Moving to orangeboard.info

I finally got my orangeboard.indo domain and now I am going to more the blog from the wordpress.com servers where it is hosted at the moment to a seperate server. The new domain is 

http://orangeboard.info

Hope to see you guys over there soon. 

online currencies

I am not so sure about the US market but inside the german internet market there are several online currencies. They are used to have an value in exchange for several online services. For example you can buy posters for your site or you can give others some credits for doing a review on your site. I also tested this kind of services on my own and I earned around 10$ for a month of online activity, but honestly I believe those networks are going down within the next five years. 

But first of all I want to give you a short impression what all these online currencies are about: 

1. klamm.de is the biggest provider of an independent online currency, founded in 1999 and having around 45000 members already. With an incredible exchange rate of 1,000,000 Lose = $0.20 . The main aim behind klamm.de was the idea of creating virtual batches, so users can investigate batches to win a certain Jackpot of either batches or real money. And very fast the users started exchanging batches versus online services and even real money. 
2. ebesucher.de is the biggest provider of view and mail exchanges in Germany, claiming to have more than 100 000 users and their currency which is one 15 second view equals around 100 Lose from Klamm.de . 
3. primusstart.de that is the third provider I want to mention at this point because they keep their value as $0.01 = 300 Primus, which again equals 30 000 Lose from Klamm.de . They have around 30 000 Members. 

It is pretty obvious to see that the provider of these sites make a lot of money. But the first question I want to go into at this point is why are those online currencies that popular. 

The Advantages of an online currency: 

• it is a pretty easy way to exchange services, you make a post and you get paid (for example certain providers at klamm.de offer around 300 000 Lose per post).
• the real value is very low but as they are using big numbers people seem to feel good about what they are doing. Or do you know anybody who would start posting for $0.07 per post ? 
• there are basically no rules and some users even use services like the cash doubler where you pay a certain amount of your choice in one big jackpot and then the everybody who paid for the jackpot before you did gets a small payout until their investigations is doubled. You won’t see people doing this with real money but on klamm.de they do, or they waste their money on external lottery sites. 

So to sum it all up as theirs no control on the market you can earn a lot and you feel like loosing nothing as you because you do not spend real money, just your time.

Nevertheless I am pretty sure all these sites are going down within the next five years, because

•  the inner circle of all these networks is around 40 years old, which is pretty old when you think about that other new networks like twitter.com or facebook or even google are founded by young people who just finished college.
• the design is really bad, which is caused by none professionals building up a business with people who do not really know what the web 2.0 is. People who have not heard about things like clear and simple design. I guess one of the most ugliest examples is klammgeil.de which looks like the websites I used around five years ago. 
• the whole system is pretty unsocial, people want to be paid for anything they do and if they are not they won’t do anything. This again is causing the age inside the inner circle of klamm.de because only those who have been online for a very long time have the chance to built up an successful external site. Therefore the network won’t be facing any chances until those who work with the site for five years or even long want to change it and that is why their going to be an decrease in popularity of klamm.de in the coming years.

For myself I was thinking about some kind of next generation website share holder market where people trade shares of websites with the exchange rates listed and all that stuff. Sure I wanted to design all this in an nice and cute web 2.0 style but I canceled the idea after I experienced the online solidarity on social networks like twitter.

I met people there who helped me with problems I ran into for free and in exchanged I helped them and that is how we became friends.

While during my time on klamm.de I made around 20$ in two month by doing several post exchanges and other services but I did not have any personal relation to the people I worked with. But it is not only the fun why I like those social networks so much more it is also the idea of living in a group where you help each other and that is what is creating vital websites, sites people are looking for. 

Because when I made a deal on klamm.de for getting paid for a certain amount of posts, I won’t go back to the forum at any time to look for the others and to see what they are doing but when I joined group on twitter of other webmasters we started out helping each other for nothing in exchange as we know the other group members would do the same for us. 

The web 2.0 is meant to be social, not paid !  

School is out for ever

Today, just about 3 hours ago, I did my final high school exam. Actually it is not a high school what I have visited during the last eight and a half years. In Germany we call it “Gymnasium” never the less I am officially done with school now, received my last marks and now I can do what ever I want to. Sounds great  but that is not the way it is, I plan to start studying physics in april or  may in an college in the next big city. Therefore for the moment I am sorting different stuff out wondering if I can get my first own flat over there in Kaiserslautern. As you can easily imagine there is still a lot stuff to organize, like the official part when we get our results as well as some party for the younger students. So I am sorry but you might see a little delay in my postings next week. Any way you can be sure I try my best to keep this blog up to the latest and inform you about all the stuff that comes to my mind.

Leaving my school also means leaving the cluster work group, that is something I did not write about before but an really interesting project, I was working on for around half a year now. Some friends and I built a computer cluster in school, meaning we took a bunch of old computers connected them to each other and told them to work together, just like one of these super computers. It is a pretty funny project and I guess it is a Chance for anybody who is interested in computers at our school, as the workgroup is free to join. Anyway I am out of that workgroup now but I am going to publish some report about it here soon. Just need some time to sum it all up.

And last but not least I am busy with a lot of client stuff, like designing webpages, writing articles and so on. As well as some major private projects but I am going to show you all that stuff as soon as I got some results online.

Hidden search engine power

We all know Google, Yahoo and live search from Microsoft. There might be several more but these are the three important one but many already fail by using these tools which really are the most powerful ones you can find online these days especially google. First of all any other search engine than google can not be as good as google (at least for general searches) because nobody else spend such a great amount of money on their crawler than google does. Therefore google caches most of the websites in a certain amount of time compared to the other search engines available today, so what ever you do your website is going to appear on google first before you see it anywhere else. That is why I use Google also I know they track all the search requests I do (no matter if I activate tracking search requests in igoogle or not).

This means you loose your privacy when you use google but google is that powerful you can not work without google.

It is the same issue with using their mail service as it is no secret that they read each of your mails but nobody else is offering 7 GB of free storage and still growing like google does. So I also used the Google mail service until I started my own website, now I am using my own mail address as I can not force my clients to sent me their private requests to my google mail address. But anyway that is not todays topic. 

So when you search for something like “What are the new trends in webdesign for 2009 ?” then you should not ask google the whole question. It is way better to simply search for the keywords like “trends webdesign 2009” you could also write you request like “trends+webdesign+2009” or “trends,webdesign,2009” it is all the same. 

But there is one hidden command in google which is

site: domain.com

This shows you all the results google already crawled from domain.com and of course you can also replace domain.com with your site so you see how popular your site is. In most cases these results are even way better than the actual pagerank and you can approximate your increase of page rank by simply checking how many of your pages google already indexed. 

So you think that is already fantastic wait until you see the Google Adwords tool which allows you to see which keywords your site is listed under and how many people search for these keywords and stuff like that. These are two most powerful resources to optimize your site because google is dominating the market. Therefore if you are good at google many people are going to find your site and visit your sponsors or buy your products. 

There is just one more thing I would like google to add, that is a feature live.com from Microsoft already has, it is the ability to search for ip addresses and list all the other users on your server. This is really helpful to see the power behind a project as many webmasters host all their sites on one server so you can simply check all the things they have done and all the other sites hosted on that server. The syntax for this special search request is:

ip: 127.0.0.1

I hope these short introduction helped you to improving the way you search and gave you some ideas to improve your own sites.  For further questions feel free to drop me a comment, or sent me an mail.

The remake

So now it is for another Release of the Orangeboard, Version 0.3 it is going to be still beta but adding many new features. So before I am going to tell you what is so special about this new Version I want to give you a short overview about the improvements I made during my step up to blogging. 

 

Version 0.1

It all started out with version 0.1 on the 16th February 2009. Back then I honestly had now idea what blogging was about, just some friend who told me I should better start to learn how to blog. So I did what I used to suggest others when they asked me how to start a blog. 

• grap the latest copy of wordpress from wordpress.org
• install it on a webserver of your choice, either free or paid, it does not matter at the beginning. 
• get a domain, it does not have to be a regular toplevel one you could also use a subdomain. You can get them from your hosting provider. 
• and then start writing. 

That is exactly what I did, I installed wordpress on my hosting account, pointed an old unused domain to it and started writing. At that point I had absolutely no idea how to write on a blog and if you have a look at my first post you actually see that. 

 

Version 0.2

After some days I started to improve my writing and especially the make up of my blog by adding a theme and an About page as well as other things I saw on other blogs:

• Adding categories as well as Tags to make it easier for Readers to find the content they were looking for. 
• Adding a picture to each post so people see more visually what my blog is about. 
• Usage of bold words to allow readers to skim through the text by just reading the bold words. 
• Adding Italic writing, lists and quotes to structure the text.

All this resulted in the blog being way more readable, which was the aim of version 0.2 .

 

Version 0.3

After Version 0.2 being a remake of writing and handling posts Version 0.3 is planed to be a release with an improved interface, by getting a new custom theme and several new pages to structuring the content. You can think about it like some kind of boxing for the content I publish, it does not improve the content I write but it changes the way people look at my work. 

For so far the blog is going to be divided in

• the basic blogging page 
• About me page, where I explain who I am and what I do and where you can find me online. (or just sent me emails from a built in script.)
• an Archive page instead of an Archive in the side menu
• a Projects page where I present the projects I am part of. 
• a ebooks page where you can read the ebooks I wrote, for free, or at least read a preview.

So there is an extra page for all the different things you might be searching for on my blog. I can not tell you more for the moment as the design is still under development.

Another Break

I am very sorry for my recent delay in posting but it is just things do not work out the way I want them to be. Sure that is normal and I expected things to go that way but not that far. It is just for the moment there are so many things I want to do or have to do that I do not find enough time to sit down each day and blog some lines. Also I understand that this is what makes the difference between those successful bloggers and the ones who are not. Therefore I decided to cut myself down to one report per day. They might be a bit shorter than the reports I wrote before but therefore you can be sure you are going to find new content here each day. So I hope you keep up reading. 

For those of you who want to get in contact with me, feel free to drop me an email at jan@orangeboard.info or leave me a comment here and I am going to contact you. 

By the way there is going to be an new improved version of this blog being available at the 6th of April so stay tuned.  

new theme

After two weeks I finally found a design that matches the term orangeboard even more than the last design did and there are several other improvements this new design provides. 

But before presenting the new design I want to talk about the old design, the one you have seen here the last to weeks. 

It was the Creative Arts theme from free the me layouts I really liked it as it looks pretty much like a digital pin board and that is exactly what I want the orangeboard to be. The only problem is the dark design, it is still too dark also the text is on a brighter background. So what I was searching for was something lighter even more web 2.0 styled. 

What I came up with was the sunnyskies theme from Wp theme land that is exactly what I was looking for as the theme is so much lighter and way more easy to read, the only problem I am facing at the moment is the two columns right side menu. That is not the way I like it but maybe if I add some more widgets or so adverts it is going to suite way better, I am sure. 

So this is my new theme, I hope you like it as much as I do.

CeBIT

From the 3rd to 8th of March there was the CeBIT in Hannover this year. The CeBIT is the biggest computer trade show in Germany and I also got tickets to go there, but as Hannover is around 430 kilometers away I was not there. Even though I want to give you an overview what the CeBIT was about here so you get a small preview what kind of new inventions are going to enter the market this year. 

This years main topic was the mobile internet and how to make the internet more comfortable for mobile devices, this topic was divided in: 

• Content generation: Nowadays websites are built on two platforms, the content on the one site and the design on the other site. Therefore many sites just create an design focused on mobile devices with a much smaller screen resolution and less images to speed up the loading. But this theory is not that good because nobody likes to read a five pages blog entry on a mobile phone. I might bookmark the domain so I can read it at home but I would never read the text on my mobile phone. Therefore developers from all over the world search for a way to generate sum up version of the content, automatically of course. 
• Media usage: As online connections are limited on at least most of the mobile devices so scientists are searching for a new way how to bring multimedia content to mobile phones. 
• Pricing: For now there are only a few providers which offer mobile phone internet flatrates like they do for local internet connections, but we are going to see more of them soon.
• Mobile Business: The ability to connect with all your friends and business partners on the go takes online business to a whole new level, now we need new ways to sign business contracts from your mobile phone. Connections to social networks and all these things to make the internet on mobile phones as powerful as the internet on standard computers. 
• Green IT: As computers are required for nearly any thing now, creating green computers is required these days as otherwise we might be unable to produce any kind of computer in around 50 years when we run out of oil.  

All these sounds really impressive to me and I would really love to be there but I was not. So I can not provide you with any live reports. 

But you might also want to watch the official CeBIT video stream on youtube or follow the cebit on twitter (german only) and do not forget about the official CeBIT homepage.

third week

 

After three weeks of blogging this is my third post about the problems I faced during the time I run this blog. The blog is not announced at this point only some friends and supporters already know about this place. But for now the feedback I get is quite good, so I might release this blog even earlier than planed before. On the other hand there are plans to integrate this blog in even bigger projects therefore I am not sure how to go on in future anyway you are going to find the latest news about my blogging here. 

 

For now I am happy to announce the new subcategory Green cars where I am going to blog about the next generation of mans most often sold toys – cars. For the beginning this is just some guest blog section here on the orangeboard but as the topic is totally different from what I usually blog about I might extract this category to another blog at some point of time. Or if you have a blog about living green just contact me and I might join you as a guest blogger.   

So these are my plans about how to go on with this blog, if you have further ideas on what I should implement or features I might missed, feel free to contact me or leave me a comment here. 

 

What I did last week ? 

I added tags to my blog so you can find the content you are looking for more easily. In combination with Categories and the Archive you are now able to skim through the blog and search for the posts you want to read. 

But during the last week I also noticed how hard blogging can be. Also I had nearly no school during this week there were so many other things to organize in real life. I hardly found the time to write some posts here and when I got some free minutes I made a draft but I only finished a few. This does not mean I plan or even think about quitting blogging, it is just I noticed how hard it can be.

Therefore I have to structure the time I spend online.

You know I have to exactly define when to spend how much time on which sites. The web is that big I can not handle all the different projects I am in at the moment, I have to decide where to focus on and this blog is definitively one of the projects I want to keep or even expand it. It is just I have other projects waiting as well so there are some things I have to do first before I can focus on this blog.

cheap Cars – Germany

At the moment the German government pays each citizen who recycles an old car which owned for at least one year 2500€ which is around 5000$, if they buy a new car on one that is only one year old. 

This means if I would recycle my around 8 year old VW Passat, which is worth around 500€ (1000 $) and I would buy a new car I would get 2500€ (5000$) instead, which is five times as much. All this was desired to pump money into the Germany car companies, so the Germans buy more German cars. But the problem is that other countries like Rumanian produce way cheaper cars. Therefore instead of buying German cars people started buying Cars from Rumania or even China. This might help the local car resellers but it did not help the German car industry. 

So the idea of providing cheap cars to make the car industry start up again did not succeed.

But it is even worse ! As those cars you give away for 2500€ (5000$) are recycled no matter if they still work or not. That is exactly the point now I want you to think about if being paid for destroying something could be good. In most other case the answer would be definitely no. It is only the government telling you buy a new car because:

 

• You save fuel and pay less.
• You get a whole new car. 
• You do not pollute the air (green) !

 

Sounds nice does not it , but it is not true. You save some fuel that is right as the new cars do not need that much, but you pay around 6000€ for the new car on your own so it takes a long time till you start saving money as you have to investigate that much at the beginning. The second point is obviously correct but the point is the new car you buy is going to be smaller as the old one you give away at least in most cases, therefore you might get a new one but I am not sure if you get what you are looking for.  And the third point is even worse, it is right as far as new cars do not pollute the air that much but while the car is produced they pollute the air like a car would do in 80 years. So only if you drive around 120 years then you have the chance to save some pollution. 

To sum it all up these 2500€ are nice if you have an old car which is not working any longer or struggling with car checks and stuff like that. But as long as the car is driving and there are no security risks, for example if you do not use it a lot and it is parked in the garage most of the time then buying a new car now is not the right choice. 

And by the way you always have to remember where these 2500€ come from – taxes – so you are the one who pays in the end.