TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

The Joke is on You

I’m starting to get back on track with my blog here… 🙂

• Hypotheticals.org: The Joke is on You…
• Return from Realtor’s Tour
• Shredder: Protect your Identity
• Blog Updates

Hypotheticals.org: The Joke is on You…

If you’re a close reader of my blog, you may know about my site Hypotheticals.org.

A couple years back I had registered the domain just because it seemed like a good investment for $8. I also had an idea in mind on how to develop it, although these days since I’ve been so preoccupied with other things, I probably won’t ever have time to actually follow it through for a long time.

So, instead, I decided to turn the site into a humourous fake web design company website. I added midi music, Javascript prompts, and all of the standard crap that reminds us of the good ol’ days of the late 90’s. It had to be a web design site parody, as ironically it’s usually the web design sites that tend to be the worst. They are usually made by people who found or bought a copy of Frontpage, or learned the basics of HTML and thought they were God’s gift to the internet, and then naturally took the next step to create a web design company… 🙂

Anyhow, I made the site just for fun and to link people with in during discussions for laughs. However, one month ago, somebody (it actually turned out to be a reader of my blog and poster on PublisherForums.com I later found out) decided to Digg the site, deeming it as “one of the worst web design studios around”.

It received 137 Diggs as a result, and most people found it funny for the reasons I had hoped it would be.

As a result of being Dugg, even though I had only one block of AdSense there, and not to mention the fact that I made it as ugly as possible, enough people actually clicked on it that I ended up making around $75! Many sites immediately linked to Hypotheticals, totalling thousands of visitors. Some forums which linked to the site had hundreds of replies, and gave me thousands of hits.

Knowing that I had to take advantage of the 5-minutes of fame the site was receiving, I put up a message on the site and gave PublisherForums.com a bit of a plug. It worked – I received thousands of visitors to PublisherForumas as a result, and probably a dozen or two sign-ups.

Anyhow, nothing about the power of being Dugg is new, but I find it funny how a site so blatantly ugly and horrible ended up making me $75, generated a lot of good backlinks, and drove temporary traffic to my other sites.

Return from Realtor’s Tour

This morning I went on a ‘Realtor’s Tour’ to look at a bunch of places. I explain how it went in the video below. I had just got home and was starving, so don’t mind the Coke and McDonalds commercials…

Shredder: Protect your Identity

Yesterday, I was going through my bank and credit card statements, and had got the good ol’ trusty scissors out and started to cut them up. Obviously I do this to protect myself from identity theft – your credit card numbers and details are there for anyone who rummages around the recycling bin or recycling plant to grab. However, I always end up spending so much time simply cutting away, as I like to cut them up into tiny pieces.. after all, what good is cutting them up if your credit card numbers are still shown on the smaller pieces?

So, I decided to go out and buy myself a paper shredder, simply to save myself the time and hassle of manually cutting up confidential papers. I was lucky, as it is back-to-school season still, which means sales galore. Staples had a bunch of shredders to choose from, but only one which was simple and cheap; the others were all REAL fancy ones which actually tempted me to buy (they were just big and cool…) but obviously I have no need for them. So I grabbed one which was like 60% off, and only $15:

It’s actually a lot better than I thought. It can cut through staples, and can cut up credit cards. It also came with the basket, and I like the look of it.. sleek and black. My favourite part of it is that it shreds the paper up into diagonal lines – so you won’t have your information as easily read.

Again, it’s not fool-proof, but it sure goes a long way to help prevent your identity. Not a bad investment for $15…

Blog Updates

I managed to get a bit more blog stuff done again.

First, I fixed the Comments link on my posts. Previously it simply linked back to the individual post. It now links to the comments section of that post. A thank-you to wesley who brought that to my attention.

Secondly, I finished the ‘About Me’ page located on the left side. I hope to finish the other pages in upcoming posts.

I have a question – when I post smiley faces, it seems to enter a line break before displaying them. How can I fix this, or is there not really a simple way? My guess is that the image is bigger than the font or something… anyhow, it’s annoying 🙂

…See?

Finally, a dude named Andrew offered to skin me a custom WP template for my blog. It won’t be anything amazing.. just simple, but hopefully it will display things a bit better here and provide a bit of a unique touch.

That’s all for now.

Good luck and good earnings!

blog updates

-simley face break