Web Cash

Digg can be a great source of traffic and recognition for tech related blogs. Some people take it to the extreme though, and show the “Digg This” badge on every article they write.

As others have pointed out, this can be counter-productive. People don’t like to read articles that have just one Digg – they seem unpopular.

So here’s a solution: use the Conditional “Digg This” WordPress Plugin to only show the Digg Badge for articles that have a certain number of Diggs.
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A few weeks ago, I installed the “Per Post CSS and JS” plugin for WordPress. This allows you to add a custom field to your post and include extra .css or .js files to link to that individual page.

I only realized today – while testing something else – that the plugin had been firing off warning messages because of an oversight in the code. Warning messages annoy me, so I decided to fix it up.
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I read about the Digg API the other day, and I thought it was about time I played around with it.

There is a ton of cool stuff you can do with this. Basically, you send a request to the Digg server and it sends back whatever kind of information you want – category names, recent diggs, recent stories, archived stories, etc. You can read through the API to see everything you can do.

For now, we’ll focus on one nifty little trick – grabbing a random story from a given topic.
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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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A user on Programming Talk had a problem the other day. He was trying to build an XML parser to work with an xml data file (a character sheet from the WoW Armory).

His parser wasn’t working – because all of the information was stored in attributes instead of child elements. What’s the difference between the two? And how can we fix it?

Use SimpleXML.
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Google AdSense could be a great way to monetize your site. But if you’re CTR or eCPM is in the crapper, you may be looking for a new solution – an ad network that pays a decent flat rate per thousand impressions.

There are some reputable CPM programs out there (ValueClick seems to be among the best), but there are surely plenty of scams out there. I just read about one program – RevenueResponse – that seems like a site you should avoid using.
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Note: If you look around the site, you may have noticed that I haven’t updated this place in a long time. Check out my new project, which is more closely focused on photography. I still discuss some design issues, though, like these free InDesign templates. If you’re looking for a camera, check out this post on the differences between entry level Canon dSLR cameras.

Or, take a look at my photography studio’s website. Along with photography, we offer a handful of design and printing services, mostly for models, actors, and fashion designers. Our newest offering is the design and printing of modeling/acting comp cards, which start at $60 for a set.

Most blogging platforms come with built-in support for RSS feeds. Why? It’s a great way for users to keep up to date on your new content. Instead of loading up a dozen favorite sites, they can look at one feed reader and then decide what to pursue further.

So what if you don’t use a blogging platform or CMS that creates a feed for you? You can create one yourself in PHP. It’s pretty simple.
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There are a lot of situations in which you’d like to alternate CSS styles from one element to the next. Long tables, for example, look a lot nicer when the background color of the rows is alternated.

How do we do that? Some pretty simple PHP can help you accomplish this task and spice up your HTML/CSS.
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Here’s another quick tip for creating targeted, dofollow backlinks – write Xomblurbs and Xombytes at Xomba.com.

What is Xomba.com? It’s just another site you can write for on the ‘net – and get a share of the revenue through your AdSense account. This makes it ripe for writing short articles that feature your own website – full of targetted backlinks.
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I was looking for a project to tackle today, and I decided to make a script that would convert lengths from one unit or system to another.

It doesn’t sound all that complicated – and it’s not. I had a working script in a few minutes, but I didn’t like it. It had too many functions to do conversions for individual units. I wanted this script to be pretty well abstracted so that I could easily add new unit types – and so that the source code for the class would be very short.
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