I spent several months not long ago – well, perhaps 3 years ago now I guess it’s been – researching methods for making a ton of easy money as fast as possible using the Internet and a web site. I bought some programs about how to do it. Spent a few hundred dollars.

I’m here to tell you, the only thing I did was to provide someone else with their mad free money through my own greed.
Some programs teach you how to use ads on your website to make money. They forget to tell you that you have to be spending crazy amounts of time creating content. Or spending a bunch of that crazy cash you were supposed to make buying content. Private label rights, article writing, or stealing content from others’ rss feeds – the list is endless. The bottom line is beg, borrow, steal content so you have pages that are indexed in Google. If 1% of 1,000,000 page views click on an ad that’s a lot.

If you participate in this madness let me just say a sarcastic “thank you” for spamming the entire world wide web. it’s not enough to do it in email, now we’re doing it online too.

In the end, I realized that the one good way to make a lot of money online, and I made a good living last year doing this is to find something that you are good at and sell that as a service online.

I make websites. I charge to make websites. If I’m working, I’m earning. I don’t earn without working. Somehow that feels good to me.

My favorite credit cards

Posted by Tim on April 9th, 2009

My Favorite credit cards:

Citi Card Credit Card. Ours has a rewards program that gives us 1-2% back in rewards for purchases.
Chase Credit Card. This has been one of our lowest interest rates. They also call us and ask what they can do to be more competitive – I tell them to lower our rate. They usually do.

Discover Credit Card. This is accepted at Sams Club – comes in handy.
American Express Credit Card. It’s been a long time since I had one of these. International acceptance is one good part of having an AMEX card.
Visa Credit Card. We have Visa debit cards. We also have a Visa Credit card through our bank. By far our lowest rate on a card anywhere – might be our bank which is a credit union.

I’m constantly looking for other offers from card companies. Things like balance transfers are nice especially with a zero interest rate period. Be careful of transfer fees. They used to be capped at 3% or $75 – the $75 cap has been removed by almost all card companies. You should ask if you want the fee waived or reduced or capped – sometimes they will if you ask.

You would be better off not using credit cards though.

Free Online Mortgage Calculator

Posted by Tim on April 9th, 2009

Mortgage Calculator

Sale price ($)

Down payment (%)

Interest Rate (%)

Term (years)

Printing from Windows Vista to Windows XP

Posted by Tim on March 18th, 2007

I just bought a laptop that is running Windows Vista. I wanted to print to my HP LaserJet 4L connected to my desktop running Windows XP. Problem: I kept getting an Access Denied error. Keep reading to find out how I was able to work around this. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress Plugin Activation Code

Posted by Tim on February 7th, 2007

I just had to look this up from my own comment to a support question on the WordPress codex so I’m posting it here for my future reference. However, this pattern is a good pattern to use when needing to add an activate function call for your plugin. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress Plugins

Posted by Tim on January 15th, 2007

Here is a little tidbit that has helped me when programming WordPress plugins.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quick Solution to Vexing HTTP POST Problem

Posted by Tim on November 30th, 2006

I recently added a new tool to my www.ThePhpPro.com web site.

This tool is a PHP Code Beautifier program.

There has been just one problem. Sometimes when I pasted a huge amount of text into the box, I would get an HTTP error message stating “FORBIDDEN.”
Read the rest of this entry »

BumpTop – New Windows Desktop Interface

Posted by Tim on November 19th, 2006

A new metaphor for working on a computer “desktop” has come to my attention.
Read the rest of this entry »

New PHP Article

Posted by Tim on November 19th, 2006

Last week I posted a new article to my professional web site. It talks about PHP templates and my approach to this thorny issue. Many people have different opinions about templates – in the article I present what I believe to be a “Best Practice” approach.

You can read the article.

New Products Available

Posted by Tim on November 1st, 2006

I have launched 3 new products on my professional website: www.ThePhpPro.com

I have an ASCII – read keyboard art – CAPTCHA that requires no image libraries for PHP. In fact, it is so backwards compatible, it should work on PHP version 3 with perhaps only a minor change (opening and reading files) needed.

It’s quite clever, you really should go check it out.

I also have packaged the ascii font engine from tppCaptcha and have released a $1 ascii art font package targeted at giving website owners the ability to output email addresses in a form that is readable by humans, but not by machines.

And finally, I have spent the better part of a month taking the code from my AJAX tutorial and polishing it, learning a bunch more about ajax, and packaging it up into a product available for sale. It utilizes connection pooling so multiple connections can be running at once. tppAJAX will prove to be a capable inexpensive AJAX toolkit. It also happens to be on sale (as of the writing of this article) also.