On-topic, seriously

Like any social bookmarking website, there have been some issues with spam and off-topic content being submitted, but rest assured that I’d rather have a lack of content than a flood of spam.  This particular community will be tightly guarded for relevance and submission quality, so in the long run this should actually improve the utility and reputation of the site.

Start Submitting

In the meantime, you can get in on the ground floor by getting started with registration so you can add your own submissions or vote on upcoming links.  requesting to have your site’s feed added to the bookmark’s automated import process. Please send any such requests to JohnFCB (at) Gmail.com

All the links are clean, and while the traffic is low it will only be going up.  At the very least, a PR and link building campaign is underway and some kind of juice will flow across the lines.  You get a link, I get a snippet of unique content, everyone is happy – as long as you stay on topic and don’t post junk!

About Social Bookmarking

Pligg sites are almost the link economy’s equivalent to the “leave a penny, take a penny” tray.  Anyone can register and submit, so you don’t have to go begging for links.  Just add it to the queue and let the power of internet democracy decide what is worthy of front page levels of attention. So, don’t feel bad about taking a few pennies, just try to help out by opening up your own and letting someone else get a little benefit from your domain and IP address resources.

Now, what are you sitting around waiting for?  You should be signing up to add your webmaster bookmarks, or you should be downloading Pligg so you can build your own bookmarking community!

75for1year – Click here to signup for Dreamhost with a $75 max discount

If you’re looking for web hosting, be sure to check out some of the deals I can offer for anyone who wants to check out Dreamhost.  Not only are they giving a free trial to anyone who signs up, but you can also get $75 if you decide to continue the service for at least a year.  Of course, even if you do sign up and pay for hosting time after the free trial, they’ve still got a money-back period of 97 days!  You know, just in case you change your mind.

So, without any further delay, check out the only link you need to save $75 on a year of quality shared hosting:

75for1year

Just click on that link and you’ll be on your way!  First you enter a few details to get your trial account set up, and then in a couple of weeks you can decide whether or not this is something worth your while.  Of course, the $75 discount coupon will be attached to your Dreamhost trial account, so when it is time to pay the annual hosting fee, you’ll know you’re getting the best price around.  If paying out a year in advance is still too much of a commitment, you can also use the Dreamhost coupon this link activates to get $50 off the setup of a monthly payment plan.

So yeah, I do make some money when people sign up, but I also have my domains where my mouth is.  Yup, that’s right, this site right here and about half of the other ones I run are all hosted on a single Dreamhost hosting account.  If you want to know how it performs, just click around for a while and let me know what you think about the speed and the response time!

First, I’ve got someone who wants to learn about building websites and making some money online.  Hopefully, I can help.  The process of teaching does a lot to cement your own knowledge and force your own advances in thinking.

Second, I’ve got a new contract job to prepare for.  Its nothing special, but I’ll get to do online work for a set wage.  A little bit of extra income and wage stability will be nice considering the rapid fluctuations in the hosting industry and online advertising rates in general.  Although my websites have continuously grown in traffic since they started, the average prices of advertising space has fallen in almost a perfectly proportionate amount.  Go figure, its like people don’t have as much money to spend!

Now that I think about it, the fact that I have more work to do doesn’t sound like that interesting of a thing to blog about after all.

I’M STILL EXCITED, DAMNIT

Now where is all of this time supposed to come from…?

But whatever it was, a few days of an extra second or two of lag is still the worst experience during my time hosting sites on Dreamhost.  I’d say that’s a pretty good track record, and I’m looking forward to the next few years of speedy service

Heck, I still don’t even know that it was anything on the host’s end.  There very well could have been a problem with Comcast or any of the hops in between Comcast and DH’s data warehouse in California.  There’s a whole country worth of “internet tubes” in between us, after all. As with air travel, a lot of the internet data out of Jacksonville gets tied up with long lines and waits in Atlanta.

Anyway, as soon as one problem is resolved, the next one will inevitably pop up.  And at the moment, my biggest problem in the website building biz is the fact that about half of my websites are loading incredibly slowly.  You can see it on this one here or any of the domains I’ve hosted on Dreamhost – the load time has just been painfully slow since the weekend started.  I was hoping for some relief, but there is no notification on the Dreamhost status blog.

For almost two years, I’ve been extremely happy with Dreamhost’s hosting services, so I’m a bit surprised to see this sudden slowdown across multiple domains.  These aren’t even high traffic domains!

I’m starting to wonder if one of my server-neighbors is hogging up the resources and lagging up our machine.  If so, I hope someone at Dreamhost realizes or else I’ll have to actually send in my first support request after 20 months of hosting!

Anyone else on the altair server noticing a slowdown?  Let me know!

Really though, anything beyond a few hundred bucks is going to kill the budget.  And I’ve got a sinking feeling that all of the AC companies in town are pushing for a record sales weekend.  Every website I’ve visited is promoting some new federal subsidy for brand-new energy efficient air conditioners, and it took a little extra digging to find even a little bit of information about their repair policies.  A lot of these AC repair guys work on commission and the competition for jobs has been particularly fierce, so I’m half expecting anyone who shows up today to claim our current unit is beyond repair.

Despite the cynicism, this lack of an air conditioner can’t go on.  Since it went out, I’ve been carrying an ice pack around in a shirt, and from time to time I’m forced to leave the ice pack sitting on top of the computer – next to where the power supply is situated.  My computer has been running hot since I upgraded the PSU and video card, and now without any sort of inside air control the thing is just burning up.  I’m really surprised that it hasn’t melted down completely yet, but I do need to keep it one once in a while so I can do some writing and work online.

I’ve learned that I don’t know the first thing about air conditioners.  Although Aisling and I somehow fixed the clothes washer and dryer, we haven’t even known where to start with troubleshooting the AC.

The absolute worst though, was going outside to cut the grass (I mean two-foot tall weeds) and coming back in to the stuffy house.  I was pretty confident that the cold shower would cool me down, but in a humid environment with still warm air, its hard to ever really dry out.  Next time I’ll try to stay dry when there’s no AC.  No, you know what?  “There ain’t gonna be a next time!”

Its 12:15 now – the repair guy is supposed to be here between 2 pm and 6pm.  I might have to wait around at the hottest part of the day, but he’ll have to actually fix the AC.

One popular choice for non-commercial web publishing is free hosting.  This can be obtained at places like Blogspot, WordPress, or even Facebook and Myspace.  These sites provide the hosting for free and give you everything you need to publish content to the web, but with the exception of Blogspot they’re not interested in helping you build a commercial site.  They’d rather keep the profits your content generates to pay for their own hosting and promotion expenses.

Shared hosting – cost effective and business friendly

One step up from free hosting is shared hosting – a service that allows multiple webmasters to share the resources of a single server machine.  Shared hosting gives webmasters more control over the look and organization of their sites, and there are rarely any limits on commercial activity (other than legally prescribed regulations, of course).  Most hosting accounts also allow you to run multiple domains off the same service, so there’s really no external limit to the number of sites you can build.

Hosting coupons are available

Like any other business, hosting providers are competing for customers.  One way they do so is through coupons, promotional codes, and other discounts that allow the buyer to customize the service, features, and price they’re willing to pay.  To help get the word out, affiliates can also earn money when their personal hosting coupon or code are used to make a purchase.

Dreamhost Coupon Codes 2009:

Dreamhost is the shared host this site is published on, and its served me well for the installation of multiple WordPress and Pligg domains under a single hosting account.  They also have a huge selection of Dreamhost coupon codes to choose from, so there’s never a reason to pay full price when you’re signing up:

• Saves50 - $50 off
• 3free4life - 3 extra free domain registrations for the life of your account
• BizAndBlog - 1 extra free domain registration and $30 off
• BizCode - $20 off and a dedicated IP address
• 218233078703 - use this code to get $150 off a 5 year plan or $200 off a 10 year plan!

Hostgator Coupon Codes 2009:

Hostgator is another popular web host, but I don’t have as much experience using the service.  Its highly recommended and I’ll probably invest in my next hosting account with them (whenever its time to diversify again.)  Hostgator coupon codes are also available to secure a discount on shared, VPS, or even dedicated hosting in case your site is already bringing in heavy traffic and you need more CPU time.

• Green - 20% off the purchase of any new account
• WordPress - 1 penny for the first month of service

There’s no catch, just pick your favorite coupon code and add it to the promotional code field during account registration.  Entering a code will give you a new cost calculation or upgrade your service – so be sure to take advantage of this discount opportunity.

High speed broadband is supposed to fix this, right?

The problem is those cable broadband lines that seemed cutting edge in 1999 are showing their age and years of neglect.  While the ownership of that network has changed hands and brands more than once, every company to come along and offer access has been gifted with a virtual monopoly over cable internet in Jacksonville.

Of course, AT&T provides a “choice” with their DSL, but let’s not even discuss that disaster.  At least the cable is good enough to pay for even if it requires complaining to get it to work half the time.

While the actual cable infrastructure hasn’t changed much, I’d say my experience over the last 10 years has been one of a steady decline in service quality.  There were simply fewer people on the network – and congestion hadn’t been a problem.

Nowadays, I can’t even keep a connection active for more than an hour.  Frequent outages are commonplace, and while they’re usually as brief as five minutes, they often disrupt file transfers and browser-based publishing.  Forget gaming – I can’t even run a stable AFK script in a text-based online MUD (The MUD I’m playing was designed in 1993 and Comcast still can’t deliver the kind of stable connection it requires)

That’s enough of a rant.  I probably just need to go pick up my third cable modem replacement for the year.  Ugh.

Basically, users sign up and then they’ve got the ability to post links to content they find on the web and find interesting (or, commonly, content that they’ve written and want to promote ) From there, other users can vote on the link or leave a comment about it in hopes of triggering a discussion.

Although Pligg has been available for a while, the 1.0 release (and latest 1.0.2) represents the first time Pligg has been released under a “final” version as opposed to a beta version. Some hosts don’t allow users to install beta versions of software onto their servers – and many webmasters don’t want to run the risks associated with beta software either. Good news for the reluctant, because Pligg 1.0 is safe, stable, and will probably be around in this basic form for many years to come.

One loss is the old templates that were released for beta versions of Pligg – many of the visual designs were built around very specific software functions and operational codes that may have changed in the release version. Older templates and visual themes, therefor, aren’t compatible with the current software.

This does create a great opportunity for those of you web publishers who are handy with CSS and reverse-engineering code. New Pligg templates are in high demand, and it can be a quick and easy way to insert your link into the footer of dozens or hundreds of domains.

If you want to learn more about Pligg or download the latest version, be sure to check out their homepage at http://www.pligg.com/

The risk is present when over-activity creates a possibility of a search engine penalty such as the minus 30 penalty.

My main projects and resources regarding SEO:

Website SEO – Links to articles about SEO written as a blog/journal style approach. A recollection of my discoveries as they are occurring and a helpful guide

Jacksonville SEO – Need SEO help for your website? Organic and search traffic just not living up to expectations? You can see I’m not much of a visual designer, but I can definitely help bring some traffic and bot recognition to a domain. Is there a risk involved with hiring an SEO consultant? Always. Efforts might backfire or they might pay off. Make sure they use good practices and don’t promise more than they can reasonably deliver.

Jacksonville SEO Blog – Articles about the potential utility and risks of SEO. Why search engine marketing can deliver better value to a business than traditional mass media efforts. Also, introductions to a lot of the vocabulary terms and jargon in the SEO business.

-John McDonald, adding SEO to the resume because it pays the bills.

• Saves50 – save $50
• 3Free4Life – three extra free domains
• bizandblog – one extra free domain and a cash discount

Dreamhost and Bluehost are the two web hosting services I’m using right now to get my internet marketing work off the ground. Hosting is an important decision because the minor details of the company’s policies and agreements make all of the difference in how your websites will be able to operate, what amount of resources you’ll be able to use, and basically, whether or not your websites will be online at all.

This site is hosted on Dreamhost, and since its been up and running the load times and up-time have been great. My education bookmarking website is also hosted on Dreamhost, and I have to say this has been great. Some other shared hosts won’t allow beta software like Pligg, but this one will even install it for you. I had a hard time manually extracting the Pligg files and setting them up properly, so I set the website up in the advanced automatic installation mode and installed a pre-coded visual template. All I had to do was find certain parts in the existing style sheets to make a few modifications regarding the text content of the website. If you can use a Google search to determine which files have template areas and text you want to change, editing this to make your site unique and personal isn’t much different than writing any other digital document.

If you’re signing up for Dreamhot check out this Dreamhost coupon code list for all the discounts available. The best Dreamhost code depends on your website’s software and traffic types, just like the decision of who is the best website host for your plans. Dreamhost has excellent prices, few restrictions on the type of content you post (as long as it is legal!), and they offer a lot of options for server-side software installation that’s useful for new webmasters like myself. I would definitely recommend this for anyone looking to get started.

What’s up with the discount code? Well, anyone who signs up for the rewards program can create their own discounts and get paid when someone uses it! That’s right, you could make money giving people discounts. I figure that’s a pretty good deal for everyone involved because its a service that I use and enjoy myself and so have no reservations about recommending. You can learn more about Dreamhost’s rewards program here, or even sign up if you want!

Well, Blogspot and Squidoo offer unique web creation software and unique modes of marketing web pages. Each community offers insight, links, and a new perspective on how to approach the internet business.

• Jacksonville SEO – Jacksonville SEO is a collection of about 20 articles I wrote as I was thinking out a business plan that will soon be fully operational. The first trick was to actually rank for Jacksonville SEO as a search key word, now I need to set up a professional landing page offering the services and providing contact info.
• Free College Aid – A place for collecting links to other interesting education blogs on the net, and its been a great place to store drafts and ideas for later posts at my main college blog.
• Politics Undergroud – Again, a great tool for me to collect links of interesting political opinions in the blogosphere. When I’m lucky I can get the article’s original author to come back for some more comments on the topic. The internet has no doubt done wonders for the civil politics debate.
• Gluten Blog – No wheat – its gluten-free for me. The Gluten Blog is a place for me to record recipes on the fly and store links of my favorite Celiac resources.
• Jacksonville Artists – A side-project to help my artist friends and of course the love of my life Aisling

Squidoo sites:

• Free College Lens – More free college resources for students, parents, and anyone considering continuing their college education
• Website Building – A Squidoo lens web page about building web pages. Including a more thorough introduction to Squidoo and free hosting services.
• News and Politics – News feeds, debate, politics, news, what else do you need?
• Florida Bright Futures – A lens about the history and possible future of the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship program. Also links to a requirements and Q&A page I’m running on shared hosting.
• Dreamhost Coupon – If you’re interested in setting up a shared hosting account with Dreamhost (the same company hosting the JohnMcDonald.info domain) this Squidoo lens includes some discount coupons that can help you save some cash.
• Web hosting types – Free, shared, dedicated? What is it all about and how can you use different types to maximize your online strategy?
• Search Scholarships – My first lens, one of my first websites of my own. A summary of the scholarship hunting process with links to more detailed accounts of the specific steps involved.
• Website SEO – Of course, if you’re going to be building all of these websites, you have to make sure that someone sees them, right!?
• College Financial Aid – A primer for college financial aid, links to free resources, and tips on applying for the FAFSA.

Now if anything, we have the reverse problem. Since the cost of publishing is so low, we’ve probably reached a point where a lot of the information floating around is of diluted value. The good news is that the total amount of available information has never been higher – and the democratic nature of web 2.0 applications promises an idealized internet where the collective wisdom organizes and assigns value to competing content.

Don’t just call me an optimist, I think of website building as a modern newspaper or television station. An individual, with proper distribution of his/her ideas and a sufficiently compelling argument, can have a profound impact on public perception of events & debates. Typical barriers to entry like limited broadcast frequencies, federal licensing, and expensive distribution mechanisms are gone. Marketing has gone viral, and what is left is a simplified game of wits, where ideas and opinions go head to head with fewer distractions. (As long as you can ignore the trolls and spammers, anyway)