Web Cash

Part of developing a successful blog and your identity as a blogger is creating a web of blogs that you read and participate in. Imagine the blogosphere as a giant web. You want to connect your website to a bunch of others – you don’t want to just be a random thread connected to nothing.

Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.
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As I mentioned before, Helium is another great place to publish your writing online. It ranks up with Associated Content as one of my favorite writing sites.

So how do you get started? Is it hard to publish your first article at Helium? Not at all.
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This site has kind of strayed from my original intent – to explore and report on ways to make money online. For a couple months now, I’ve focused almost exclusively on the development and design end to working the web for cash.

I think it’s time to take a step back and look at a site where you can write for profit – without requiring any tech, design, or development savvy. I’ll be working on a complete section about Helium, but in the meantime here’s a quick overview.
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At it’s core, all of the information on your computer is made up of bits – or 0′s and 1′s. There’s quite a bit of interpretation that goes on between that basic binary code and the information as it is displayed on your screen.

However, you may find a time to work with data at the binary level in PHP (and many other programming languages). Here’s a quick guide to understanding binary numbers and the common operators for handling them.
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Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering data about your website. You can track and analyze all kinds of data about your visitors, their navigation paths, and the effectiveness of your content.

To use Google Analytics, you need to place some javascript on your website. A commonly asked question in forums is, “How do I add Google Analytics to my WordPress template?”
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If you write tutorials on your website or blog, then niche tutorial directories are a great source of traffic. I list most of my php tutorials with good-tutorials and get a nice burst of traffic with each new listing.

Another site I’ve found useful is Gimp Tutorials. They’re a great place to list any graphics tutorials that you write for the GIMP graphic design program.
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An old web design adage is, “Content is king.” All the SEO and fancy design in the world won’t help you if you don’t have any content.

So how do you keep on writing? Where do all the new ideas come from?

Everybody’s got their own tricks, but here’s one that I love to use when I’m short on ideas. Go through your search engine logs and see what people are searching for – and not finding.
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The other day I wrote about how to add a gradient background to a css tooltip. So I thought it might be a good idea to walk through how to create the actual gradient image.

Since I recently switched to Ubuntu Linux, I don’t use Photoshop anymore. GIMP all the way. So this tutorial will show you briefly how to create a gradient image in GIMP and then use it as the background of an html element.
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This site is fairly new. Ok, it’s really new. So, naturally, I’ve been looking for ways to increase backlinks, search engine visibility, and traffic.

I’ve tried out a few methods, with varying success. What has worked really well, so far, is submitting an article to a niche site: Good Tutorials.
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I was browsing around the PHP forum on Daniweb and came across this problem in a post.

Here’s the situation.

The guy wanted to send out a newsletter, so he grabbed a pre-fabbed newsletter script. The PHP script seemed to work fine – it read an HTML template and then fired off the e-mail in HTML form.

There was just one problem: none of the images were appearing in the HTML e-mail when he tried to view it.
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