Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Ok, being a shareholder of Microsoft Stock (MSFT), and generally a fan of their company (I know how can I like the “evil empire,” I am really dissapointed with Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). I recently ranted about it over at my SprintRants Forum Rant about anything Sub-Forum and there’s a reason it was a rant and not a review.

Let me start out by saying that I use flock and you can find out why at my flock browser review post.

It’s a great expansion on the open source mozilla browser. It allows you to have speedy tabbed browsing, faster browsing than IE, it easily organizes and displays (more on this later) rss feeds and also lets you blog to a number of different blog softwares right from the browser (just like I’m doing right now.)

Ok, onto IE7. It sucks. For one thing it’s big and clunky. It was a huge download and seemed like it took 30 minutes to install. It’s slow to start and the biggest pain in the but is the tabbed browsing. For IE 6 you could download the msn toolbar and get tabbed browsing that, from my recolection was fast at loading tabs. Now the tabs take literally 3-5 seconds to load. I know that’s not a lot of time but it’s a pain in the butt. Both flock and firefox load new tabs in less than a second, instantaneously.

Next up on my list of why IE7 is bad is the dang navigation bar that’s frozen to the top and the refresh and stop buttons that are completely different from all other browsers, they’re left of the nav bar and from my best efforts to change them seem to be imovable. The only reason I can think of why this is, is because MSFT decided to make it different and unchangeable to piss you off if you were trying to switch between browsers, eventually you’d just stick with IE because you’re sick of always going to the left of the screen when the refresh button is now right of the nav bar.In addtion to not being able to move the forward, back, refresh and stop buttons around, the nav bar is stuck to the top of the browser. You can’t unlock it and move it to the bottom where it’s been on every othe browser ever created, or at least below the dang file/edit/view/favorites/tools/help selections. Why the hell are those now stuck to forever existing below my navigation bar.

If someone determines how to unlock the navigation bar let me know, for now I’m just pissed off that Microsoft thinks they know more than I do about where I want that bar.

As for the wonderful integration of an RSS reader. IT SUCKS, plane and simple. Maybe I wouldn’t have said that about it had I not used flocks rss reader but it’s true. When you click on your feeds button in flock a sidebar opens to the left, like that in IE, but then Flock allows you to have a front page, then organize in sub categories (folders) all your feeds for each category. When you first view your front page it shows you the most recent feeds in the browser (to the right) from all your categories. A quick snapshot of your feeds. How novel? Then if you click on a category it shows you the 10, 50, or 100 most recent feeds in the browser window. Then if you click on an individual feed it will show you the 10-50 most recent posts for that feed.IE7 does no of that, sure it organizes it in folders, but you don’t have anyway of seeing a quick snapshot of all your feeds, or for that matter a quick snapshot of your categories or folders. You have to click on each individual feed to see it and then it shows you the 10 most recent posts. Of course you can change how many posts you see but you have to view each feed separately.

Of course you may be able to change this but from my googling of the topic and from my extensive digging on IE7, I can’t figure out how.

Next up is the fact that maybe Microsoft missed the fact that blogging is pretty big right now. Maybe they want to stick with ruling the corporate and little old lady world. But wouldn’t they have won over a lot of techies if they would have integrated a way to blog easily into their IE7. Even if it was just blogging to Microsoft Spaces, but they have nothing. Flock lets you blog to blogger, wordpress, typepad, and I think a few others. IE, nothing, unless you count the fact that you can download a google toolbar and blog to blogger. Maybe the MSN toolbar allows you to blog to Spaces, but does anyone use Spaces?

Bottom line is use Flock, or at least don’t upgrade from IE6, 7 is bad enough said.

PS sorry if I ranted a little too much.

technorati tags:IE7, Microsoft, Flock, Firefox

I just checked in on my domain names over at namedrive and noticed (kinda hard to miss) that they got a facelift. A new logo, a cleaner and a little brighter colorscheme and the most important part, they got some new layouts.

They got both single click and portal designs that look more like web pages rather than just parking pages. There’s a sidebar-two center ads-search-top bar- page that looks great and I’m going to try it for some of my domains that get less than 20% CTR and see how they go. If my CTR (click through rate) increases significantly I’m going to slowly transfer my domains over to new templates.

Check them out if you don’t use them, I get OK payout rates, I know there’s better out there but a lot of those are tough to get into, like fabulous.

Blog design is tough. Coding, for myself, is way easier than sitting down in front of Fireworks or Photoshop and trying to layout a blog template, or a forum template. Colorschemes, logo design, font choice. Why is it so hard? Am I less of an internet entrepreneur if I can’t design a blog template and get the coloring right?

I have been asking myself this over the past day as I my weeks long laboring over my blog network main site has been getting nowhere, should I desing these sites, graphically that is, or should I hire someone else?. I’ve never sat down to design a graphically elegant design. Or maybe I should say I’ve never succeeded. For those of you who’ve been to my blogs within the network, you’ll notice that they all have the same layout with a 3 color pattern and slight changes here and there. Nothing big.

Now that I’ve got a name and a decent size network in place, I want to get a design that sets itself apart from all the other blogs. I am sure, or at least I feel, I could sit here and labor over designing a site for a while and maybe, just maybe I could strike something that I like, something that makes me say, sweet! Now that’s a design. But how long would that take, and would my time be better spent coding and producing content, something that I feel I’m much better at.

I gots to thinking, what would a true entrepreneur do, or a business leader do? He or she would realize their shortcomings and hire someone to do the job that they were meant to do. It’s more efficient, and it will save money. If I spend 60 hours coming up with a design that looks half as good as some creative type can come up with in 5 hours, maybe less, wouldn’t spending 60 hours producing content for the network be a better use of my time.

Silly that I even had to think about that one.

More to come…

I’m not really sure why I need a list, compiled by someone else, to tell me which books I should be reading. I never like those lists in school so why should I start liking them now? Maybe because someone over at listology took the time to put together a list of 1001 books you should read before you die. It’s quite a list.

It was kinda depressing to try and dig through the massive list, seeing as how I haven’t read about 99% of the books on there, but it is quite a list. I’ve seen quite a few of the movies if that counts? In my limited digging I’ve come up with the sad number of 10 that I’ve read and about 20 of which I’ve seen the movie of.

I found the list via webomatica who it looks like had read a few more than I, 32ish. I also was tipped off fom webomatica to a list of movies over at AFI called the AFI 100 American Films list out of the last 100 years. That might be more my speed seeing as how it appears I like to watch great literature rather than read it.

Either way, this should give some of you with nothign do to something to work towards.

It was a normal morning on sunday. My fiance and I were sleeping, our 31st floor hole in the wall condo in Waikiki was as muggy as it had been all week with the trade winds not around. Then suddenly we were both startled awake by the fact that the room and everything in it was moving back and forth a foot or two. Literally! I truly mean the building was moving more than a foot from side to side The paintings on the walls were rattling, it sounded like a jet was flying by and king kong was pushing the place back and forth like a slinky.

Although I prefer a good cup of coffee in the morning, being woken up my a 6.6 earthquake will also do the trick. Thankfully those wonderful engineers decided to allow the building to sway or I feel as though it would have snapped off! It was darn near the freakiest thing I’ve expereinced.

The earthquake happened about 10 miles off the west coast of the Big Island (the one with the active volcano) and we are about 150 miles north west of that. The earthquake knocked out power to the hole state, 6 seperate islands, Kauai, Maui, Oahu, Molokai, Lanai, and the Big Island. We live on Oahu with about 1 million other people and the whole island was without power. Nothing. We live in the tourist mecca of Waikiki and even the hotels were running on limited generator power. The town sounded like one big diesel truck was running.

On top of that it was a rainy day, and there were flash flood warnings on select parts of the island. It would have been a great day to sit inside and watch TV. But instead my fiance and I found ourselves cruzing the town looking for any place that was open. (I should also mention that all street lights were out, not even back-up flashing reds were going, police were everywhere.)

Most stores were closed but those that were open would only let in a few people at a time. Being a tourist town, everyone was stocking up like they weren’t going to eat for weeks. ABC Stores, the local chain that is like a 7 eleven everywhere else without the gas had lines around the corner. And there are about 20 in the 10 blocks that make up Waikiki. We figured that we were going to get power in a little bit so why not take advantage of the situation and get the ice cream they were selling for half-off. Breakfast of champions, half-frozen icea cream bars.

After wondering, walking and driving around some more, we began to wonder what we did without TV on rainy days, did people really just sit and talk?

Nah, instead I took a nap while she finished her paper for class (silly law students.)

By 6 pm no one around us had power, and we were hearing only a few spots on the west side of the island had juice so we thought we would wonder the town again. After figuring out that walking in the rain wasn’t any fun we decided we would drive around some more in the dark. We used to live in the country, no lights doesn’t really matter, but I don’t think half the people in this town have ever driven without street lights before.

We happened upon the only place in town that had power, a two block stretch that included the wonderful and hot food of Jack in the Box. We figured since we had nothing else to do, and our apartment was blacked out why not wait 20 minutes in line at jack and then wait another 45 minutes for the food. It was delightful though.

We finally decided to head back and discuss our feelings by candle light.

However, as we rounded the corner into Waikiki we noticed that a third of the buildings had lights on and crossed our fingers that ours was one of the chosen few. IT WAS!

So we finished off our day by laying back on our couch watch the 45 minutes of Desperate Housewives that Tivo picked up with the lights out

Picture Source

technorati tags:Earthquake, Hawaii, Blog, Oahu, My, story

I’ve been battling the naming beast for about 5 months on and off. Meaning, I tried for about 1 week 5 months ago then gave up until this past week, searching for a good name for my blog network.

Do I name a a media company that would incorporate all of my media needs or do I just name my blog network, which has now expanded to 13 blogs with a 14th and 15th blog on the way (yeah it’s twins). I’ve been asking a couple people close to me and my Internet endeavours, what should I name my blog network?

Some good names have come around but all of them are taken, not necessarily naming a blog network but naming something. I couldn’t find a .com name that rolled off the tongue and fit the blogging world. (Of course b5media doesn’t really scream blog network, but it does have a great ring to it.)

Well I went running this afternoon, after the Michigan Wolverines defeated Penn State!!!! They gave a little scare towards the end but remembered they had to play the whole 60 minutes and played tough to stop em. BCS standings come out this week!!!

Anyway, about 5 minutes into the run and bam, it hit me. The name of my network. Now I’m not going to give the name away right now, that would be silly. I’m going to do an official launch in about a week with a network home site and a sweet contest that I know everyone will want to take part in. YOU WIN SOMETHING, and IT’S FREE!

I’ve been learning how to create “web 2.0″ feeling graphics and hope to have a great looking site in a few days.

Finally!!!

Google makes headlines today as it buys YouTube.com for a $1.65 billion all stock deal.

The Google/YouTube rumor was a hot one this weekend, with every major financial news outlet, and basically any blog caring about the internet, was reporting about.

Google, which runs Google Video, a searchable database of video’s very similar to the YouTube.com sensation is purchasing YouTube.com while the company isn’t making a dime! That’s right, YouTube.com isn’t making a profit yet.

Google, making the bulk of it’s money from the online advertising industry is obviously looking into Youtube.com’s user base and the fact that a lot of made for internet commercials and self-made miniseries are making a dent in the television advertising dollars. Take for instance the Youtube.com sensation of lonelygirl15 Her story was picked up by all the major news outlets in the states, and many many worldwide as well. That’s some free publicity, both for lonelygirl and for youtube.com.

technorati tags:YouTube.com, YouTube, Google, buys, deal

OK, so digging around it seems like this is still a problem for some people. About 8 months ago there was a bit of buzz surrounding the BETA release of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). Darren Rowse over at problogger.net posted a quote from an email some of the publishers being banned were recieving. It basically stated that publishers who had “too much” non-US traffic using their site and clicking through on their ads were kicked out from the YPN program.

I almost didn’t sign up when I got my invite because of this post. Why would I want to waste my time on something that people were saying was inferior to AdSense. However, I followed through with it, got my account, then got “the call” from a YPN rep asking me how I liked the program. I said hadn’t used it yet but was wondering if I could create some coding to display ads YPN ads to just US users while other ads would be displayed if the user wasn’t from the US.

I then contacted Google and asked them if this was ok and they said, “that doesn’t appear to violate the terms and conditions” blah blah blah. Great, so if you are still worried or having a problem here’s what I did!

PS this uses a wordpress plugin and some PHP, but you get the ID, you can also use some server commands that check the IP of the page viewer but I don’t think that works as well and frankly was making me mad when I first tried it out.

Anyway, the idea is this:

if (visitorIP = us){
  display YPN;
  }
else{
  display AdSense
  }

Outline

1. Get your Google AdSense and YPN account if you don’t have one.
2. Populate your database with the IP to Country data
3. Download the IP2Country Wordpress plugin
4. Update your code on your index.php, page.php, single.php, etc with an IF statement.

That’s it, really simple. I had a few problems here and there that I will try and address solutions to but hopefully you will go through the process problem free.

1. Get your Google AdSense and YPN account

Chances are if you are reading this you already have both an AdSense account and a YPN account. If you don’t though visit Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher to sign-up and get your accounts today.

Those who have the accounts should be familiar with ads and ad code so you can easily insert the code into the files mentioned below.

2. Populate your databasse with the IP to Country data

This was my most problematic part. You need to get the data from the IPtoCountry .csv file into your MySQL database. You can find the Database here and the plugin that I use for this ip2_country has a nice little tutorial about how to create the proper tables.

Create them first then upload your data search the web for how to do this or your mySQL database help file, or you can…

WARNING: I HAVEN’T HAD OTHERS TEST THIS UPLOAD SCRIPT SO PLEASE CHECK TO MAKE SURE THIS IS RIGHT, IT WORKED FOR ME BUT I DON’T WANT TO SCREW UP PEOPLE’S mySQL DATABASE. CHECK IT FIRST

If you need a .php script to do this for you, you can try out the one I used, just copy and past this into an editor, change the appropriate fields where it has

$hostname=yourhost;
$username=yourusername;
$password=”yourpassword”;
$dbid=databaseID;

save it as something.php, upload it and the .csv country list to the same folder at your site, and navigate to it via your browser and presto. You should be getting a long list of what it’s doing, it’s adding the proper info to the ip2country table you made.

3. Download and activate the IP2Country Plugin

Now download and activate the IP to Country Plugin. Should explain itself.

4. Now add code that looks like this

if (wp_ip2c_getCountryCode2(0) == us)
{
print’
Yahoo Publisher Code
‘;
}

else{
print ‘
Google AdSense Code
‘;
}
?>

Put that wherever you want your ads to appear.

As a test below you should see yahoo ads if your from the US and if you’re not you should see Google ads.

Sweet.

Let me know if anyone has any troubles and I can try and help you out or point you in the right direction.

Darren Rowse just posted over at problogger.net that the blog network he is helping to build b5media just got funding!

That’s right, two Canadian VCs are helping to finance their company and make it grow and earn more. I hope you all realize how motivating this is and get out there and blog or build like crazy! If not, it was $2 MILLION.

I’m currently up to 14 blogs that I try and update several times a week for each blog. I’d like to update 2 or 3 times a day on each blog but I’m basically a 1 man show (aside from my guest poster over at fuelingtheworld.com. But that’s OK, for now I just want to slowly build an internet presence, build my virtual real estate, build backlinks, and get listed in search engines.

Have a great rest of you Thursday, as my good friend Brett in would always say, “One more day ’til the weekend!”

technorati tags:Blog, Network, b5media, blogging, money, investment, venture, capitalist

Ok, so this post really should be on a main blog network blog but since I have no name for my blog network besides, erik’s blog network, you guys are stuck with hearing about my site updates. Besides it could help you out.

Rumor Patrol, my blog on Hollywood rumors, got a little bit of a facelift today. I have a source for new graphics (that I will reveal to those who need some sweet graphics) and just got this one sent over to me. I think it makes the blog look a little more,…. sassy, and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

Also, on a blog network note, I need a name for a media company, any ideas? Let me know, preferably something that doesn’t have a .com taken (don’t go giving me a sweet idea and then snagging the name only to sell it to me for a sizeable amount) but if you do have a good name for a media company and have the .com already, I’d be happy to offer.

technorati tags:Blog, Network, Graphics, Design, Rumors, Hollywood