I wrote up a series of short articles on Associated Content explaining the basics of exposure. If you’re starting out with photography and feel that you’re ready to break out of the “auto” mode on your camera, they’re a good read. The more you read about photography and how everything works together to create an image, the better you’ll be.

What Does the Aperture Setting of a Camera Do? The aperture is the size of the hole that lets light into your camera. Bigger hole = more light, smaller hole = less light. But, this also affects the depth of field – how much of an image will be in focus. Read the article for more details.

What Does the Shutter Speed Setting of Your Camera Do? The shutter speed is how long light is allowed to shine on your cameras image sensor (or film, if you’ve got a film camera). Keeping the shutter open longer allows in more light, and keep it open for a shorter period of time allows in less light. But… this also affects whether your picture will be blurry or not. Read the article for more details.

What Does the ISO Setting On Your Digital Camera Do? The ISO rating determines how sensitive your camera’s image sensor is to the light coming in. Turn the rating up, and your sensor will be more sensitive and create a brighter image. But, this also creates more “noise” – little pixelly speckles that can ruin your photo. Read the article for more details.

The Dell Inspiron 2600, on the other hand, was troublesome. I finally have it working now, and I’ve written a couple articles on my other blog about the process. These aren’t in depth tutorials, but they’re meant to help point people in the right direction if they have similar problems.

Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 2600. This seemingly simple task was complicated by the fact that the integrated graphics card doesn’t seem to work with most Ubuntu installations. I found some suggestions that Ubuntu 8.04 worked, and eventually it did after I modified the settings and specified the correct graphics driver. Read more about this in the full article.

Adding RAM to a Dell Inspiron 2600. This should have been simple, but it wasn’t. The machine reported 320mb of installed RAM, but I could only find one memory module – a 256mb memory module located underneath the mother board. After skimming through the documentation a couple times, I found that there was a second location to install a memory module located on the other side of the motherboard (underneath the keyboard). I followed the Dell documentation to disassemble the laptop and install another 256mb chip (which replaced the presumably original 64mb RAM chip).

I have been updating my other blog a bit, but its mostly inconsequential posts about my training as a runner.

I have, however, been doing some writing for Associated Content. I’ve amassed a decent amount of pageviews there (170k), and I’m close to hitting the second highest ranking on the site – Clout 9. If I keep writing articles, I’ll hit that benchmark in a month or two. The next goal would be to hit Clout 10, which would require 3-400k pageviews. These are fun goals, but they also bring with them higher pay-outs per pageview… so there’s a point.

Anyhow, here’s a quick rundown of some of the articles I’ve written recently.

Where Can I Find a Replacement Lens Cap for My Nikon Coolpix P80? I lost the lens cap for my P80, and I had a hell of a time finding a replacement. Nikon doesn’t seem to manufacture the part anymore, but I found a third party vendor on Ebay. Very useful article, if you happen to have the same model camera.

What is the Derivative of a Function? I’ve been working with some kids at school on Calculus, so I thought it would be interesting to try my hand at explaining math concepts online. I might expand this work into a larger site in the future, but for now I want to get some thoughts on paper, as it were.

How to Remove an Autorun Virus from Your Flash Drive. We had a nasty infection on our school network recently, and I spent a lot of time cleaning autorun viruses off my flash drive. I found a quicker way to handle it, through a basic DOS batch script, explained in the article.

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.

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.

I got the site up and running, updated some content, and then submitted my sitemap information to the Google Webmaster Tools. As usual, the next step is to wait and see how long it takes Google to start regularly indexing the site.

Instant Indexing

When I checked my site’s info in Webmaster Tools the next day, I found something strange – a page in the site was already cached in the index.

I had included a link to the site in the article here. This site has a decent reputation with Google. According to SEO Meter, this site gets crawled every 1 to 2 days.

Apparently, Google crawled the site, followed the link, and cached that page in the index. It has yet to sort through the new links and the sitemap, but the home page is accessible through a Google search.

Get Articles Listed Quickly

This leads me to a pretty useful bit of information. If you have a link on a trusted site to an page that is previously unknown to Google, it will quickly get stored in the index.

I’ve never found this type of quick response with directory listings or forum links. I suppose the difference here is that it’s a direct content to content link that carries some real weight.

If you already run a website – or if you write articles at Associated Content or a similar site – this seems like a pretty good strategy for jump-starting the crawling process. Choose some of your main landing pages and link to them immediately from other sites that you own and write for.

This will send Google your way, get your pages indexed, and start bringing in a modicum of search engine traffic. From there, you can wait for the rest of your link building strategy to help improve your SERP and Page Rank.