The BookmarkMoney Blog

Image via Wikipedia

This is a quick post just to say that I’m alive. While I was browsing the Library of Congress’ blog, I came across this awesome post: The Library of Congress acquired 24 pages of original 1962 drawings from “Amazing Fantasy #15.”

Amazing Fantasy #15 was the first appearance of Spider Man, and spawned one of the most prolific comic characters of all time. Although I’ve never really been a big fan of Spider Man, the thought of seeing these pages in person makes my fatty little fanboy heart dance with glee.

If the Library of Congress deemed these pages worthy of inclusion, perhaps that means comic books have finally become a ‘legitimate’ art form.

Tags: Books by Jotun
No Comments »

Michael Martine of Remarkablogger shares his tips at Pure Blogging on how to make your tutorials must have resources.

Online Opportunity lets us know how to pick the subject when writing an ebook. I came across this about halfway through writing my own ebook. It wouldn’t have helped me choose my subject, but writing tips are always appreciated.

Finally, although it’s not a a writing tip per se, I had to include this: Six Revisions rounds up a list of 10 AJAX effects to sexy up your website. There’s a lot of cool stuff there, but I fear they wouldn’t be dialup friendly. Half of writing is in the presentation.

Tags: Blogging by Jotun
No Comments »

Tonight I have no links, only sorrow. I write this as a tribute to a man who I never met, yet whose works profoundly shaped my life. I learned this evening that Level 100 geek Gary Gygax passed away this morning from an inoperable abdominal aortic aneurysm.

In my teens, I would occasionally play D&D with friends, informally. Like most other ‘parties’ we rarely left the taven where quests tend to originate - preferring instead to cause tavern brawls a-plenty, run up bar tabs into the millions of dollars, and generally molest any NPC that was female and nearby. Although we never approached the game with the seriousness that some do, we had fun dammit, and it helped forge bonds of friendship that are still carried on to this day.

Later came Magic: The Gathering. Many years, and thousands of dead minions. Oh how Ioved the smell of burning orcs in the morning!

Dungeons and Dragons introduced me to fantasy, for which I will be eternally grateful. I was first made aware of the world of Dungeons and Dragons, like most children of the 80’s, through the Saturday morning CBS cartoon. I was enamored with the possibility of using my imagination to becore more than I was. Even though the show only lasted a few seasons, it opened my eyes to fantasy and roleplaying and diverted me from the path of science fiction that I was following at that point.

Although some tend to look at anything that has swords and dragons on the covers as crap, I find it to be a nice escape. I read to forget reality, if only for a few minutes. I grew up on Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, who were amazing science fiction authors, precisely because they remembered the fiction aspect. Today’s crop of science fiction authors trend towards the science, with fiction tacked on as an afterthought. When I want to read chemistry, physics, etc I know where to find good source material. When I’m reading for the story, I want fiction, not a doctoral thesis in particle physics with a half-rewritten episode of Melrose Place tacked on.

The other major contribution Mr. Gygax made that changed my life was GenCon. I’ll skip descriptions of it, because it defies all description. Suffice it to say, my wife and I planned our wedding so that we were able to attend GenCon on our honeymoon. I look forward to taking my daughter to it in a few years, because I think it will create a lasting memory.

I don’t know if Mr. Gygax was a religious man, but I will say a prayer for him nonetheless. A legend has moved from mortality into a more eternal pantheon. If I meet him in heaven when I die, I plan on joinng the line to buy him a tankard of ale!

Farewell Gary.

Gary Gygax July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008: Rest In Peace

Tags: Uncategorized by Jotun
2 Comments »

This week I signed up with Entrecard and their webmaster traffic share program. It’s a pretty nifty way of dropping off a digital business card to webmasters of a similar mind. The whole system works on credits. You get 1 credit when you card someone, and another when someone clicks from your site to somebody else’s. You also get credits for allowing other people to advertise on your site, which you split with Entrecard. Your ad rate is based on an average of how many cards you’ve dropped over the previous five days. You can also use credits to advertise on other sites. It’s an interesting system, and I’m having fun with it.

After 4 days, my account is -7386 credits. You read that right, negative 7386 credits.

About ten minutes after I signed up for my account, I figured out how to break their carding system. I’m no programmer - not even a talented amateur, but 4 hours later, a little hacking on a MySpace whoretrain script, and a little help from Yahoo Answers, and I had cobbled a script together that would automatically collect my 300 drops a day. Without thinking, I uploaded it and started playing with it, trying to fine tune it.

After an hour of putting the script through its paces I logged into my Entrecard account. At which point I noticed I was almost 7900 credits to the negative. Let that be a lesson to you boys and girls: always clear your cookies before you try out any black hat tactics.

I went back and looked at my script, and figured out what I did wrong - besides trying to cheat the system - and adjusted it so that it would work right. But, considering how far my curiosity dug me into the hole, I’m going to back shelf it, since it’s going to take me a month, or $50 on eBay to dig myself out again. Still, I did learn a couple things about programming, and I finally got to actually test out my observations on system weaknesses. Plus I gave it a cool name: ForcedEntre.

Speaking of scripts, Online Business Life released scripts to make your Entrecarding much easier. They’re both white hat tactics, but they do speed up the process immensely. Script one lets you quickly build a list of people that card you, and script two dumps out the list of a certain category. Both are excellent at what they do.

Walt debuted a new site this week: PowerDropping.com. PowerDropping.com lists the 300 fastest loading sites with the Entrecard widget on them, which helps the dedicated EntreCard droppers achieve a nice shotgun effect of coverage.

Finally, today is my third day of missed work, and I’m really not missing it at all. I called in Friday for shits and grins. Sunday we got hammered by almost six inches of snow being tossed around by 40mph winds, my adventure in which I detailed in a previous post. My dad was stranded here in town, as was my cousin, who is a delivery driver for a beverage distributor. He wasn’t aware that we lived in town, but in a lucky coincidence the godmother of our daughter was working at the only hotel in town, and was able to steer him in our direction. We had a full house last night, although my dad ended up sleeping at my brother’s house.

When I woke up this morning, the weather was still pretty putrid. Every major road around here was flagged Travel Not Advised, and every school within 30 miles was closed, so I decided to call it a day at 6:30 am. My father called me around 8 am, and told me he counted 55 cars in the ditches between here and the halfway point of his commute. My brother went to work today and said the drive wasn’t too bad. I had thought about pulling a half day, but lost track of the time, and missed the point of departure.

Anyway, I’ve put a lot of work into BookMark Money and this blog over the last few days. I’ve done some decent networking, and I’m starting to get noticed in the blogosphere. I have a contest coming up that I think people will find exciting. My RSS subscribers went from 2 to 13 in the space of two days, and I got my first user on the main BookMark Money site.

My first week of affiliate marketing is over. I made one sale of $18, and spent about $25 on that campaign. With all of the other campaigns I’m out about $50 for this week. Not an auspicious start, but now I’m getting ideas on what works and what doesn’t, and I’m starting to refocus and attack this beast from another angle.

Oh, and if anybody’s interested, I’ll sell them a copy of ForcedEntre for $6.95.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Entrecard, Pay Per Click (PPC), Site News by Jotun
5 Comments »