Dawn of the Geeks

Hypnobro.com Redux

For my web-design class we were asked to find an existing site and make it better. I went to Web Pages That Suck and found Hypnobro.com.

You can download the redux flash intro here. Pass it around!

indie-mobile is back. After a couple days down, the server is back up and reorganized. The drivers have been moved in with DevCenter. The news section is gone. All the old sections that were previously being forwarded to their new home at DevCenter have been removed. The DevCenter database is being rebuilt so it may not be entirely functional for awhile longer.

Open Directory is still the same but a new database driven version is in the works with the latest categories and links.

The server has been updated to the latest version of Apache 2 and PHP 4

Hopefully it will be stable again and remain up for months on end like it was before.

Free Speech Zone is a combination dictionary (from 1913) and anonymous posting board. Anyone can create any pages they want and anyone can post anything to those pages. It’s like a wiki but much simpler. No registration is required. No entries can be edited, only new information can be added. Popular pages from the FSZ will be copied and possibly modified and pasted into The Programmer’s Wiki. The FSZ is not moderated. HTML is disabled.

The intended use for the FSZ is to post random information from various sources without mucking up the real wiki. Since the FSZ allows for feedback it can also help in refining information before it’s posted to the wiki.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Cox’s amazing quality service, Indie-Mobile et al will be down until Monday evening. Which is fine I suppose. Besides them being the lesser of two evils which makes it pointless to complain. So I’m going to take advantage of this situation and do some serious server work so that when it does go back live, everything will hopefully look better and run smoother.

In the mean time, check out everything else Icarus Independent has to offer.

The alternate server with Indie-Mobile, Open Directory etc, is down due to Apache flaking out for unknown reasons. Since the server is being moved today anyway I’m not rushing out to fix it. Depending on when the new internet service is installed the server will be brought back up and hopefully stablized. Previously Open Directory was using a flat file format which is a little silly. But I’ve found a script to put all the data into mySQL so we’ll see if that improves performance. If nothing else, it’ll free up a lot of disk space on the server. It’s also a good stress test for mySQL with millions of rows of data.

Tomorrow the 26th of November the alternate server with Indie-Mobile, DevCenter, etc will be moving to a new location. It’ll be down for about an hour but with the IP change, it could take hours to a couple days for various countries around the world to be able to access the sites. This move will make the server much more accessible for updates, upgrades and general server maintanence.

It’s that time of the year again. The time to stuff our faces with nutricious food so that the next day we’re all ready to go to battle at the local stores to get the best deals. The time to gloss over this holiday and focus on Christmas. Looking at all the disasters that happened this year (man-made, man-inflicted, and natural) causing many to lose everything, it should be a time to reflect on what we do have rather than a time to prepare to get more.

Not to say you should feel guilty for being better off than others, but that you simply should appreciate it. Don’t let Thanksgiving slip by in a hurried rush to get to the giving and getting of things that will soon be forgotten. This is the time to simply say thanks to God and those in our life for being there to make our lives better. Something we should be doing all year long.

Indie-Mobile has had a face lift. It’s the first step in what will most likely end up being an overhaul. As one of the top sections of Icarus Independent, Indie-Mobile is in the spot light. MIDI files are ancient technology and although nearly all phones out there today use MIDI for ringtones, people want MP3 ringtones. The latest craze is getting your favorite song as a ringtone. The problem? Those tones cost a couple bucks or more. Why pay so much money for a song you most likely already have in your CD collection just so you can put it on your phone? Coming soon will be a complete how-to for converting your music CDs to ringtones for your phone.

I’m going to be researching fair use laws to see if it would be possible to post sample MP3 ringtones on Indie-Mobile. Indie-Mobile already has the largest collection of MIDI polyphonic ringtones. It’d be nice to keep up with the times and start putting together the largest collection of MP3 ringtones. Wallpapers are also something I’ve considered. I will most likely stick to a how-to on converting your digital pictures to wallpapers for your cell phones using myMobile.

Over the winter break from University my goal is to push Indie-Mobile to be one of the top ringtone sites on the net.

Back when I started AdSense in March of 2004 I really had no idea how well it would work. It took 5,4,3, and then 2 months to earn more than $100 in order to get a check from Google. For a long time $1 a day was good. Then $2 a day was good. Now, $3 a day is abysmal. It’s not about the money as the money is an indicator of the quality of the site. The more money the site makes per day the better the site is. At least this is my goal; to increase revenue by building up quality. I know that lots of sites throw up a lot of spam just to get hits and display ads to people.

Winter break is amost here and the key site to focus on improving is Indie-Mobile. I’m going to research fair use laws and see if I can’t post some MP3 ringtones of current hit music. If nothing else, I’m going to post a lot more information of creating MP3 ringtones from your own collection and how to get them on your phone through indie-mobile.

Due to spam I’ve dropped user submitted pages to the Wiki. It’s too easy to muck up real pages’ rankings on Google. So, I’ll be creating a simplified wiki for the masses on this site soon. That will allow anyone to post anything they want. I often find random information I’d like to put somewhere and a wiki is the place to do that. But not the wiki that’s currently in use.

My new goal is to make over $10 per day in AdSense revenue. By the end of the next year my goal is $5o per day. We’ll if I can meet or exceed those goals.

The only thing more frustrating than a server being down is the server that’s down being located at least 20 minutes away and not having the time to go fix it. So, for the time being the ringtones and other large sections of the site are currently inaccessible.

Hopefully it’s nothing serious. Apache has been known to flake out on occasion but in this case, the FTP server is also down. This indicates that for whatever reason, the server is completely down.

Ugh.

*update*

The power went off and so went the server as well. With the power back on and the power button hit, everything is back to normal.