Life, the Universe and the Internet

My ramblings about making a living on the internet and life in general

Archive for May, 2006


Learning Something New

Published May 15th, 2006 in Programming | No Comments »

Last week I attended a course on building Web Services with the Microsoft .Net platform. It was a truly fascinating course and has given me lots of ideas for potential ways to use web services with my existing websites. I’m probably going to make a start by offering DVD news as a service from one of my websites and take it from there. I’m also probably going to make services for most of my data even if I just only end up using them myself.

Stay tuned and I’ll let you know when I’ve got my first services up and running.

Using MySpace for Promotion

Published May 4th, 2006 in Website Promotion | 2 Comments »

I’ve been reading a lot recently about people using MySpace to promote their Internet businesses. With over 75 Million accounts (according to the MySpace home page), there’s a massive potential readership there. The key of course is your list of friends on MySpace, you really need to go out there and try and generate as many links back to you as possible.

I hope to approach people with the offer of my Free E-Book, to try and get some links so I will wait and see how I get on with this. From what I’ve read the best way to find people of similar interests is to join MySpace interest groups and then IM people in the group to ask about exchanging links.

I’ve only just put my page together (no mugshot yet), so I’ll keep you posted on how I get on with this experiment.

If you want to exchange friend links, just visit my page at http://www.myspace.com/deadlydog and add me to your friends, I will return the favour.

My Latest Uber Gadget

Published May 2nd, 2006 in Gadgets | No Comments »

Buffalo NASFor a while now I’ve been building up a media center PC as a kind of all in one media delivery system for the house. The idea is that all my music, digital photos, recorded TV and some of my favourite films can be played across the network on the media center PC, any other PC on the network and an Xbox.
The media center PC itself uses Windows Media Center and so far it is working well. All the music I own is know on MP3, and a lot of my fave films are now on there two. However I have started to become concerned recently about backing up this huge amount of data.

So here in comes the Uber-Gadget of this message title. I recently purchased one of these babies from Amazon: Buffalo HD-H1.0TGL 1.0 Terabyte Network Attached Storage.

This is basically a network attached big disk box, so instead of storing all my data on the PC I store it in this box and access it across the network. The great thing apart from the large amount of disk space is that I can set it up to use raid 5 mirroring so I can feel comfortable that my data is now very safe.

I love this little box, it works like a dream and even serves as a print server at the same time.