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.

Get a Google Account: Start Reading

If you don’t use Google Reader – or another feed reader – start using one. Until you use RSS feeds on a daily basis, you’ll never know how wonderful they are, and you’ll never know how much your readers may come to rely on them.

Once I decide I like a site, I generally read it through Google Reader. If an article is interesting, I’ll click through to the site and comment on it. Other than that, I rarely go back to the site. Without the RSS reader, I’d probably never return to the site at all.

An RSS reader is a great way to collect relevant readings into one location – so you can sit there with your cup of coffee and read all of the new stuff out in the blogosphere. You can then decide what is important enough to comment on (on someone else’s blog) or respond to (on your own blog).

Share Items – Creating Your Own Feed

With Google Reader, there is a cool “Share” feature. At the bottom of the article you are reading, there’s a list of options – “Add Star,” “Share,” “E-mail,” and “Mark as Read.”

By choosing the “Share” option you are adding that article to a publicly viewable list. That list also generates its own RSS feed – which makes it easy for you to syndicate the feed on your own site. By doing so, you provide your readers with a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.

It’s a more targeted and stable than a standard RSS feed that just shows every headline from a given website – which will hopefully make it more useful for your readers.

Grab the Widget, Style Yourself

This feed is available in a standard rss xml file. You could use SimpleXML to parse the feed and display the information yourself. Or, you could use the ready-made widget that Google provides.

The Google widget uses Javascript to access the information while your page is loading. This potentially stops your page from hanging if the Google server is not responding – the rest of the page can load while the RSS feed is updated. You can find this widget by clicking on the “Your shared items” link in Google Reader and clicking on the “put a clip of your shared items” link.

The only problem is that the pre-designed styles don’t offer you a lot of options for making the list blend in with your site’s theme. My suggestion would be to select “None,” for the color scheme. You may also want to leave the title blank, and add your own title to the feed.

If you do this, the feed will be generated with the following HTML. Note: This example uses the “Show item sources” option.

<div id="readerpublishermodule0" class="reader-publisher-module">
  <ul>
    <li>
      <a class="i" title="Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids" href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/good-for-hunters-bad-for-druids/">Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids</a>
      <div class="s">from <a href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com">For the Horde</a></div>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a class="i" title="Bornakk: Druids Not to be &quot;Big Green Blobs&quot;" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/Resto4Life/%7E3/279629927/">Bornakk: Druids Not to be "Big Green Blobs"</a>
      <div class="s">from <a href="http://www.resto4life.com">Resto4Life</a></div>
    </li>
  </ul>
  <div class="f"><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/18391951200330501918/state/com.google/broadcast">Read more...</a></div>
</div>

By taking a look at this example HTML, you can easily style the widget yourself.

The entire thing is contained in a div with class “reader-publisher-module.” Each headline is contained within its own “li.” If you use the option to display the source of the article, it’s in a div with class “s” inside the list item.

My one gripe with Google Reader is I can’t create multiple shared lists. For example, I’ve divided blogs I read into ones related to web development and ones related to World of Warcraft. I’d love to be able to create a shared article list for each topic, so that I can syndicate each one on a different website.

If you want to see this in action, check out my World of Warcraft blog, Rolling Horde. It’s on the right hand side, in the middle column, underneath the recent articles.

So how do you get started? Is it hard to publish your first article at Helium? Not at all.

Each Topic Has Multiple Articles

On a writing site, you would expect to find a collection of articles. You might expect to find a list of titles – and each title represents one article.

This is where Helium is a bit unique. Helium is more like a collection of topics than headlines. For any give headline, there could be anywhere from a half dozen to a hundred articles.

For example, “The best ways to learn how to maintain a computer” has ten different articles. “Should cell phone use be banned while driving,” on the other hand, has 125 articles.

Once an author suggests a topic and submits an article – or the Helium staff creates a topic and requests an article – the topic appears on the site. It’s categorized by topic so that people can find it through browsing. Other users can then write their own article on the same topic.

How Do We Pick an Article to Read?

If there are 125 articles on the same topic, how does a user (or the computer) decide which article to read?

Another unique feature of Helium is the rating process. As well as writing articles for the site, users are asked to rate articles that have already been published.

When rating, you are presented with two articles on the same topic. You read each one and mark which one is better and by how much. The software uses this data to rank the articles from best to worst.

When someone clicks on a headline, they are taken to the #1 rated article. They can then browse other articles on the topic – but chances are they’ll only read the first couple. If you’re rated at the bottom of the heap… your article won’t get read much.

Get Started: Write On an Existing Topic

The easiest way to get started is to simply write on an existing topic.

Browse around the site and find something interesting. There are a number of general categories, and each one has a number of subcategories. You’ll find topics on everything from Religion, to Sports, to the Arts.

Once you’ve found a topic, click on the headline. You may want to read a few of the articles. If you don’t have anything substantially different to say – or if you don’t think you can say it better than it has already been said – then you should keep moving. After all, we don’t need a hundred identical articles under one topic.

If you do have something to add to the conversation, click on the pencil icon. This will take you to the writing screen, where you simply fill in the box and submit.

Your article will be instantaneously published. No review process required! Don’t you love instant gratification?

I’d suggest browsing the site for a while and then writing on some pre-existing topics. This will give you a chance to feel out what goes over well and what doesn’t. If your articles get rated poorly – then something needs to change! Otherwise, you must be doing something right.

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.

Writing for Profit – Revenue Sharing

Helium is another online writing site, similar to Associated Content.

The site is a collection of articles – mostly non-fiction, but fiction and poetry are allowed. It generates revenue through advertising based on its traffic. When you post an article on the site, you carve out a portion of that advertising revenue for yourself.

The basic form of profit on the site is revenue sharing. When you article is read, you get a portion of the advertising revenue that the article’s topic generates. Helium hasn’t released specific details about the monetization formula, but basically more page views leads to more money.

Unfortunately, Helium doesn’t report the number of page views your article gets. It’s difficult to gauge, then, whether Helium pays more per page view than other sites (like Associated Content).

I have a little over 80 articles on the site. Many of these are highly rated – which means they appear towards the topic of their category – but many of them aren’t on highly monetized topics. As a result, I earn an average of $5 per month based on these old articles.

Alternate Forms of Income – Contests and Marketplace

One thing that sets Helium apart is the availability of alternate (and more profitable) sources of income.

At any given time, Helium is usually offering a contest or promotion that can net you a lot of cash. One popular contest format is the “Channel Champion” contest.

A list of topics (20-30) is generated for a given category. Everyone is eligible to write articles in that category for the week, and the most popular author at the end of the week wins a prize. In the past, first place has been $75 and second place has been $25. This can be a good way to build up a repertoire of articles for revenue sharing while also possibly earning a nice bonus.

The most profitable – and unique – section of the site is the marketplace. Publishers come to Heilum and request articles on a given topic. You submit an article on that topic. If your article is chosen, you get paid a premium rate for it. It’s essentially a marketplace for freelance writing.

Although some publishers pay poorly (less than $20 per article), there are many premium publishers. I wrote an article that was purchased for $80, and there are offers available for $100+.

A Final Plus – Community

Another reason I prefer Helium to Associated Content is that there is a strong, friendly community.

The Associated Content forums are generally populated by people complaining about problems with the site. There are some decent discussions if you dig deep enough, but I find little reason to frequent them.

Helium, on the other hand, has worked hard to develop a community within their site. The forums have sections for peer review of articles, suggestions for new features, critiques of the site, and general discussions about writing. Helium employees constantly frequent the forums and you can be assured that any issues you have will be noticed.

Check It Out

The bottom line is that you should check it out. Helium is a great place to start building your online writing portfolio, and it can even net you some real freelance gigs.

The revenue sharing isn’t as strong as Associated Content, from my experience, but you can more than make up for that if you participate in contests and the marketplace. The forums are also a great place to meet up with other writers and practice your craft.

If you’re truly interested in developing as a writer on the ‘net or in print, this is a great place to start. Check it out, and check back here later for a more in depth look at writing at Helium.

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.

“Normal” Numbers – Base Ten, Decimal System

When you deal with numbers, you are probably using the “Base Ten” or “Decimal” number system. These are numbers made up of a set of ten different digits – zero through nine.

A given quantity – like 512 – is created with a series of digits. The position of the digit tells us how much the digit actually represents. The ’2′ here is in the units place, so it simply represents 2. The 1 is in the tens place, so it actually represents 10. The 5 is in the hundreds place, so it represents 500.

The number could be re-written as:

500 + 10 + 2 = 512

You’ll notice a pattern here. Each new place is worth ten times the previous place. The third digit (the hundreds place) is worth 10 * 10. If we added a fourth place, it would be worth 10 * 100 (1000).

This gives us a nifty little mathematical formula – which is why this is called “base ten” numbering. The nth digit (where zero is the right-most digit) is worth 10^n. Here’s the number 1024 re-written to illustrate this.

(1 * 10^3) + (0 * 10^2) + (2 * 10^1) + (4 * 10^0) = 1024

This is a lot of work to read a number that we intuitively know is worth 1,024. However, it helps to understand how binary numbers work.

Binary Numbers – The Base Two System

While base ten numbers are simple enough for humans to work with, computers are designed to use a binary or base two numbering system.

The simplest unit of information is a binary bit – a 0 or a 1.

To create complex numbers, we can string together 0′s and 1′s. For example, a number could be written as 0010 0101.

To understand what this value means, we can apply the same rules as we did above. However, since this is a base two system instead of a base ten system, each place is multiplied by 2^n.

Let’s start with a smaller example – 1111.

(1 * 2^3) + (1 * 2^2) + (1 * 2^1) + (1 * 2^0)
    = 8 + 4 + 2 + 1
    = 15

These rules can be expanded to represent byte-sized numbers (8-bits, or 2^8, or 255) or even larger numbers.

Manipulating Bits and Bytes – Bitwise Operators

Most programming languages come with some built in operators to handle bits. These help make very basic comparisons and manipulations of numbers.

These typically include the ‘and’ or intersection operator, the ‘or’ or union operator, and the ‘xor’ or exclusive-or operator. We’ll just take a look at the ‘and’ and ‘or’ operators right now. [Note: I use the terms intersection and union because I think they make it much easier to understand, if you are at all familiar with math sets and statistics. They aren’t typical ‘coding’ terms).

The ‘and’ or intersection operator – the ‘&’ character in PHP – compares two binary numbers and returns a new binary number with a ’1′ in every unit in which both numbers have a ’1′. If both numbers have a value in the second place, then the return number will have a value in the second place. If only one number has a value in the third place, then the return number will have no value in the third place.

0111 & 0101 = 0101
0101 & 1010 = 0000
1111 & 1111 = 1111

If you imagine ’0111′ and ’0101′ as sets of numbers ({4, 2, 1} and {4, 1} respectively), then the result of a bitwise ‘and’ operation is the simple intersection of the two sets.

The bitwise ‘or’ operator – a | in PHP – returns a value in each place that either number has a value. So if only one number has a value in the first place, the result will have a value in the first place. A place will only have no value if neither number had a value there.

0111 | 0101 = 0111
0101 1110 | 1010 0001 = 1111 1111
0000 1111 | 1111 0000 = 1111 1111

These operators aren’t used very much, but it is important to recognize them. If you don’t know what they are, it is easy to confuse them with the standard logical operators – || and &&.

For example, the following two lines of code have very different meanings.

$x = 124;
$y = 36;
$bitwise = $x & $y;
$logical = $x && $y;

In the first comparison ($x & $y), we’re finding the bitwise intersection of the two values. This would be…

0111 1100 & 0010 0100 = 0010 0100

In base ten terms, $bitwise would be equal to 36. In the second example ($x && $y), we’re looking for a simple boolean comparison. In this case, both $x and $y have a value, so the comparison will return ’1′ or ‘true’.

Is This Useful…? Comparing Constant Flags

You may be thinking to yourself, “When will I ever use this?”

While anyone working with computer code should understand how binary numbers work, there will probably be very few cases in which you manipulate numerical values in a binary format. The rest of the world works with decimal numbers – and your programming language is designed to do the same thing.

However, there are some cases where you will want to use bitwise numbers and comparisons. A perfect example is the use of constants and flags.

Let’s say that a function takes 16 parameters. Each of these parameters is a simple “True” or “False.”

You could write the function take sixteen different parameters and use sixteen different variables. However, this would make function calls quite long – especially if you usually only make two or three parameters true.

Instead, you can pass one value as a parameter. This value – 16 bits long – includes 16 individual flags to tell the function whether a specific parameter is true or false.

If every parameter is set to true, this value would be “1111 1111 1111 1111″. If only the first parameter should be set to true, this value would be “0000 0000 0000 0001″.

Each flag is represented by a specific place in this binary number. The first flag is “0001,” the second flag is “0010,” the third flag is “0100,” etc.

Your code wouldn’t be very readable if you referred to each flag by its numerical value. Instead, you can define constant values. For example, FUNCTION_FLAG_ONE would represent “0001,” “FUNCTION_FLAG_TWO would represent “0010,” etc. These constants would follow whatever naming convention you usually use.

The value of this is that you can easily set any number of flags with the use of the bitwise ‘or’ operator.

For example, let’s say you want to set flags one, seven, and fifteen to true.

$flags = FUNCTION_FLAG_ONE | 
    FUNCTION_FLAG_SEVEN | FUNCTION_FLAG_FIFTEEN;

The result would be ’0100 0000 0100 0001.’

Inside the function, you could then use the bitwise ‘and’ operator to see which flags were set. For example, this would let you check to see if the fifteenth flag was set to true.

$fifteen = $flags & FUNCTION_FLAG_FIFTEEN;

Although your function’s code will have to do some legwork to find out which flags were set and which ones were not, this makes the function call itself much more efficient and readable.

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?”

Where the Analytics Code Goes

When you sign up for Google Analytics, Google provides you with a short piece of javascript to place on your site. The code should look like this.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-2894597-3");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

According to Google’s instructions, this needs to be placed at the very end of your site – just before the closing body tag. To do this, we need to find the closing body tag on the WordPress template.

Look In Footer.php

As we previously discovered, a WordPress template is made up of a series of files. Three basic files – header.php, sidebar.php, and footer.php – help build the components of the page.

If your WordPress template follows normal conventions, the closing body tag should be in the footer.php file.

Go to your themes directory of the WordPress installation, navigate to your current theme, and open footer.php. You should see something like this at the end.

<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

Add a blank line before the closing body tag. Simply copy and paste the javascript code that Google provides on that blank line, save the file, and you’re good to go.

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.

In case you don’t know what GIMP is, head to the Gimp homepage. It’s a free, open source graphic editing suite – similar in many ways to the expensive, proprietary Adobe Photoshop.

Gimp Tutorials is another niche directory where you can submit appropriate tutorials for listing. In this case, appropriate means just about anything related to creating or editing an image in Gimp.

I wrote a very basic tutorial to show users how to create a gradient background image in GIMP. Since I submitted the tutorial to Gimp Tutorials, slightly less than week ago, they’ve sent me 200 visits.

There was a brief spike on the first day, and I’ve been getting a steady stream of 20-30 visitors each day after that.

There doesn’t appear to be a lot of turnover on the site, so my tutorial is still listed third on the front page. That’s after five days. That’s a pretty lengthy period of exposure – considering that others sites (like Good Tutorials) turnover in about a day.

So if you write any tutorials for GIMP, don’t hesitate to submit them here. It’s a good way to drive a few extra users to your latest article.

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.

Here’s an example. Last week I wrote an article on How to Create Style-able CSS Tooltips.

As usual, I was browsing through the Google Analytics data a day or two later. While looking through the Search Engine results (the queries that people used to come to my site), I noticed that someone used the query “gradient background image gimp.”

The odd thing about this was that the article wasn’t about creating background images in Gimp – I just happened to mention at the end that you could use Gimp to create a gradient background image and add it to your tooltip.

This tells me two things.

First, someone is looking for this information. If I write it… they will come.

Second, someone else is not serving this information up. If a user stumbles on one of my articles that just barely mentions the topic, there can’t be a lot of targeted articles out there.

I decided to take the topic and run with it. A few days later, I wrote a simple tutorial about how to create a gradient background image in Gimp. I targeted the article at those major keywords – gradient, background, image, Gimp – and now it’s getting some nice search engine traffic.

So if you’re ever short on ideas, this is a great way to respark that creativity. Look through your search engine logs for queries that bring people in – but don’t bring people to what they’re looking for. Then… give them what they want.

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.

Create a Blank Image (120px x 120px)

First thing – fire up GIMP and create a new image. Usually a gradient background image is 1 pixel wide. For now we’ll create a bigger image so it’s easier to see what we’re doing – 120 pixels by 120 pixels. You can crop the image down to a 1 pixel width later.

Set the Foreground and Background Colors

When you create a gradient, you need to set two colors – the beginning color (usually the foreground) and the ending color (usually the background color). To change these colors, click on the square swatch of the foreground color in your toolbar (see the circled area in the screenshot to the right).

This should bring up a box titled, “Change Foreground Color.” Pick a dark color – I used #981313. Then, click on the Background Color Swatch (the one right behind the Foreground color). Change the background color to a lighter version of your foreground color – I used #f17b7b.

Select the Gradient Tool

Now that you’ve chosen the two colors, you’re ready to create the gradient. Click on the “Gradient” tool – it’s the square that fades from black to light gray. See the screenshot to the right. There are a bunch of options you could customize, but for a standard gradient background image you’re better off leaving them alone.

Draw the Gradient! Then Crop Away

Now you can actually create the gradient by clicking and dragging on your image canvas. Position the tool at the top border of your canvas (if you look in the bottom left, it’ll tell you when you’re over pixel “0″). Hold down the Control button to force GIMP to draw a straight line, and drag the cursor down to the bottom pixel of your canvas.

Let go. Voila! You’ve got a nice gradient image created.

You could use it as-is in your css stylesheet, but it’s usually a good idea to trim your picture to 1px wide. The browser can simply repeat the image across the entire width of the element – so making it wider than 1 px is simply wasting bandwidth. Go ahead and crop the image now, and in the future make your gradient images 1 px wide by whatever height you want.

Now, let’s write the css to use this as a background image for an html element.

.gradient {
  background: #f17b7b url(images/gradient.png)
    repeat-x top; }

There’s four pieces to this shorthand css declaration.

• #f17b7b sets the background color. This is the same as the bottom color in our gradient, so that if the container is taller than the gradient image it seems to blend smoothly.
• url(images/gradient.png) sets our gradient image as the background image. Make sure you change the path to where-ever you uploaded your gradient image.
• repeat-x tells the browser to repeat the image left-to-right for the entire width of the container. This is what makes our 1-pixel background image “stretch” across the entire width.
• top simply tells the background image to align itself to the top edge of the container. Not always necessary, but your better safe than sorry.

And that’s all there is to it. Create an html element with class gradient and it should have your lovely gradient background.

So get to it. Start drawing.

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.

People often advise you to submit your articles to social networking and article sites. Often times this will get you a few backlinks and little to no traffic.

I stumbled on Good Tutorials when I was looking for some information on a different topic. After browsing around the site, I noticed that they take and review submissions of tutorials for inclusion in the directory. I thought what the hell, let me try it out.

I submitted the tutorial I wrote about creating a php script to send trackbacks. After signing up and submitting the tutorial, they told me it would take one to two days to be reviewed.

I never got an e-mail back confirming that my tutorial had been accepted or not. I forgot about it for a couple of days – kind of busy at work. Then, today, I logged in to see what the status was.

My tutorial had been accepted two days ago. In that time frame, it got 95 clicks. I logged into Google Analytics, and sure enough there was a big jump in traffic. Good Tutorials had sent me approximately 90 visits, and some of those people had looked around the site at other entries and articles.

I also noticed a bit of traffic coming from another new site – Tuts Buzz. I checked it out and it was another tutorial directory. A link to my tutorial had shown up there as well, probably from Good Tutorial’s feed.

Whether or not I’ll continue to get substantial traffic from these sites, I don’t know. It may be that I’m getting some click throughs because my tutorial is on the “Newest Tutorials” list. Maybe it’ll drop off to nothingness when it just becomes a filed away tutorial.

However, it definitely seems to be a worthwhile way to get some traffic. Unlike a lot of article sites – that send you a few low PR backlinks and no traffic – I got a real measurable increase in traffic.

So, if you write any tutorials on coding, software, or technology – head over to Good Tutorials and see about getting your own listing.

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.

What was the culprit? The PHP script? Or simply some faulty HTML?

It turns out the PHP script was working just as intended. If you view his post, you can get a copy of the source code. I haven’t tested it, but he claims it worked fine.

The problem was a simple mistake in HTML coding.

When the img tags were declared, the src attribute was set with a relative url instead of an absolute url.

What’s the difference?

A relative url tells the browser the path to a file from the current file’s directory location. So, for example, let’s say I have a file “index.html” and a file “guide.html” inside the directory “web-design-guides” on the domain “http://www.earn-web-cash.com.”

If I want to create a link from “index.html” to “guide.html” using a relative url, I simply use this tag…

<a href="guide.html">Guide.html</a>

That tells the browser to look inside the same directory for the file “guide.html.”

A absolute url defines the absolute path to a file. In the same example, we’d have to include in the href the domain, the directory, and the file name, like so…

<a href="http://www.earn-web-cash.com/
  web-design-guides/guide.html">Guide.html</a>

The advantage of relative URLs is that they’re quick to type and they make webpages easily portable. If all of my links are relative and I move the entire site to a new server, I don’t have to edit anything.

If I had used absolute urls, I would have had to change the domain name in every anchor tag. The advantage of absolute urls, though, is that they can be accessed no matter where the page is accessed.

So, for example, if I turn the webpage into an e-mail (or if it’s read in an rss reader), the absolute url is still valid. If I use a relative url in an html e-mail, the reader’s browser won’t be able to find the file – it will look in the directory that the e-mail script is running to find the file you’re linking to.

So what’s the lesson here?

If you’re writing HTML that is going to be displayed somewhere other than your server – i.e. in an e-mail, cached on someone’s hard drive, or on an rss reader – remember to always use absolute urls.

This is especially important for <img> tags – because they are almost always declared in regular pages as relative urls.