters out there (currently out of my league) that are making $50 per day from AdSense. I might not be able to produce those sort of numbers right now, but I think I am an intelligent enough guy to start working towards that goal.

How will I get there? Creating websites that people will actually use. Not exactly a hard task, but definately a time-consuming one. I’ve learned that there is someone out there to buy any product, no matter how useless or overpriced. My line of thinking says, give the consumer something useful at a decent price, and you will attract buyers. Do I want to control the market completely? Well, that would be nice now wouldn’t it? Really though, all you have to do is get enough customers to cover your development costs, and most of your revenue from that point on will be pure profit (minus hosting, transactional costs, etc). Thats the great thing about operating an ebusiness of your own.

Another way to get your blog noticed (the first way being to submit to the blog directories… aka the blog mafia), is to get out and have your RSS feed syndicated. Here are some more places to have your RSS feed syndicated and your blog linked.

syndic8.com
feedster.com

2rss.com

Today is the day that the Paniris Web Development paperwork gets filed (i swear… no more foot dragging). This means that hopefully by the week’s end, I can start making some purchases in the businesses name. My first project Online Christmas Gift List will be receiving a MAJOR overhaul. I’m talking about new graphic design, new programming, and even a new domain (I’ll announce that AFTER I actually purchase it). And all of this of course needs to be completed within a month’s time (My birthday is my personal deadline.. Aug. 22nd). This aint no joke folks… A full site redesigned and programmed, not to mention some good link building really needs to happen to get my PR up (I’d LOVE to get a PR5 for this site…). I’m trying to stay with the low-cost link directories & plain old link trading, but I might actually have to purchase some text links (on good PR sites of course) until the end of the year. And then of course you have google adwords. I will be using google adwords to find out the *sweet spot* for the price on the Christmas List. Can’t charge too much, or people won’t buy. It’s all a learning process though, so If no one buys I will be dissapointed, but not completely crushed.

Oh yeah, If anyone out there is interested in putting up a text link on their site, let me know and we’ll talk about how I might be able to compensate you. (Leave comment!)

- Kyle

I decided to ignore my awstats for a while, and try out ShortStat by Shaun Inman. And then use the ShortStat Widget to moniter my stats from my dashboard. I’ve heard that its a good simple stats program… Only time will tell.

WordPress, in conjunction with a couple Ecto testers have worked together to create a patch to the WordPress 1.5.1.3 release that allows WordPress to play nicely with its XML-RPC counterparts. Now WordPressDash, and other XML-RPC clients of WordPress can resume daily activities. Thanks to WordPress and the Ecto testers for addressing this quicly. The patch can be downloaded on the Ecto site.

Thanks to Cory Cooper (if you want me to link, let me know), I have been alerted to the fact that WordPress version 1.5.1.3 breaks WordPressDash. Ok, so it really doesn’t break it, it just injured it a little. Something changed in the way posts are handled (i’m not sure if it’s an xml-rpc thing or not), but when you post to a blog the xmlhttprequest receives a 404 “Page not found”. Its the weirdest thing too, because the post actually goes through, but the categories won’t set. To make things more confusing, the 404 is generated on the xmlhttprequest to actually make the post, not to set the categories…
I’ve got a support thread started to try and get to the bottom of this. And I’m crossing my fingers that the solution will be backwards compatible.

So rumor has it that Steve Jobs is just as heartless as Bill Gates. While that may be true, you have to give credit to Jobs. He personally called the father of the teen who was killed for his iPod to give his condolences. So today my hat goes off for Steve Jobs.

I have had a lot of good feedback for WordPressDash. The community wanted to post to multiple categories, so I gave them that support. The community had trouble configuring their widget, so I enhanced error reporting. Now the community wants UTF-8 support and QuickTags. Well, I will do my best to make WordPressDash UTF-8 compliant. QuickTags? Maybe not. Due to Safari’s inferior cursor position handling in textarea’s, Quicktags were actually turned off for Safari users in Wordpress 1.5. And According to another post about quicktags in safari.

..until they allow you to get and set cursor position and selection in a TEXTAREA, the Quicktags will suck on Safari.
Alex King

And for those wondering what quicktags in safari has to do with quicktags in my WordPressDash widget, dashboard widgets use the same engine as safari

According to Daring Fireball, Dashboard widgets stemmed from an old apple application called Desk Accessories and not the cross-platform Konfabulator. Daring Fireball goes on to state that had Konfabulator fit the needs that apple was looking for, then Apple would have either bought Konfabulator, or hired the development team to work on Dashboard. However, Apple wanted something that was more tightly integrated with the OS, and that had better resource consumption and smaller footprints.
Either way, Im glad I don’t need to write custom XML and custom Javascript in order to write software for a platform that I have to pay for (granted, I do have to pay for Tiger, but I’m getting a lot more than just a widget runtime environment…).