out fox the net

Need some decent free replacement fonts for your system?

First the Redhat liberation fonts. The liberation fonts give you a free alternative Sans, Serif and Mono.

My personal favorite is the
Bitstream Vera font family. The Bitstream monospaced font is really nice in my opinion and I primarily use it with my text editor when writing html or programming code, such as PHP. With a monospaced font, columns line up since all characters are the same width and spacing. This Bitstream mono makes "Courier New" seem absurd.

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

Now that the site has been moved, I am getting to know Wordpress again. The release of Wordpress 2.2 occurred at the same time I was working on the transition so this site is using the latest and greatest.

Along with the new WP version I have been exploring some of the plugin options. Although I have not come to terms with the new widget system and dynamic sidebars etc... there are many new plugins that do the work that once was impossible or at least a serious pain.

First off is Fold page list makes collapsible sidebar lists more manageable if you have a lot of pages and subpages.

Next, WP-Cache is a very impressive page caching system. If your site uses a lot of database queries or just gets a lot of traffic, this plugin can dramatically improve performance.

And finally, All in One SEO Pack makes your WP driven site more search engine friendly.

For the webmasters out there:

I have created a short "cheat sheet" page of SEOtools and tutorials that you may find useful. If you are looking for basic advise on how to make your website more search engine friendly or need to do a complex linking analysis of your site, it is all right here in one place.

Online SEO Tools

Hope you find it useful.

Ok, first thing first. SOA = S.O.A. = Service oriented architecture.

Next question.