July 10, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
People who follow my work probably already know I’m an user of world’s first digital cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. I’m not a very advanced user, I just use it for storing the little profit from my websites and receive a few cents for some occasional work I do online. It is also the only way you can donate money to me. I’m always looking for ways to earn a little more money in preferably free/easy ways, and I’m a bit tired of going through free offers, getting free bitcoins from faucets and waiting for the occasional cent from ads. I don’t think freelancing in the web development area is for me, either – I feel like I’d never manage to finish any work in time, and my skills are not that high.
So, back on topic. What brought me to write this post were two things: a) I didn’t post here in a long time; b) I’m doing this for money. Heh, joking, I’m not doing this just for money. I explain: I was yet again earning a little money from Bitvisitor, when I came across Rugatu. I had read and seen it before, but I never cared to visit it. I thought it was just another questions and answers (Q&A) site, like Yahoo Answers. Honestly, I have better use for my time than answering questions from many noob people (sorry for being harsh, but that’s the truth!), even when the use for that time is spend hours laughing at 9Gag. Oh well – I better stop now, this is ruining my reputation.
One thing made me stop for looking more carefully at Rugatu, and it was probably the only thing that made me register, for the first time ever, on a Q&A website. The thing is, this Q&A website runs on OSQA, which is Open Source software licensed under the GNU GPL version 3! Amazing, isn’t it? Amazing it might be, but no, that wasn’t exactly what made me register on Rugatu. The fact that one gets rewarded in Bitcoins, when answering others’ questions, was the distinctive aspect that made me register at this Q&A site. This may look irrelevant but for me it makes all the difference: you get paid for your work of answering questions.
Yes, I’ll probably still answer questions from noobs, but hey, when my answers are good, I get paid for them! It makes a big difference.
And another thing: that site is not very well known yet. There don’t seem to be noobs there, nor stupid and non-sense questions. Which means I won’t be answering “How format ma pendrive?” questions but interesting ones put by other people. Let’s hope I haven’t set my expectations for Rugatu too high. It’s just that I registered perhaps an hour ago, and still haven’t answered any questions. I’ll try and do it right after I finish this post.
But why would I be writing about this little-known site called Rugatu? Hell, I haven’t even written about my own cloud service which urgently needs to get clients or it flops and puts me owing money to other people, but instead I prefer writing about some Q&A service? I’m writing this for three reasons: first, it gets traffic to this abandoned blog; second, it helps Rugatu grow (I wish people wrote blog posts about my websites, so why don’t I start and do it first about others’ websites?); and a third reason, is a selfish motivation: money money, must be funny… Read here. Yeah, if my answer with this post gets voted up enough, I’d earn 1.50 BTC (over $10 USD considering 1 BTC is now worth about $7), which should be enough to help cover a flop with my service tnyCloud. In fact, if I earn, the 1.5 Bitcoins are going straight to the tnyCloud wallet to help with the server costs.
Sorry if this post looks like a forced positive review of a service which, actually, I haven’t tried very well yet. If it looks like so, then it probably is – but one needs to compensate the little amount of advertisements on this blog somehow, right? You can start thinking about what my next post will be: perhaps I’ll become a Microsoft advocate (ugh!) to win a free copy of Windows 8, or an Apple fanboy (ugh ugh ugh!) to win a Apple sticker (they don’t give away anything more valuable) or I’ll just argue how Samsung is right about their devices not copying Apple just in order to win a Galaxy Tab. Probably next blog post will be something just as boring as the one I wrote about the Like button some time ago. Eventually, it will be about intellectual property and the stupid thing software patents are.
For some reason, this post is looking like a link farm. I better finish it with a giant link to the website this post really is about…
Try it, question it, answer it! Then earn the coin 🙂
EDIT: I did it! I won the 1.5 Bitcoins. Yeah! 🙂 Thanks a lot Rugatu and everyone who voted.
June 14, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Yesterday I wrote a post saying l.f.nu was down… and it still is.
So I bought a domain and moved my URL shortener to yet another domain:
This time, I’m sure it will be up for at least one year – if it goes down within this period, at least it won’t be because of the domain, as that’s paid for an year already. I didn’t pay it, some friends at Cloudstg did – I’ll pay them back gradually, by advertising their services and such. Again, thanks for investing $11 on my service: if it weren’t you, I’d have to spend my savings on buying this short domain, which would leave me with no money to renew this .com domain next October.
The tny.im domain is as long as l.f.nu, but with less dots, nicer, and since it’s a top level domain and not a subdomain, I have much more control over it. This is a important point, as I plan on adding IPv6 support to tny.im, and a FreeDNS subdomain wouldn’t let me have multiple records on a subdomain. With a real TLD, I can have both an A and an AAAA record for the same domain.
Like it was with the transition from 4.l.to to l.f.nu, no data has been lost, and 4.l.to and l.f.nu links work as long as you change the domain to tny.im. Statistics, link editing, etc. all work.
I hope you enjoy tny.im, and remember, this time it’s for real: the shortener will be around for more than a year, assuming I can get enough profit from it to keep paying for the domain. Having me profiting with tny.im only depends on you – by using my shortening service, you’ll help me earn some cents from ads (but, please, don’t click-bomb them!), which I’ll use to renew the domain and eventually pay for server(s), in order to offer you an even better service.
Again, I hope the ads are not annoying… if they are, make sure to drop me a line so I can fix them.
June 13, 2012 / gbl08ma / 2 Comments
…it will be back with a new domain, this time paid, and things will be done for real – I promise.
What happened was that the owner of the f.nu domain took over the subdomain l.f.nu and built his own URL shortener. I tried to negotiate merging l.f.nu with f.nu, but the other party didn’t reply in enough time, so the offer is closed.
This time, I’m doing things for real, with a paid domain. Doing things for real also means doing things for real profit, but don’t worry, I won’t mine your shorten URLs with ads – on this subject, things will keep as they were before: a toolbar with one ad which is forcibly enabled after the link has more than 250 hits.
Sorry for all inconvenience; again, like it was when 4.l.to became l.f.nu, all links will work, only the domain changes (just replace l.f.nu with the new domain). About the new domain, I’ll have to keep it as a secret until at least tomorrow…
March 30, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
After the unexpected breaking of the l.to sudomains, 4.l.to went down, as I explained in this post. It’s been over ten days since that domain went down, so I decided to move 4.l.to to another domain, consequently renaming it (of course, duh!). After lots of searching of the FreeDNS domain catalog, I finally found another domain name that was just as long as 4.l.to, and happened to have a one-letter subdomain available.
So I registered l.f.nu. It’s my “new” URL shortener. All the 4.l.to shorten links work now, if you change the “4.l.to” part to “l.f.nu”. The official announcement about the change is here. While this isn’t as good as having all the 4.l.to links working again without changes, I guess it’s better than, for example, having a complete database or server crash and no backups, thus losing all the shorten URL<->long URL associations and click statistics.
l.f.nu allows for some interesting “acronym-sound-reading” results. It can be interpreted as “Linking For New Universes”, “Linking For New(s)” (if you read the “nu” as nee-yuu), or even “Linking For Nothing Useful” 🙂 . I’m sure you can come up with some new meanings too; if you happen to find an interesting one, don’t forget to post in a comment!
I also gave my URL shortener a new look. It no longer uses the default Bootstrap theme (it’s become too mainstream!), but rather the United theme from Bootswatch. And finally, I also fixed some bugs in functionality and looks (read: port the thing to the latest version of Bootstrap). There are still some things left to fix, and I plan on adding some new features one of these days.
Also, looks like the new domain l.f.nu is allowed on Twitter, while 4.l.to was not – it was marked as dangerous even though I don’t know why, perhaps it was something common to all the l.to subdomains. Looks like this domain change is better than I initially thought!
Don’t forget to comment on this relaunch of 4.l.to, which is the launch of l.f.nu!
October 5, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Following the latest changes in this website domain, it looks like it will have to edit the URL for this website in wordpress settings again, in no more than a week.
But this time, unlike last time, I’m incredibly happy. No, my birthday is only on 8th October, but the owner of http://freevps.us, dmmcintyre3 has registered for me the domain “myself on .com”, that is,http://gbl08ma.com . Yeah! That’s myself on a .com domain – in case you haven’t understood.
Goodbye malware-false-markings due to the use of crappy free domains! Now I only have to make sure my real TLD is not marked as malware itself.
Now I can freely post URLs for posts in my blog without fear for supposedly containing malware! This is an huge step!
Remember, the Bitcoin donations thing is still valid; at the end, I want to renew this domain next year 🙂
An huge thank you to dmmcintyre3! And to Namecheap for providing cheap domain names.
July 22, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Why do I have the impression that it is starting to be kind of a website-promoting website for the web 2.0?
You see, a bare web service that wouldn’t get otherwise very well known, not very rarely gets hundreds of users once it publishes an app for that service on the Chrome Web Store. Even if the app is nothing more than a link to the website of the web service, it doesn’t matter: as long is the web service is of good quality, it’ll get popular amongst Google Chrome users in a way it would never be as a normal website showing up on Google results.
If these guys doing website optimizations to get more visits aren’t still using the Chrome Web Store as a way to promote websites, they should. At the end, nowadays calling “app” to a website acts as an huge upgrade to that website.
June 3, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Just a quick post to inform the (few) readers of this blog that I got the first spam comment. It was on the Lua Scripts for Rockbox page, and the “Spam” link right below the comment on the “Recent Comments” widget on my WordPress Dashboard fit just perfectly in this case 🙂
Now lets hope this doesn’t continue or I’ll have to go about more agressive antispam measures, and starting to fill the list of banned IPs of the server.
EDIT: I got another Spam post, but this one looked more like some stupid guy trying to be funny typing random characters into the comment box. And it contained a random URL which I didn’t care about checking where it lead. I’ll try to keep this post updated with more news of Spam on this blog… while it’s humanly possible.
EDIT2: I enabled Akismet after getting another trash comment 🙂 Let’s see how it goes.