Can’t Get Rich

Alright, I’m doing it. I’m going to kick the habit. I’ve mentioned before that I have an serious addiction to caffeine (I ingest 300+ mg daily). If I don’t get my daily dose, I get incredibly ‘foggy’ and have severe, pulsating headaches. I’ve been dealing with this on and off for the past few years and this time, I’m done. I’ve decided to go cold turkey. No backing down to lower doses, I’m just dropping the habit.

Plus I have 200 aspirin sitting right here on my desk. That always helps.

What does this have to do with not getting rich? Well, for starters, there’s all the money I spend on Mountain Dew and Vault each week. Then there’s the fact that I can’t concentrate on anything if I go for more than 3 waking hours without a can of green caffeinated liquid. Finally, I think this will help me in the long run with peer-to-peer interactions. I tend to get cranky if I’m un-caffeinated.

You know what that means, right? This week will be packed with angry, cranky posts that will take me hours to write due to lack of concentration and headaches! Good times.

Anybody else have any bad habits they’d like to drop? If you’re not sure, take a look at how much it’s costing you each week, and then ask your significant other if you’d be better off without it. A high $$$ value plus a ‘yes’ from a girlfriend equals a habit you need to drop. Make sure that you have someone who can hold you accountable, though. Otherwise, it’s too easy to slip back into the old routine.

On a related note, I need a new signature drink. This blog used to be powered by Vault, but that’s going to change. Any suggestions?

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I hate copycats. I especially hate John Chow copycats, and for a long time, I considered them to be the bottom of the blogger barrel. Then, I found this site: Chowmoney. A horrible amalgamation of John Chow and Shoemoney. Someone thinks they’re being clever with their naming conventions, but John Cow cornered that market a long time ago.

About the author

Truly, the stuff of nightmares. The author of this blog is a character known as Chowmoney, a man who claims that he is the illegitimate offspring of John Chow and Shoemoney. He created his blog to make it big, just like his two Dads. Claiming that he will take over the world one cent at a time, Chowmoney started his little blog…and then fell flat on his face.

Thankfully

It looks like this site hasn’t been updated since October. Phew, the Internet dodged a bullet there. Think of all the space this guy could have wasted. In fact, it looks like the author only wrote seven entries before getting bored and wandering off. Someone obviously didn’t think their plan through.

Parody blogs

There’s nothing wrong with a parody blog as long as it has something interesting to say. John Cow, which started out as a parody of John Chow, is now (in my opinion) a better site than its parent. While Chow talks about what he had for dinner last night, Cow talks about marketing ideas and new products. In fact, he hardly references John Chow at all anymore. That’s what I like to see: A parody site that can stand on it’s own two feet (hooves?). Maybe if Chowmoney had followed through, he could have reached that critical tipping point, but I guess we’ll never know.

Frankly, I’m relieved. I’d hate to see any other childhood pictures of the bastard offspring of Chow and Shoe.

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When I first discovered Entrecard, I thought it was a great idea. After acquiring enough credits, I could advertise on big sites like John Chow and Shoemoney! Think of all the traffic I’d be getting! For free!

Well, that was the theory anyway. Reality hasn’t quite lived up to the hype.

First of all, even though I have plenty of credits, I can’t ever seem to get good value from them. Big sites always seem to have their ad queues full, and there’s really no point in advertising on tiny blogs. The two times I did manage to apply for an ad spot on a big site, both ads were declined. I never really understood that, because those same sites were plugging Entrecard as a great way for small blogs like mine to get free traffic from the big guys.

Secondly, I’m a little irked at the card-dropping crowd. You know, the ones who pop in, drop their card, and leave without reading anything. Junk traffic. I’m curious as to whether or not I’ve gotten any returning readers from that crowd. If so, there can’t be more than two or three. I’m thinking of redirecting all of the traffic I get from the main Entrecard site to a different page that says “If you’re just here to drop your card, have fun finding the real button.” That page then automatically forwards them to this. Maybe I’ll throw in a few Adsense blocks too. Who knows, it could end up being the most profitable part of this site.

I just feel like I’m not getting any measurable results from Entrecard. If you found this site through Entrecard, please, comment and let me know. If I find that I’ve gotten at least ten regular readers this way, I’ll keep the Entrecard widget. If not, well, it’ll go the same way as my Blogrush widget.

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It’s time we had a chat.

13%. That’s how many of you are still using Internet Explorer. Seriously guys, this needs to stop. IE7 may be the biggest waste of development time in the history of software. Between eating up all half of your RAM, crashing for no apparent reason, ignoring web standards, and being more susceptible to spyware and viruses than any other browser on the market, it’s a small miracle that anybody uses it at all. IE6 is old news, and to the one person out there still using IE5.5: Are you on Windows 95 or what?

I guess a few of you haven’t yet seen the light, so let me go over some alternatives:

Firefox

By far the most popular alternative to IE. Visually, it’s pretty much exactly the same as IE6. Underneath, it’s got a lot fewer security holes, a built-in RSS reader, support for plugins, etc. It’s fast, stable, and reliable. I haven’t had a single popup in years. You couldn’t pay me to go back to IE. Firefox 2.0.0.11 can be downloaded here.

Opera

Opera is pretty cool, if a little flaky at times. It’s incredibly lightweight and has tons of features, including built-in mail and bittorrent clients. All of that in 4.7 MB. That’s pretty impressive. I haven’t used Opera in awhile, so I’m not up to date on the newest features, but my favorite feature by far is the gesture browsing. Want to go back a page? Don’t click the back button, hold in the mouse button, gesture to the left, and then release the mouse button. It takes some getting used to but it’s pretty cool. You can download Opera here.

Safari

Personally, I hate Safari, but I do have some Mac readers out there. Also, if you weren’t aware, Safari is now available on Windows as well. The only time I’d ever use Safari is if I had to choose between it and IE7. Do yourself a favor and download Firefox instead. If that’s not an option, and you really don’t want to play with Opera, you can give Safari a try.

The bottom line

It almost goes without saying that the previous three browsers are much more secure than Internet Explorer. I’ve heard that Microsoft’s IE development team is actually trying to get their act together with IE8, but until then, your best bet is to use one of the above. I want to see that 13% drop to 5% or lower.

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There are literally thousands of contest blogs online. There’s only one that I’m subscribed to (look at my middle ad block). Back when I held my contest, I shuddered a little each time a contest blog entered. Why? Because 99% of them are useless. Read on.

Define “contest blog”

To me, a contest blog is a blog that lacks any real content and exists solely to enter other blogging contests. You know, the contests that are held to generate backlinks (write a post about my contest for an entry, etc). When blog owners hold these contests, they’re looking for two things:

1. Potential new readers referred from the entering blog.
2. A backlink to increase their Google page rank or Technorati score.

Based on those two criterion, an example of a perfect entry would be a 200 word post from John Chow or Shoemoney dedicated to the contest. This would give you a high-value backlink and a potential flood of visitors.

It’s a little disappointing when half of the entries in a contest come from blogspot blogs with a Technorati ranking of 2,000,000 and three readers. Don’t get me wrong, having a bigger contest blog plug your contest is potentially great, as it can send dozens, or even hundreds of readers to your site, but for every big contest blog there’s 1,000 little contest blogs. Besides, most of that traffic never comes back after the contest is over, and that can be very disappointing for new bloggers.

A new code

Would it be elitist to demand a certain level of quality from people who want to enter a blogging contest? Nothing too complex, I’m thinking something along the lines of:

• Actual content
• A certain number of readers (in case it’s a pure contest blog)
• Can’t be hosted on a free service (Xanga, blogspot, livejournal, etc)

The last one would exclude a lot of people, and plenty of blogspot blogs have good content, so maybe I shouldn’t go that far. In any case, I’d like to hear some opinions on the matter.

Hey, I wrote a guest post for the University Kid. Go read!

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