Harrison Gervitz is a 16 year-old affiliate marketer who reportedly earns a six-figure a month. Beats a paper-round or pizza delivery, that’s for sure.

He’s posted some affiliate marketing hints and tips on Shoemoney’s blog. Worth a read if you are into PPC.

This post is written using Blogdesk. It’s a desktop application that lets you write blog post and then publish them without having to visit your blog through a browser.

It took roughly 5 minutes to setup, I:

• Created a new blog user with Author rights but not Admin (I’m paranoid)
• Installed BlogDesk
• Went through the “New Blog” wizard. This set the blog user to post with, downloaded the categories and checked that images could be uploaded.
• Wrote this post.

The Blogdesk GUI is nicely laid out, you can start the app up and get straight into writing a post without having to select any menus or other needles UI interactions.

The editor has all the features you expect:

• Change fonts and styles
• Change colours
• Insert lists
• Add links
• Spell checker
• Insert graphics.

The “insert graphic” option is great. It lets add styles such as the shadow on the left, position the graphic and also resize it. Very nice.

 

 

The F5 button switches the GUI editor between WYSIWYG and HTML modes so you can tweak your markup if you need to.

This is my first post using BlogDesk but it seems like a quick and easy way to blog – much quicker than using Wordpress’ own method. The image insertion functions make BlogDesk worth using on their own.

I’ve been running my hearing aids blog for a few years now. In that time it has changed theme 3 or 4 times. During the most recent theme update I decided to change it from being a traditional blog type of layout to using a static front page.

Most blogs have the last 10 posts displayed either paritally or in full on the front page. A categories list, some links and some Adsense down the sidebar. This is great for personal blogs that are meant to be read as a diary with sequential posts but what about information-centric blogs? Blogs that people will come to through a search engine looking for a specific piece of information and will most likely then want to find out what else your site has to offer on that subject.

That’s where the traditional blog layout fails. It doesn’t group relevant information together very well. Chrisg.com is a good example of this. He’s a great blogger who writes interesting stuff on blogging and new media – I’ve been reading his RSS forever so it’s not an issue for me but what about someone who comes to the site for the first time looking for, say, information on business blogging? The sitemap page lists all posts under headings of blogging and business but nothing really links a specific post to another.

People need easy navigation on websites to get around and blogs fail on that.

Breadcrumbs would help.

So would a category specific landing page showing popule, all posts for that category with a header describing the category.

Those two would ease navigation but I think a static front page with a welcome message, a descrption of the site and section specific links would be a real winner. I’m getting there on hearnig aids, I’m usnig the Brandford Magazine WP theme and that has a static front page with good navigation. I don’t have a welcome message so people hitting the site don’t know if I’m selling something, a charity or what. I don’t have breadcrumbs either.

The Guardian website is a great example of a site that is easy to navigate around. It’s a design that I can aspire to. You’re never lost on that site. The breadcrumbs are in your face. They have a category specific colour scheme for an easy visual indicator of what you are readnig or are about to click on.

I really liked BlogDesk – really liked it. Used it at lunchtime to write a couple of posts using my XP box at work. Was about to set it up here at home when I realised that it’s for Windows only. Bummer.

I need to find a desktop blogging app for Linux. BloGTK seems to be popular and I’m writing this with it. It’s definitely not in the same class as BlogDesk.

First of all, I went to set up a new connection. There was no Wordpress option. WTF? There was an option for a Metablog API and so I picked that – not a good start.

The editor is not so good either. The link I pasted in above appears in the editor as raw HTML – it doesn’t look like there’s a WYSIWYG editor. There is a Preview Pane that shows you what your post should like when published but it’s view only.

<blockquote>There’s an option on the editor menu to create a blockquote. Again, the raw blockquote markup is shown in the editor. Also, the blockquotes don’t look correct in the Preview Post editor pane.</blockquote>

Spell checker works OK.

I went to add an image to this post but the Insert An Image dialog is not a patch on BlogDesk’s. There’s no way to browse my local disk to pick up an image. There’s a positioning option but not styling and there’s no easy sizing options.

Eh, so, I never actually managed to post this with BloGTK – had to go to WP and post it from there. Seems that my account wasn’t set up properly as I couldn’t publish. No errors, no warnings, no hints – I don’t know what’s wrong with it and it’s not telling me.

As you can see above, the blockquote didn’t work either.

Think I’ll give Bleezer a go. Either that or I’m gonna have to boot XP at home, which I’m reluctant to do.

Ron Jeffries of XP fame:

“If I’ve got six months to build a system, then I’ll spend six months building it. I’ll also spend six months designing it, and another six months testing it. The good news is that it’s the same six months”.

Seems like the best (and obvious) thing, right? Build the design based on your knowledge, which you acquire as you work on the project and encounter problems and design choices.

But begs the question: Is there a place for an Architect in an Agile environment and is there any value in an architecture document?

An architecture document is a system design that answers key design problems and breaks the system down into manageable and extensible components. I’ve worked on big arch documents in the past when working in waterfall environments – looking back, it’s easy to see that we spent a lot of time agonizing over design decisions that couldn’t be properly answered until much of the code was written. So continuous design is good.

But how do you document it in a continuous fashion? We used to create Word documents but that seems like too much work if you are going to be changing it often as you will be re-arranging the document all the time. A Wiki? Some bespoke Agile tool? UML tool?

Or do you not document it at all? Is Javadoc (or your language’s equivalent) enough along with some auto-generated class diagrams? Perhaps the test cases will document the functions of the system and avoid the need for Sequence diagrams? After all, once the code is done, the tests pass and the system is released, what’s the architecture design document for? It can only be a reference tool for people coming onto the project later on.

Many people have said that an Agile design document should have “Just enough in it to get the job done”. Great in theory but a tough one to do – what’s just enough?

If it’s not the coolest then it’s definitely the geekiest:

http://www.jwz.org/

If you were thinking of opening a shop, you probably wouldn’t open a burger bar next to McDonalds and try to compete – would you? A back-street restaurant away from the big boys that serves a niche could work – your niche could be local students, office workers or vegetarians.

The Internet is the same as the high-street. There a lot of big players and big brands and you aren’t going to be competing with them anytime soon. An online music shop? I think Play, HMV, Amazon and the rest have that covered. But what about a CD shop for the Bangra niche – maybe that’s not being served by the big boys. It’s going to be a smaller market but a small market can be a lucrative one.

du -hs -b <dir>

For example:

The “-h” parameter specifies human reaable output and the “-s” flag specifies that a summary should be printed. If you don’t specify the -s then the size of each sub-directoy is printed individually.

The “-b” parameter specifed that the output is show in bytes, if you remove it the output defailts to MB.

General Shortcut Keys

Alt + F1	Opens the Applicantions Menu .

Window Shortcut Keys

Alt + Tab	Switches between windows. When you use these shortcut keys, a list of windows that you can select is displayed. Release the keys to select a window.

Panel Shortcut Keys

Ctrl + Alt + Tab	Switches the focus between the panels and the desktop. When you use these shortcut keys, a list of items that you can select is displayed. Release the keys to select an item.

Application Shortcut Keys

Shortcut Keys	Command
Ctrl + Z	Undo
Ctrl + S	Save
Ctrl + Q	Quit

So, I’m blogging a bit more often on here and traffic is picking up a bit. There’s a few posts that get most of it – mainly the linux and PDF ones.

So that’s more posts and more traffic but no comments.

C’MON PEOPLE! LEAVE A COMMENT. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

I am giving you something in return – all comments have dofollow enabled so any comments back to your blog count as a link. See, it’s like soooo worth it, dewd!