This is a first hand account of my experience riding in BikeMS Colorado for the first time in 2009. It was a fantastic experience, and I am excited (even while sore) to have not only finished, but to be even better next year in fundraising and riding. The following is pure opinion, and in general I was thrilled with the organization, planning, and overall atmosphere of the entire event… thank you Bike MS Colorado staff, volunteers, and sponsors!
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New Page Added: MASHD
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Just a quick note that there is a new page available on MarioLurig.com: MASHD. It’s an Active Monitoring tool for people who are using Dreamhost‘s Virtual Private Server (VPS) for their web hosting. It graphically displays their CPU and Memory usage while the webpage is open, and requires only copying a single file over to your web server before accessing that file through a web browser. It does the rest by creating 3 more files and running immediately; no configuration required. It works on any Linux based VPS or Dedicated server, I just happen to use Dreamhost VPS.
Dreamhost VPS Root Access and System Monitoring
SUDO has long since been removed from Dreamhost making this invalid
If you are a Dreamhost customer, you may have popular enough websites that you switched from their stellar shared hosting to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). They offer both your main Apache/PHP server as well as a MySQL VPS. I switched to these shortly after it became available, to ensure maximum control over restarting my servers, troubleshooting problems, and scalable resources. The latter option is a real perk: You can change the memory/CPU allocation for your VPS as activity grows on your websites. On the down side, once those resources are used up, specifically memory, your server will determine that memory was exceeded and all processes will be killed.
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Creating a Unique Advertising Campaign – M&M’s Made it Better Case Study
This weekend I launched a new website: M&M’s Made it Better. This site was conceived over a year ago based on a simple idea: M&M’s make me happy, and their effect is likely the same for others. So, I decided to create a simple advertising campaign that allowed me to: Practice photography with a light tent, design a creative yet simple concept, and spend as little money as possible. In total, I spent ~$40 for extra supplies.
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Building an E-Book from HTML: Sample Code
Update 8/30/12: For those interested in simply writing an ePub file from scratch in a clean editor, Check out the free project Sigil. While it creates a fantastic ePub file, the Table of Contents does not carry over when Amazon converts it. However, Sigil simply creates HTML and this tutorial will give you some additional information regarding how to manually create a Kindle ready version.
I recently wrote up a case study for the audience at NovelRank.com on converting blog posts into an ePub e-book, and the experience helped me immensely. It was a bit of refresher course, as I had gone through the process to create my second book, 50 Conversation Starters for the Modern Age. Once it was built using the sample HTML code below, I used a fantastic and free program called Calibre, which is available for all operating systems, to convert the file to both ePub and Mobi (Kindle) formats. Finally, for editing the HTML, I used Notepad++, especially for its ability to do Find and Replace based upon Regular Expressions.
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Custom Consulting Domain Landing Pages
Sometimes I hold back on purchasing domains until I’m ready to use them, and other times I’m more impulsive. Two domains purchased over a year ago were in the latter category, and the focus was on a consulting area of interest of mine: Price consulting. Inspired by reading Priceless by William Poundstone as well as Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, I wanted to bring a young art form (1985) to small businesses in the Denver/Boulder area. With that in mind, I needed to know which of these domains would be more beneficial. Both had the copy (i.e. written text) designed for their keywords, but the overall message is the same.
But why not use the same copy on both pages?
That makes search engines angry. The copy needs to be unique and avoid being labeled as duplicate content. It also allows me to test different wording and ideas.
What inspired the web-design?
My shower curtain. Let me be very clear: I’m a creative type, sure, but when it comes to visual artistry, I’m not an original. There are better people out there, and their ideas inspire my adaptations. This is my shower curtain. Now to see the design, these are the two websites:
- Best Price Consulting
- Denver Price Consultant
The color scheme is from ColourLovers and the palette is called Funny Like the Moon. See? Better people, adapted.
Finally, I went ahead and did all the usual things: Added them to Bing, Yahoo, and Google’s webmaster tools, as well as installed analytics for tracking.
Twitter Marketing With Search and Reply
If you are running a website, an e-commerce store, or any sort of business, you need an online presence in social networks. This comes as no surprise to anyone. However, besides being aware of your brand on these sites, responding to customer complaints, and reinforcing positive feedback, Twitter also allows you to reach out to new customers, one at a time. Does that sound like a lot of work? Yup. If it means you sell one more item or sign-up one more user, is it worth it? Absolutely.
Every customer counts when you are starting off!