out fox the net

Finally I updated my blog. Amazing, no? I have a new system in place as an experiment, so let's see what happens.

"Lifehacks" are habits and applications which enhance your productivity. But do many people really consciously "lifehack" and call it by that name?

Some wonderful... person... hacked the site. They used a flaw in the WordPress system to edit some of the existing content and insert some links to their nasty web site. For those of you who were affected, sorry.

Everything has been corrected. Comments are now closed. If you would like to talk to me, please email me via the link in the lower left side.

Today, June 28, 2007 at about 5pm, Out Fox the Net enjoyed its 100,000 page view. Thanks for everyone who has come to visit.

OFtN (Out Fox the Net) started about 2 ½ years ago. Here is how it happened.

I met someone online who was interested in a certain web based marketing tool. Being a programmer and having been involved with the web for a long time, I understood just what he wanted and why. In essence the tool, when given a list of websites, would determine and rank which of them were most popular i.e. had the most traffic, highest page rank etc. I registered the OFtN domain and put the tool up in a password protected area.

The guy was very happy with it and suggested that we open a “for pay” service with it. That didn’t sound like a bad idea at all so I started to develop a better interface for it and some supplementary tools to go along with it. That also was working out pretty well until one day…

…completely out of the blue, the guy accused me of “stealing” his ideas and cutting him out of the business he had developed… and on a public message board we both visited frequently. Total paranoid delusions coming from this guy who had been so friendly up until then. Keep in mind that no one except he and I had ever even seen the tool at that point – it was never opened to the public and hadn’t made 1 cent.

Well anyway, to cut a short story short, I posted a calm reply and told him I was done working on the project and was returning “his precious ideas” unused.

But I still had the domain and nothing to do with it.

Over the next year or so, I would occasionally come up with an idea and make a half-hearted attempt at implementing it. Webmasters tools, news aggregator and nothing much of interest.

And then. I bought World of Warcraft.

After disappearing into WoW for several months I came back with some unique techniques for making money in the game. Hmm, Out Fox the Net and crazy money making scams, hmm, goes together like peanut butter and chocolate.

So I wrote up my World of Warcraft money making guide and posted about it on the official WoW web forums. Bam, 100 people showed up and read every page. Then people started to link to it from their guild boards.

Then it got 'ed.

Then it got posted to Digg.

Then Dan Hunter from Terranova contacted me to do an interview.

Then a BBC reporter contacted me to collect information for an article.

Final run down:

• Age of Site: 2 ½ years
• Unique visitors: 27,856
• Page Views: 100,004
• Time spent correcting spelling mistakes: 312 hours
• Number of times site has been completely deleted: 3
• Most unusual visitor location: Greenland
• Number of pages average visitor reads: 3.6

The site has cost me about $239.85 in domain name registration and web hosting costs. Altogether I have made about $196.38 from it.

Prices exclude my blood, sweat and tears

This is a remake of a flash game, uh, thing that originally featured a bikini clad woman falling. Now it has been modified to match current events.

It is flash based, but doesn't seem to work properly in Firefox (maybe it is just me )