I couldn’t help it.

It was just too much fun.

Make your own HERE

I can’t help but notice how often Captain Kirk and company landed on planets where computers had been running entire planets for thousands of years before crashing.

I’d really, really like to get in touch with the manufacturers of those computers, since I can’t get a computer to survive more than 12 months without replacing some piece of hardware or software.

My computers are housed in a very nice, cool, dry place. Not at all like the caves and hovels the computers on other planets had to endure.

And my computers aren’t running anything as complex as planet-cloaking or mind-control systems. I’m just trying to host a few web pages, or databases, or just get email and surf… and not even all on one machine.

So even if you could send over just a smidgen of that alien technology, both hardware and software– Just enough to have my computers run for, say, 25 years without failure– that would just be peachy.

I don’t even care if the computer tries to control the world, just as long as the hard drive doesn’t develop bad sectors after less than a year of service.

I recognize that all of the alien technologies on the show had some flaw or other, but I’m guessing that as long as I don’t allow Captain Kirk to bore it into self-destruction, this technology might just last till after I retire. And who really cares what happens after that?

I’ve discovered by adding Google AdLinks to the top of any left hand menu bar, you can boost your AdSense total by about 5%. Odds are that will decrease over time, but for now it’s a nice little boost for no extra effort.

There are four main sources of free content I use when creating a one-day or weekend website.

1) Free articles from article directories
2) Free public domain ebooks from archive.org or ProjectGutenberg.com
3) Public domain material from the U.S. Federal government
4) Brief articles I write myself.

The first source I’ve mentioned before. Most of the articles I use come directly into my Gmail box where I can do quick searches. I also scan article directories if I have fewer than 10 articles from Gmail.

Here are the directories I’ve found most useful:

• GoArticles.com
• eZine Articles.com
• World Wide Information Outlet
• ArticleCity.com
• IdeaMarketers.com
• Family-Content.com
• NetterWeb.com
• AuthorConnection.com

It’s a quick and simple process to copy and paste the articles into a template, but I often also use a database driven site format, and in those cases it’s a matter of copying and pasting into a web form to get it online.

Project Gutenberg can be a great source for information on a variety of generic (non techy) subjects. I do a subject search, a title search, and from the results that come up that are related I look for the Library of Congress category and list all of the other books in that category.

I use Conversionary software to quickly add the chapters to my template. It takes about five minutes to add the tags to the template, set up the software, and create neatly sliced html pages that match my site perfectly.

You can also find segments of books that fit your subject, even though the complete work doesn’t. You can use the Google search for that. I found a whole bunch of wild game recipes inside larger cookbooks that bring in lots of traffic to my hunting site, for example. I just copied the portions that were relevant, and cut out the rest.

All works created by the U.S. Federal government is in the public domain, so a simple search on your_topic site:.gov will bring up pages of information you can use on your site with only a simple attribution of the source. Be aware though that while Federal government documents are public domain, state government documents are not.

Finally, writing your own short informative articles is not difficult. Just take your topic and come up with a number of questions about it. For example, if you were creating a site about plasma televisions, your list might look like this:

Why are plasma televisions so expensive?
How big can a plasma TV get?
Are plasma TVs better than LCD?
Are plasma TVs safe to use with video games?
What is the expected lifespan of a plasma TV?
How can I prolong the life of my plasma TV?
How do I mount my plasma TV?

etc.

Taking five minutes to research each question on MSN or Google, and 15 minutes to write a few paragraphs summarizing what you’ve learned from your search as an answer to each question, and in a few hours you can have quite a few articles written.

Polish them up and be sure to use a spell checker, if not a grammar checker, on each, and you can not only use them for content on your own site, but you can also submit them to article submission services/directories in order to help you drive traffic to your site.

I’ve been slowly but surely working on my challenge sites. I’ve not made nearly as much progress as I intended at the start, but the income from these sites is starting to appear.

I’ve gotten my first Clickbank cheque for the new sites, and Adsense income is still trickling in… surprisingly the site that’s leading the pack is primarily populated with Traffic Equalizer pages.

This week I’ll be working on converting an old site, which has 500+ pages indexed by Google but generates no income at all, into something a little more easily monetized. I’ll be changing the links sections, moving content around, and adding AdSense, ExitPoint and Clickbank links wherever I can.

I’m still miles away from $100 per day, but I’m confident that these sites, along with the ones in progress, will hit that mark within 4 or 5 months, if not within the 12 week time frame specified by the challenge.