Because I got cut off fron AdSense (thanks for nice emails, ya’ll), I decided to channel my thirst for web-related knowledge elsewhere, particularly the renegade website-building gigs. Because for the longest time I’ve been focusing on the interactivity aspect of web as opposed to the design, I’ve gotten a good idea about homebrewing simple php+MySql sites that can do some neat interactive things, like sessions.

Moreover, these little php tricks impress the living hell out of the local website-needing public as well as website-building folk. Hey, there’s a clear upside to living in rural Michigan – all of these hackey Frontpage 4.0 warriors cringe when they hear php and CSS. With a decent word-of-mouth campaign and some revenue reinvested into promotion, I could literally quit my day job.

Case and point – I wrote this script that uploads a jpeg on the server, resizes the picture to 75×75, and inserts the name and path into a MySQL table to be later pulled into a list of products as a thumbnail. It was a part of a laughably simple website, so I charged $350 for the whole thing. Imagine my surprise when I learned the owners were ready to pay $1,000 for the laughably simple website alone! A grand, as in “spend 4 hours building and setting up a website, and then skip work for the next two weeks because comparatively speaking, your day job is not even worth your time”.

Then it was my time to cringe and hit the phone to see what the other web-building renegades are charging. Turns out, even if you are not that good, you can still make money! This, for instance,

would cost around $400-500. This hot little layout

goes for $500-700. Finally, based on the rates the design firm charged this guy,

they must have cleared around a grand.

If you think about it, when a fuel pump in your car takes a dump and you have to tow the car into the shop, you don’t ask yourself whether it’s really going to cost the mechanics $400, $600, or $800. Most people (and you too, admit it) simply fork over the money. Same thing with intellectual labor – they don’t know it takes me just a few hours to build a fully functional semi-interactive website. They are simply ready to pay someone to do something they can’t do themselves.

If I keep getting referred, I might depart from the affiliate marketing thing because the A.M. pay is tears in the ocean. Salty tears of ass-breaking labor, lack of motivation, and false hopes in the vast ocean of vicious competition and unfair practices.

After immediately learning from my first renegade web-builing experience, I charged market rate for my second and third, and I am a happy man.

For those familiar with a programming language, check out this Slashdot post and comments. Truly geeky humor. I laughed my ass off.

This gentleman found me through my supercool Mercedes site.  Since then, he moved from the “complete stranger” category into the “online friend I’ve never met” category.  He contributes to my 300SD site; that’s on top of posting three times a day on his own blog, at midnight, 12:15, 15:30 (EST).

He is writing about luxury cars, a subject he loves.  His vernacular is quite exquisit, though easy to read.  He’s knowledgeable, intelligent, and classy.  From his words, there are about 100 daily people who have made his blog their daily read.  Considering the topic and his delivery, I can see his blog becoming a classier version of Engadget-gone-car-happy, in other words, a huge luxury car resource.
All of the aforementioned things communicate one thing: bad-ass.

Lessons I am learning from him:

• Be persistent.  Be persistent.  Be persistent.
• Respect your reader.
• Love what you do.

Check it out, Automobiles DeLuxe.

That word is Japanese for ‘hell’.

This sad little number was discovered in one of the parking lots in Michigan. Yes, my supersweet Mercedes-Benz 300SD is parked behind it.

What makes this car worthy of posting here? Its pitiful, neglected existence as somebody’s automotive bitch. There’s no pampering of any kind in its future, not even regular oil changes, just abuse, neglect, and plenty of quiet rusting.

Just after I decided to share this car with ya’ll, I thought to myself, “Judging from the overall condition of this car, I must be extra careful when taking pictures. I guarantee the owner is lurking somewhere in the vicinity just waiting to chase after me”.

Then I saw the goofy little modifications to the headlights – the white flames that look like eyelashes. It that doesn’t make this car look like a severely abused animal, I don’t know what does.

The rear end is showing signs of impending rust-related doom.

The wheel wells look like sloppy, jagged Saturday-morning pancakes in my household. That’s because I wake up so hungry, I just throw them on, otherwise I would pass out.

And finally, the crowning achievement in parking lot rampage, a big-ass dent on the driver’s side. Of course, the dent (like everything) is covered in rust.

This car is approaching the level of unsafe I used to live with when I drove my Cavalier (that’s a part of the door in the picture). Sadly, being a late-80′s Japanese car, it can probably go for another winter or two … wait … (to himself) We’re in Michigan, so … It’s going to go till next February. After that, it’s going to disintegrate on Michigan’s hellaciously salty roads.

I thought I almost escaped the wrath of this car’s owner, but I was wrong. A teen-aged person rushed out of the building, swinging what looked like a pair of homemade nunchucks. Because I’m categorically against those methods of dealing with bloggers, I peeled out of the parking lot in my clearly superior-looking Benz. In the rear view mirror I saw the teenager do a pretty intimidating-looking nunchuck routine.

Your AdSense account was found to be related to an account previously
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account. Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed
further participation in AdSense and do not receive any further
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As outlined in our program Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the
right to terminate any publisher’s participation at any time.

Sincerely,

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I’ve got to regroup. I was planning on a $200 check in May, but I guess it ain’t coming. Kind of puts a damper on my affiliate marketing gravy-train. Therefore, all ideas welcome – alternatives, substitutes, etc. My Mercedes site will be hit the hardest by my upcoming out-of-pocket financing – the amount of bandwidth those 200k pictures eat up is unreal.

However, it’s not like I’m quitting or anything. But in the back of my mind I knew making this “money for nothing” was too easy …

Update: here’s the second email from Google basically telling me to piss off:

It’s funny how topic drift happens – you start a site as a generic resource to help people save money, and not even a year later you end up with a crazy personal blog heavily involved into affiliate marketing and writing code.

Another late night for me, enthusiastically writing lots of php code and learning as I go.

I always wanted to build a site template that would be almost 100% programmatically controlled, meaning that I would have to modify very little of actual code to build content.

Back in the day I never understood why I had to carry my navigation toolbar from page to page, and change every one of those pages when just one link changed. I got very pissed when table layout prevented me from quickly inserting a paragraph. I got furious just thinking about the fact that the preferred method of laying out a site was cutting spacer images that matched the background color.

Nowadays it’s shameful to not use some sort of interactivity on your site. Need to quickly dump 15 pictures in a column on your site? Do a quick loop in whatever language your server supports, give all images sequential names, and three lines of code later you’re done. Or you can copy and paste 15 times, but that’s your business.

I always keep that kind of interactivity in mind. I mean, always. It’s killing me to know there’s a better way to do something, and just give up and move on with my life, my wife, and re-runs of Firefly.

Tonight I’m done building a very generic template for a simple site. I wanted a template completely dependent on MySQL backend and CSS.

Now I got one. If someone comes up to me and says “I need a site”, s/he will have one in under 10 minutes. We’ll then sit around and wait until DNS propagation is done. All I will have to do is punch in a few rows through phpMyAdmin in a (title, content) format, and I’m done. The titles will serve as links, automatically pointing to the content part linked with the title. Does it remind anyone of WordPress?

I’ve spent countless hours mastering Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). They are not without their flaws, but they work extremely well if you use them sparingly or learn appropriate hacks for individual browsers. This little template site utilizes tabbed navigation written entirely in CSS. Look at the code, all you’ll see is unordered lists, ul. The code is clean and simple, and I am pretty proud if it – no tables, inline formatting, and zero Javascript.

I don’t know how search engines react to this kind of code.

Can I market this thing and how much do you think anyone would pay for a template like this?