The Joke is on You

September 14, 2006 Posted by Tyler Cruz

I’m starting to get back on track with my blog here… 🙂

  • Hypotheticals.org: The Joke is on You…
  • Return from Realtor’s Tour
  • Shredder: Protect your Identity
  • Blog Updates

Hypotheticals.org: The Joke is on You…

If you’re a close reader of my blog, you may know about my site Hypotheticals.org.

A couple years back I had registered the domain just because it seemed like a good investment for $8. I also had an idea in mind on how to develop it, although these days since I’ve been so preoccupied with other things, I probably won’t ever have time to actually follow it through for a long time.

So, instead, I decided to turn the site into a humourous fake web design company website. I added midi music, Javascript prompts, and all of the standard crap that reminds us of the good ol’ days of the late 90’s. It had to be a web design site parody, as ironically it’s usually the web design sites that tend to be the worst. They are usually made by people who found or bought a copy of Frontpage, or learned the basics of HTML and thought they were God’s gift to the internet, and then naturally took the next step to create a web design company… 🙂

Anyhow, I made the site just for fun and to link people with in during discussions for laughs. However, one month ago, somebody (it actually turned out to be a reader of my blog and poster on PublisherForums.com I later found out) decided to Digg the site, deeming it as “one of the worst web design studios around”.

It received 137 Diggs as a result, and most people found it funny for the reasons I had hoped it would be.

As a result of being Dugg, even though I had only one block of AdSense there, and not to mention the fact that I made it as ugly as possible, enough people actually clicked on it that I ended up making around $75! Many sites immediately linked to Hypotheticals, totalling thousands of visitors. Some forums which linked to the site had hundreds of replies, and gave me thousands of hits.

Knowing that I had to take advantage of the 5-minutes of fame the site was receiving, I put up a message on the site and gave PublisherForums.com a bit of a plug. It worked – I received thousands of visitors to PublisherForumas as a result, and probably a dozen or two sign-ups.

Anyhow, nothing about the power of being Dugg is new, but I find it funny how a site so blatantly ugly and horrible ended up making me $75, generated a lot of good backlinks, and drove temporary traffic to my other sites.

Return from Realtor’s Tour

This morning I went on a ‘Realtor’s Tour’ to look at a bunch of places. I explain how it went in the video below. I had just got home and was starving, so don’t mind the Coke and McDonalds commercials…

Shredder: Protect your Identity

Yesterday, I was going through my bank and credit card statements, and had got the good ol’ trusty scissors out and started to cut them up. Obviously I do this to protect myself from identity theft – your credit card numbers and details are there for anyone who rummages around the recycling bin or recycling plant to grab. However, I always end up spending so much time simply cutting away, as I like to cut them up into tiny pieces.. after all, what good is cutting them up if your credit card numbers are still shown on the smaller pieces?

So, I decided to go out and buy myself a paper shredder, simply to save myself the time and hassle of manually cutting up confidential papers. I was lucky, as it is back-to-school season still, which means sales galore. Staples had a bunch of shredders to choose from, but only one which was simple and cheap; the others were all REAL fancy ones which actually tempted me to buy (they were just big and cool…) but obviously I have no need for them. So I grabbed one which was like 60% off, and only $15:

My Shredder

It’s actually a lot better than I thought. It can cut through staples, and can cut up credit cards. It also came with the basket, and I like the look of it.. sleek and black. My favourite part of it is that it shreds the paper up into diagonal lines – so you won’t have your information as easily read.

Again, it’s not fool-proof, but it sure goes a long way to help prevent your identity. Not a bad investment for $15…

Blog Updates

I managed to get a bit more blog stuff done again.

First, I fixed the Comments link on my posts. Previously it simply linked back to the individual post. It now links to the comments section of that post. A thank-you to wesley who brought that to my attention.

Secondly, I finished the ‘About Me’ page located on the left side. I hope to finish the other pages in upcoming posts.

I have a question – when I post smiley faces, it seems to enter a line break before displaying them. How can I fix this, or is there not really a simple way? My guess is that the image is bigger than the font or something… anyhow, it’s annoying 🙂

…See?

Finally, a dude named Andrew offered to skin me a custom WP template for my blog. It won’t be anything amazing.. just simple, but hopefully it will display things a bit better here and provide a bit of a unique touch.

That’s all for now.

Good luck and good earnings!

blog updates

-simley face break

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Posted: September 14th, 2006 under My Websites  

4 Responses to “The Joke is on You”

  1. rls says:

    Tyler regarding the smiley problem, access your CSS stylesheet and look for the ID “#content img,#contentwide” I believe that’s what causing the problem so try deleting it and see if that will solve this issue

  2. Andrew says:

    Hmm, that’s wierd, it didn’t go straight to the comments this time as it did once you said you fixed it. Anyway, nice update, and yeah, shredders are great, my dad uses one for his business and has to empty it about 2 times a week. :O

    I’ll have to watch the video tomorrow morning to see what you did when I start the blog template during my free time in my class. 😛

    Cheers.

  3. webBrander says:

    You got quite lucky with that site, I bet you didnt expect that response, its amazing what a joke can do

PeerFly

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