Creating a new adsense site

So... In my quest to try to put in place some of my recent internet marketing learning, I've downloaded a huge whack of content to a new site that I'm developing called 2xl.in

It's a little pun on my XL brand... get it?
If you want to excel (XL) in... go to www.2xl.in
and in good internet marketing fashion, since most people only remember the .com, or go there first instinctively, I've also registered www.2xlin.com, which just bounces you to the .in domain.

As I've mentioned before, I like the literal use of the (IN) as a word, I think with the domain market place expanding so much, sites using cleaver wording like del.icio.us, as part of their naming strategy, will eventually gain more popular use.

But I digress...

We're here to discuss my adsense site experiments.

I haven't found that the site I did called tiredofsmoking.com has done much for my adsense income. I still haven't found the "driver" for the content side of the site. I suppose posting to some related forums would be in order, as well as some google adwords ads... but I think if I was going to do that, I'd put a little more effort into getting a few clickbank offers in there also.

That said, Tiredofsmoking.com is a pretty targeted micro demographic... well, not that small I guess, but still, 2xl.in will give me the ability to cover more subject matter than I am now.

The next step is to create a directory page for the front of the site. I think what I'm going to try to do is make it an article submission site also. Use the existing categories that I've got already, and add the ability for users to add their own articles.

It would be really great if I could also create RSS feeds from each of the headings, not sure if I could automate that, but don't see why not.

Off to rentacoder.com with me I guess, let's track the progress on this project and see what happens shall we?

I'll make this into a little mini course on product creation using outsourcing.

Our First .mobi Domain

Well, after purchasing a few .mobi domains for my portfolio, I decided that I should put up a site for our company... ya know... just to say we'd done it.

I went looking for a site builder program that I could use that would spit out compliant code (.mobi is pretty fussy about the code that you put up, has to work on mobile devices and be light on graphics and such).

I found a good little tool at this site www.mobisitegalore.com
It was fast and easy to make my mobi site, they had some good templates and the whole thing took me about 1.5 hours to do, including copy.

Not sure how this would stand up to a more robust application request, but for my simple 'brochure site" requirements it was fast and easy... even included it's own upload so I didn't have to deal with FTP'ing the site.

They work on a donation basis, so you can do your first project for free if you like... they have a few options that are interesting for designers and people looking for a more "pro" offering. Worth a look I'd say.

Why MCE sucks

OK, I just spent the last half hour trying to figure out why the TV shows that i recorded on my Media Center Edition PC, can't be watched over my internal network on my laptop.

Now grant you my laptop is not MCE, but wouldn't it seem like a common requirement that if you have a Digital File Repository (I have 4 drives running RAID striped and mirrored... so I'll never again loose those kid photo's or my ever growing music collection) you would be able to access it over your network.

So i look on Microsoft's site... to find out how to watch MCE shows on my laptop?

Their brilliant suggestion is to drag the file to my laptop over the network, copy it locally and run it from my local drive.

OK... besides the obvious digital file pollution that is being promoted here (do I need 2 copies of the file? no!) doesn't this go against the whole concept of a networked home?

I want freedom with my files, not restrictions...

I won't even get into the fact that the TV shows that I record won't burn to DVD (so I can take them with me, like the promo says you can?) since they are "protected" ? Didn't they just send them out over the airways and get money from the network? Shouldn't I be allowed to watch it when and where i want?

For these and several other reasons, I'm still looking for a DRM free media center like solution.

Any suggestions?

We're Opensourcing our Application XLsuite

It's a fine day for us. We've grown this project over the last 18 months now and it's very exciting to have reached this point.

We've decided to opensource the code for the site. Our aim is to provide a hosted version for general consumption (and hopefully profit) however we are releasing the code for those developers that want to extend it's functionality and adapt it for other uses.

XLsuite is a full featured (getting fuller all the time) CRM / ERP system that centralizes Client management, invoicing, estimating and reporting. Additional features help to round out a complete business management website for any company.

Please visit the XLsuite website for more information.

How Cool is THIS? - GEO TRACKING TODO LISTS?

This is from the rememberthemilk.com blog, I haven't used the service much yet at all, but I'm really impressed with the level of integration they've managed with google calendar and better yet, google maps. Check it out
Remember The Milk - Blog: "See your tasks in the real world

Thanks to the magic of Google Maps, we've made a mini version of the Locations feature available in Google Calendar. The map shows where your day's tasks are located in the real world, so you can see what's nearby or on your way, and plan the best way to get things done.

Remember The Milk map in Google Calendar

As with the gadget we created for Google Personalized Homepage, this feature is available in 18 languages and will use your language setting to automatically display in your language."

Launching a New XL Site

We're just doing a little market testing with our new "satelite site" marketing concept. Using RSS feeds to feed a dynamic shell, we're able to quickly create new sites that provide external linking to other domains in our portfolio.

A handy little SEO tool for bumping your rankings, just make sure you're using different IP addresses if you really want it to make an impact on your rankings.

The site is itself using the RSSXL quick website agregator, follow our "Make Money With RSS" link.

Other sites we're testing it on include secrets.agooglepro.com and 4am.dj an excellent DJ information site