The Fall Of Troy just made their status as “CD band”..
Blogged on April 29th, 2007 at 6:40pmJust been listening to The Fall Of Troy on YouTube, live. I’ve been listening to them on MP3 for about a year now, and they’re one of those bands that have great music but not so amazing vocals. I’ve just discovered just how polished their vocals are on CD, as live their vocals sound like two poor old men with skunks crammed down their throats. I guess if you don’t believe me then you’ll have to believe this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTnvYn5HRYI
I have money to spend. Dilemma time..
Blogged on April 26th, 2007 at 8:05pmFollowing yesterday’s earnings of in excess of $50, it’s meant that my AdSense earnings have rolled past the $100 mark. For any web geek or AdSense enthusiast, that would suggest that sometime next month it’s payday for me. Payday with payments of $120, which make about £60 given current exchange rates, perhaps a bit more.
AdSense is the only reason why I semi hope the dollar gets its own back on the rest of the world markets. Unfortunately this probably won’t be the case before I get paid, but £60 is a lot of money to a 16 year old, or at least me, anyway.
I’m stuck on what to spend it on. Earlier in the day I bought a 5.1 sound system as well as a dual headed graphics card, which means in the future I’ll be able to connect another monitor up to my current dream machine. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it, my dad offered to slap them on the plastic for me. Another £40 in debt thanks to eBuyer dot com. He didn’t even accept any form of payment from me, but I slipped him a tenner in his coat pocket for the good deed. Hopefully he’ll spend it on something productive, like a VCR player to play the 12 hours of Frasier I bought him at Christmas.
I’ve told myself many times that it would be a good idea to get some new clothes. Since college is coming up in September, which believe it or not is only four months away, I’ll need to wear more diverse clothing than tshirt and jeans. Infact, the word “diverse” in style terms right now means “more than one choice of tshirt in a week.” I’m trying to kick the habit of black tshirt and jeans, and so far I’m doing quite well. My conscience is yelling out to me “wear something other than black, you wannabe SAS moron!”
I guess I have the incentive to buy a new monitor now anyway. However, I’ve become a bit of a power consumption headcase. I turned down buying a dual core processor earlier because the wattage rate almost doubled. “Where am I going to plug in that second socket for my monitor?”, I ask myself. Ah well, I’d probably better give that a miss.
So, back onto clothing. I need more of it. However, my underwear selection is pretty good: I have about 14 pairs of boxers.
I could, on the other hand, just purchase some advertising for my supercool new websites. Overall I will have something like £130 in the bank, not including the change scattered over my floor or under my carpet.
Well, there’s my dilemma for you. Throw stuff at me. Well, not literally please.
CSS Slicing Guide
Blogged on April 25th, 2007 at 11:31amMy latest project that hasn’t got anything to do with clients or AvengeX is CSS Slicing Guide. It’s basically a site based around one tutorial: how to slice your Photoshop layout into CSS and XHTML.
The guide is aimed at newbie webmasters mostly, and so far the audience has received it quite well. I have learned a few things from the CSS gods in the publishing of the site and I’m working on making it better that way too. I’m not sure if I want to flog the site on Sitepoint or elsewhere after a few months, as I want to see how well it does in terms of advertising revenue first. Either way, I think it’s quite a good addition to a portfolio as a quick job, as the guide itself only took about 4 or 5 days to write on and off.
The design is simple small on the code size, and I hope this will give it a healthy advantage in the SEO department. The layout image is only 60kb and that’s it - the rest is done with text, allowing for the content to really be king in this scenario.
The backend is very simple and lightweight - naturally written in PHP. Dynamic titles using arrays, and then including the relevant stage with a mod_rewrite interface for URLs. All of the editing is done by me on Dreamweaver and not much is automated apart from that, but it works, and there’s no need for a user system or anything.
As for marketting.. this is where the challenge begins. I submitted it to Good-Tutorials, Digg and Slashdot yesterday, but it only made 12 Diggs so far, and only made it into the Firehose at Slashdot. As for Good-Tutorials, I’m not expecting anything promising from there since the moderators are pretty harsh guys. Considering the traffic for the first day, looking at 200 unique visitors wasn’t so bad. I’ve yet to get a decent idea of what the revenue will be like. I’m also considering investing on a little bit of advertising in the future, perhaps on AdWords or privately arranged advertising elsewhere. Not to mention it will be getting a link in the AvengeX newsletter in the next few days when I’ve written it. I’ve also submitted it to Pixel2Life, in the hope that Mr Dan Richard won’t get annoyed since I’m technically competing with him now.
The money spent on the project is something like £12, if you count all the domains and exclude the hosting. I hope to start to make a profit out of it in three months.
That’s about it for CSS Slicing Guide, when more news comes through I’ll be posting it here.
Edit! It’s currently way past the 400 Diggs mark on Digg.com, which is an amazing wow for me as it’s my first time anything I’ve posted has got so popular. Within the past 5 minutes it’s almost got past the 500 mark too!
If you’d like to contribute to the Digg effect, point yourself to the link below:
http://www.digg.com/design/Learn_to_professionally_slice_in_CSS_with_this_9_page_full_featured_guide
Edit 2: The Digg effect is setting in.. not too sure how well ikhost is handling the traffic spike but the site seems to be up for me still, and the Diggs are hitting the 800 mark now.
Edit 3: Dear God. We’re now past the 2200 Diggs mark and I am so chuffed! This will definitely help Google index it, and all the rest! I’ve decided this site will be a keeper, since I’ve got good feedback through email on the site and it makes me warm and fuzzy inside to get all the compliments and the feeling I actually help people. (I also guess $30 in a day is pretty good too, cheers Digg!)
First things first..
Blogged on April 25th, 2007 at 11:17amWelcome to the “new” Alt. Virtue. Originally this site was going to turn into an internet radio station, but since those sort of ideas hardly ever take off, the idea quickly got ditched. Also if I would have done something like that, the RIAA would have cast their fishing rod across the great Atlantic Ocean and killed me off. So, since everyone else appears to have a blog and it’s a pretty good way to ramble about nothing, I thought I’d better get one set up too.
It’s also a good time to get myself familiarized with Wordpress too.
This blog will cover news about my site network, The Alcatomic Network, other technical and web design related things that follow my long path on the road to knowing everything about it.
There isn’t really much to write about right now, so I’m going to start thinking about finding a better theme than Kubrick to use on this, so, later on.