I was at a store the other day and happened to find a Dora The Explorer toy that I found to be funny. Here’s what it looks like as it comes:

The one I saw had the basket in the front missing:

Obviously the one piece that represents something phallic is just the piece that holds the basket onto Dora.

Here’s a comparison shot next to each other:

Maybe it’s just my dirty mind, but I found it to be hilarious!

Update: I was doing a little internet research and found another dirty Dora The Explorer sexual toy:

I made two changes to my blog, and I was surprised to notice that my CPC rates are now 5-10x what they were. What did I do? First I added AdSense section targeting, and second, I removed advertising from the page.

AdSense section targeting allows you to specifically exactly where Google should be scanning your page to deliver targeted ads. The entire reason AdSense is so effective is because the advertisements are meant to be targeted to the reader and the context that they have an interest about in the first place. The more targeted, the higher the click-through-rates, and more than likely more money to be made. Rather than just putting the standard AdSense code on your page, you can wrap you the content you want to either target or filter out using section targeting. If you want Google to target a specific area (for example the main content of your post), simply wrap it around this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you want to filter out specific sections of your page, you can wrap those in this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>

The second thing I did was simply remove two of the three AdSense spots that I had on the site. I had a 468×60 on the top of the posts, a 160×600 on the sidebar, and a 468×60 on the bottom of the posts. I only kept the 468×60 on the top for now, and I noticed that the ads are much better, and my CPC rates have been averaging over $1 a click. Previously, I’d be lucky to get 25 cents. Taking other AdSense ads off of the page can make a huge difference in CPC rates because Google can only fulfill so many spots, and each one is worth less. This reason is why some people will limit Google advertising to limited spots and use other types of ads in other spots in order to maximize revenue. Of course, you should be doing some testing to see what works best for you.

Update: I have also compiled a best of the best list.

I’ve already looked at the 45 best tech sector corporate web designs with companies starting with A-G. This week it’s time to tackle on H-O. See what companies with millions of dollars in budgets can do with their web designs. Do you have any favorites? Post your comments and let me know, I’ll be compiling best of the best in the last part of this series.

Health Axis

Hewlett Packard

Hyperion

Ikon Office Solutions

Illumina, Inc.

Continue Reading »

I have always been a big proponent of having a sitemap for your site. I feel that it was a major part of why Google starting indexing my blog so quickly. Now Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask have announced a partnership, a uniform support for sitemap files. If you already have a sitemap file, getting it crawled by these guys is easy, simply add this line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Your sitemap will now be supported by all the major search engines, and automatically crawled. This is the most effective way to make sure they all see your new content, as it’s specifically telling them the pages that are on your site.

For those of you with Wordpress, check out my list of top 10 Wordpress plugins. One of them is a sitemap generator. Simply turn it on, change some options, and all the work is done for you.

For those of you interested in more information, check out the announcements made by each search engine:

• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo
• Ask
  

Gotta love standards on the web! Especially when all of the major companies comply.

Last weekend I went back home to NJ. I’m originally from there, and my mom and brother are still there. I decided to take my ex-girlfriend Crystal to dinner at Acacia (Horrible website, they should hire Tri Megatech), which considers themselves progressive American cuisine. The restaurant is located in Lawrenceville, NJ, right across the street from Lawrenceville prep school, a top private school in the country.

Acacia considers themselves fine dining, with appetizer, dinner for two, and desert, the bill came out to be around $100 after tip. One thing to note is they are BYOB, which means no liquor license. If you want wine with your dinner, it’s your job to bring it yourself.

Appetizer

We started off with garlic roasted shrimp set on a creamy mascarpone polenta. I’ve never had mascarpone polenta before, but it was very good. We ate most of it before I realized that I forgot to take a picture!

Dinner

For dinner I had the grilled black angus filet mignon. It’s set on top of a smoked bacon potato and sweet potato tart. It’s topped off with onion rings.

Crystal had the chicken breast filled with truffled goat cheese. She thought it was very tasty, but it would have been better without so much breading.

Desert

This was another one that I forgot to take a picture of before eating some of it! The desert was excellent, we split the chocolate mousse dome on a triple chocolate brownie with a side of mint chocolate chip ice cream and chocolate covered strawberry:

Atmosphere

Acacia is a pretty small restaurant, that is a bit hidden. Here’s a couple pictures:

The After Party

After dinner we met up with a couple of friends at Top Dog in Cherry Hill, NJ for some drinking and dancing. Top Dog is a great place where you can just hang out and drink at the bar if you don’t feel like dancing, or pay $5 to go upstairs to the dance club.

I was going through my RSS feed of Engadget, and found the Hamster Shredder. This state-of-the-art contraption utilizes 1hp (hamster power) to shred your documents in order to ensure complete privacy.

I found a neat tool that gauges whether you are paying too much for rent, it’s called RentOMeter. Simply enter your address, how many bedrooms you have, and how many units are in your building, and the tool will let you know what’s up.

I’m currently renting right now, and also looking to buy a house sometime in the next .5-2 years. I’m currently renting a newly-built townhouse with 3 bedrooms, den and 3.5 bathrooms. One of the bedrooms has been converted into an office that I use for ActiveTuning, and the den has been converted into a working office. It’s about 2,000 sq/ft with a 2-car garage in Northern Virginia (expensive area). Between my roommate and I, we’re paying $1,780/month. We started out at $1,730, and it was raised $50/month after the first year. A third year was just signed, and the rent has stayed the same. The location is great, it’s really in the middle of everything that I need, and it’s about 30 minutes from Washington DC and an hour from Baltimore. Comparing our rent prices from what I’ve seen, I feel that we’re getting a good deal for what we got…lets see what the RentOMeter thinks:

The reason I put 4 bedrooms in is because the den can actually be converted into a bedroom (in fact one of our neighbors rents it out). So it looks like my deal is pretty good. Give it a shot, and let me know if you’re overpaying (or charging!) or not.

Note: For those of you interested in integrating RentOMeter on your site, there is an API, so you can integrate it with a little work.

I run another blog which a friend and I use to share viral videos online with, it’s called VideoExperiment.com. In the past I’ve submitted many items to Digg, but haven’t had any luck getting it onto the front page. From what I’ve heard, 60% of the material that makes it to the front is submitted by the top 5% of users, so that makes it even harder to get content up there.

Jason found a hidden gem video in a forum, which we submitted to Digg, and it hit the front page. A video isn’t the same as an article, but it still brings a generous amount of traffic to the site. The video was about a car with 30″ wheels that went to the drag strip, the axle broke, and the wheel continued down the track without the car.

Being Dugg is a great way to get a kick start on your site. You’ve gotta get it in front eyeballs in order for people to keep coming back, right? So what happened with VE after being Dugg?

Traffic

We have to keep in mind we really don’t work on generating traffic, so we were getting an average of 20 unique visitors and 36 pageviews a day. The day we got Dugg we generated 7,818 uniques and 8,865 pageviews. From the day that we got Dugg (Tuesday) through Sunday we generated 15,345 uniques and 17,517 pageviews. We also got a good amount of comments on videos where we normally don’t get comments. The amount of traffic has drastically come down, but we hope to retain some visitors as a result of the Digging. We also generated a ton of new backlinks, which should help us out with SEO, an important part of building traffic on that blog. This also obviously generated more traffic than just Digg.

RSS Subscribers

The RSS subscribers jumped up from an average of around 7-11 to 123 the next day. It has since come down to around the 30 range, but still much better than before! We’ll continue to watch the numbers and see if things keep coming down or level off higher than they were previously.

Monetization

We are only using Google AdSense ads on the site, and were only making a couple dollars a month from those. Digg readers are notorious for not clicking ads, or even having some sort of ad blocker, so I wasn’t expecting much out of this. All-in-all the traffic brought in around $11, enough to almost cover the hosting expenses! Again, we’re not really concerned about the money stuff yet, it’s more about building some retained traffic.

Have you ever been Dugg? How have your experiences been? I’m more interested in seeing how things are a couple weeks, or even months afterwards.

In order to make money blogging, it’s important to diversify your revenue streams. Many bloggers make the mistake of putting 100% of their faith into just Google AdSense. I recently added Kontera in-text links for a new revenue source, and you can do the same. Just signing up and putting their default code isn’t enough to maximize your earnings though.

Kontera provides a few different things you can do to customize your advertising to help juice every penny into your revenue. This is what your default ad tag will look like:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var dc_UnitID = 14;
var dc_PublisherID = XXXXX;
var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue’;
var dc_adprod=’ADL’;
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://kona.kontera.com/javascript/lib/KonaLibInline.js”></script>

This just makes your links the default blue, which most sites with a real design shouldn’t have. On top of this, it can also make things like your sidebar and your headlines links. This is no good, and we need to do something about it.

Change The Kontera Link Color

To change the link color simply change this line:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue‘;

You can switch blue to any hex color code. For example this would make the links black:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘#000000‘;

Most people will normally make the color of the Kontera links the same color as their regular links. The main difference is that Kontera links are double underlined, but it’s still a little iffy in terms of users being tricked into clicking a link. I personally decided to make the links green when my links are blue.

Target A Specific Area

You can target a specific area of your page, for example if you just want a specific paragraph to get linked. Simply add a class=”KonaBody” to a section of your code, and everything in it can get linked by Kontera. For example:

<div class=”KonaBody”>This text can possible get linked by Kontera!</div>

Restrict Areas From Getting Linked

If you don’t want an area to get linked simply add a class=”KonaFilter” to a section of your code. For example if you don’t want the sidebar linked you can do something like:

<div id=”sidebar” class=”KonaFilter”>This code will note get linked by Kontera</div>

Easiest Thing To Do In Wordpress

All I did in Wordpress was add a class=”KonaBody” to the div=”content” section. This will cover all of the content you write, but filter out the side bar, footer, and header.

All of the buzz on the internet lately has been all about blogging and making money through advertising. That’s not the only way to make money, eCommerce is still alive and kicking! One of my companies, ActiveTuning, sells aftermarket parts for Nissan and Infiniti that we manufacture. Practically 100% of our sales are done online through our eCommerce platform. It’s a part-time gig for both my partner and I, yet we still manage to pull in 6-figures for gross sales. I designed and developed the website on my own, so there was no cost to building it. The eCommerce platform used is an open-source solution called osCommerce. I have heavily modified it to fit our needs, and even still there are many things I would like to change to make things better and more efficient…but it works. It has handled thousands of customers and thousands of orders without a hitch.

osCommerce has been in development for a very long time, especially the upcoming version 3.0…a drastic improvement over todays outdated version. The developers just recently released a public alpha version (version 3.0 alpha 4), which allows us to get a sneak peak at what the final version 3 will look like. I installed it on a local test server to see what some of the changes are, and I was very impressed. The usability of the administration interface is so much better, but there are still many improvements needed. Many of the improvements that I can think of, are on the roadmap for future alpha releases before the final version is announced. Among the “must-need” features that need to be added in my opinion:

• Product Attributes Implementation
• Purchase Without An Account
• Gift Vouchers And Coupons
• Can’t edit a shipping or billing address
• Weight to attributes

These are all features that are listed to be implemented before the final release. There are still some major features I feel are not included but need to be:

• Needs support for tracking #’s in a customers order status
• Better support/customization for your standard shipping modules (USPS, UPS FedEx, DHL)
• Better support/customization for your standard payment modules (Google Checkout, PayPal Pro, etc)
• Ability to edit orders in the administration interface
• Ability do add new orders in the administration interface
• Option for customer to agree to statement when ordering certain products (for example a liability agreement)
• Better methods for supporting products that offer free shipping
• Better support for customizing products weight. For example many shipping companies deal with dimensional weight, not just regular weight. Also some sort of per-product override for weight classes.
• Better reports
• One click access to orders. Currently you click a line item, it then reloads the page and highlights it, then you can click into it.

Although there is a lot left to do in my opinion, they are on the right track. Here are some screenshots of some of the new improvements so far:

The new installation interface. This is a huge improvement over the old interface, and makes installation much simpler.

This is your standard product page

The administration now supports user access levels. This is a major feature that should been added in the first version! We’ll see in another screenshot that we can now create users and give them access to certain areas of the administration.

This is the new “welcome screen” for the administration. Also a huge improvement over the old version. It provides easy access to commonly accessed information.

The new menu system provides a clean and easy to use dropdown. This is a 200% improvement in usability.

Here is the feature that allows you to provide certain levels of access to specific users.

You can now enter a new customer into the system manually. In the old version you would have to register somebody through the actual frontend of the eCommerce site. Not very professional.

Here is the new order page. It is now nicely organized through the use of tabs which don’t require a refresh on the page…so it’s fast.

A new template system will allow for much easier customizations to your store. Frontend code is also being updated to be XHTML compliant, rather than an outdated table layout.

A new services section lets you turn on and off various features with ease. This is huge for me, because I had to literally take off all features manually on the version I use.

Here is the new add product page. Like viewing an order, everything is organized through tabs. An HTML editor is now an option.

I’m very excited as we get closer and closer to a final version. I hope that more of the features which I feel need to be added will be.

If you use osCommerce for your eCommerce solution, how do you feel about it? If you use something else, tell us about it, and any downfalls you’ve had.