Web Cash

Part of developing a successful blog and your identity as a blogger is creating a web of blogs that you read and participate in. Imagine the blogosphere as a giant web. You want to connect your website to a bunch of others - you don’t want to just be a random thread connected to nothing.

Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.
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As I mentioned before, Helium is another great place to publish your writing online. It ranks up with Associated Content as one of my favorite writing sites.

So how do you get started? Is it hard to publish your first article at Helium? Not at all.
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This site has kind of strayed from my original intent - to explore and report on ways to make money online. For a couple months now, I’ve focused almost exclusively on the development and design end to working the web for cash.

I think it’s time to take a step back and look at a site where you can write for profit - without requiring any tech, design, or development savvy. I’ll be working on a complete section about Helium, but in the meantime here’s a quick overview.
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At it’s core, all of the information on your computer is made up of bits - or 0’s and 1’s. There’s quite a bit of interpretation that goes on between that basic binary code and the information as it is displayed on your screen.

However, you may find a time to work with data at the binary level in PHP (and many other programming languages). Here’s a quick guide to understanding binary numbers and the common operators for handling them.
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Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering data about your website. You can track and analyze all kinds of data about your visitors, their navigation paths, and the effectiveness of your content.

To use Google Analytics, you need to place some javascript on your website. A commonly asked question in forums is, “How do I add Google Analytics to my Wordpress template?”
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I recently started working on a new website - the one I mentioned in the article on creating individual 301 redirects for Wordpress.

I got the site up and running, updated some content, and then submitted my sitemap information to the Google Webmaster Tools. As usual, the next step is to wait and see how long it takes Google to start regularly indexing the site.
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While working on a new site (Rolling Horde), I decided to include a small image gallery. I randomly display four images from a flickr album in the sidebar.

The pictures are presented in the mark-up that flickr creates, and I used the styling that came with the template I was working from. It creates a simple two by two square of photos, with a slight gap in between them.

Although I like the way they are presented, I’m not sure I like the mark-up that flickr creates. What would be the simplest, semantic way to mark-up and style images in a small album like this?
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I recently decided to move part of an old blog to an independent site.

In order to maintain the meager search engine and referral traffic that the old pages had, I planned on using 301 Redirects. I figured that I would re-create each of the old articles (~10 total articles) on the new site and set up an individual 301 Redirect to send users and search engine spiders to the new location.

The problem, however, was that the standard .htaccess rewrite that Wordpress uses was conflicting with the 301 Redirects. For some reason, they just weren’t working - so I turned to a PHP-based solution.
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I’ve been playing around with developing Wordpress sites for a while now. I love how quick and easy it is to launch a site and update content.

One of the greatest features is the thousands of plug-ins available for Wordpress. You can find a plug-in for just about anything you want to do - or if you have some PHP know-how, you can develop your own.

Here are five basic Wordpress plug-ins that I’d recommend using for any project you start.
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The other day, I was looking into using Picasa to create an image album and embed it as a slideshow on a website.

Uploading the images and creating the album was easy. However, I noticed that the code Google creates to embed the slideshow (a flash file) is not standards compliant - it uses the <embed> tag.

How can we convert this code to a standards compliant version?
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