Mark Cole

Well hello dear and not so dear readers. It seems yet again I am back. I sold my old theme which I had handcrafted into wordpress. So I am back onto the default wordpress theme. I have been working on my design skills and trying to pull a theme out but creativity isn’t really my thing so I am having troubles. I am sure one day I will get there and design a theme I like.

As usualy I am back and will be blogging both about the web and about my personal life. Something has changed with the blog. You probably won’t notice but we are not hosted by HostedFX. This will mean less downtime as my previous host started to get into the routine of downtime. I would like to thank HostedFX and I would definetly recommend them to anyone in need of a host. I had a slight problem the other day but I reported it and it was fixed really quick. For this I am greatful.

As usual I guess I am still freelancing in my PSD to XHTML/CSS and PSD to Wordpress and even PSD to vBulletin. Seeing as I am on this theme if any designer wants to collaborate i.e. I code a couple of their designs and they make me a custom design I would be really happy to oblige.

In personal news, I broke my tooth yesterday and it hurts like hell. Thats not really news. Apart from that all thats going on in my personal life is that its now the summer holidays. So I have nothing to do as usual.

Remember to subscribe to the RSS and follow me on twitter. Thats all for now :]

:3 Yeah thats right I just got my laptop and it is so epic. I am fucking loving it! excuse my french. It is a HP Compaq 6720s and it is pretty awesome assuming it was free. I have vista on it but I am going to install Debian or Ubuntu :].

I know its a really short update but I will post more as soon.

Well the web junkie is going to college apparently :]. Today I went to Macduff (a town not too far from where I live). And I had a formal interview so I now have a place at college which I have accepted.

I am going to do Business and Administrative studies. Not something you’d expect from a brilliant web developer like me eh? Alot of people expected me to do computing. I would have loved to do computing. However I know all I need to know about computing. Although I fantasize about starting a web development company I know it’s not going to happen. There are so many out there so I don’t think it’s viable for me to start one.

I would however like to start some websites that would generate revenue and it would be great if they became so successful it turned into a full time job and paid like a full time job would. Sadly I don’t have the funding at the moment to make any of my website ideas a reality. Maybe in the future I will when I get a job and have some funding to startup some websites. For now I will just have to stick with this blog. It seems like you are stuck with me readers :].

Well today is the day we have been waiting for. The release of Firefox 3!. And it was supposed to release around 10 minutes ago. However so far the sites haven’t been loading. Seems they have been overloaded? x]

Just heard an awesome suggestion in IRC. Mozilla should put up a rick roll. Just a video of Rick Astley singing. No doubt it would be the greatest Rick Roll

Update: I finally got firefox theme. And I have found the default theme to be ugly as sin. The bookmarks icons for RSS are especially bad. I better find a good theme.

I thought I would write a quick note telling my readers about Sleepycast. Sleepycast is a tech podcast hosted by four very technical hosts ;). Brad Purchase, Rowan Henderson, Mike Morris and Naresh Chandranatha. You should all check out the sleepycast site as I find their podcast’s interesting and funny. I can’t wait for episode three :D.

Ok to starting a website is a relatively simple thing to do. Although people usually run into problems. Therefore I will walk you through creating a simple website.

The first thing you will need is a domain name. I suggest Namecheap. Think of a name that is short, memorable and most of all will relate to your website. If you want a personal blog then maybe you could try and register yourname.com. As it will “protect” your web identity so to speak. Domain names are relatively cheap and most common TLD’s (.com, .net, .org) cost less than $10.

Once your domain name has been registered you will need a web host. I suggest trying out BlueFur webhosting who are very reliable from what I hear. They currently host many big sites such as John Chow. Once ordered you should get an email telling you the nameservers. You then go back to namecheap and change your nameservers to the ones given to you by your host.

Now that we have your hosting setup you can go into your public_html folder and add a basic holding. Create an index.html file. Open it and put in any HTML you want.

In part 2 learn to -

• Install some preinstalled scripts
• How and Where to learn PHP
• How to make a design for your website

Well as you may have noticed my blog has been down for over a week. My host has been having some problems so sadly I have been down. I am so sorry. I would have put it on another host but at the moment I have no money. Therefore I had to wait. I am hopefully moving host soon though.

I will post a new post very soon.

Today I am going to talk about the wonderful thing that is: Mint. I have been using Mint since December 2007 and it has been brilliant. It keeps track of all the traffic coming to my site. It even makes some awesome little graphs. These graphs tell you all about your traffic. They look brilliant and they are easy to read.

The list of mint features is pretty big. Mint currently tracks refferers, searches from known search engines, which pages are visited, which pages have been visited most and numerous other things such as browser agents.

A feature that I just realised Mint had is RSS Feeds. RSS feeds allows you to do things with your Mint Data. Perhaps create some application that helps you with traffic goals. Or to show off your traffic to the world.

Mint has alot of awesome features and the ability to add more features with what they call “peppers”. Peppers are basically Mint Plugins and there are loads of them.

Mint is developed by Shaun Inman who has done a brilliant job with the software which is pretty darn cheap at $30 a license. I would rate it well above the free alternatives such as google analytics and well worth the investment.

On this blog a very long time ago I had quite a few posts on advertising. A main one was one on Advertising types. Recently I have been getting quite a few hits from google looking for this post. Seeing as it has long since been deleted I decided to write a new one.

When advertising your website there are four main types of Advertising you can use.

1. PPC - Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is probably the easiest to understand of all advertising types. You pay for each unique click to your advertisement. Most ad companies provide this service. I’d say this is the most reliable type of advertising. You pay for what you get. If I pay for 100 PPC clicks I get 100 unique visitors. It’s simple and it’s efficient. And by far one of my favourite types of advertising.

2. CPA - Cost Per Action

Cost Per Action basically means you pay a company for each action someone they have referred does. For example you could set it up so you pay for every time a user registers on your site. This is also a pretty good type of advertising. However I believe if you are paying them to register people may just sign up and not come back. Just to get money. This type of advertising is favored by affiliate marketing companies. This can be quite useful if used in a smart way.

3. CPM - Cost Per Thousand Impressions

This is when you pay for each time a page is viewed with your ad on it. This can be very unreliable as they may get 100,000 impressions but only 50 or so decide to click your ad. Impressions are usually quite cheap to buy and are sold in lots of 1000 to make it profitable for the people selling. I don’t like this type of advertising as you can never guarantee if people will click so it is quite a big gamble.

4. Private Ad Sales

A private ad sale is when you pay a website to have your ad on for a certain amount of time. These are generally 125×125 ad’s or 468×60 ad’s. They can cost anywhere from $5 per to over $1000 depending on the popularity of the site. You really have to find out the site’s traffic and take a guess on whether or not you think it will be worth it.

And that is basically all the post had in it. Woo for ad’s eh?

Well I submitted my design to WeLoveWP and a few other CSS Galleries a couple of days ago. I didn’t actually expect that I would get accepted as my design is rather rubbish in comparison to others their.

However today my design got accepted on WeLoveWP. The design is here! Rate it?