Blind Ape Seo

The path of the ape

Archive for the 'crazy stuff' Category

Quadzilla inspires once again.

Ending a post titled “Do it fucking now” with a quote from a Shakespearian play must be a sign of class.

Anyway, hop on over and read it.

::emp::

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Process overkill - How to have 6 people do the job of two.

My 9 to 5?
I work as an IT project manager in a huge international company.
As with any IT in any company, we are heavily into project and process management.

The countless hours spent in meetings, teams formed just to define processes, Quality Managers looking at projects, crueling process audits,…
Does this all work out? Does the effort pay out in the end?

Here is one example of what is happening. (Names changed to protect the guilty.)

dev: “I need to deploy this program to the test server. I’ll call Harry, he knows what he’s got to do.”
<phone call><done>

<Project Management falls from the sky>

PM: “This can’t go on, we need to document what is being done.”
dev:”Fair deal, this will make my work easier and save my butt from time to time. Done.”
PM:”You also need to write this document and fill out that form and report to this person and write to the Change Management team and enter the schedule in the scheduler control and….”
dev: “$#@% !! Alright, I’ll just write a program to do all that.”

(Actually, not a bad idea. No one says the docs have to be written by hand. And programs make it less tedious and are less error prone. Automation FTW!)

The situation now (this actually happened to me just yesterday)

me:”We need to deploy to the test server”
dev:”Sure, I’ll just call Harry, he knows what to do.”
me:”Err, the scheduling program won’t let us, until we have the docs. And there are new components, after all.”
dev:”$#@% !! Well, I can’t generate all of it, I’ll just fake it.”

<fakes it, enters some additional content by hand>

me:”Err… that might work, but what if that ain’t good enough at inspection?”
dev:”That’s 180 pages of automatically generated documentation, the stuff I entered is sloppy, but not wrong. Let them read the fucker and try to find any error.”
me:”OK, this is urgent so what do we do now?”
dev:”I’ll call Harry, he knows what to do.”
<phone call><done>

So this company basically moved from:

“I’ll call [personX], he knows what to do.”

to:

“I’ll call [personX], he knows what to do.”

In between we are now feeding an additional project manager, a quality management initiative with X teams (I really do not know, but it the head count is in the hundreds, in this city alone), wrote a documentation generator, killed a few thousand trees and annoyed countless developers and added hours to every little step along the way.

Somehow, I fail to be convinced.

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CSE directories

Ok folks, this is just a crazy idea right now, but it might well be worth your time.

Since some time, you can use google to create your own specialty search engine under google.com/coop . All in all, this is similar to sevices like rollyo.com or squidoo. Google calls this “Custom Search Engines” or CSE from now on, as I am a lazy ape.

Google gives you quite the palette to customize the search results and pages that are crawled, including giving some weight to sepcific pages, etc.. RTFM for all that, I am not going to explain all this for you.

Money comes via adsense, what else?

So I have been thinking about a way to monetize this bitch for a while and I think I’ve come to a conclusion.

A directory! yay

Now, let me speak out before you turn away in disgust.

Here is the plan
- Look for an area that you know something about, for example: Aqarium fish.
- Make up a list of sub-topics, like this:

Sweet water fish
Salt water fish
Aquarium care
Water Plants…

Pour these into a directory-like structure on your new page: www.supreme-aquarium-information-for-you.com

For each topic, get a small article in place and create a google co-op search engine with about 5 pages to crawl.

You’ll also create a custom search engine with every page in all subtopics to put on your front page.

As I love user generated content, give the list of pages used for each CSE to your users.
A small paragraph with “these pages are crawled for this search engine: a, b, c” If you know another good page on the topic of salt water plants, please contact me under:XYZ” should be OK.

Be sure to market “in cooperation with GOOGLE” all over the place. Google actually insists on that, so we might take the seach giant’s good reputation for our gains as well.

Now you also have a nice list of pages that you can contact and promote your CSE directory. Webmasters will probably feel flattered enough to link to your page.

Et viola. Every search will get you some money.

Enjoy. And drop me some lines when you try this, or if you have additional ideas for this.

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Pink heart projects for wickedfire

Sooo much work..

.. often you see people balking at the work involved in this business.
I do have to admit, sometimes I do this too.

It is easy to get a bit tired when…

… you see a hill of 50 or 100 pages that need to be created/updated, domains that need to be registered / transfered or blog posts that need to be written, and I am not even diving into the configuration files that need to be changed, images that need to be edited, files to be uploaded, forum posts to be answered, contacts to be made, banners to be created, links to be exchanged, scripts to be coded, noooooooo I will not even tell you about the templates that need to be done, the deals that need to be struck, the asshats in need of banning, the news that have to be read, nonono, I’ll spare you all of that.

But is this really hard work? I beg to differ.
A lot of this is just mind numbingly boring, or tedious copy and paste.

Yes, you will be tired after a day of computing and I admit it can be strenuous.

However, I still think this beats nightshifts in a hotel, burger flipping, newspaper delivery, digging holes in other people’s garden, walking dogs, making macchiatos and above all working for idiot bosses!

But not to let this digress into an useless rant, I’ll add some advice on getting ahead as well.

Let’s call this the “pink hearts method”, in honor of wickedfire, the internet’s premier gay affiliate forum.

I found that when I balk, it is often not the actual work, but often projects that are all about money making and nothing else.

To counteract this, I recommend keeping a list of “pink heart projects” that you can come back to during those times.

here are some of those hearts to use for you:

Pink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heartPink heart
(Courtesy of wickedfire - gay affiliate forum)

Those are the projects that might not make much money, but you love them nonetheless. It might be a blog, it might be a hobbyist site, it might be the next American novel. Hey, they might even bring some real content and service to the net.

This way, you’ll have a list of things to do the next time Copy and Paste seems just like too much hard work.

::emp::

PS: Yes, most of this was just to improve WF’s ranking. Fags!

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Making money with digital photography

Well, this is not really an internet marketing post, but as we are all trying to make some cash online, you might think about selling some digital production assets.

Pictures, to be precise.

The company I’ll point you to is crestock.com (no affiliate link).

Why crestock?
I am choosing crestock because I was impressed with the quality of the images they offer and their review process.

Requirements?
A digital camera of 6MP+,  some good pictures.
crestock also accepts digital images other than photos, so if your pictures are 3D or vector based, go ahead and submit those as well.

The review of your pictures is actually intended to give you pointers to improvements.

How much do they pay?
Greedy bastards! I am so proud of you. <sniff>

crestock pays 20% of each photo sold by a normal customer, you’ll get 0.25$ if a subscriber chooses one of your photos.

Payout limit?
crestock pays once you reach 100$, payout is via paypal.

Conclusion:
All in all, the offer is not impressing, but solid. It should be easy to get a few dozen images into their database and once I get my new camera, I am planning to do just that. I might even give the old trusty lightwave another spin.

Enjoy.

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being owned by Ubuntu

I wanted to change to Linux for ages now and the Vista DRM is the last straw.

Just feeling stupid as I can not get Edgy Eft to recognize my wireless network.

So… still online with XP.

::emp::

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