Archive for December, 2007
This custom theme you see here on this blog, well it’s not that custom anymore! It was an imitation of the JohnCow.com theme, which was perfectly fine by me at the time. But now, things have changed. Firstly, John Cow released an imitation of his theme for sale to the masses. A clever move by him, but it pretty much renders this theme as slight variation on a theme that a lot of people will have. Secondly, I used a website to check the coding on the theme. The site basically checks for errors in the coding and tells you how many you have, and I had way too many. 50-60 if I remember correctly. There’s also a few annoying things about this theme. At first it didn’t say the exact date of posts (I had to fix this), and there was no way to navigate between the homepage and older posts. I had to get onto the guy and ask him about this (in fairness to him he’s very obliging and sorted it immediately). Thirdly, the ads at the side appear to be 150×150 in size, and 125×125 is really the common size. Finally, and I’m not sure if this is to do with the theme (it probably isn’t) but it’s annoying me lately. When writing a post, there’s a bar above the text box, with all options such as bold, italics, images etc, so you don’t have to put in the code yourself. It’s basically like the top of Miscrosoft Word. For some reason lately, this isn’t appearing in my posts, meaning I have to either put in the codes myself, or type it up on a different blog, then get full post + codes and copy it over. Pain in the hole basically, and one I shouldn’t have to endure. Then there’s just a lot of other things I’d like to have on my theme.
So, essentially, why am I looking at a potential waste of $100?
Because I was hasty. This isn’t usually a problem for me. I generally think things out before parting with my money. But I really didn’t this time, and I’ll be suffering a $100 loss because of it. You learn from your mistakes though, and this time I’ll be planning the theme very carefully, and choosing my designer carefully, so the next theme could take a very long time to actually get done 
At the moment to get a few advertisers on the site I’m offering a bundle package of a text ad, image ad, and blog post (written by me) for $25 for the lot. That’s a pretty decent deal in my eyes since I see a fair few bloggers out there charging a lot more, despite them having way less visitors and traffic than me. You’ve gotta start small, and I realise that. I’d rather get a couple of advertisers at cheap rates rather than one at a more expensive rate.
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Posted on 19 December '07 by Mark, under Business. 4 Comments.
A while back I posted about my first adsense cheque. I still haven’t found the charger for my digital camera, but before I cashed the cheque I did have the sense so scan the cheque and letter into my computer for you all to see. I stupidly forgot to post it, and thankfully remembered tonight when I’m feeling rather lazy (perhaps it has something to do with yesterday’s long post). Anyway, hopefully some webmasters out there would like to see what an adsense cheque looks like, so click the thumbnail below and you’ll see.
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Posted on 18 December '07 by Mark, under Business. 2 Comments.
There’s a valuable lesson to be learned in this post - People are bastards. Bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.
Allow me to explain. I’ve had a total of 3 different people steal my ebook and try to sell it as their own work. This pisses me off no end, and truly makes me want to get my revenge on these people who dare leech off my hard work to earn a few sly dollars.
The first guy who did this did it when I was still running my ebook site, and getting sales. He was some Indian guy who tried changing a few words here and there from my ebook. All images were the same (including the random screenshot I’d taken for no real reason, other than aesthetics) and 90% of text was my exact words. So I basically went crazy at the guy, who was trying to sell it on the same forum as I was. His thread got ruined by me and a few friends. He then tried changing his ebook to get himself off the hook, but of course I was smart enough to save the original copy to my hard-drive. The guy was so irritatingly stupid. A week later he tried again and I pwned him, and where is he now? Banned. Justice.
Then last week, I had two different guys trying something similar. Only idiots try this sort of thing, because only idiots can’t make a few dollars online, and only idiots would think they would get away with this kind of blatant thievery.
The first one of these was clearly not a native english speaker, so this worried me when I saw him selling an english ebook. I didn’t want to wait to find out if it was a copy of mine, so I paid him his $5 price and bought a copy of the ebook. See the thread here. A lot of people were interested, so it’s a good thing I got in so early, but others people did ask him if he meant my site, which shows the ebook and site are pretty well known, which is good. he He responded saying he’d never seen that site before. Alas, this was a lie.
So this guy sends me a message with a ton of text in it as the “ebook”. Poor form. So I read it and realise it’s my ebook, and the guy has executed this so so poorly. Here’s my reply on the thread :
“You just sold me a copy of my own ebook where you tried to change the words but basically just made it less coherant. You’re a dick.
You didn’t even put the thing into an ebook, you copied my text and put it into a PM to sell.
I’m getting so sick of thieves like you.
Look at this guy’s english and grammar, does he look like someone who could write a decent ebook?
Stop selling this stolen material immediately, and refund me the money I paid for this. I don’t really enjoy paying someone else to send me my own work.
[I then edited it to include this next bit also]
Man you’re also such a damn idiot. In my ebook I had links to certain sites, and you copied the text but didn’t even link it. So you have parts saying “click here” and there’s nothing!
This guide is a shit ripoff of getfrontpage.com, and you have no rights to resell the material, so I strongly advise that you stop immediately, before trouble arises.”
Necessarily harsh. He replies with :
“i didnt copied your work, your work is similar to my work.
Also, if u say it is similar to your work, then I will sell different methods.
thanks”
And we get some classic Walsho ownage in my reply :
“Similar to my work?! You are such a tool.
You didn’t even change the bit of my book where I refer back to my website, which is a giveaway since you don’t even have a fucking website.
Your idiocy is beyond comprehension.”
Idiocy beyond comprehension, not bad eh? One guy commented after that post, saying :
“Sorry mods, but had to say this:
Ambhad you got PWNT, quit trying to defend yourself. He caught you there, don’t try taking the quick road to riches.“
The thread was then locked, and the guy got banned for either this reason, or acting the bollocks somewhere else.
But we’re not done yet folks, we’ve one more guy to laugh at. And this guy’s the best. You can read this one at this link, and I strongly advise you to read through the thread yourself, as it’s simply priceless. Things started to go wrong for this guy when people began to ask him if he wrote the ebook himself, and then one kind member of the forum messaged me asking if I had given him resell rights. Obviously I hadn’t, so I asked for the download link that he was selling. This proved that the guy was selling my exact ebook, using a fucking rapidshare link. My name still on it, my website, everything. The exact file. He was obviously too much of a an idiot to even know how to change it a tiny bit.
I posted asking if if was my ebook, and he replied quite rudely, and tried to reassure everyone that there was no resell rights issue. So once I discovered that he was infact selling my ebook, I went to town.
“You absolute bastard, you stole my ebook. You didn’t change a single thing about my book, still has my name, my links, everything. You have absolutely no rights to do this.
Don’t dare sell another copy, theiving scum.
This ebook is stolen from www.getfrontpage.com“
And dear readers, I hope you’re ready for the most retarded response you will ever find. Usually when this happens the person puts up a weak defence, or just disappears completely. Here’s what this guy replied when he’d been caught.
“oh really? “
I mean, what the hell is that?! From this post onwards, everyone just raped this guy. I had a few of my online friends looking and helping out with the rapage. So in reply to his pitiful response, I posted :
“That’s the best defense case I’ve ever heard in my life.
Seriously, have you considered a career as a lawyer? “
Jason then posted the hilarious and appropriate image in reply to his defence :
The thread then just turned into a bit of chaos, with me and a few mates on there completely taking the piss and posting hilarious and insulting comments. A few people remarked that it was “thread of the year” and one guy submitted a screenshot that resulted from the whole thing to Digg, which you can check out here. It was really hilarious, the group of us who know each other joining up and taking this guy down. The thread had a lot of people viewing it too, so I’d say a lot of people enjoyed it. The guy hasn’t been banned, but he won’t be trying shit like that again.
Anyway, I’d like to thank Jason, William, Sean and Mongey for all having my back, and they all convieniently have blogs for me to link to as a thanks! Yours truly actually bought Mongey his first domain name as an early Christmas present, so give his brand new blog some traffic 
Thanks to any strangers who also joined in the fun on the thread, but since I don’t know them I’m too lazy to find out their names and link to their sites.
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Posted on 17 December '07 by Mark, under Business, Ranting. 8 Comments.
After much consideration, I decided a while ago to leave my part-time job, so I could concentrate more on school and online work. Today I work my last shift in the shop I’d worked in for two and a half years. Overall, I’ll look back fondly on all the time I spent in that place, and particularly the people I met there. Working in a shop means you basically have to develop your people skills, and I’ve grown in that regard. More importantly, the people I met there when I first got the job introduced me to all the music I’m now into today. When I first got the job, I was a little rap fan. Now when I look through my artists on iTunes or Windows Media Player, I can trace pretty much all the artists back to a few people I met in work. Anyway, now is not the time for reminiscing.
This means I’ll have an extra 7 hours free every Sunday night, so I have absolutely no excuse for not getting my homework done at weekends, and I should also get more work done online. Saturday nights will now also be a lot better for me, not having the dread of work the next day. Essentially, I have seven ‘extra’ hours at weekends now, and I should use this wisely. For example, setting aside seven hours study/online work to do throughout the day. I’ll see how this goes, but I certainly don’t want to waste the extra time I now have.
While I’m on a personal post, I feel I should mention that on a hilarious nerdy sidenote, I got a freakin’ nosebleed when writing this post. Come get me ladies, you know you want it.
Another anecdote you say? Well, if you insist.
The other day, walking home from school, I suddenly notice a big lump of leaves stuck to the bottom of my shoe. That’s not right, I thought to myself. My detective work that then ensued had the following series of events as the conclusion.
1. Mark commences walking home from school.
2. Without realising, Mark steps in a huge pile of dog crap. Potentially horse crap, given the magnitude of feaces that remained afterwards.
3. Immediately after stepping in the aforementioned crap, Mark goes and walks on a pile of leaves, which stick to the crap.
4. Mark notices an odd accumulation of leaves on his shoe, and tries to use his other shoe to remove the leaves.
5. Mark gasps in horror as he realises he has now spread some crap onto the front of his previously clean shoe.
6. Mark finishes his walk home in disgust, with one shoe having a bunch of leaves still stuck to it with crap as adhesive, and the other shoe with crap spread across the front of it.
Wasn’t that fun?
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Posted on 16 December '07 by Mark, under Life etc.. 3 Comments.
We know everyone loves a contest, or free stuff. Jason from TheUniversityKid.com has held a great contest over the past month, and there’s just enough time for any of you to enter and be elligible to win some of $2000 worth of prizes.
Full details of the contest can be found here, and with the prizes he’s got on offer, you’d be slightly foolish not to enter. First prize is having Jason himself write you an ebook, and sales page for the accompanying website. This was the kind of work that brought me my big sale last week, so I know first hand how great a prize this could be. There’s other great prizes, namely an ad spot on JohnCow.com, amongst various ebooks, hosting packages, and websites. If you’re not in, you can’t win 
I’d also like to say a congratulations to Girish of KiHack.com, who sold his site, ProxyEarner.com for $400 and is now selling DnMoola.com up on Sitepoint, at this auction. I wish him the best of luck in his sales.
Lately a fair few people seem to have noticed my success with the Digg eBook. I’ve noticed a good few people creating an ebook, getting sales, then selling exclusive rights on Sitepoint. Obviously a lot of people would have done this before me, but I reckon a helped encourage a few others to try selling on Sitepoint (despite there being a fee on creating auctions there).
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Posted on 15 December '07 by Mark, under Business. 2 Comments.
Right, I haven’t much time as I want to go do a little study for two exams I have on tomorrow. Today’s gone according to yesterday’s plans though, to let you all know (Particularly Jason, who’d have gotten $10 if they didn’t )
This business of making plans on here is working well, but I’m gonna stop doing it for a while now. I don’t want this blog simply becoming an online daily planner do I?
You may notice every post now has a reminder to subscribe to my RSS feed at the bottom of it. I’ve added this plugin in the hope that any of you readers who haven’t done so already will subscribe and put a smile on little Marky’s face
Speaking of RSS, if anyone fancies getting a free ebook of an A-Z guide to RSS, check out our latest post on WebmasterDiscounts.com for the download link. It’s free, need I say more? I also encourage you to subscribe on there. We give out free guides/advice/products everyday for webmasters, so if you’re looking for a few tips on how to make some money or simply get some free stuff everyday, it’d be well worth your while subscribing.
Anyway apologies for the fairly useless post, ach caithfidh mé bheith ag staidéar (I have to study, as Gaeilge)
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Posted on 13 December '07 by Mark, under Life etc.. 2 Comments.
Today I was at the Trinity College (TCD) open day. As I mentioned in a post yesterday, this college is the elite college in Ireland, and is held in very high esteem not only in Ireland, but across Europe and the World.
My first lecture started at 9.30 this morning, one of the first ones of the day. Unfortunately, I arrived in a little late, after a few complications in getting there, so missed that first lecture. A great start eh?
So we arrive at TCD and it’s impressive, as I expected. Absolutley huge place, but there were people all over the place in luminous orange jackets to show us around and help us find where we were going. I liked that, it was professional, as you’d expect from Trinity. There were also tables at the entrance, which had people handing out prospectus’ (sp?), timetables and maps etc. So far, so good.
My first proper lecture then, was about a course called MSISS. It’s a business orientated course, about problem solving and decision making and the like. Very very interesting talk. The lecturer was brilliant. Funny at the appropriate times, without effort, very well spoken and concise. He was clearly such an intelligent man. He told us a story of an lecture he was years ago, when this well spoken english man stood up and said :
“Ladies and gentlemen, what is the difference between seduction, and rape?
The answer? Salesmanship.”
I loved that. I had absolutely no questions at the end of his talk, which showed just how good a job he did. After realising we’d be too late for out next lecture, we grabbed some food and went back to the college a while later.
The famous economist and writer, David McWilliams was then due to do a lecture. He was late coming out, as he was ill apparently, but it was worth the wait. The room was the biggest one I’d been in all day, and it was packed, with people sitting on stairs and standing at the back. I think everyone enjoyed the talk. He was a clever man, and very funny in parts. He didn’t really talk much about the college though, but he hilariously pointed out this fault in his talk at the end, which I appreciated. Apparently he was signing copies of his books afterwards too, so fair play to him, he’s a very likeable man.
After that, in the same room, was the BESS course lecture. This is Business, Economics, and Social Studies. The course seemed interesting, but the lecturer didn’t quite captivate the audience as much as the other two lectures I’d been to that day. A lot of people were getting up and leaving, which annoyed me, but I guess it was understandable. The guy certainly knew his stuff, but with the day drawing to a close for many of us, we didn’t want a particularly long lecture, and it became increasingly hard to concentrate on what he was saying.
I have to seriously consider this college, it was just a really nice place, and the level of education appears to be top quality. Big decision for me to make over the next couple of months 
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Posted on 12 December '07 by Mark, under Education. 5 Comments.
I’ve managed to get everything done today that I needed to, as I mentioned in my post yesterday.
I’ll be posting about the Trinity College open day soon, as it deserves a post of it’s own. Regarding the plans, I actually feel asleep for a bit today when I came home, but with very little homework to do, everything worked out. So making these plans and schedules really works out well, and I highly recommend you try yourselves. Making a timetable for your day makes you less likely to waste time on doing nothing, since you have something to try stick to. If you have a blog it’s even better ; you don’t want to have to admit you failed in your plans.
So, tomorrow. We’ve a half day in school, but unfortunately my maths class is staying back for an extra class. I’ve also to cover someone for two hours in work. Plan is as follows :
3pm (as the latest) : Get home and start written homework
5pm : Do some physics and Irish oral study
7pm : Dinner and ready for work
8-10.30pm : Work (boo-urns!)
10.30pm - Midnight : Check internet, do some cramming, and get some sleep.
Again, nothing too difficult, but a lot more productive looking than an average day for me. I’m hoping that soon I’ll stop have to posting the plans on here and that I’ll gain enough self discipline to be able follow a self-made timetable without having to post it up here (I doubt these posts are very interesting, they’re basically for my own sake!).
Again, to add some purpose to these posts for the readers, $10 to the first person to comment here should I fail to complete the plans for tomorrow.
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Posted on 12 December '07 by Mark, under Education, Life etc.. 1 Comment.
Right, I posted last night about making plans and schedules to help me get my work done over this coming week. From how it’s looking right now, online work is taking a back seat to school work, and I’ll settle for ensuring I simply keep up with blog posts etc, rather than actually getting to start a new project or anything like that.
Tomorrow instead of school I’m going to the Trinity College open day, which I’m hoping will be very helpful and useful, since they’re the best and most well respected university in the country. Trinity’s the elite basically. They’re the 1337 guys of education. Admittedly, that’s a huge attraction of the place from my view, and also, an employer seeing you with a degree from Trinity does put you in a nice position. The other college I’m considering (NUI Maynooth) doesn’t have as good a reputation in the Business courses. The social life is supposedly a hell of a lot better in Maynooth though, so there’s a temptation for me. Maynooth is very close to me, but then again Trinity is just one bus ride too, so no big deal.
Apologies for going off topic there. Anyway, I’ve got permission from the school to go tomorrow, which means no homework has to be done tonight. We have a half day on Thursday too, which is great, but I believe there’s going to be an extra maths class available for my class, so I’d best attend that. Then, on Thursday night, I’m in the crappy situation of having to cover someone in work for a measly 2 hours of their shift, but I couldn’t really say no to the person, as I know they’d help me out were I stuck (and hell it’s my last week, I might as well leave on a kind note )
So those are the influences of the plans for the next three days. The things I absolutely need to get done over the next three days are as follows:
- All homework done for the next day
- One blog post on here each night
- One post every second night on WebmasterDiscounts.com (Jason and I are taking turns on the daily posts)
- Study for my Irish Oral that’s on Friday
- Study for my Physics exam that’s also on Friday (want to maintain my physics crown!)
So here’s the plan for Wednesday. Dublin Bus play a bit part of tomorrow’s plans, which could certainly be a source of plans going askew, but here it goes :
7.30am - Up and shower, eat, dressed, doll myself up for the ladies
8.00-8.30 - Hop on a bus, meet Mr. Lynam en route
9.30 - 1pm - Catch my lectures, (first one is at 9.30, last one starts at 12.30)
1.30pm - Grab something to eat and hop on a bus home
3pm - Get home and chill, check business
4pm - 6pm - Written homework for subjects due the next day (namely English, History, Maths)
6- 9pm - Study for Irish oral and Physics exam (preferably write out everything I need to know on sheets, study it and keep it for last minute cramming)
9pm - It’s business time baby. Get online and enjoy freedom from the school crap, and onto the important stuff. Ensure to blog on here and WD.
12 midnight - Try get off the laptop and get some much needed rest. Not sleeping properly lately at all.
There’s the plan. I reckon I can stick to it fairly easily, provided I don’t miss buses or get lost in town or something stupid like that. I’ll post on here about how I get on, and then make the plans for Thursday. I’m studying early for those exams since I’m not sure I’ll have much time on Thursday, and I can’t screw up the oral exam. An ordinary exam, you can go in without studying and either wing it and do really well, or fail miserably. But an oral exam, if you can’t answer, how awkward would that be?! You can leave an answer blank in a written exam, but in an oral you can’t just sit there not replying can you?
If I fail miserably with sticking to these plans, I’ll say so on here, and the first person to comment will get a whopping $10. That’s right, I’m breaking the freakin’ bank this time 
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Posted on 11 December '07 by Mark, under Business, Education, Life etc.. 8 Comments.
Lately I’ve found myself slacking in both my online work and my schoolwork. I’m simply not getting things done lately. I find myself wasting time far too much, be it on MSN, browsing forums, browsing bebo or myspace or staring into space. I believe this is partly down to a lack of sleep and perhaps not eating enough healthy crap. Before resorting to actually eating healthily or anything womanly like that, I’m gonna try use timetables / schedules to plan my days. Generally if I make a realistic goal and post it on here, I don’t want to admit failure to my readers, so I actually stick to the plans and accomplish whatever it is that I needed to do. Tomorrow I’ll hopefully get to post up some actual timetables for the coming days, most likely designed in MS Paint using my elite skills. The general outline of what I want to do during the week is as follows :
- Complete homework by a reasonable time each night (no ‘late night, going around like a zombie the next morning’ sort of crap)
- Get a post up on here every day
- Ensure WebmasterDiscounts gets a post every day
- Study for my Irish oral exam which is on Friday.
- Get started on CleanseAcne
- Get working on YourDebs.com again (as you can see from the site at the moment, I’ve neglected it a bit!)
Also, check out the post by Tyler Cruz today about this blog. A reward for my willingness to do the right thing. A reward that was greatly appreciated on my part, so many thanks to Tyler.
In other news, I’m currently getting all old school with my music, as I’m currently enjoying the soundtrack of my childhood, an old Limp Bizkit album!
Fred Durst (the guy always wearing the red cap) was a hero. His lyrics were truly revolutionary, I mean check out this line :
“Hey kid, take my advice - You don’t wanna step into a big pile of shit”
Where would I be without that line? Would my childhood have just been years upon years of stepping into piles of excrement? Who knows? All I can be sure of is that Fred Durst has potentially saved my life and you all have him to thank for making me into the young man I am today.
Aside from this mockery, their music is actually decent enough. Cheesy though it is, it brings back the memories
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Posted on 10 December '07 by Mark, under Business, Listening. 1 Comment.
