Welcome to 2008! I started this blog on May 1 of last year as just another one of the infinite “make money online” blogs out there. But even though I’m more involved in Internet business than I was a year ago, the world doesn’t need another online business blog. So what does that make me and, accordingly, this site?
A jack of all trades.
I’m a coder and a designer by upbringing and a journalist by training. I want do to a little bit of everything, and I want to write about it at the same time. I may be going in a new direction with this site, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not still building an online empire, learning new coding techniques or cooking up nifty new layouts (like this one) in the background.
Enough rambling, what does this mean?
It means that I’m free. No more having to eke out a post everyday about something that everybody else posts about. Expect anything here from now on, from code snippets and design prototypes to opinion pieces and earnings checks. Like the big Chow says, it’s simply not wise to run a commercial site under your own name. From day one, I never intended TimSpangler.com to be commercial - which is why I never made a single attempt to monetize it. Blogging won’t make you rich - there are so many other ways to do that which don’t require putting up with the hassles and long hours of the content creation game.
One more thing…
I myself told aspiring bloggerpreneurs to pick a posting schedule and stick with it. Now that I’ve made it abundantly clear that this is a personal site and not a moneymaking venture, I don’t have the pressure of making an oftentimes crappy and pointless post just to fill up the calendar. If you’re subscribed to the feed, I urge you to stay subscribed, because even though the posting won’t be as frequent, it will be of much higher quality and far more interesting than the same old Internet marketing spiel you can read anywhere else.
The point is…
…that blogging is supposed to be fun. That being said, I’m looking forward to a great new year in every aspect of my life. I’ve set some resolutions, but if any of my old readers are still out there, I want to know yours: what do you hope to accomplish in 2008?
P.S. Let me know what you think of the new theme by using the contact form. I slaved long and hard to make it work in all browsers, so please let me know if you find any layout problems.
Right now I’m writing this entry in ecto, a blog editor for OS X. It uses the XML-RPC capabilities of WordPress to talk to your blog server from a stable piece of desktop software instead of the TinyMCE-based web interface that, in addition to simply feeling clunky, tends to have compatibility issues with Safari.
Not only do third-party tools fix the bugs inherent in the web-based interface, but they can also motivate you to write more, which is a good way to resurrect a dying blog. There’s a full list of offline editors, for Mac and Windows, on the official WordPress Codex. See if it helps your productivity any, and keep your eyes on timspangler.com. I’m cooking up something that’s bodacious, radical and gnarly at the same time.
Even though I’m from his town, for the longest time I would see his name and say ‘who the crap is Kanye West?’ Then I downloaded bought his discography and see where all the hype is. Now here’s the video for his new single “Good Life,” featuring T-Pain, in both embedded Flash and downloadable high-resolution glory. Let’s see if it brings me as much traffic as posting T.I. did for Daniel.
It’s 5:30 a.m. and I’m warm, comfortable and very, very asleep. Somewhere in town out there, Drew Peterson is being a douche. Elsewhere in town, cheap people are coming out of their houses to save a few bucks on TVs and toys.
That’s right, it’s Black Friday again. For retail workers it’s a nightmare. For chintzy people it’s a fuckin’ land rush as they wait in the cold for store doors to open in hopes of getting cheap stuff. The worst of them attempt to resell what they buy as a form of offline->online arbitrage, under the illusion that the miniscule profit they might make will make up for all the time they spent freezing their asses off in line.
It’s not worth it. In the morning I’ll wake up to media coverage of the inevitable tramplings that the sunrise will bring, and it will deliver many lulz. But there’s one opportunity for real profit on Black Friday, and it doesn’t even involve leaving the comfort of your warm house and cup of hot chocolate.
Affiliate sites devoted to Black Friday make a killing
Sites like BFAds.net cater to the cheapskates of the internet (believe me, there are many!) by offering links to or downloadable scans of major retailers’ Black Friday ads, so savvy tightwads (who either suck up the bill for internet or, more likely, jack their neighbor’s WiFi) can figure out where the best deals are.
The real beauty behind BFAds, though, is the Online Deals section, which, as you might have guessed, is packed to the frickin’ rafters with affiliate links, mostly from Commission Junction. The only problem is that this kind of affiliate site is only good for one season out of the year. But I’m sure the guy who runs it cleans up enough every November to give him a nice stack of cash to last him until the next big shopping season.In other words, Black Friday shoppers are suckers. And the best way to make real money is to capitalize on suckers!
On November 22, 1987 at 11:15 p.m., Dr. Who fans tuned in to WTTW11 in Chicago were treated to one of the most bizarre occurences in television history: The original broadcast faded out and was replaced by video of an anonymous signal hijacker donning a mask bearing the likeness of TV character Max Headroom. After a minute and a half of garbled rambling, the hacker faded out and the Dr. Who broadcast resumed.
The thinking is that the hijacker was either on the roof of a building near the Sears Tower (where WTTW broadcasts from) or had access to a very high-powered ground-based transmitter. To this day he hasn’t been caught. Fellow video pirate Captain Midnight, however, was not so fortunate.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program…the tape of the original Max Headroom incident from 11/22/87. And here’s a textfile dated 12/20/87 with some technical details of the hack.
Even though I’m from his town, for the longest time I would see his name and say ‘who the crap is Kanye West?’ Then I 
On November 22, 1987 at 11:15 p.m., Dr. Who fans tuned in to WTTW11 in Chicago were treated to one of the most bizarre occurences in television history: The original broadcast faded out and was replaced by video of an anonymous 
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