Surf the Mind

Archive for 2005

Since it’s impossible to keep up with all the sites offering private label articles, I thought I might offer some insight into the three different membership programs I am familiar with.

First, there is InfoGoRound. I am an unabashed fan of this one, because not only is there a sh**load of new articles added every month to the members area, but if you add one yourself, the membership is essentially free. The private label product, article bundles and public domain products that also arrive each month are just icing on the cake.

If I could join only one private label content site, InfoGoRound would be the one. As you can get the membership for no cost, however, I’m sure you can find room in your pocketbook for a second site if you need even more content each month.

The second I have a membership to is Paul Kleinmeulman’s Private Rights Article Sites (both 1 & 2). I don’t know where Paul gets his articles, but they have EVERYONE elses ghostwritten articles beat hands down. Yes, that includes InfoGoGetter’s article bundles too, although some of the member written articles are of a similar calibre.

The third membership I have experience with is Cody Moya’s Your Own Articles. The articles I received from this site aren’t bad. Again better than the article bundles from IGR but inferior to most of the member articles. And they don’t hold a candle to the ones you’ll get at Private Rights Articles, so today when Paul Kleinmeulman sent an email offering one of 50 open spots in PRA1 to PRA2 members, I unsubscribed from Your Own Articles and joined PRA1 in a heartbeat.

Are there other niche article sites? Without a doubt, there are many. But as I only build content sites on the weekends when I have a spare minute or two, three membership sites delivering articles is all I can handle without falling behind. And being a cheapskate (something to do with being of Dutch ancestry, I’m told), I hate paying for something I’m not able to use.

Well, I launched PDE a few days ago, and I’m VERY happy with the response thus far. Sales of Conversionary are up too… I’m not sure if the two things are related, but I’m not complaining.

Busy doesn’t begin to describe my life in the past few weeks, thus I haven’t had a lot of time for posting, but I have found one AWESOME plug in for PhotoShop called SiteGrinder that builds entire sites for you, without ever needing to use Dreamweaver. And the only thing you need to do differently is to name your layers as -rollover, or -popup, or -button.

I’ve only done one site design with it so far, but it does have some great possibilities.

If you’re using Gimp with Windows, an alternative might be PhotoWebber, which doesn’t have all the fancy popup building features, but it does do a great job of splitting the layers into great compressed size graphics.

It handles nearly all sorts of PSD files, so converting from Gimp’s native format to PSD (as long as layers can be preserved) should work great.

Today it was too wet and windy to do anything outside with the cutest kid in the world, so we found some rainy day activities to do indoors.

About a year ago I found a book called “My Little Blue Robot” in the remainder bin of the local bargain bookstore. It didn’t have much of a story, but it did have a cardboard robot that could be assembled and disassembled fairly easily.

I decided today was as good a day as any to break it out of the packaging and see how it would go over with my three-year old. And it turns out, the robot was a hit.

David spent a good part of the day playing with his robot, assembling it twice — once with me and once with his dad — and talking to it, teaching it how to play tiddly winks, and other imaginative things.

If you’ve got a three or four year old, try to find a copy to fill several hours of the next rainy or wintery day.

Really, these things usually don’t happen to me.

I have a Win2K box that never crashes, and a Linux box that REALLY never crashes, and in less than a week, I managed to kill both of them

First, the linux box just died after a system update. After a great deal of fiddling, I got it back to normal … well, better than normal since the updates are done too.. today.

Then today the hard drive on my Windows computer started to go. Everything is as sloooooooow as running Windows 3.1 on a 286 (remember those days?).

Anyway, I picked up an external hard drive and I’m transferring all the important files to it so I can swap hard drives. I ghosted a drive about a year ago with the same configuration, so as least I won’t be starting from scratch.

The bad news is, because the hard drive is so slow, the transfer is taking FOREVER. Like downloading on a 300 baud modem.

So, that’s why I haven’t been blogging.

And now that I’ve got some geekiness out of my system, I feel better already.

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