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<channel>
	<title>The Planning Cycle</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor</link>
	<description></description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:18:05 +0000</pubDate>
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			<item>
		<title>Site up</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/site-up/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/site-up/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:18:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=23</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Feels nice to have a working site up now. I&#8217;ve got to say, Drupal is fucking awesome to work with. After all the different systems I&#8217;ve tried to get this site working on (at one point it was even running on phpBB), this has got to be my absolute favorite. It does what I want, [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Feels nice to have a working site up now. I&#8217;ve got to say, Drupal is fucking awesome to work with. After all the different systems I&#8217;ve tried to get this site working on (at one point it was even running on phpBB), this has got to be my absolute favorite. It does what I want, plain and simple.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m also rather excited about getting to use Drupal. For some time I&#8217;ve been planning to start up a series of micro-sites, but have shirked away because of how difficult it would be to set up 10-20 different site. Drupal makes it crazy easy though, one installation, a bunch of sites.</p>
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			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/site-up/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>About me</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/about-me/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/about-me/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:45:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=22</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m working on writin up a new About me page. I&#8217;ve decided to make a comitment to being easier to reach. I&#8217;ve decided to make a concerted effort to communicate with people more. On that note, I&#8217;m workin on a list of all the social networks/chat programs/etc that I use. If you notice anything missing, [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;m working on writin up a new About me page. I&#8217;ve decided to make a comitment to being easier to reach. I&#8217;ve decided to make a concerted effort to communicate with people more. On that note, I&#8217;m workin on a list of all the social networks/chat programs/etc that I use. If you notice anything missing, either things that I don&#8217;t have on the list but you know I have, or something which you think I /should/ have, leave me a comment with it. Here is a partial:</p>
<ul>
<li>Myspace</li>
<li>Facebook</li>
<li>Last.fm</li>
<li>Plurk</li>
<li>Twitter</li>
<li>Aim</li>
<li>MSN</li>
<li>Yahoo</li>
<li>List of the websites I&#8217;m running</li>
<li>Email/Gtalk</li>
</ul>
<p>I&#8217;m also going to work on making accounts on a bunch of different social networking sites. I&#8217;ll need some suggestions for that, I&#8217;ve only got a fairly basic idea of what I should be signing up for.</p>
<p>In addition to all that, I&#8217;m thinking about getting a domain for this blog. Its nice having it here, but I certainly think I should get a domain for my personal blog too.</p>
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			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/about-me/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>A little update</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/a-little-update/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/a-little-update/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:10:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=21</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Its been quite a while since I&#8217;ve posted anything. Between a rather hectic schedule for my summer and just having other stuff to work on I wasn&#8217;t able to do much in the way of posting. So, I figured I would let any readers I have know about some of current projects for the blog.

Spreadsheet [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Its been quite a while since I&#8217;ve posted anything. Between a rather hectic schedule for my summer and just having other stuff to work on I wasn&#8217;t able to do much in the way of posting. So, I figured I would let any readers I have know about some of current projects for the blog.</p>
<ul>
<li>Spreadsheet tutorial. I&#8217;ll probably be working on the basics, then I&#8217;ll do some videos on making spreadsheets for gaming purposes. Hopefully it will help someone at least a little bit&#8230; I figure this will be a series of 5-10 posts, depending on how in depth I go.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Runescape. I&#8217;ll be doing an essay-article on Runescape, specifically how much good it did for me because of its terrible features. Hopefully I can drum up some cool traffic from the Runescape fan-kids.</li>
<li>Some website projects. I&#8217;m testing out outsourcing blogging. I&#8217;ve got some high school kids and a few middle easterners doing a couple of test runs, to see if I can make some nice money off of it.</li>
<li>NBTD Site work. Notice how far down this is? That&#8217;s because the real site updater isn&#8217;t doing shit anyway&#8230;</li>
</ul>
<p>So, I&#8217;d like some feedback on it. Lets see if anyone has ideas.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/a-little-update/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Spreadsheeting</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/spreadsheeting/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/spreadsheeting/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:37:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=20</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You&#8217;ve probably heard of the mystic &#8220;spreadsheets.&#8221; Almost all gamers have heard of them, and anyone who works in an office has a passing familiarity with them. But how many of you know how to use them, really use them, not just creating simple tables?
I&#8217;ve mentioned the game Kingdom of Loathing before on here. Its [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>You&#8217;ve probably heard of the mystic &#8220;spreadsheets.&#8221; Almost all gamers have heard of them, and anyone who works in an office has a passing familiarity with them. But how many of you know how to use them, really use them, not just creating simple tables?</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve mentioned the game Kingdom of Loathing before on here. Its my favorite game, and spreadsheets play a huge part in it (for some people). See, there&#8217;s two ways to play a game, any game at all: Casually, or Hardcore. Casual is pretty simple, you sit down and play, nothing complicated at all about that, and most games design at least a portion of the game for that kind of person. Hardcore is, well, hardcore. A hardcore player spends hours researching things, digging through piles of old data and numbers to try and come up with the &#8220;Optimal&#8221; thing to do. That&#8217;s what Hardcore players, <strong>real </strong>hardcore players, love Spread Sheets. See, spreadsheets are all about taking a bunch of numbers, and giving you something usable out of it.</p>
<p>So what makes a good spreadsheet? There&#8217;s a couple things you need:<br />
Data. Lots of data, usually in the form of percentages and the like</p>
<p>Inputs. Good spreadsheets don&#8217;t just work in one situation, they let you put your situation in and pull up the best thing to do.</p>
<p>Results. The spreadsheet has to create results of some sort, and answer.</p>
<p>Thats it. Over the next few weeks I&#8217;ll be working on this, and doing a nice introduction to spreadsheeting.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Me, Video Blogging</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/me-video-blogging/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/me-video-blogging/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:28:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=19</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I did a video blog. Yay me!

]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I did a video blog. Yay me!</p>
<p><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1sSOaHJx3Ak&#038;hl=en&#038;fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1sSOaHJx3Ak&#038;hl=en&#038;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/me-video-blogging/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Where to go?</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/where-to-go/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/where-to-go/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2008 01:55:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=17</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Well, I&#8217;m not quite sure what to do with this blog. I may be turning this into more of a personal blog, I may turn it more into the test tricks topic, I&#8217;m just not sure right now. See, with the MicroBlogging that I talked about the other day, I no longer have to try [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Well, I&#8217;m not quite sure what to do with this blog. I may be turning this into more of a personal blog, I may turn it more into the test tricks topic, I&#8217;m just not sure right now. See, with the MicroBlogging that I talked about the other day, I no longer have to try and fit things I want to talk about into a given category. If it doesn&#8217;t fit into one of the ones I&#8217;ve currently got, I can just launch a new blog and let it make money for me.<br />
That means this needs to have a clear, concise topic, something I can stick with. I&#8217;m not entirely sure what thats going to be. Do the handful of people who read this on a regular basis have an opinion on it? I&#8217;d love to hear what you guys have to say about it.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Moving a blog to NearlyFreeSpeech.net</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/moving-a-blog-to-nearlyfreespeech/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/moving-a-blog-to-nearlyfreespeech/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2008 17:20:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=16</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I’m not going to walk you through signing up for NearlyFreeSpeech.net, I’m pretty sure you can do that on your own; it’s not difficult at all. Actually, I will; Go to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, click “Sign Up Now” and follow their 5 simple steps. The most complicated part of the whole process is pumping some money into [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’m not going to walk you through signing up for <a href="http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net">NearlyFreeSpeech.net</a>, I’m pretty sure you can do that on your own; it’s not difficult at all. Actually, I will; Go to <a href="http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net">NearlyFreeSpeech.net</a>, click “Sign Up Now” and follow their 5 simple steps. The most complicated part of the whole process is pumping some money into your account, but I’m sure if you’ve been on the internet a while you can use Paypal well enough to do that. Personally, I put $2.50 into my account, after fees it came out to be 2.33, which seems like more than enough for quite a while.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>So, let’s get down to the complicated part of it: actually moving a blog. For my example, I’m moving <a href="http://www.theothermmo.com">www.theothermmo.com</a>, a blog that I own, and am currently moving. This is the exact process, and I did it exactly this way.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p><span id="more-16"></span><br />
You’re going to start by logging in. If you’re at the main <a href="http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net">NearlyFreeSpeech.net</a> home page, you’ll click member login in the top left. What you want is the sites tab, that’s where we’re going to set up our blog. Over to the right, after clicking on sites, is a link to “Create a New Site,” that’s what you want. First they want a short name; if you’ve got an acronym for your site, use that, if not, use the full thing. The next screen asks for another name, that’s where you put in your domain name, so I put in <a href="http://www.theothermmo.com">www.theothermmo.com</a>. Now, you’ve got a choice. The first is setting up DNS and email, but they’re going to charge you $0.02 a day for email. I personally would do the second one, just DNS, but it’s up to you. You should know that their email system won’t be like what you had on CPanel, so it might not be the best idea to play with it until you get more used to their system.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>I’ll assume you did the second one, like I did. They’ll be two continue buttons to press, and then you’re all done. You’ve got a couple other things you need to set up for a blog. The most important is a MySQL database; most blogs won’t run without one. Unfortunately, that’s going to probably be the most costly part of your blog, a whole $0.30 a month. Good thing you can use the same process (what holds the databases, and what they charge for) for many different databases, so you’ll only be paying that $0.30, no matter how many blogs you’re running.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Let’s head over to the MySQL tab, that’s where you’ll be setting it up at. Just like setting up a site, you’ll click on “Create a new MySQL Process.” From there, you’ll be asked for a name for it. Pick something simple, you’ll be using it on all your blogs, so you’ll have to remember it. Then on the dropdown, click your account. There should only be one, so hit that one, it’s where you should have your money. Click continue, and you’re all set up. We’ve just got to add the database and user, so click on the name of the database from the list. Then, over to the right will be a link to “Open PHPMyAdmin,” that’s what you want. Type in your username and password, and hit continue twice. Click on privileges, then add new user. Type in a username (I’d suggest the short name you used), click generate and copy and paste the password (make sure to save the password). Change the radio button to the second option: “Create database with same name and grant all privileges.” Hit go, and you’ve got your database set up.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Before you do anything else, we’ll need a copy of your old site, you’re going to want to save all that work, right? The first part is to go download your MySQL Database. It will be different from host to host, but generally you’ll be looking for phpMyAdmin, however you get to it. Once you do, there should be a link on the first page to export. On the export page, all you need to do is hit the “Save as File” checkbox, and you’re good, hit ok. You’ve now got your databased saved nicely, so fire up your favorite FTP client and go download all the files. Again, this is going to differ between hosts, just make sure you get all the files.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Now that you’ve got your site set up, and your database set up, it’s time for the hard part. The first thing you’ll want is to point your name to the new hosts, so this may not work the same for everyone. I used GoDaddy to register <a href="http://www.theothermmo.com">www.theothermmo.com</a> originally, so I have to use their system to point the name at the new domain. It will be different for every host, but you’re looking for a “Domain Control Panel” of some sort. For GoDaddy, you get to that by logging in, clicking Domains&gt;My Domains, and clicking on the link for the domain you’re transferring. From there, you want to change the name server, so click on the name server button (or however you do it with your hosts). To find out what to change the Name Servers to, head back over to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, and go to your control panel. Click on the Domains tab, and click manage under DNS for your site. The first thing that comes up should be Name Servers, so copy and paste those into the box your old host has for you. It’s worth considering simply adding the new Name Servers, and not getting rid of the old ones just yet, so your site will stay up while you’re making the change. Of course, if you’re lazy like me, the few minutes of downtime won’t matter that much to you.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Everything is set up and pointing at your new host, you’ve got to install the blog now. This is probably something you’ve never done before; you’re going to be installing the blog by subversion. It’s a little easier, but it’s very different. First you’ll need what’s called a SSH client, I like <a href="http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html">PuTTY</a>. Download it, and load it up. You’ll see a lot of boxes, most of which you won’t need. The important one is the host name, so head over to NearlyFreeSpeech.net’s member area again, we’ll need that. Go to sites again, and click on your site name. The first box there should have FTP info, SSH info, and your login info for both. Copy and paste the SSH info into PuTTY and hit open. You’ll be prompted for credentials, the username is what it says on that site page, the password is the password you log into NFS.N with. Now you’ve got an even more confusing box. You’re going to type “cd ..” which should bring up “me@XXXXX  /home/” type “cd public” which will then put you at /home/public/, which is where you want to be.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Then:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Type the following commands, replacing &#8220;2.3.3&#8243; with the version number of your blog:</p>
<p>$ svn checkout http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3/ .<br />
$ cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php<br />
$ nano -w wp-config.php</p>
<p>Edit the the following lines in the configuration file with the appropriate values:<br />
define(&#8217;DB_NAME&#8217;, &#8216;putyourdbnamehere&#8217;); // The name of the database<br />
define(&#8217;DB_USER&#8217;, &#8216;usernamehere&#8217;); // Your MySQL username<br />
define(&#8217;DB_PASSWORD&#8217;, &#8216;yourpasswordhere&#8217;); // &#8230;and password<br />
define(&#8217;DB_HOST&#8217;, &#8216;localhost&#8217;);</p>
<p>Replace localhost with the name of your process, e.g., yourprocess.db</p>
<p>Go to http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/wp-admin/install.php</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>You’ve now got a blank blog installed. Go back to phpMyAdmin (its under MySQL on your members login). Pull up your database on the right, and it should give you a list of all the tables. On the dropdown beside it click drop, and hit go. Click ok (make sure to do this, I always forget). Then click import, and browse to the table that you downloaded from your old host.  As a note, if your database is not named the same thing as the old one, you will have problems. Before importing it, open the file in Notepad (or an equivalent), and use the replace function to replace the old database name with the new one. You may also have to delete the “Create…” line in the file, depending on how it was saved.<br />
You now have all your blog posts put back, so load up your FTP client again, and upload the wp-content folder to the /public folder of your site. This adds your themes and plugins back to the site. You may have to re-install the plugins depending on how they were installed.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>And you’re finished. Yes, it took a little while, but it was worth it. You’re getting a much better deal for your hosting, around $0.35 a month, plus bandwidth (which will doubtfully exceed $1.00).</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Websites from your Pocket Change</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/websites-from-your-pocket-change/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/websites-from-your-pocket-change/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2008 18:32:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/?p=15</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No, I&#8217;m not taking a break from posting. I&#8217;m just taking a break from that topic, mainly because I&#8217;ve got something new I want to talk about.
&#160;
I&#8217;ve had my finger on the good old blog-o-sphere for a while now. One of the big things thats going around right now, or at least was a little [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>No, I&#8217;m not taking a break from posting. I&#8217;m just taking a break from that topic, mainly because I&#8217;ve got something new I want to talk about.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve had my finger on the good old blog-o-sphere for a while now. One of the big things thats going around right now, or at least was a little while ago, was the micro-blogs/micro-sites. Simple, little blogs that you update a few times a month, and are expected to make $5 a day/week. Now, I&#8217;ve thought about this, but it seems a little hard to me.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Lets take a look at the math: If the blog is making $5 a week (which is a good bit, don&#8217;t get me wrong), then you make around $260 a year. Not bad at all, especially if you&#8217;re running a number of these. There&#8217;s only one problem: you&#8217;re not looking at the costs. First, you registered the domain, thats $15, then you&#8217;re paying for hosting, the most reasonable of which is usually around $4 a month. So that means you&#8217;re down almost 20% of your profits in operating costs. Something seems a little wrong  with that equation to me.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p><span id="more-15"></span></p>
<p>The concept generally is based on making websites that mostly take care of themselves, but if you&#8217;ve got constant bills, every month, that are eating up over 20% of the <em>projected </em>profits, it looks to me like you&#8217;ll be losing money in the long run. See, most blogs have up and down spikes. You&#8217;ll get a bunch of traffic, and then it will slow down. Then it&#8217;ll pick up again. With a micro blog like this, you&#8217;re probably going to see a spike every few weeks when you make a post, and then drop right back down. Its doubtful you&#8217;ll be making a consistent $5 a month, and even more doubtful that you&#8217;ll want to make a post when you check your ad revenue and see that for the past week you&#8217;ve gotten 4 hits.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;m not the kind of person to shoot down and idea and not fix it. Lets start with the assumption that you&#8217;re not going to be making consistent profits, that they&#8217;ll come and go, depending on traffic. If thats the case, a host thats requiring you to pay the same no matter how much your site is used isn&#8217;t doing you much good. You also need a massive number of these sites to make a good profit, and could probably use a few good ideas for advertising.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the setup that I&#8217;ve come up with, and what I plan on starting immediately:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>First, I discovered <a href="http://nearlyfreespeech.net">Nearly Free Speech.Net</a> the other day. I realized that I used, get this, less than 1% of the hosting I was paid for the past two months. My host was giving me 1 gig of space, and 100 gigs of bandwidth. I used around 50 megabytes of space and about 1.2 gigabytes of bandwidth. Not a lot. Nearly free speech has become my overall host, I haven&#8217;t moved everything there yet, but I will be. It took a little doing, but I&#8217;m now completely set up.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s there cost breakdown: $1/Gigabyte of bandwidth, at least at the start. The more you use, the less it costs. On top of that, there are a couple of other charges: $0.01 a day for MySQL, and $0.01 a month per megabyte of storage. When you&#8217;re used to a few dollars for several gigs of storage that sounds like a lot, but think about it. Your average blog is less than 10 megabytes (this is 4 megs, and I could shrink it by getting rid of the default themes). A forum is around 30 megabytes, if you&#8217;ve got a couple of hacks and a custom theme. So, I&#8217;m running 3 blogs, a (currently) small website, and a forum for around $0.50 a month. Sure, I&#8217;m being charged by the bandwidth too, but I would have to use over 5 gigs of transfer to even equal my old hosts, and these guys are a lot better. Thats around 100,000 page views, or 100 different people downloading my entire website. If I&#8217;m getting that I&#8217;m making a fortune, and the $5 it costs in bandwidth won&#8217;t mean anything.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>I know what you&#8217;re thinking. Great, he found a new host. What does this mean for me? Sure, its nice, but it doesn&#8217;t sound like its worth moving for, it just doesn&#8217;t. Thats where the micro-site concept comes in. Most hosts will charge you $10-15 for a domain name. These guys only charge $8. Thats great, because it puts registering loads of websites well within my grasp. Most people, when they say to go out and make one of these micro blogs, suggest making a handful and updating them regularly. My goal is to make at least 3 new websites a month. Thats $24 a month, well within my grasp. The guys at NFSN make it easy to handle all of it, its just a matter of clicking through a few buttons and telling them where to pull the cash from.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>So what do I do with 3 websites a month? Make new content. It may seem hard, but it really isn&#8217;t. Do you like cooking? Register something for all the chicken recipes you make, and blog each time you try a new one. Then, register one for rice dishes, or deserts, or whatever it is you cook. Do you do any type of troubleshooting at work? Make a new blog for each type of problem. I do sysadmin work, so I&#8217;ll be starting an active directory blog, an exchange blog, a Windows XP blog, and Office blog&#8230; The list goes on. And every day I&#8217;ll have 1-2 problems to put on ONE of them. Instead of pushing to put up regular updates for a couple of sites, I&#8217;ll be writing a handful of blog posts every day, on various topics, and post them to whichever blog it happens to apply to. Apply to more than one? Its going on both. Slow day, nothing to write about? No big deal, its not a problem.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Almost everyone uses categories or tags on their blogs. I&#8217;m suggesting removing that process and instead using completely different domains for the blogging, each category gets translated into its own domain and blog, you&#8217;ll put posts on it when you feel like it, just post something every day.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Now, there&#8217;s only one problem left. We&#8217;ve got hosting that we only get charged for when we use. We&#8217;ve got an easy way to put content up on tons of different sites, and keep all of them updating. The only thing we have to do is keep them profitable, as long as they&#8217;re all bringing in a profit we&#8217;re good, and it was worthwhile.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve got two main suggestions for it: <a href="http://www.projectwonderful.com">Project Wonderful</a> and Adsense (<script type="text/javascript"><!--
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// &#8211;&gt;
// &#8211;&gt;
// &#8211;&gt;</script><script src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript"></script>). You&#8217;ve probably used both of them, but not made a whole lot of money off them. Now, Project Wonderful is almost a requirement for this kind of blogging. In my time using it, I&#8217;ve found putting one of the two large ads, either a leaderboard or a skyscraper, almost always leads to a 2-3 cents a day earnings on them. As long as you can average a hit or two a day, which you&#8217;ll easily get if you post on it, you&#8217;ll be keeping the blog afloat purely on Project Wonderful ad revenue. While having a website that provides for itself is pretty cool, its not your only goal. You want a profit, and thats where Adsense comes in. The problem with adsense, and the reason it normally won&#8217;t make you a huge profit, is because your sites are too general. Sure, most people are into niche blogging, but they usually have at least 4-5 different categories they regularly post in. If each of those categories was its own blog, like I&#8217;m doing, the ads would be super targeted. Place them well, and any Search Engine traffic is almost guaranteed to be clicking on it, they found precisely what they wanted and the ad is targeted at specifically what you&#8217;re talking about.  This means revenue for you, and you making a profit.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Now, this isn&#8217;t perfect by any means, and it certainly isn&#8217;t automated. My best guess it will take probably an hour or two a day to make all your postings. I&#8217;m very seriously considering writing a script specifically for this.There&#8217;s also the problem of payments. You&#8217;ll have to take care of those, and to keep your website up, I would suggest using Paypal, get an account set up. NFS.N accepts Paypal, and they&#8217;re really good about it. Project Wonderful, which should be supplying you with all your operating funds, also uses Paypal and works very well with it. I&#8217;m heavily considering writing a script for that too, something which runs once a month, transferring all you funds out of Project Wonderful to the Paypal account, and then transferring all those funds to NFS.N to pay for your hosting. The other downside is NFS.N. Its not like most hosts, there&#8217;s no CPanel, there&#8217;s no Fantastico, you&#8217;ll have to do everything by hand. You&#8217;ll have to add all your Blogs by hand, and you&#8217;ll have to get under the hood a little more. I&#8217;ll write up more complete directions next week, but for now I think most people can stumble through it.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>What are you waiting for? Go, find a couple bucks, and throw it at NSF.N to start. Then its a matter of scrounging up about a dollar a day to register a new Domain every week to put content on. If you need some help setting NFS.N up, let me know, I&#8217;ll be happy to put it together for you and take care of the maintenance for a small fee.</p>
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		<title>Answer Analysis</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/answer-analysis/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/answer-analysis/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:25:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Meta-Test]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://nbtd-productions.com/skolor/answer-analysis/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve always been a good test taker. Being able to take tests well and know what the test givers are looking for is a skill I&#8217;ve spent many years developing, to the point its almost an art form. 12 years of public school and my first year of college have thought me that not only [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve always been a good test taker. Being able to take tests well and know what the test givers are looking for is a skill I&#8217;ve spent many years developing, to the point its almost an art form. 12 years of public school and my first year of college have thought me that not only is good test taking important, it can be even more important than actually knowing the subject; I have recently taken several tests on subjects I know next to nothing about, and manage to get passing grades. I&#8217;ve got tons of tricks to help pass tests, I rarely get below a 55% on any test, no matter how little I know about the subject.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>The secret is what I like to call meta-testing. From the greek word meta, meaning beyond, its the concept of taking it a step beyond the test, knowing about the nature of tests enough to decide the right answers, even if you don&#8217;t know how to get them or why they&#8217;re right, there are simple processes to create the right answer out of nothing.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Over the next period of time (weeks, months, years even, however long it takes) I&#8217;ll be discussing the subject of meta-testing. I&#8217;ve gained immense skill in it, I can walk into a multiple choice test on any math-based subject (physics, chemistry, any form of math) and get at least a 55%, a long answer test, in the same fields, I can usually get at least a 40%, which can easily be raised to 60% with an hour or so of study time and a knowledge of what will be tested.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p><span id="more-14"></span></p>
<p>The secret is meta-testing, tests have become so common in US schools that they almost all resemble each other. They follow similar rules, there grading scales are similar, and the secrets are similar. If you can beat one, you can beat them all.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>The first major principle of meta-testing builds on a time honored tradition of students: Christmas Treeing. Its a common practice for students, when presented a Scantron test on a subject they don&#8217;t know, to perform what is referred to as Christmas Tree Answering, or just Christmas Treeing. Since Scantron tests are multiple choice tests, with either 4 or 5 possible answers, its a simple matter to make a pattern across the page, and a Christmas Tree&#8217;d test is likely to get either a 20% or a 25%, significantly better for your average than a 0%.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>The problem with Christmas Treeing is that it is done regardless of the test writer, it does not apply any of the core principles of Meta-Testing. It is still a form of Meta-Testing, in that it goes beyond the test, but it does not take the core features of Meta-Testing in, and can be improved by the application of the three most basic tenets: The test writer is predictable, you know <em>something </em>about the subject matter, and questions are designed to have answers.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Multiple choice tests are great. They <em>give you the answer</em>. They actually tell you what the right answer is, you just need to decide which one is actually right.  Since the question is designed to be answered, and you have the right answer sitting right in front of you, it only takes a little bit of a stretch to decide which one is actually correct. Look at all parts of the question, and make a list of all the information given to you; its usually a lot more than it appears at first glance, and can lead you to the answer. I&#8217;ll go more in depth about meta-answering later, right now lets just assume you&#8217;re able to reason out a handful of questions, lets say 20% of the test, a mere 10 questions on a 40 question test, and we&#8217;ll say that at least 75% of those are right (a statistic that has held true on almost every occasion I&#8217;ve tested).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>This means you&#8217;ve got 7 or 8 correct answers, more than enough to make a decent analysis of the test writer&#8217;s preferences. The problem with Christmas Treeing is that it is usually done by putting ABCDABCD on the test, answering in order. While you have a statistical 25% chance of getting any single answer right this way, its very easy to have the wrong pattern. One very important thing is that test writers try and make random tests answers, to prevent people from guessing the pattern and building on that. That means they do a couple of things, the most important being an avoidance of regular patterns. Rarely will a test have a string of ABCD in a row, and if they do, it won&#8217;t occur more than once. The Christmas Tree pattern is one usually avoided, and strings like that will not occur often enough to make it worth while.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Its not too much trouble for a test writer to completely avoid having a pattern in their answers, at least not an obvious one. One thing they can&#8217;t do, however, is not use a letter. Very, very rarely will a test writer completely neglect a certain answer choice throughout a test, since it pops up in the mind as a pattern, which they want to avoid. Despite wanting to avoid not using an answer, they have a tendency of favoring one answer more than others.  For 4 answer tests, that answer is usually C, answering straight down a test will often score you at least a 30%, for the 5 answer tests its usually B, which will net you a 25%. Its not a major improvement, but it is definitely more than what you started with, which is what meta-testing is all about.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">&nbsp;</p>
<p>Lets go back to those deduced answers. You&#8217;ve got 7 or 8 questions that  or correct, a decent enough sample to get a guess at the writer&#8217;s preference. Take the answer most used in the 10 questions you have, and answer it for all the questions you don&#8217;t know. You&#8217;ve got significant chance at error, but its a whole lot better than nothing. Even with the error, you&#8217;re looking at almost 40% correct answers on a 4 question test, or a 38% on a 5 question, as long as the tendency towards a single answer choice holds true, which it always will. It isn&#8217;t much, but its something to build off of, and it will keep you well within passing ranges for the class.</p>
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		<title>Practical- How the NBTD website has been planned</title>
		<link>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/practical-how-the-nbtd-website-has-been-planned/</link>
		<comments>http://www.nbtd-productions.com/skolor/practical-how-the-nbtd-website-has-been-planned/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:42:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Skolor</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://nbtd-productions.com/skolor/practical-how-the-nbtd-website-has-been-planned/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If you go to the main NBTD website right now, you won&#8217;t see much. I&#8217;ve been talking with our hosts for a while now, trying to get it set up so I can do my database editing in Dream Weaver, since I have a huge aversion to writing connect scripts on my own. Nothing has [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>If you go to the main <a href="http://www.nbtd-productions.com" target="_blank">NBTD website</a> right now, you won&#8217;t see much. I&#8217;ve been talking with our hosts for a while now, trying to get it set up so I can do my database editing in Dream Weaver, since I have a huge aversion to writing connect scripts on my own. Nothing has come of it, so as of right now, we have no main page, except for some links to the blogs and forum, which I have gotten running just fine.</p>
<p>Since I&#8217;ve spent the past week talking about  how to plan a website, its time to describe a practical example, how the NBTD website has been planned out, from start to its current state, with a little about the future plans. Since the website currently doesn&#8217;t have much actual content, my focus will be on my blog and the forum, the two parts that are working and I&#8217;ve worked on promoting/monetizing.</p>
<p><span id="more-12"></span></p>
<p>Starting from the beginning, I was re-launching the NBTD website. We&#8217;ve been around for quite a while, a year and 4 months, give or take a little while. Originally, the website was NBTD-animations, and was mainly a site to promote some flash animations we had done, and allow Josh (one of the other members) to post various comics he did. I never really got around to promoting the website much, and almost all of the traffic was from school friends, who got on the forums to talk. Josh had been updating on a fairly regular basis, about once a week, give or take, he&#8217;d put up a handful of comics. Everything was going fine, and we were making money, until he stopped. After a month of that, most of our friends stopping coming on the site. A month later, the NBTD crew itself wasn&#8217;t visiting the site much. By graduation in May, just 6 months after the website went up, almost all traffic was gone from the site. When November rolled back around, and our hosting deal/domain name was up, I decided to call it quits and not renew the site.</p>
<p>Then, by February of this year,  I was really missing having a website. I didn&#8217;t have a forum to screw around on whenever I wanted. I didn&#8217;t have hosting to post anything I wanted to share. It wasn&#8217;t right, so I got together some money, and at the beginning of March, the new NBTD Productions was launched. The new name is significant, we&#8217;re not just animating now, its more of a general production group. Currently we&#8217;re blogging, video blogging, Josh is still doing comics, and there are plans to start doing Podcasts. The future looks bright, as long as we can keep the site up and afloat.</p>
<p>Which is what you&#8217;re really interested in, whats being done on those terms. What am I doing to promote the site, and keep it profitable?  First, there are/will be 4 portions of the site:</p>
<ul>
<li>The Main Site, which will work much like a blog/feed of whatever projects the crew is working on. They&#8217;ll post stuff, it&#8217;ll show up on the site, and you&#8217;ll be able to look at it, nothing terribly complicated.</li>
<li>The Blogs. Josh and I are both blogging, him just because he thinks its cool, me partially because I&#8217;ve got the time for it and partially because it will hopefully bring in traffic to the website as a whole.</li>
<li>The Videos/Podcasts. 2 years ago we did a series of half hour to hour long animations. Once things get rolling with the site again, they&#8217;ll be posted up here to view, along with whatever podcasts we do, and Josh will start hosting his video blogs here.</li>
<li>The Forums. These are the heart and soul of NBTD, because its what keeps us together. Without the forums for us to chat on all the time, we become distracted and fall apart.</li>
</ul>
<p>Each of these has a number of unique features and challenges, each requiring its own method of Monetizing and Promotion. I&#8217;ll be discussing them all in order.</p>
<p>The main site has yet to have any promotion at all, except for being linked in forum signatures by Josh and me on the other forums we frequent. Despite this, and the fact that there is no actual text on the main page, its still ranked on the first page, when searching for NBTD. When doing any type of promotion, this is vitally important. You MUST put a link with your search terms in forum signatures. A forum is the easiest way to generate some SEO, many public forums allow you to place the link in your signature, or even let you post advertising threads. This kind of things greatly raises your ranking on Google. While you&#8217;re at it, if you&#8217;ve got a personal MySpace or Facebook, on any social site like that, link to your site, every link counts. Consider making special MySpace accounts for the site as a promotion method, it will help more than you think.</p>
<p>When it comes to ads, we don&#8217;t have a lot yet. The plan, right now, is to stick with Project Wonderful and Adsense for the main page once it gets up. I figure most of our traffic will be Loyal Followers, so the Adsense ads won&#8217;t get many hits, but the Project Wonderful stuff should bring in some sort of profit.</p>
<p>The blogs are much more developed, at least mine is. I&#8217;ve spent quite a bit of time the past two weeks promoting my blogging, going everywhere trying to get links and hits. You&#8217;ll notice quite a few of them around the site, but there are others too:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.entrecard.com" target="_blank">EntreCard</a>. Its a must register for a blog. You&#8217;ll get a lot of bounce traffic, but if you&#8217;ve got good content people will start sticking around and reading your blog. Its just a matter of keeping at it. Dropping on other sites are almost as good as advertising, since you will often get the person who owns that site to drop back, and hopefully become interested in your site. Just try and stick to the pages that have similar themes, so that users are more likely to stick around.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.bloggeries.com/forum/" target="_blank">Bloggeries</a>.  Its a relatively small forum with quite a bit of information on blogs. I&#8217;ve found a lot of good information there, and from posting on the forums have generated a good number of hits to my blog.</li>
</ul>
<p>Right now those are my biggest avenues for promotion. I prefer a viral approach to marketing, since I believe it promotes more of a Loyal Following, rather than Answer Seekers. Its also considerably cheaper, and we don&#8217;t have much of a budget here for advertising.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve got to offset our costs some how. We don&#8217;t have a lot of costs, but they still need to be paid for. You can see most of them on this page, but there are a few others that I haven&#8217;t fully implemented yet.</p>
<ul>
<li>Adsense. Everyone uses adsense, but that doesn&#8217;t make it any less useful. Just make sure that you put it places it will be useful, remember you don&#8217;t get paid unless they click, so you want Adsense ads where people coming to your site, looking for an Answer will see and click on it.<script type="text/javascript"><!--
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</script><br />
<script type="text/javascript">
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script></li>
<li><a href="http://www.Projectwonderful.com" target="_blank">Project Wonderful</a>. Great people there, they&#8217;ve got a cool setup, and it generally means you&#8217;ll always be getting at a few cents a day from them.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.moola.com/moopubs/b2b/exc/join.jsp?sid=4d5449744d54417a4e44417a-2" target="_blank">Moola</a>. Not an actual ad, I keep talking about Moola a lot. Its a game, where you gamble with advertisers money. Great concept, and fun, plus its referal only and the referals get a cut of your winnings when you cash out. There&#8217;s nothing not to like about it.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.sellingppp.com/a.cgi?ppp=121268722" target="_blank">Pay Per Play</a>.  I have yet to add these yet, but I will be adding them to our Video/Podcasting pages. Each of the Videos/Podcasts will play in a pop up, which will contain at the very least a line of Project Wonderful ads at the top, and row of Adsense ads at the bottom, and will play the audio supplied by these guys before playing the actual video.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now, I&#8217;ve still got some work to do. I definitely need to keep working on promoting the site, thats a major thing to do. I&#8217;m going to be turning this past cycle of blog posts into articles and submitting them to a bunch of article databases, in hopes of getting hits from there. I&#8217;ve done this in the past, but haven&#8217;t kept up with it on the website planning posts, so I need to get to it. I&#8217;ll probably post a blog about submitting articles sometime in the near future. Also, I&#8217;ll be trying to funnel traffic. One of my short term goals is to build special entrance pages for each of my ads. All forum links will go to a specific page (they might go to the main page, not sure yet), all Entrecard traffic will go to another page (definitely), and so on. This way, I&#8217;ll be able to tailor those pages in hopes of catching their attention quicker. I&#8217;ve got no idea how well this will work, its going to be an experiment.</p>
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