Flip this website

Flipping houses has become passe as the housing market in many areas has taken a hit. Luckily for the internet-minded there's an online analog. If it were a show, it'd be called "Flip This Website" or maybe "Flip this Site". To accomplish such a feat requires a lot of knowledge and experience in what makes a site successful. Here I present 9 ways to make a site more valuable and 4 concerns that can turn a buyer off.

9 Ways To Make Websites More Valuable:

1. Profit - Assuming you want to make money, profit is the primary goal. Increase profits and your site becomes worth more all else being equal.

2. Revenue - the next best thing to profit is revenue. A steady stream of money means if you can cut costs, you can make a steady stream of profit.

3. Visitors - If you don't have revenue but you have lots of visitors, you just have to think about what sorts of products, services, and advertisements would make sense to them. Then you can get some money that could potentially turn into profit.

4. Stickiness - what good is traffic if people don't stick around. It's best if people hang out all day every day, waiting for a message from a friend, have a chat with a knowledgeable expert, or just trying to get a handle on what's hot right this moment...no, right THIS moment.

5. Cool factor - this intangible has a lot to do with how word of mouth spreads around your website. If you can generate some buzz that brings in whole new groups of visitors, you're on your way to making it rich!

6. Social networking - yeah, it's a buzzword but this has a lot to do with stickiness and its big brother, loyalty. If a visitor has friends on your system, they're more likely to stay, that is until their friend group finds another cooler social network or place to hang.

7. Finished graphics - They say a person's first impression of a website is formed during the first 5 seconds. Polished, tasteful graphics with flow can help that initial impression be a good one. At least, good enough that they'll stick around to find out what your site is really about.

8. No 404 errors - When a link on a site is broken, it reflects badly on the site, it's visitors, and it's advertisers. This is why there's always a message to email the webmaster if an error is found. Likelyhood of that actually happening? 1 in a googol. Test your site regularly and watch those error logs.

9. Cross-browser tested - this appeals mostly to the website maintainers among us, we want to know that a site isn't going to look all screwed up if it's viewed with firefox or IE. It's got to work and the best way to do that is to test test test.

4 Concerns Amongst Potential Buyers:

1. Quality of inbound links - people who buy websites want to know that inbound links are solid. It's important that traffic from other websites is not going anywhere at least during the change in management. If traffic is the result of link exchange, that it's clear so the linking relationship can be kept or improved.

2. Adsense validity - advertising is a major source of revenue for any site that doesn't ship stuff or sell ebooks. The biggest advertising system is Google's Adsense so it makes sense that any site that wants to get sold isn't on Google's blacklist for bad behavior. If it is, you'll need to "come to Goosus" and fix it before you sell.

3. Monthly expenses - A savvy buyer doesn't just look at traffic or revenue, hidden expenses like huge hosting or advertising bills can really drag on the financial success of a website. If your expenses are low, on the other hand, talk your sites frugality up!

4. Admin Tools - It's likely a new buyer is going to want to make some changes to the site. On that front, they'll want to know that good tools make updating the site easy. If code needs to be written, it's got to be in standard languages and technologies for which lots of programmers and designers can be found. If you're using uncommon or restrictive technology, be prepared to sell for a lower price.

As the internet matures and "properties" fall into disrepair, flipping websites is going to be just as common as flipping real estate. With these tips, you're on your way to understanding how to get some cha-ching out of your bling. Happy flipping!

Mathematical Amusements in Perler Beads

Over the holiday, I picked up the Safari Pack of Perler Beads and began to think of what I'd like to make. I mostly thought of mathematics and computer based designs. Here's what I got:




First off, I wanted to explore how I could express binary math using perler beads, since there are many colors it's possible to explore binary, octal, decimal, or even hexadecimal arithmetic. Here's what it looks like to count as high as you can with 4 bits.



Once I'd done what I could in the counting realm, I thought "Wouldn't it be neat to show some bitwise boolean operations?" The columns on the left are made of two fields of two bits each. The following sets of 2 columns show bitwise and, or, and xor.



Vanity caused me then to write my name in binary(ASCII mapping) and lay it out as square as I could. In hindsight, it's probably better to keep it at 8 bits per row but this works ok too.



This is my favorite: the IP packet header. Each block of color is a different field in the IPv4 packet and each bead represents a bit of space. Maybe I'll do IPv6 if I get some more beads later. While you can google for a more explanatory map, this gives you an idea of how your web requests and pr0n downloads exist on the wire.



Straight from Conway's Game of Life a.k.a. Cellular Automata, it's a glider! Gliders move in a straight line in CGL as long as they don't touch anything. I've also heard of this being mentioned as a proposed hacker community logo.



The best computer game ever.



After I'd done a bit of beading, I just started pulling beads out of the bag at random. I placed each bead as close to the center of my blob as possible without cutting off the space for growth of other colored areas. Since there are 100 beads in total, this is a random sample shows a reasonable estimate of the distribution of the beads in the bag.



The Fibonacci sequence is found widely in nature from seashells to the number of petals on a flower. This one illustrates the first 8 elements of the sequence as they grow outward in a spiral.




Imagine you are standing on one point of an infinite 2d grid and every other point has a pole sticking up from it. The fraction of all the poles you can see that aren't blocked by a closer one is related to pi in some way. What I've done here is color the "poles" you can see pink and the ones you can't brown. This is the closest part of 1/8th of the grid. Just rotate and mirror this one to fill out the rest of the plane.



Finally as I was coming to the end of my pack, I decided to do something to use them all up. While I call it "Tree By Water", you can call it whatever you want.

If you liked these, why not send me some beads? I'll be your best friend if you ship these here! ;-)

Installing TrueType fonts on Ubuntu

I'm working on a little website project and wanted to create a logo for the site with one of many free fonts I've downloaded. I'm using The Gimp and I have the .ttf font files unpacked on my desktop. The question for me was, how do I get these into the system so The Gimp and other apps will see them?

Turns out it was fairly easy to do. At the advice of some websites I read, I learned that /usr/share/fonts/truetype is where many truetype fonts are stored and that by creating a custom folder as root, I then had a place where I could just move the fonts. One site I read mentioned creating a hints file but for my purposes, it turned out not to be necessary. Having them there is enough.

Once I had moved the fonts into the custom folder, I refreshed the fonts in The Gimp and my fonts were available! I could also select any of these fonts to use on my Desktop or Application windows. This process has the potential(for a large number of fonts) to be even simpler than the one by which you could install fonts in Windows.

The most popular question out there was how to get the Microsoft core fonts into Ubuntu and that's as simple as running "sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts" in your terminal. Unfortunately, Tahoma's not included in that package so you'll need to google for how to do that.