davidbarbarisi.com

I read the other day on Sitepoint about AOL purchasing Weblogs Inc. I didn't really know how Weblogs Inc. worked before, but for a little while I loved Engadget and Joystiq, as you can probably see from a few of my earlier posts on this blog. So the way it works is Weblogs Inc. pays bloggers for posting on specific topics on their 40 or so blogs, like Engadget. Then, ads are run on the blogs, and Weblogs Inc. gets paid from that. It turns out that Weblogs Inc. gets about a million dollars a year from ad revenue. Anyway, AOL bought Weblogs Inc. for $25 million. Or they're in the process of buying it or whatever.

On the Weblogs Inc. site they have a blogger application and I think bloggers get paid by the post. But I think you have to be an expert on one of the topics or at least be really passionate about it.

This also got me thinking about making a content based site. A lot of sites (I'm guessing) are profitable through ad revenue alone but they just have such great content that the fans just keep coming back and the ads are targeted to them. So I'm wondering what kind of content site Alex, Jay, and/or I could create. It would have to be a relatively specific topic that we care about, and something that we are knowledgeable about. Probably the most likely topic would be video games, but we don't exactly know stuff that most other gamers don't know, and we don't exactly have the money to get a lot of games. One idea I had about this topic is to cover the hidden gems, which are games that are really good that nobody knows about.

Another idea I recently had was a site about web design for beginners. I was thinking that it's hard to find tutorials on XHTML or CSS for people who don't do web design. Most of the tutorials teach HTML and teach bad coding practices, or 90s style web design with tables and other old ways to do things. So I'm thinking I could probably write tutorials and guides on XHTML so people can learn web design the correct way. Plus I would write CSS guides as well. I still have to look up some more sites on this to see which ones are covering this topic for this audience I want to target. I'm also going to run this by some people to see what they think.

I think both of these content ideas are decent, but not great. Well, they'll have to be refined some more if they're to become great. I'm still trying to think of some other content site ideas. I'm not sure what else I'm good at that isn't already covered in a bazillion other nerd sites.

I've working on the Festa Italiana DC site using a program that created the site before I started updating it, called websitecreator. I just want to say that I really really hate that program. It's probably one of the first WYSIWYG editors I've used, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I've just been fighting with this software the whole time. At least three times it didn't save my changes. I can't paste already formatted HTML into it. It doesn't allow centering of images. I can't get the lines to not wrap. Worst of all, they charge by the page I guess. It limited me to 12 pages for the site, and it says if I want any more I have to upgrade to websitecreator pro. Now I understand charging actual web designers charging by the page since that's work done by a real person, in which time is a limited resource for that designer. But in this case, it's an automated program that easily adds extra pages without using up anything but server resources, which is what the hosting fee pays for. So I think this is just a case of the cm4all company (or maybe the webhost?) trying to squeeze some extra money out of a customer by setting imaginary limits. They may as well limit the number of words per page. Uh oh, I hope I'm not giving anyone any ideasÂ…

I should also mention that I'm used to mostly using free and open source web software in which there are very few limits. So to me this idea of limiting something like number of pages is crazy. Also I really don't like WYSIWYG web editors. I usually hand code sites, or use a capable content management system and theme it up.

I also feel that as a web application, websitecreator is pretty bad. Lots of loading. And what I think is really bad is that it doesn't fully work on Firefox. But they don't tell you that. Instead it sorta works on Firefox. So for a while I thought it was running really badly, but then I tried opening it in Internet Explorer and it worked a lot better. On Firefox it opens a new window to edit text, but in Internet Explorer it lets you edit text directly on the page. Also I had trouble seeing the cursor on the gray background for editing text. I really had to search around for it. And anything loses points with me if it asks me to disable my popup blocker for that site.

I've just been so frustrated with this thing on so many occasions, that I just had to write about it.

AlexlovesRichelle.com is getting some crazy traffic just for
this one page. I'm pretty sure it's because of the cartoon monkey image, but when ever I do a search for cartoon monkey related terms, I can't find that page. The logs seem to always point to that page and say that people were searching for images of cartoon monkies monkeys, which I guess is a really popular search phrase. It's really weird that that page is getting a lot of traffic. Well, not really a lot, but more than the rest. So I'm thinking it would be really cool to make that page super duper popular. So I'll keep using the terms cartoon monkey and cartoon monkeys in this post, and linking to that page, so it'll move up in the search engines. I wonder if this'll work, and I hope this doesn't count as cheating. Also Alex and I were wondering if anybody would want a drawing like that of themselves. Jay drew that as a large poster, and Alex got it wallet sized and he said the people he shows all like it, so maybe someone out there would want to pay money to get a caricature of them like that picture? Let me know if you're interested. I can probably convince Jay to do it. We'll probably take requests for almost anything that you want drawn. I would show you some links to more stuff he made, but I can't think of anything to show right now.
Here's his band's web site though. And
here's his film site. That should help him get some traffic.

Oh yeah and his name's really Jared, but I can't be bothered with that many syllables, and he didn't like being called Jar, so we call him Jay. Mostly just online though. And mostly just Alex and I call him that. Alex gets to have two syllables.

And while I'm trying to sell you stuff, alexlovesrichelle.com was started by Alex to show how much he loves Richelle. Don't you want to start a web site to show how much you love your sweetheart? Because if you don't you know what that means... Yeah, anyway, if you want to start a site like that, or any other site for that matter, I can sell you some web hosting. Maybe even some web design. But Alex frontpaged his way through alexlovesrichelle.com, so that's not an example of my work. I do better stuff. I like to get my hands dirty in the HTML and CSS. Fieri DC is a much better example of my work.

Alex showed me some cool games, so check these out when you have some time to kill. They're all pretty good.

Here's a parallel parking game. It's funner then it sounds. Kinda. Up and down on the keyboard are forward and reverse, left and right are steering. I haven't been able to beat it. But that shouldn't be a surprise since I can't drive.

Here's a snake game where you use the left and right arrow keys to move a snake across some platforms. Also sorta fun.

Here's a potato peeling game. Click and drag the mouse across the potato to peel, hover over the arrows to rotate. My best time is 2 minutes 30 seconds. Try to beat me.

A fun game where you move a squirrel across a cityscape. I'm mad that it resizes the browser window, but the coolness of this game makes up for that. You move the mouse to where you want the squirrel to go, and you click when you want it to jump. The music is great too.

From Tag Body Spray, Hide the Hotties. It's sorta like a memory game. You have to hide your girlfriends before their dads get there. Then you have to remember where you hid each daughter so you return them to the correct dad. I got up to level 2. It's really hard, but fun.

Etch a Sketch. You know how it works.

And finally, the best one so far, Poulaga Challenge. It's a very addictive chicken tossing game. You pick a character and enter a chat room, and make or accept challenges. Then you throw and catch the chicken. It's so much fun. I wish there were more people to play though. I'm up there as zer0cha0s usually, so challenge me if you see me.