Down the Free software high-way, how has it paid out?

February 14, 2012 – 5:07 am
I've been down the free software highway for about 2 years (atleast according to the date of the last backup of windows-stuff), and I figured I might share my experiences and what-not with the few people who still pop in here every now and then for a visit :) First of all, I have not been faithful to any single distribution (with the exception of the one I'm using now, which I've stuck by for it's last two releases), but I've grown attached to and kept faithful to a couple of applications. I swear by LibreOffice, i refuse to use anything not webkit-based for web browsing (google chrome for regular browsing, luakit for some sites i need to keep open as single applications), and I tend to start looking for alternatives when sites i visit depend on flash. I've found great replacements for most of my old windows software (who weren't really ...

Facebook Fan Pages

June 8, 2011 – 12:00 am
I'm sure you, like me, have received quite a few email promotions lately promoting various ways to build and cash in on the Facebook Fan Page Craze. There is an easy, not to mention free, way to setup fan page(s) on existing Wordpress-sites, keeping your site looking like your site, and your fan pages like fan pages. It installs as a plugin and is really easy to use .. Oh, and did I mention that it's free? Visit  >> fanpage connect << for more info and download.

Switching from Oracle OpenOffice.org to Libre Office

February 23, 2011 – 2:19 am
As you all know, a while back Oracla acquired a couple of other companies, amongst other things leading the great OpenSolaris Operating System getting ditched. Oracles acquisition of Sun gave them somewhat control of the OpenOffice.org-product as well ... It seems quite clear that Oracle aren't the "nice guys" the former owners were, and are in a sense looking to get rid of stuff that doesn't make money and prevent anyone else from using that stuff, and to turn some stuff that doesn't make money into stuff that makes money. Oracles take-over lead to a few developers from the OOo-project to leave and found a new project. They took what source they could and created a free office-package that isn't tied to Java the way OOo was under Suns reign of virtual machine terror. On Linux at the moment, I figured I might as well just delete OOo and install Libre immediately ...

Are you transparent … enough?

January 12, 2011 – 11:05 am
It should come as no surprise to anyone even mildly involved in the IM-industry that the US government is starting to crack down on what they consider illegal and unethical practices for anyone selling digital products online. It's been going on for some time now, and  just over a year ago the FTC announced it's new guidelines that had some marketers go totally bananas. They were upset because suddenly shady tactics became not just shady, but actually illegal. Illegal as in "could cost you your life savings and possibly end your ass up in jail, in deep debt to the government". When I started out in the early 2000's, one of the things that actually struck me with what was considered normal practices in the IM-industry (I'm not talking about the marketing online as a whole, just the marketing of internet marketing materials, otherwise known as the "Make Money Marketing Marketing" ...

NYOP – this is pretty awesome

December 21, 2010 – 10:00 am
I heard about this a couple of days ago, and find it incredibly awesome ... The Humble Indie Bundle #2, where five independent game developers allow you to purchase 5 cool games at a price of your choice (NYOP = Name Your Own Price), and you also decide who gets your money. The developers, Humble Bundle who takes care of the technical tidbits, or one or both of 2 charities (Electronic Frontier Foundation and Childs Play charity). The games are multiplatform and work on Windows, MacOS X and Linux alike. You also get access to the games through Steam and Desura. So far, they've sold over 170'000 bundles at a total of over $1,2 million. When you visit the site, check out the platform-graph. You know how people used to say "Linux? That's for cheap-skates who wants stuff for free!"? You'll notice that the average linux user paid about twice as much ...

Solid IM business, is it possible?

December 11, 2010 – 12:45 pm
I was checking my email and found a mail from Mike Young, well known and respected Internet Lawyer amongst other things. While most mails that arrive are thrown in the spam-jar, a mail from Mike is generally something I want to read. Sure, there's the occasional promotion-mail (a rare occurance) but mostly they tend to be interesting comments on business, and spot-on reflections about IM. Mikes mail is also posted on his blog, right here: Mike Young - 7 Internet Biz Trends for 2011 you should know about. I suggest you read it. It might open your eyes, and I'm going to add some thoughts of my own in regards to some of the things Mike mentions. I found an old, retired harddrive the other day. It's not broken or anything, it's just old. I retired the drive in 2006, and I've scribbled "IM stuff" on it. There's 120gb or something ...

A Free plugin for you :)

December 3, 2010 – 3:57 am
I've setup a database at the old scripttricks.com-domain and wrote a small plugin that, when activated, grabs and displays a famous quote on all of your posts. Demo: check the bottom of the posts on this blog :) Here's the code: <?php /* Plugin Name: myQuotesWP Version: 0.5 Plugin URI: http://www.scripttricks.com Description: Adds a famous quote to the end of all blog posts Author: Bjorn Author URI: */ function file_get_contents_curl($url) { $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); $data = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); return $data; } function fetch_quote($content) { if(! is_feed() && ! is_page()) { // dont want it showing on anything but posts $content .= file_get_contents_curl("http://www.scripttricks.com/qu1/getquote.php"); } return $content; } add_filter('the_content', 'fetch_quote'); ?> Save the code as "myQuotesWP.php", copy it into your plugins-folder, activate and you're ready to go. If you make any improvements on it or tweak, don't hesitate to let me know, I enjoy seeing what others do with my code :) You can also download it right here: [dm]2[/dm]

The right tools for the job ..

December 3, 2010 – 3:32 am
If you're doing any development, you need a set of tools that helps you finish the task at hand. For a webcoder, a syntax-highlighting editor is a must. If indentation is built in and configurable as well, that helps too. I've myself used jEdit (http://www.jedit.org) for years and years and years, because not only does it do everything i want it to, there's also an almost perverse number of plugins that does everything, from chatting on irc, playing tic-tac-toe and everything else you can think of. Plus it's free and multi-platform. Last few months it's felt like jEdit has gotten a bit slow on my machine, so i figured I would try out some other applications. I've tried about 9 or 10 or perhaps even eleven, but I only have two editors left on the system (besides jEdit). First up is intype. Intype is ridiculously fast on my machine not to mention the ...

How NOT to treat your customers.

November 10, 2010 – 12:05 am
Read the angry, salty droids' post right over here: http://saltydroid.info/matt-harwards-fifteen-minutes/ and then tell me you would like for him to teach you anything that has anything whatsoever to do with people and/or financials. Apparently, Matt's success here in life is selling his first company and walking away with millions. Hooray! Now, Matt has a new goal in life, he's gonna teach anyone ready to be sucked in for a thou how they can be successfull online. Because clearly, that's what Matt is good at. Selling a software company. Online. Marketing. Magical Bullet. Dreaming the Wealth... It feels like you understood what I was trying to there, so I'm gonna stop it. Now, Matt launched and you have to take pity on him because he wasn't prepared for the number of signups. Matt was prepared steal from maybe 25-30 peope, but it ended up in 300. Other businesses would have hired extras and ...

A small thought that I haven’t been able to get rid off ..

October 8, 2010 – 1:31 am
A thought and a quick Poll for you today As I've mentioned, I'm not doing any IM-related marketing anylonger, and in fact my main focus is duplicating working ideas. Now, I was thinking that maybe I should take you through what jumps around in my head when I look for ideas to swipe and creating something of my own from it. I'm not talking a 5 dvd-course with "studymaterial" (read: transcipts)  available for the low price of $5.000 plus your shirt, I was rather thinking simply publishing these step-by-step instruction right here on the blog, texts, images and videos if necessary, with commentfields being open for your questions and comments. So, I'm asking you - there on the other side of screen reading this - would that be something that suited you? Whaddya think? Should I? [poll id="3"] Affiliate Sidekick - in need of beta testers Work on the affiliate sidekick is going underway, i'm ...