RORY HANSEN

A friend sent me this video tonight. I think it’s amazing.

Today, I created my first website using the Code Igniter PHP framework and, oh boy, do I like it a lot more than Ruby on Rails. But I’ll dig into that further in a future post.

The purpose of this post is to shed some light on a problem that I wracked my brain over for a few hours last night.

The problem: After installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL and configuring the Code Igniter framework, you get a blank web page when testing your first controller, model, and view.

What I discovered were two issues that, when combined, create the perfect storm of an installation problem:

1. First, MySQL is no longer enabled by default with PHP 5. Says the PHP website of MySQL in PHP 5:
   

   MySQL is no longer enabled by default, so the php_mysql.dll DLL must be enabled inside of php.ini. Also, PHP needs access to the MySQL client library. A file named libmysql.dll is included in the Windows PHP distribution and in order for PHP to talk to MySQL this file needs to be available to the Windows systems PATH.

   It’s been a LONG time since I’ve programmed in PHP let alone installed PHP, so this was news to me. Anyway, if check out the MySQL installation notes on the PHP website if you need help enabling MySQL.  

2. Unfortunately, that was the easy part. Once I had an error message to work with, Google lead me to the PHP website, and I was in the clear. But, for the longest time, I wasn’t even getting an error page. Remember, all I was getting was a blank HTML page. So what was the cause? Code Igniter…
3. Using some creatively placed die() calls, I found out that the application was dying when trying to connect to the database. (Previous to this, I had already double- and triple-checked my MySQL username and password in the Code Igniter configuration file, and had even tried out alternate accounts, like my MySQL root account.)What I found out was that the MySQL drivers in Code Igniter were suppressing errors when attempting database connections.

This is what the code looks like in the Code Igniter mysql_driver.php file:

function db_connect()
{
   if ($this->port != '')
   {
      $this->hostname .= ':'.$this->port;
   }
   return @mysql_connect($this->hostname, $this->username, $this->password, TRUE);
}
The “@” symbol before the mysql_connect() function call supresses any errors that may be returned. It is that symbol that wasted a good 2 hours of my life.Anyway, after I removed the “@” symbol from the code and re-tested my web application, PHP spit out the error message that I should have been presented with hours ago, and I was well on my way to fixing the problem.
 If you’re experiencing the same problem that I was, I hope this helps you correct it faster than I did! Best of luck.

Oh, and did I mention how much I prefer Code Igniter over Ruby on Rails? It’s messier, but with my C and Java background, it makes more sense than Ruby and Ruby on Rails does!

This post is by guest contributor Jay Lee, an aspiring filmmaker and creative writer who provides commentary on movies, literature, and video games through his blog, TrainWreckIdeas.

Vulgarity and crude jokes are the basic ingredients of a great Kevin Smith movie, and never have they been used so fittingly.  Funny while funny looking Seth Rogen, alongside up and coming Elizabeth Banks, star in Silent Bob’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”. 

Two lifelong friends find themselves in a monetary crisis and make an amateur porno to dig their way up.  As with all solutions, it includes pitfalls that can trap you in a deeper hole than the one before.  Bye-bye money issues, hello relationship issues.  “Never thought of the repercussions of sleeping with someone you’ve known your whole life? What are you, slow?”

Seth Rogen had always been a funny cat with his unforgettable roles in “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared”.  In the last few years, he had proven himself to be Hollywood’s newest comedic powerhouse with his roles in Judd Apatow’s “40 Year Old Virgin”, “Knocked Up”, and “Superbad”.  Now throw in some witty dialogue from Kevin Smith’s repertoire, and you get comedy’s hottest dynamic duo, a funnier, not quite Oscar-esque version of Depp and Burton if you will.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has been the hype for the last couple of months.  With great reviews outside of his core audience (unlike Mallrats), Smith might be looking to crack the $30 million barrier on the opening weekend (His previous highest grossing flick was Dogma which grossed approximately $30 million in total).  With a gut busting supporting crew that includes: Jason Mewes (Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back), Jeff Anderson (Clerks, Clerks 2), Craig Robinson (The Office, Pineapple Express), Justin Long (Live Free of Die Hard, Accepted), Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) as well as adult industry superstars Traci Lord and Katie Morgan, that barrier doesn’t look too hard to break at all.

My friend Keith, who is an avid contributer to a few technology podcasts, is working on a new mission: To get his KickJoey website to PageRank 1 within the week.

For those that follow PageRank updates, you might already know the unlikeliness of this happening, considering that Google hasn’t updated PageRanks since July (or February, depending on what info you follow). But, hey, a mission is a mission, and you never know!

Anyway, head on over to the KickJoey website and share your PageRank opinions. Does Keith have a chance?

On Friday, I earned more than $125 through my small network of sites and couldn’t help but tell everyone around me! I was ecstatic! It was the first time that I’d earned more than $100 in one day.

It’s amazing how small, incremental earnings improvements can do wonders for personal motivation. I’m not making a 6-figure income from affiliate marketing or blogging, but I feel like I’m headed in the right direction. In September, I was averaging about $10 per day, which added up to $330 that month. And, with one week to go in October, I know I’ll be surpassing that by QUITE A BIT, but I’m trying to avoid calculating anything til after the 31st. I’m looking to be surprised!

I’ve had some good days in the past, but none as good as this. Some readers might recall my Firefox experiment for Google Referrals. During my most successful days, I had Google Referrals earnings of over $175/day. But this is a bit deceiving, because I was also PAYING for Google AdWords. In all, I saw profits of about $1000/month during the experiment, which would average to about $30/day.

Perhaps this was just a lucky day for me. And I doubt I’ll even hit the $1000 mark for the month of October. Regardless, I’m so pleased with where I am this month and am even more motivated to hit my Mortgage Goal.

A few posts I’ve bookmarked as references for creating effective landing pages.

Jonathan Volk:
The Landing Page MUST
- Customized landing pages create the feeling of “exclusivity.”

Zac Johnson:
Create Killer Landing Pages
- Landing page template

Free Comparison Shopping Landing Page Template
- Multi-product landing page template

Examples of Good and Bad Landing Pages

Cash Tactics:
Landing Pages and Tracking

I first started playing with AdSense and affiliate marketing after reading about the financial success that probloggers like Darren Rowse and Jason Calcanis were achieving. Like many other followers at the time, I figured that, if they could do it, so could I. So, I started up a few (spam) blogs, posted (crappy) stories, and pasted AdSense code everywhere I could. Yes, I did a little SEO as well as a bit of little link-building, but I probably spent more time logging into the Google AdSense website to check out my puny earnings than I spent creating quality content. And, as you can probably guess, I faired pretty poorly financially.

In hindsight, I admit that I was attempting to spend pennies to make millions. I was hoping to get lucky, score a high Google SERP, get tonnes of instant traffic, and convert that into paying clicks. How naive.

Years later, and with a much clearer head, I know that it’ll be impossible to achieve my goal of covering my monthly mortgage without putting in a lot of hard work. Such a simple realization, but it’s only now that I’m finally accepting the idea.

And you know what? It’s already paying off. In a previous post, I calculated that I had earned $335.79 last month. At a glance, it looks like my October earnings will be a significant percentage higher, and I attribute that to this matured mindset.

The Vancouver International Film Festival has come and gone, and although I had a small list of films I intended to watch, I never ended up making it out to the theatre. I suppose there’s always next year. On a related note, another film festival flick that I want to catch is Battle in Seattle, which played at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and opened in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto this past week.

Having been in Vancouver at the time, I can vividly remember the news coverage of the street violence that erupted during the WTO protests in 1999. It’s these protests that the film Battle in Seattle centers upon, and by the looks of the trailer, the movie truly takes us back 9 years to those emotional days.

Back in 1999, the city of Seattle was host to the World Trade Organization, which was big news then, as it was the first time the ministerial conference was being held in America. Although intended to highlight the launch of new trade talks with developing countries, the 40,000 plus protesters that collapsed into the heart of Seattle saw the conference as a rallying cry for protesting the globalization and exploitation that multinational corporations engage in. On news footage at the time, I can remember the stand-offs between the protesters and the Seattle Police Department, as well as the destruction to storefronts which resulted. Definitely a conflict I’d never want to be in the middle of.

The movie has a star-studded cast that includes the likes of Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, and Ray Liotta, which only helps to bolster my interest in the movie. (Who doesn’t love Charlize!?) If you’re interested in learning more about the movie, you can do so here.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my affiliate marketing goal of making enough money online per month to cover my mortgage. Effectively, this is around $1500/month.

I figured that I was bringing in around $300 per month already, as it’s been pretty steady for the last year. Up until September 2008, I’d been coasting, doing less than an hour per month of work to support that $300/month income stream, as I had no motivation to invest anything more.

As a baseline measurement to understand where I am with respect to meeting my goal, I need to know my September 2008 results. Well, I just took a couple minutes to tabulate them, and here they are:

Mortgage Goal: $1500 / month

September Results:
AdSense For Content: $254.25
Text-Link-Ads: $81.54
Total: $335.79

(No earnings from Amazon Affiliates, and neglible earnings from Chitika and other programs during September.)

Mortgage Goal Remaining: $1164.21 / month
Percent of Mortgage Goal Met: 22%

Just got back from Green Lemon Grass restaurant, where John Chow (yes, that John Chow) was hosting this week’s Dot Com Pho meetup. It was my first time attending Dot Com Pho, and driving to the restaurant, I had no idea what to expect.

In total, there were about 11 people there, including the focus of one of John’s recent posts, Tim Sykes. In a nutshell, Tim’s story is that, as a teenager, he managed to turn his $12,000 of Bar Mitzvah gift money into $1.65 million dollars by shorting stocks. He’s in town for a seminar, and I guess John convinced him to come out to Dot Com Pho as well.

I really enjoyed the 2 hours we spent at the restaurant, casually chatting about politics (both Canadian and American), blogging, and any other topic that sprang to mind. But most of all, I appreciated meeting so many new contacts in the Vancouver-area that are interested in blogging, blogging for money, and making money online through a variety of mediums. Of course, meeting John Chow, Internet Blogging Celebrity, was definitely a bonus.

Actually, no, the real bonus was walking away with some Dot Com Pho schwag. Courtesy of Market Leverage, I received an “I’m blogging this” t-shirt, and from Tim (or John, maybe) I got a signed copy of Tim Sykes’ new book An American Hedge Fund, which details “How [He] Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund.”