Robert’s personal meeting room
Start time: 24. August 2010, 14:15 GMT+2
Duration: 60 mins

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I found a cool plugin called Sexy Bookmarks. It inserts these nicely styled buttons I have at the bottom of every page allowing people to tweet, facebook, digg, whatever. You can choose which services you want to allow people to spread the word with. This is essential for creating a viral effect.

I also opened comments even though I initially thought I wouldn’t. Dialog is good.

Google analytics was installed. Naturally the stats are rather depressing at the moment but that’s fine.

My adsense account was approved after a few days, I think it was wednesday. Actually this might have been earlier but they didnt send me a mail to notify me. I immediately started google ads. I set up three horizontal blocks on my homepage. They were great in the beginning but now since I launched the multilanguage plugin the ads show up in different languages, not in relation to the language you’re reading. That’s pretty lame and I want to get to the bottom of why.

The coolest thing so far is that I reached the first page on google on first day for term “the best hamburger in barcelona”. This was immediately followed by the rather mood dampening revelation that hardly anyone looks for that. According to google’s keyword tool there are less than 10 searches per day for this term. WTF, maybe I should have checked that out BEFORE I started the project. Oh well..

In any case, here’s a link to the tool in case you dont know it. It’s pretty awesome. I found out that loads of people in spain search for humbuger. Not sure how to optimise my keywords for that.

Google keyword tool.
Keyword Tool - Google AdWords - Online Advertising by Google
Enter one keyword or phrase per line to see what related word searches your ad will show on.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I also added keywords to my template. They are  hardcoded into the header.php file of my wordpress template for now and only in english so not ideal. I’ll get that fixed.

Re: Internationalization. I tried out some modules, have not found perfect one yet. qTranslate looked promising but autoconversion did not work. Global Translator doesnt allow me to keep some words from translating. E.g. it translates my number on rated restaurants name from Bacoa to Baccus. NOT ideal And I want to show up on the first page of google for “la millor hamburguesa de Barcelona” as well as “la mejor hamburguesa de Barcelona” just like I already do in english.

Bonus. I made 44cents for two clicks thanks to some friend clicking I suppose. Not bad. Only 9.50 until I break even. I invested around 10 bucks into the domain name. I read that to make 10 bucks a day i need about 10.000 pageviews. Per day. Right now I’m getting about 10. You gotta start somewhere I guess but I get the feeling this project is not gonna get me rich quick.

I really need to work on content!

http://www.thebestburgerinbarcelona.com

If you have not worked it out from the URL, its a ranking page of the best burgers I can find in Barcelona. I truly believe burgers are like one of the cornerstones of our society and I’ve decided to turn this passion of mine into a social experiment/business. I’m gonna keep the site simple and to the point. Reviews will be written by me, the ranking is by me and the pics are done by moi aussi. Then I’m gonna trickle in a couple of google ads and link the places to google maps as well as post on blogs throughout the web and see if I can generate some traffic and hopefully end up making some pocket money (yes, in the end its all about the benjamins).

If you’re in BCN, definitely make sure to check out BACOA, number on burger spot in town. For the adress, go on and visit the best burger in barcelona dot com. I’d be happy to join you if you drop me a line.

Today I came across this information by chance, while researching on skinning flex components (the results of this research will be another post).

So, turns out the guy is called Jason Wilson and you can check out his rather impressive porfolio here: http://wilson.tv/

I have just upgraded to Worpress 2.7 which has a much more powerful admin than 2.0 which I was using previously. I’m still experimenting with some themes so don’t be suprised if the pages look & feel changes over the next days and weeks. If you find any issues, please use the comments.

Wishing everyone all the best for the upcoming year!

David documents every step he takes throughout his experiment very thoroughly and provides a step-by-step guide you can follow to monetize on your own blog - It’s useful for both novices and experienced bloggers.

I wish David the best of luck and loads and loads of money!

Go check it out at www.monetizando.net.

http://developer.ribbitphone.com/

This sounds exciting, I have not tried this yet but if this component keeps what it promises it could have an immense impact on the way people communicate. I’ll update this post if/once we get access to the pre-release/beta.

At launch, the iPhone version of the Safari browser is missing some plug-ins needed for playing common types of Web videos. The most important of these is the plug-in for Adobe’s Flash technology. Apple says it plans to add that plug-in through an early software update, which I am guessing will occur within the next couple of months.

This would of course be great news as it would allow another indirect route of developing applications such as OnSync on this device. Remains to be seen whether will be the full-blown flash player and thereby give the iPhone an edge over other mobile devices such as Nokia’s N95 which merely supports the dumbed down flash player lite.

(for some reason the embed html code won’t work..)

YackPack is one of many flash based free VoIP tools hitting the market right now. Nice to see this tech is finally gaining momentum.