Web Cash

The idea of penny auction sites – like QuiBid – is enticing. I’m sure you’ve seen the ads… he bought an iPad for $5! What a savings!

Well, there’s another company on the scene – Bigger Bidder – with a similar business model. Bigger Bidder hosts penny auctions, just like QuiBid. People “bid” on stuff, just like they would on eBay, and each bid increases the price one penny. At the end, you pay for the final bid, you pay for the shipping, and you get the item.

So… How Does That Work?

Here’s how it works.

Bids are not free. Each bid costs you $0.68. When you place a bid, you use a bid… in other words, you just spent $0.68.

So let’s take an example (and yes, this is a real example from the website). On September 23, an auction ended for an Apple iPad 2. The final price was $15.09. Shipping was an additional $20.00.

The final bidder paid $35.09 out of pocket for a brand new iPad 2. Awesome! Right? Maybe.

Let’s say the winner placed one final bid and happened to win. That would be an awesome deal. But, if the price increased to $15.09, there were 1,509 bids placed. Let’s say the winner was bidding heavily for the last couple hours, and placed 100 bids. Well, then he spent $68 in bids alone. Still a good deal; around $100 with the final price and shipping.

How does Bigger Bidder make money? All the other bids. In this case, 1,509 bids x $0.68/bid = $1,026. That’s double the retail price of the item, so assuming they got some kind of wholesale price they made a nice profit on this. The trick (or luck) of it is to get in at the end of an auction. If you bid too early, you either invest a lot of money (and don’t save anything) or just end up giving up and wasting all your money.

Are There Deals to Be Had?

Most definitely. Somebody won an Apple TV for $0.02 + $15 shipping. Less than $20, for an item that costs $100 on Amazon? A Dell Inspiron laptop (retail $900) also went for $0.02.

I don’t quite understand the rhyme or reason behind these auctions ending so low. I guess it’s just plain dumb luck… but if you can get lucky, you can definitely get a good deal. It may also be that the user base is still relatively small, so there are auctions ending at weird times of the day where you won’t have competition. A larger site, like QuiBids, will have a more steady buying audience and thus more stable end prices.

The Best Part?

You can get free bids. Sign Up through this link and you can get 150 free bids.

You might not win anything… but at least you can try the site out without wasting your own money. Just think, that’s about $100 worth of bids. Isn’t it worth trying to snag some nice piece of electronics at a discount price? And if you lose, just keep on moving!

If you take a look at the archives, you may notice that this site hasn’t been updated in quite some time. April, to be specific.

In the late Spring, I got burnt out and kind of lost momentum to continue posting things. Ironically, the site was increasing in traffic and readership. Doh.

I was otherwise occupied throughout the summer (Damn you, WoW!). When the school year swung around, and I officially quit WoW, I decided it was time to revive my old web development/publishing pursuits.

However, for a variety of reasons, I chose not to just pick up with this site and continue. For one thing, I wanted to combine a handful of projects into one, manageable project. One reason I stopped posting here was to work on a blog about World of Warcraft. My new project – This Life of Brian – incorporates a couple of different topics/websites under one umbrella. It makes it a lot easier to keep things up to date.

Also, I grew tired of this domain name. It sounded catchy at first, but now I think it’s a bit spammy. I had a couple articles do well on Digg, and some commenters pointed out the domain name. Doh.

I’m now in the process of slowly migrating the archives of this site to my new project. They’ll all be contained in the web development and publishing section of the site – Nerds at Work. It’s pretty well segregated from the other topics (online gaming, education, and random blogging pursuits). It’s got its own theme and its own RSS feed.

I’m also hosting all of my new content at that site, and this site will no longer be updated. I just renewed the domain for another year, so this site will be here until next December. However, don’t expect anything new here… and hopefully all of the old articles will be at Nerds at Work by the spring time.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over and check out my latest work.

I’ve been playing around with developing WordPress sites for a while now. I love how quick and easy it is to launch a site and update content.

One of the greatest features is the thousands of plug-ins available for WordPress. You can find a plug-in for just about anything you want to do – or if you have some PHP know-how, you can develop your own.

Here are five basic WordPress plug-ins that I’d recommend using for any project you start.
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Every time I see a discussion on the forums about Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac, I’m struck by the persistence of certain myths about Linux. Reading the conversations, it seems obvious that a lot of people who have never tried Linux have seriously inaccurate conceptions of it.

I recently switched my main computer to Ubuntu Linux. With that as an example Distro, let’s take a look at some popular myths about Linux and see just how true they are.
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Every couple of days, I quickly browse through the Akismet spam bin to see if any real comments got sucked in. There usually aren’t any.

However, I’ve been struck recently by seemingly pointless spam comments. They are clearly generated by a bot, but they don’t include any kind of backlink… what’s the purpose of that?
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I came across this problem on the DigitalPoint forums the other day. How can we write a script to calculate the total number of random combinations in a set (i.e. the binomial coefficient), and how can we generate a list of these combinations?

Today, we’ll tackle the first part. We’ll start with a quick primer on math – what is a binomial coefficient? Then, we’ll look into the most efficient way to calculate that and get the total number of possible combinations.
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I was browsing the Frihost forums this morning, and I stumbled on a cool Javascript game.

One of the Frihost users and his friend made a 3d Worm game. Although the directions are in Spanish (as is the source code), the game is pretty cool. It’s a good example of what you can accomplish with some Javascript/DOM trickery.
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I was browsing the Sitepoint forum today and somebody raised this question – is it better to use ‘and’ or ‘&&’ as a logical operator in PHP?

In most cases, they evaluate the same way. For example, these two statements are equivalent.

if ($x && $y) { ... }
if ($x and $y) { ... }

So what’s the difference?
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I’d seen this idea suggested on a forum, and it’s about time I got around to it. I created my first lens at Squidoo.

Why? I was able to work in a few nice backlinks to my site and my articles. I’ll earn some cash if it gets traffic of its own.
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While browsing through dZone the other day, I stumbled on this article – 40 signs you really are a lousy PHP programmer.

While I don’t agree with all of the author’s points, it’s an interesting list of php coding habits to avoid – but that most of us tend to pick up anyway. Here’s a list of my five biggest pet peeves.
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