Mocca Gallery

This morning I had an idea for a new website. It will be a website/blog about building a website/blog.

I recently read an article explaining how bloggers earn money online. I knew a little bit about Google ads, and wasn’t impressed. But this article described how, once you have enough traffic, you can rent out ad space to specific advertisers for a surprising amount of money. Instead of those annoying little ads, you could have one discreet expensive ad.

So for the past week I’ve been wondering, how would you go about doing that? Of course the main ingredient is content. Something worth viewing. Then it hit me, that would be the content. The building of the site will be the content of the site. My biggest skill, and favorite interest, is learning how to do new things. Especially technical things. Perfect.

The basic idea is:
a) This is a Do-It-Yourself project.
b) I don’t know how to do it, yet.
c) Information on how to do it is available for free on the Internet.
d) All I have to do is research it, and learn it, and do it, step by step.
e) Each step, and misstep, would be the content of the site.

How do you get a domain, how much does it cost, where do you find templates, how do you tell search engines about your site, how do you monitor traffic, what is page ranking, how do you accommodate traffic builders like Digg or del.icio.us, how can visitors suggest improvements, how would you get an advertiser, what would they pay? The topics are endless.

It would be a naked site, totally transparent. Everything on the site would have complete instructions on how it was done. All code would be download-able for free. All financial information would be posted, what everything cost, who the advertisers were, what they paid, down to the penny. Day by day traffic statistics would be displayed. Any books purchased that helped me would be listed as affiliate links. The more transparent, the more content, the more valuable it would be as a resource to anyone interested in building or running a moneymaking website/blog.

I think the next logical step is to look around the web and see if anyone is already doing this. Am I the first? Who are the competitors? What new ideas will I get by looking at their sites?

If this works, this little post will be the first post on the new site.

This idea to start a corporation was a great idea.

At first, I just wanted it as a way to create wealth by cutting down on our taxes and then investing the savings.

Then I started reading more about it, and it is not that easy, it is not that hard, but it is not easy. I wanted a corporation as a sort of trick, but this no longer interests me. I read that to make it work, you have to have some sort of business, and treat the corporation just like it was a real corporation.

I thought, well, sure I can do that. Treat it just like a real corporation. Then I realized, if I can make look and behave just like a real corporation, why not really make one, for real. I see now that I could do it. For awhile it would still be just us. But with tax savings. Then, one day, I’d land a larger project through the corporation, and I would be all set up to really hire other programmers. We would already know how, and be able to handle the paperwork, or we would already know a CPA who we trust and could use.

It would be a real business. Wouldn’t that be fun?

And the best way to make a real corporation is to do what I do best. So, I can start by doing a better job at my current contract, good enough to feel better about asking for more money later. And get a real CPA do the corporate set up for us. This benefits my current client, and a CPA, and us too. And it benefits anyone we are able to help later on because of it.

This idea to start a corporation is a great idea.

the employment train wreck is just ahead
should be coming up around the next bend
just looking for a good place to jump off
got to get the timing just right
got to get my mind right

Old Charlie stole the handle
and the train it won’t stop going
no way to slow down

looking forward to the next gig
the next gig is always the best gig

Time to reinvent myself yet again. I am now a Capitalist Entrepreneurial Artisan. And why not. This is America. I am now on the road to wealth and financial freedom. Halleluiah!

So, I have this friend, let’s call him – John.

John’s game is to pose as an entertainment writer, as a way to finagle free show tickets to shows he wants to ‘review’. He actual did review some shows years ago, and some of these articles are still online in archives. He wanted to update this as a new store front he can point to when people ask “who do you write for?”

John is computer illiterate, so I created a free GMail account for him. Then I created a free account on Blogger, with a nice literary style skin. I named it Vegas Entertainment. I copied his old stories over. A few minor touches to transform a blog into a reviewers site, and he’s back in business.

In the past I would have done this for free. But this time I didn’t. I charged him $40. Small money-wise maybe, but very big physiologically. I am now a person and a businessman.

I know I haven’t posted in awhile. But it’s because I’m obsessed with a new project. I get ideas for new projects all the time. I normally entertain these ideas, and then let them go. I’m very picky about which ones I decide to make physical. Because once I take one on, I’m consumed with it until it’s done.

This new project is called ‘Bully Bully’. It’s a remake of my old stock market program ‘The Bob Fund’. Because it’s a big project, I needed to have a lot of good reasons to actually do it.

•  I opened Roth IRA accounts at Scottrade for Deb and myself. ‘The Bob Fund’ was built for a single account. I needed a new system that will manage multiple portfolios.
• ‘The Bob Fund’ runs on my Windows desktop machine at home. I wanted to design a new system that can run on an open source hosting service, freeing up my personal machine.
• I’ve been working in ASP.NET for awhile, and I don’t like it. I wanted to get back into PHP, and this is a good excuse to do that.
• I’ve learned a lot about XML and XML Stylesheets. It will be fun to design a new system from scratch, taking full advantage of these technologies by building them right into the core of it.
• I’ve just finished a book on web design called Don’t Make Me Think and I’m very eager to try out all the new stuff I’ve learned.

We have this ritual, whenever we fly, Deb buys a copy of Vanity Fair magazine. After she’s done with it, I go through it and clip out the really cool ads. High quality commercial graphic art kind of stuff. This time there were also some goodies from the in-flight magazine from Southwest Airlines. Here is what appealed to me on our latest trip. Mostly booze, real estate, and Cirque Du Soleil ads.

This is a boring post about programming. If you’re not into technical trivialities, you may want to skip this one.

Lately I’ve been playing around with a lot of different programming languages. If you combine them all together, using each one the way it was designed, you can get some amazing results.
 
I have a webpage that reads data, sorts it, and displays it in a table. Clicking on the column headings changes the sorted display. Normally a webserver would have to fetch, and sort, and transmit that information over the internet every time you click the page.

I’ve found a way, with a small amount of JavaScript and XSLT code, to make browsers do all that work. Browsers download the data one time only, sort it there, render it on the page, handle all the re-sorting and re-rendering. This greatly improves response time, and takes a load off the webservers and database servers.

Click here to see this bad boy (source code included) in action.

When I was a kid I decorated one entire wall of my bedroom with one huge map. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall. I found all the topographical U.S. geological survey maps of the local area, with our house in the very center. It was beautiful. Interesting colorful patterns when viewed at a distance, and fascinating detail up close. I was always finding some curious spot on the map that would prompt an adventure to see that place in person.

I’ve often toyed with the idea of doing that again, with a wall in my home office, or maybe in tile on the floor. Rather than take on an entire wall, I thought it best to do a 16×20 section first. Something I could frame, if it turned out well.

Recently I was looking at a detailed New York City map on Google. It was amazing, their graphical representations of the buildings is fantastic. This is perfect I thought. Plus, I could add collage elements of our recent visit, like theater tickets, and place them on the map right over the actual theater. Very cool. I also created a additional layer for the subway lines. These bright colored lines seem to hold the entire thing together.

Click here to see the full image. Can you imagine an entire wall done like this? I think it would be beautiful. I think if we ever moved to New York, I would have to do it.

When we went to New York
It was obvious we didn’t know anything
It was all new and so ‘first time’
We explored and had adventures
It was exciting, and inspiring

When we got back to Vegas a friend said
“Now you should tourist on Vegas with that same spirit”
I thought that was a great idea
Take a fresh look around
Like a tourist, like an immigrant, like a young person
I found a “happenings” type of magazine
I saw that the Mirage has topless swimming pools
When the hell did that happen?
And how many other things are going on that I don’t know about?
Answer – I don’t know
But probably a lot

So, I’m looking around now
And I see that this is a very good age to be alive in
And Las Vegas is a very good city to be young in
Or have young eyes in