Giant Motorcycle Balloon

I've talked a little about a client of mine that rents / sells giant balloons and provides other outdoor advertising services like professional searchlights like you see at movie premiers and LED signs (both the plain orange text like you see on the highway, and full color version like the electronic billboards)

Well, today I made a page for him about a specific balloon. It's shaped like a Suzuki motorcycle. This thing is HUGE! It's 11' high and 25' long. It's a perfect match for the street bike it represents.

Whether to check out my work, or to check out his products, Visit the Giant Motorcycle Balloon page.

Avoid BidVertiser!

I did a search for "Alternative to Adsense" and one of the articles I found suggested BidVertiser. I decided to give it a try.

I like the fact that they offered payouts as low as $10 if you used PayPal, and the setup process was relatively simple.

The first thing I saw that I didn't like wasn't a deal breaker. My confirmation email had my password in PLAIN TEXT! Plaintext password storage and retrieval is a HORRIBLE IDEA. If they can send me my password in plaintext, that means that someone there is able to access and read my password in plaintext. Why is that a problem? I mean, come-on, it's their site. What's it matter that they know your password? Well, the problem is that people tend to re-use passwords and if they have a bad actor in their company, or they get hacked, the malicious party will have your email address and a good idea of a starting point for breaking into your other accounts.

What actually killed it for me was the first ad that showed up on my site.
I had chosen a full banner. It came up and the image was made to look like a broken embed with text that said something like "Java Not Installed" or similar, and a video popped up that was about three times bigger than the ad was supposed to be. I made the  mistake of clicking on the video and I immediately recognized what was going on. I was being coaxed into installing ransomware or similar attacks. I disabled my network adapter, closed the offending browser windows/tabs and re-enabled my adapter.

Since I was trying this on a blogger account, I went and removed the HTML gadget ("widget", to non-blogger users) and will NOT be using BidVertiser again.

My guess is that it's not BidVertiser directly that is to blame, but indirectly because this type of ad should be disallowed and aggressively defended against on their side.

That's my rant on why I will avoid BidVertiser.

If I find a good alternative or supplement to Adsense, I'll consider writing another article about it.

Why do I want an alternative?
1) Payout threshold.
2) Too many eggs in one proverbial basket.
3) Practice and experience.
4) Adsense may not be available on brand new blogspot blogs or may show blank ads for whatever reason (back when they did PSAs, this would happen to me if I let a site get stale.)

Update:
I wanted to make sure I wasn't over-reacting, so I did some Google searches and came up with this thread where other publishers experienced the same problem.
 

Yet another blog

I started a new blog, Living In Florida (http://notjustbeaches.blogspot.com/) I plan on having a lot of photos on it. Today I posted some pictures of the sun shining through some clouds and a few pictures of traffic. Both subjects are part of my Florida experience.

The Sunshine State

The wayback machine, aka: The internet archive

I thought I had checked before and not found my main website, www.tecbrat.com in the wayback machine. I was very glad today to find out it really is there.

I needed to resurrect a dead page about using cURL to upload files, and the internet archive saved the day.

If you're curious what my main site looked like long, long ago, follow this link.

It's completely unattractive and some of the programming items I mentioned were pretty naive, but it's good to see where I was so I get a better idea of the progress I've made as a true web developer.

What links to me?

http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/mapbender_commits/2011-October/008052.html Links to what was a dead page. I put up a little explanation and linked to someone else's explanation of the same thing, How to upload a file using cURL.

http://english.stackexchange.com/users/20504/tecbrat links to my home page.
Because I have a reputation (aka "fake internet points") there , they removed "nofollow", so it is what we call a "quality link back".

http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?283177-Learn-web-design-and-web-development-via-online-resources Also links to my home page. Even though it has "nofollow", This is the ONE page that Google reports when I ask it for my links back.

http://forum.qbasicnews.com/index.php?topic=10805.msg123139 Links to my business page too. Not much call for qbasic programming on the web. :P But, it was a fun way to play around with programming when I first got myself back in the game 10 or so years ago.

I'll probably update this from time to time, or add similar posts.

The irony of blogs that talk about "do follow" links.

I have seen so many blogs recently talking about how to get do follow links and talking about making quality comments on relevant blogs. The ironic part is that all of those blog posts I've been finding have their comment links as rel="external nofollow" or rel="nofollow", OR have comments disabled.

I wrote a quick post the other day about What does Google do with "nofollow" links, and I determined that whatever else they MIGHT do with them, they certainly do not ignore them.

But, it seems that links without the no follow attribute are still coveted by webmasters and SEO experts. Google apparently still gives weight to links from high PR sites, especially related sites, if the no follow attribute is missing.

I don't know if this is an oversight, (not likely), or by choice. It seems to me that those who write about these things would expect quality links back and be willing to give a little in hopes to get a little.

That's where I stand. I hope that the content of my site is helpful and informative. I hope it is well written with good grammar, spelling and punctuation. It would be even better if it were considered authoritative and engaging.

With this excellent content, if there is someone who takes the time to make a productive comment to my blog, I'll gladly set their link(s) as "do-follow".

Sincerly,
TecBrat
TecBrat.com LLC

p.s.
I could give you definitions of nofollow or do follow and talk about the importance or irrelevance of building backlinks, but if you don't already have that knowledge, then you probably aren't all that interested in this post anyway.

Cold Air Balloons

I mentioned my customer, Giant Balloon Rental, in another post, but I thought it worth bringing up again. A lot of people that might find this blog are likely to be small business owners.

In business, you learn very quickly the importance of advertising. You can put an ad in the paper, but is anyone going to read it? You can send out postcards, or put get included in one of those coupon envelope mailers, but will people actually open it?

Sometimes, the best publicity is on the spot advertisement with Giant Cold Air Balloons. I don't have an on-site type of business, so I can't give my own personal testimony, but I'll see if I can get some from my client. I'm sure with clients like Wendy's, Taco Bell & McDonald's he MUST be doing something right.

Check him out again: Orlando Outdoor Advertising, Giant Balloon Rental.

WordPress starter

Just watched a very long, very informative video on YouTube that helped me get a real good start on customizing a wordpress site. I skipped some because he covered how to buy a domain name, how to purchase hosting and how to use that particular host's quick installer.

Once he got into the meat of it, it was extremely helpful. He had some good suggestions for background tiles (subtlepatterns.com) and for free stock images (sxc.hu which now re-directs to http://www.freeimages.com)

If you don't have Photoshop or Gimp, or need his guidance, follow him though the use of pixlr.com to prepare your images to be added to your blog.

You can see the results I got by visiting KyMystery.com. Obviously, as time passes I'll be developing that site more, but at least in the short term, you'll get the idea of what his tutorial can do for your WordPress blog.

Blogs with DoFollow links

I had done this before, or at least I thought I had. I even posted that I had. That was a long time ago though.

If anyone cares to take the time to make a comment on my blog, and that comment adds value to the post, I will gladly allow their author name link to be a quality backlink. (That is, I removed "rel='nofollow'" from my template in the appropriate place as suggested by MytricksYard.com

Quality backlinks that actually pass page rank juice can be hard to come by. While this blog is still in the early stages, a link added now may end up being very valuable in the future.

All my comments are moderated, so don't bother me with spam. I'll just delete your garbage.

Sincerly,
TecBrat

aka Corry Wauford.