Affiliate Marketing

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of ClickBooth. All opinions are 100% mine.

I've been reading a lot about affiliate marketing lately and I think it's a subject that's gotten a pretty bad rap of late. Besides, who doesn't use Adblock nowadays anyway you might say, but in my experience as an IT Technician I can tell you, not a lot of people know of or use Adblock. I've seen a few sites that won't let you browse them if you have Adblock on, but those are very few and usually crappy anyway.

The truth is there's a pretty good amount of money to be made in Affiliate Marketing if you've got a good site, with a fair amount of traffic. The latter is probably more important than the former. Once you have those two though you need a descent Affiliate program membership, and that's where Clickbooth CPC comes in.

It's pretty easy to join, and rated the #1 Affiliate Network in the World by Website Magazine. A lot of Affiliate programs I've used all have pretty much the same offers, but Clickbooth actually has exclusive stuff that the others don't, and the payouts are awesome. They have tools on their site to help you create your campaigns and ads, and if you run WordPress it's stupidly easy to add the content to your site.

Most of the other Affiliate Networks I've used have some kind of rep you can email if you need to, but Clickbooth has 24/7 tech support. As far as I can see Clickbooth is one of the major networks out there that will provide this additional service to their publishers, providing more diversity. We're not talking porn banners here people, they have Dish Network, Gevalia, and other real, reputable company's so Google AdWords, Meet Your Competition: Clickbooth

Online Education

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of 2tor. All opinions are 100% mine.

I've been reading The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler lately, and in it he says that every good programmer should spend some time teaching. He say's this helps you identify common misconceptions, problems, and to think in new ways

In my last job as an IT guy at a local Public Broadcasting Station, pretty much all I did was teach our volunteers (generally elderly women) how to use word, excel, and the Internet. It sounds terrible I know, but actually I really enjoyed it. One lady told me about the old days when she used to work on a teletype and it blew me away. Lately I've been examining other career options and I thought perhaps teaching wouldn't be too bad actually. I think I had a knack for breaking complicated things down into smaller easier to manage problems (a thing programmers have to do).

Now I definitely don't have time to go to an actual university, so I've been looking at online options. This led me to USC Rossier School of Education’s MAT@USC, which seems to be one of the better online schools that offer a masters in teaching online. They've been around for over a hundred years and have been ranked #22 in the USA and #9 among all private US universities by US News and World Report and were recently award the AACTE for innovative use of technology in education.

If you look at the video it totally blows my brothers online classes at a local university here in Northern California away, check it out below.

So if you're looking to earn your Teaching Degree Online, I highly recommend you check out The USC Rossier School of Education’s MAT@USC.

program information

MyTies for iPhone

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of MyTies. All opinions are 100% mine.

I was talking to a friend recently about social networks and stuff, and how on facebook you don't have a lot of control for grouping or controlling who can see your posts. He told me about an iPhone app called MyTies.com which seems to address these issues, and with the recent facebook security issues not a moment too soon. It's ideal for people that want to have co workers and friends/family on their social network but want to control who see's what. Obviously you don't want your boss to see your post about how much you drank last night or things like that and with MyTies.com you have that kind of control. You can create multiple groups that you can share text messages, photos, and videos with. It's also optimized for small screens like the iPhone, and the app is simple to use and well laid out, so you could probably teach your mom to use it. Hopefully they'll port it to Android, but for now you can download it free on the iPhone app store and if you use the code myprivacy when you sign up you can get 20 more invites for friends and family for free.

Dual Electronics XDMA6630

This post brought to you by Dual Electronics. All opinions are 100% mine.

A friend of mine has been looking into car stereos lately, and me being a tech and stuff he asked me to check out a few and tell him what I think. His criteria was this:

• Bluetooth for hands free calls from his iPhone.
• iPhone charging.
• Play music from his iPhone.
• Remote.
• Less than $200.00.

I looked around and didn't find much in that price range honestly. After a few more days I found Dual Electronics.

I've always wondered why car stereos didn't have hardly any audio in's, but the XDMA6630 has a Headphone jack in(3.5mm) and two RCA preamp out's which is awesome.

No more fiddling with your lighter plug to charge your usb stuff either, it has a powered usb port right on the front. Plays mp3's and wma's (who uses those?) from disk or from an iPod/Flash drive, and supports those cool steering wheel controls.

One of the coolest features I think is its support for Bluetooth A2DP, so you don't even have to plug in most devices just pair them and hit play. The blue LED's look awesome, and A2DP will probably wow some people if they haven't seen it before. Increase your cars Cool stat with Dual Electronics XDMA6630, $179 is a great steal.

FFLIB.NET

    I've been messing around with video conversion lately, I'm hoping to build a windows service that reads the contents of a directory and transcodes the video it finds there into h.264 mp4 aac at a certain time. At first I was looking at FFMpeg and doing it with a bat file and windows scheduler but I think I've found a better way of doing it. FFLIB.NET is a C# wrapper around the FFMPEG .dll's which should be able to provide decent video trans coding in a language I'm much more familiar with. Bat files are nice and all but doing it in a .Net service should be much more comprehensive and provide better deployment, control, and automation.

    The code samples on Intuiitive's website look pretty simple, though I'm not sure yet if I can control bit rate and that sort of thing because it's made for a youtube style site with a php front end but we'll see.

    I know I've been promising some code here but life has been keeping me busy but stay tuned and I'll have some prototype stuff up soon.

    If you’re looking for something to read I highly recommend this book:

Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition
$59.99