One of the ways that make money online is by using affiliates. One of the ones that I have used since the beginning is Amazon. Back in the day I made a lot of money with Amazon, but lately I have been using it as a filler of sorts. If I see something neat I will link to it and use my aff-id.

Anyway, what I have done now is get paid in Gift Certificates. The last couple of payouts netted me about $70 in gift certificates. So last night I decided to do some cleaning of my wishlist. Some of the books have been in there a while and others I just recently added. Most are regarding business and marketing in general like The Dip by Seth Godin, others are just for fun like the book by Drew Curtis of Fark.

What books do you have in your Wish List? Link to your lists in the comments

The more that I do reading other blogs and working on the design of some of my other sites I am starting to realize that this site is really lame. I really have to do something about the look of this place.

Most of my readers are via RSS, so I am sure that YOU don’t even know what the place looks like. But I think that if I want to build my readership I need to look much “cooler”.

Now I am not sure what to do about this.

There are a number of cool free ones out there, but they all have those stupid “sponsored” links at the bottom of them and make the entire site look un-professional. Some that would be great for a personal site, but not a site like this where I am trying to help people out by learning about my problems with making money online by not doing what I do….

Anyway, I am thinking about starting a contest on Namepros or another site like that where they can make me up a 2.0 type theme. Or maybe I will get a buddy to do it for me. What ever I decide it is going to happen in the very start of the New Year.

I was stumbling along today and found this great blog post on “Things You Must Know About CakePHP”

There is a lot of great information in here, I especially liked the part on creating simple Admin Sections

Creating a simple admin center

If you need to create an administrative back-end for your CakePHP site and would like all the actions with administrative capabilities to exist under a specific folder, open up config/core.php and uncomment:
define(’CAKE_ADMIN’, ‘admin’);
This will then make all actions that are prefixed with “admin_” to be accessible via:
/admin/yourcontroller/youraction. For instance, if I created an action in my posts controller called “admin_add,” I would access this via: www.example.com/admin/posts/add
From there I could simply password the admin folder to prohibit unwanted users from adding posts.

This is something that I am going to have to use in the current project that I am working on.

And knowing how to make custom 404 pages is really nice to know

Creating a custom 404 error page

If you need to change the page that users see when a document is not found, create:
/app/views/errors/error404.thtml

Last night I started to realize that I don’t have a dedicated credit card for my business transactions.  Sure I have enough cash to cover just about everything and I do 90% of my online business through PayPal, but I have been finding more and more that I think that having a CC to buy that offline stuff that it takes to run an online business would be great.  Especially since I do all of my business stuff through my own name so that I don’t have to register a business number and all of the headaches that takes.  I simply claim all of my earnings on my tax return, however for the last couple of years it wasn’t a big deal since I was able to claim expenses and have the business be revenue neutral.

This year however I don’t think that I am going to have that luxury.  I have not had as much time to do investing in online properties so I have been accumulating cash, which is not a bad thing, it just means that I am going to be taxed on it at the end of the year.

Last night I had a pleasant surprise, my new bike was home.  I have a friend building me a new bike since I wrecked my old one.  I have been without for about 2 weeks, and it has been tough.  I don’t think that it is “finished” but it is more than done to get me around before the snow starts to fly.  And then I can get all of the bells and whistles finished.

As for my CakePHP project, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend on it.  I am starting to think that it would be much faster to drop the MCV, but maybe that is simply because I am not sure what I am doing yet.  I am going to work on it as is until the new year,  I think that I should have a good BETA online by then.  In the meantime I am going to start to work on a front end.  This is going to be a ready made CMS, probably Drupal since that is what I know, however since Mambo is going Cake I may decide to look at that for this site, since I am going to have a cake install anyway.

I have just finished installing a new template on BluenoserLinks. And I think that it looks good if I do say myself. I do have some more work that I would like to do on it before I think that it is good, but I am going to leave this for now.

So what do you think about the site NOW, I didn’t keep a screen shot of what it was before, but if you didn’t see it I am glad…..That means that you are a new to the directory and the first impression is even going to be better.

Anyway, I still have a few plans for this site, and soon the site is going to be the talk of the web.

So readers, what do you think of the site? Let me know what things you would like me to change, what things you like about the site, or if you just want to chat.

::EDIT::

It seems that there is some problems with the login/logout and register links with the new template. It does still work but it is not as “pretty” as I would like it to be so I am going to have to spend some more time on this sooner rather than later. I will post another update when this is complete.