Here’s a video from Michael Cheney about Capturing your information that you learn. He recommends that you summarize every book that you read and review it regularly.
Michael Cheney releases a new personal development video almost daily.
If you are looking for a digital solution to organize and capture your information check out my free online organizer.
The other day I was thinking about the differences of American and European buyers. The more I get to know how Americans tick the more I think there are fundamental differences which should influence your internet marketing copy. I’ve recently read a book from Bill Bryson called Notes from a Big Country which kind of triggered this realization. I highly recommend this book, its not a marketing book but you can learn a lot about America. I think one difference from America and Europe is that in America they are more likely to expect the “magic bullet, cure all, change your life” solution. [Read more →]
A few weeks ago one of the gurus made a video about this eBay seller who sells a guide on how to sell Barbecue food out of a trailer. Apparently he has been doing this for quite some time and is making some serious cash. Since its a digital product he doesn’t have to do a lot of work anymore, most of the whole process is automated. [Read more →]
Since I’m quite fascinated how effective viral internet marketing is I was pondering the other day how smart religion is using the same viral techniques. Think about it, religion has been around for millennia and keeps spawning new religions like Scientology. Why is that one might ask. The reason is simple, religion is very viral. It gets passed down from generation to generation. Parents teach their children about God, and these children will do the same to their children, and so on. When you are young its relatively easy to make you believe in religious concepts, especially if you are threaten with eternal hell if you don’t. So you have both the system in place to spread the believe plus a two-pronged motivation. Heaven if you believe, and hell if you don’t. If thats not a reason to believe in God then I don’t know what will. 
However some people seem to believe that the Internet and the easy access to information will have a negative impact on people believing in God unconditionally. You can browse YouTube you will be surprised how many atheist videos there are, also there are countless websites about atheism.
I’ve tested both Nucleaus CMS and Wordpress for a few days now. While Wordpress is even known among non-techies and has a lot of plugins, one shouldn’t ignore Nucleus CMS. One really cool feature is that you can maintain more than one blog within one installation. If you’ve got plenty of blogs you will really appreciate this kind of convenience. By default Wordpress doesn’t offer this. However in terms of SEO friendly URLs Wordpress has the upper hand. But there is a plugin for Nucleus to get them too so I guess you can be happy with both blog solutions. Another pro for Nucleus CMS is that their forum seems to be more friendly, in the Wordpress forum you seem to get easily no or even a rude answer.
Since two people recommended Hostmonster and I was a bit unhappy about the performance of Site5 at that time I thought I’d give them a try. The signup is pretty quick, no need to wait a whole day like I had to with Dreamhost. The control panel was pretty cool, still cpanel but they made it their own. For instance there was a search function for the various cpanel functions. If you type in “cron” at the search box it would pop up the cronjob link in cpanel. You can also drag and drop the cpanel elements and customize the “cpanel desktop”.
However after I uploaded my first site I got a server error when trying to load the index page. After talking to the support I found out that this happened because of the permissions. For some reasons newly uploaded files didn’t have the usual 644 permissions but 664. Until now I don’t know why this happened. I tried CuteFTP, Filezilla and CoreFTP but the same problem. The file permission was 644 if I didn’t upload in sFTP but normal unencrypted FTP. PenguiNet is the exception here, where I can upload with SCP (secure copy) without the permission problem. I still don’t know what the problem is since Site5 doesn’t have that problem, I can use secure FTP without the permission problem. After emailing the helpful “CuteFTP guys” they hinted that maybe Pure-FTPd might be the problem, since a few other CuteFTP customers had problem with this server.
I’ve used Hostmonster for a few days now and the server seems to be quite stable yet not perfect. The database was down for about 20 minutes but support was helpful and fixed it.
Hostmonster offers the all-important Shell access but one drawback is that you can’t have outbound FTP from the shell, only inbound. If you pay for a dedicated IP you can use “nonstandard ports for SCP” according to the live support. A dedicated IP costs 2.50 USD per month. The reason I wanted outbound FTP was to upload mysql dumps to Site5 for daily backup.
They also have a 50 emails per hour limit, but after talking to support they’ve increased it to 200 emails per hour. I liked the fact that they actually tell you that you’ve exceeded the limit not just ignore further emails.
All in all I like Hostmonster, obviously I still need more time to form an opinion but for the price of 6.95 / 5.95 USD is a good deal.
I’ve also tested Kiosk.ws for a few days. A few things I’ve noticed was that they seem to have a limit of 2000 files per directory (they are not the only host with that limit). Since I’ve got a lot of sound files and pictures (for eBay) this wouldn’t work for me. I’ve tried to sort this out with support but didn’t get anywhere. I also noticed that sometimes it takes them a couple of hours to answer my emails which is a bit slow for a relatively expensive host. A really cool feature is their Live Conference Room - called HotConference - where you can get support through talking to them with a microphone or textchat. Sometimes no support guy was there to provide help and suddenly other customer asked me for help because they didn’t realize I was a customer as well which was quite funny. You can also listen to the conversations when other customers ask for help. At one point a guy entered the room and was really upset that something wasn’t working and that this wasn’t good for his business. I haven’t really been with Kiosk.ws long enough to judge them properly but probably won’t continue after the 1 Dollar trial for one month.
