FreddieFreeloader   Rantings of a paranoid computer hobbyist

Just read this article “Whirlwind week for Michael Phelps’ mom” and was surprised that Michael was diagnosed ADHD as a child. I have a very hyperactive nephew. We haven’t brought him yet for diagnosis and we’re all scared about it. But after reading this article and realizing that ADHD isn’t as serious with the proper guidance (he won 8 gold medals for crissake!).

My nephew is  a sweet boy. He just couldn’t control his impulses most of the time. I’m not sure if he’s ADHD but we’re considering it. We love him a lot. Most of the time we try to understand. “Hey he’s just a kid, he’ll grow over it.” But sometimes it just gets too much. We don’t spank him. We just try to stay quiet and talk to him in a low voice so he wouldn’t be agitated so much. Sometimes it works. The words come through and he listens. But not every time.

One way to make money online for free is to sell things. You can find things to sell through affiliate marketing. This simply means that you promote the products that somebody is selling and for every sale that comes through by way of your site — you get paid!

These are some of the tried and true Affiliates:

Adbrite
Auction ads
Fair Ads Network
Google Adsense
Widgetbucks

After registering for these affiliates, all you need to do is drive traffic to your site. Easy? Well more like “easier said than done”.

But before driving traffic into your site, you need to know what products currently sells. Research the trend on what’s currently “hot”. If you decide on what product you’ll sell, go to Clickbank to find those products. Note: it is very important that you try to promote only one product when you are starting in affiliate marketing so you can focus on that product more before taking on another product that sells.

So now it’s time to drive traffic to your site. You can do this by paying for it OR by doing it the free way. I’ll talk about doing it for free here.

1. Create a lens on squidoo.

Basically a lens on squidoo is your collection of similar things on one subject that you think describes that subject well. It’s sort of a bookmark but better. A lens is like a shoebox where you put things that is a nice reference for that particular subject. More on this at Squidoo’s FAQ . So how will this drive traffic to your site? Let’s say you are quite expert on safe home computing and you write an article about it. You can create a squidoo lens about safe computing practices and include your own article in that. When people look for things like that there’s a high chance that they will find your article.

2. Writing keyword-optimized articles.

Research and gather keywords that are related to the products that you are promoting. Write an article for each keyword and make sure that it gets to prominent pages of search engines.

3. Create a report.

Create a short report which talk about the topic or product that you are promoting. Use free source to convert it to a PDF file, and distribute it for free on the Internet.

4. Forum postings.

Join relevant forums and include a signature to your affiliate product pages. Make sure that you do not spam but contribute informative ideas to the forum.

5. Classified ads.

Post free ads talking about the product that you are promoting on popular classified sites such as Craigslist.
These are just some free ways to drive traffic to your affiliate product pages. The quality of the product that you are promoting also plays a big part on whether you will get any sales out of it.

http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/

From their site:

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

How do I use it?

Using Adeona only requires downloading and installing a small software client. Adeona is free to use.

Since browser history we all have experienced the benefits of bookmarks. But as people are getting more and more mobile, we need a way to access our bookmarks anywhere in the world. Well there are a lot of online bookmarking sites out there. Most of the popular ones are social bookmarking sites. What are they? They are simply online bookmarks that people share with others. You can search these bookmarks. The benefit of this social bookmarks is that you are sure that actual persons made those bookmarks (as opposed to a google search). My preferred social bookmarking site is del.icio.us. I search there if google’s searches aren’t that fine tuned to what I need.

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If you’re not hiding under a rock for the past 10 years, then you’re familiar with forums and BB codes, right? Most forum junkies out there are already savvy in personalizing their signatures. They are mostly cleverly-animated gifs and placed in the signature by using the [img][/img] and [url][/url] BBcodes.

Well today I’ll teach you how you can convert these spiffy signatures into money through Paypal!

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I used to maintain a blog in Google’s Blogger. But eversince I discovered how fun Wordpress can be I have since then transfered. But blogger is a neat blogging app that’s has a no-frills setup that even your grandmother can do. For this reason alone blogger is still quite popular for the common internet-junkie.

One drawback about Blogger is that you don’t have control of its database. It just presents you with a cute web-based GUI and that’s all you will get. And because blogging in Blogger is quite easy, you’ll be surprised that you have more than a hundred posts!

So you want to back all that up in your hardrive so you’d get that warm and cozy feeling that even if Blogger goes down (however remote that is) and takes your blog with you, you still have all your posts, pictures, rants saved up in your hardrive.

So how do you backup Blogger?

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1. Apply online for an EON Cybercard account at unionbankph.com.

2. Wait for 2 weeks for processing.

3. Go to the branch you registered and claim your card. Bring 2 valid ID’s and Php 350.

4. Deposit Php 200 to your EON Cybercard account. Either via ATM or teller.

5. Login to your Paypal account and verify by entering your EON Cybercard as a debit card.

6. As soon as a message is sent to your paypal email telling you that you have verified your debit card, login to your EON Cybercard account at unionbankph.com.

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I’ve been mucking around with Drupal for a few days and I just couldn’t get the whole flow of the thing. I mean sure I know how to create content and all that but it comes out as unnatural. I don’t mean to diss Drupal, far from it. I have seen drupal sample sites and they are so nice to gawk at. But the thing is I can’t bring myself to be interested in how I can make my site in it. I am more inclined to work on something that sparks my interest. The shortcoming is clearly mine not Drupal’s.

So while looking for cute svg icons I stumbled into free-source.net. I was just amazed at how the site looked like. Talk about pure eye-candy. When I found out it was made with e107, I dumbly thought about Enlightenment, the nice window manager for *nix. Well it’s not that far in terms of beauty.

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Funny downtime message at http://isohunt.com

Ever had the dilemma of downloading files numbered sequencially without clicking each one of them and saving them? Everybody knows how robotic this task is especially if you have more than a handful of files to download. Well yes you can use download managers and browser plugins (Firefox’s DownloadThemAll!) but what if the file’s link is deeply embedded in the html file (eg: a photo gallery)?

If you have access to some type of unix console (linux, mac, windows via cygwin), you have the option to use the venerable wget. But using wget we have to make a script to automatically generate the sequencial filenames. Possible but, too much work.

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