Tomorrow is a HUGE day for me.  It is the first day of my second job in my field out of school.  I decided to switch companies about a month ago, but it was at the start of the summer that I got the call for an interview, long process.  Friday was the last day of the old and tomorrow is the first of the new.

That said I doubt that I will be blogging a lot in the near term, I have no idea how much time is going to be taken up with this new job.  I know most of the basics, but the industry is different and all of those little things like filing system, standards, etc are new and take a lot of time to get used to.

So I have been drinking heavily tonight, I must say that I am drunk as I am typing this, and when I got home I decided to check my emails.  One of the emails was talking about visiting this site that had to do with trying to get more young people involved.

In my inebriated state I clicked the link and got to the home page, and from there I got lost.   I didn’t know where I was supposed to click or what.  I knew from the article that the site was “designed” for 8-18 year olds however I doubt that a sober 8 year old would know any better where to go than a drunk 24 year old, therefore, in my opinion, the site is usless in the development ofthe engineering profession, or trying to get young people interested in Electrical Engineering.

What the lay person who is into internet marketing should get out of this ramble of a post is that if the visitor has to thing for more than 2 seconds where to click or read nexxt you have lost them and they havealready either clicked the close button or back button.

I decided that I wanted to add a RSS feed to my Vbulletin site.  I thought that iit would be a good way to psot RSS Press Releases using a “bot”.  So first thing I did was start looking over at vbulletin.org for a hack and to my suprise I couldn’t find anything of the sort, what the deuce!!

Then I asked the question on one of the VB forums that I frequent, and did I ever feel like a noob.  IT IS BUILT IN.  With VB you can add RSS feeds, pick the forum and the user and have it add the threads and is it ever simple. 

I am not sure if I have mentioned it before, but if you are looking to start a serious forum, or if you have a forum now that you started as a hobby and you want to start getting serious about it BUY VB.  You will not regret it.  Out of the box without any mods VB is by far the most comprehensive forum software that I have ever used, and the ease that you can add hacks via plugins makes customizing the forum simple.

Well that is my VB plug for the day.  Later.

What is Receive Links and why do I care? 

Those are two questions you are probably wondering about right now.  Well, simply put ReceiveLinks is a program that was developed to help website owners to promote their website.  The way that it works in a nutshell is like this.  You place links from the network on your site via a small php file that they provide.  You can place it on any or all of your pages.  depending on the quality of the page and the number of link spaces you supply, you will receive points.  These points go toward your ads being placed on other sites.

What makes ReceiveLinks better than the other existing systems is the level of control that they give you, right from the basic free to the paid accounts.  You are able to control both what type of ads are placed on your site and where you want to have your ads placed.  Some of the controls include, by language, by category, etc., and the links are all reviewed to enure that they conform to a set of guidelines that both the ads and the sites must conform  Also you can control how fast you place links up to 20 per day.  So you can place 1 link a day, or 10 links every 10 days, etc…

More –>

I have started the design modification.  Right now you probably don’t notice too much change, but that is coming.  I really do like the colours on the site so that is something that I will not be changing.  Actually the way the site “looks” now will probably stay consistent, however I am going to be taking some time to clean up the CSS and make it convertable for the other sites that I have in the bluenoser.net network, ir Webmaster Books, Bluenoser Images, etc…

I will be sure to keep everyone up-to-date, however in the next couple of weeks I will be starting a new day job that will probably take up the most of my time.  Have to be sure to give a first impression to teh new boss