I’m sure you’ve heard about the next-gen gaming consoles and the current battle between the three big guys. If not, basically there is Microsoft with their XBOX 360 console which has been out on the market for a while now and dominating against the older consoles. Then you have the not-yet-released Wii console from Nintendo and the Playstation 3 (PS3) from Sony.

Now console gaming is a massive multi-billion dollar industry and competitive too. The companies manufacturing the consoles generally don’t make much profit from the hardware (and in fact Sony will be losing about US$200 per console), but make-up for it with software licences and other services. So most of the marketing battles are focused on the gaming experience (gameplay, game graphics etc).

But people not only want a great console to run these high-end games, but they also want the price to be cheap:

Wii - US$170 (expected price)
360 - US$299 (current price)
PS3 - US$499 (expected price)

Looking at those prices, what would you buy?

I’ve always been a playstation man having gone from an NES to a Super Nintendo to a PSX and currently have a PS2. But I can tell you now I will probably be buying a 360 and Wii combo which will still workout cheaper than buying a PS3.

Now there’s a bit of a story behind why the PS3 is so expensive and if you follow the tech news you will know that Sony is also trying to launch their “Blu-Ray” portable media (it’s pretty much just a dvd disc that can hold 50GB+ of data). However they have some big competition in this sector too with another large storage portable disc called “HD-DVD”. So what Sony is doing is including a Blu-Ray read/burn drive in every PS3 in the hopes that they can establish Blu-Ray as the standard. Problem is that it’s very new technology and the drives and discs cost a truckload to produce.

Rumours have it that at US$499, Sony is set to lose about $200 per console produced… so they’re putting a lot on the line and its a big risk.

Being such a large risk and all, you’d think Sony would setup a skilled marketing team and carefully map out their pre-launch marketing as most consoles do. *pffft lol*

Sony have had soo many hiccups and bad PR, I would bet that the PS3 will be the worst console launch in gaming history.

They’ve had numerous delays, massive public outrage over the price and all-in-all just constant (almost weekly) bad publicity. Some recent announcements have been that they haven’t started production yet and so the PS3 won’t be released before Christmas, another was that their initial production output will be cut in half, and they just released their first commercial! (too bad it really sux)

Sony’s major flaw is simply that they have OVER-PROMISED and UNDER-DELIVERED. When they should be UNDER-PROMISING and OVER-DELIVERING.

From the start they should have set a later release date, announced a high price, and perhaps even scrapped the Blu-Ray component. That way they could have released “early”, “reduced” the price and when the Blu-Ray technology reduced in cost and matured a little more they could have released an advanced PS3 version with the technology included.

The Wii on the other hand has been doing everything absolutely perfect, and are set to launch before this Christmas. They are actually doing so well that they have Microsoft saying “Buy a 360 and then buy a Wii” and they have Sony saying “Buy a PS3 and then buy a Wii”.

So it will all be very interesting to see how things pan out

If you own Sony stock: SELL SELL SELL like there’s no tomorrow!

Nathan Waters
“Wii60″ - Wii/360 combo?

HTML = childs play… it’s the most basic coding for a web page, it’s easy to learn and it’s the foundation for any sort of web development. I learnt mainly by looking at the source code on various sites: just right-click, view source.

CSS = ironing… it’s something that you’d rather not do or learn, but doing it definitely makes everything look nicer/neater. You may produce/find some burn marks, but practice makes perfect. I’m still a little rusty on CSS, but I’ve just been learning by looking at what other sites do: right-click, view source and then the CSS code will either be in there or look for a bit of code in the “head” section that has “style.css” (or similar). Copy that path to the end of the domain and your browser will open up the CSS stylesheet.

PHP = public speaking… you know that learning and perhaps mastering it will produce some very cool results, but you’re scared to even learn the basics. You know everyone uses it in some form or another, but your fear gets the better of you and you push the learning aside.

I have known for a long time that just about every decent website uses PHP ranging from simple to advanced uses and integrations. But I have always put off learning it, thinking “oh, I don’t want to have to spend hours and hours trying to learn this new language when I can either use HTML or pay someone to do it”. I have a tonne of web bookmarks for php tutorials which I’ve just added in the hopes of going back later on and reading/learning it (never happened).

Well yesterday I forced myself to look into it.

I was working on the template/logo for Drop Buy which is up now, but still under development. I knew that a lot of websites have a separate header php file for the website header and one for the footer. So that you only need to make changes in the one file for it to apply to all other pages on your site. But I had thought that even this PHP coding was difficult… to the point where when I made pixTower I actually manually copied the header and footer to each and every page (yes very sad and lame lol).

….

Actually it’s easy, here’s how:

Have a search for PHP includes tutorial

In my template for Drop Buy, I only needed a header and footer (as I just included the navbar in the header). But you can “include” numerous files like a separate menu.

Soooo, what I did was:

1. Copied all the HTML code that included the top section of the site (so everything from the starting “html” until the end of the navigation bar I have)
2. Paste that into a new text file and save that as “header.php”
3. Now do the same for the footer. Copy all the HTML code which includes the footer (including the final “html”) and save that in a separate text file as “footer.php”
4. So now all that’s left is whatever content was in the middle (between the header and footer)
5. Start a new text file and save it as “index.php”
6. Add this code at the top: < ?php include "header.php"; ?>
7. Then copy the middle content beneath
8. Then add this at the bottom: < ?php include "footer.php"; ?>
9. Save, upload to your host, done.

So now when the index.php file is loaded (i.e. when someone goes to your main page) it automatically fetches the header and footer and adds them.

You can now repeat the same process for other pages, but save the file as about.php instead of index.php for example.

To display the .php pages you need to have them on a php server. So you can either set this up on your own computer using something like Apache or if that’s too complicated (as I’ve found) you can just edit the files using FTP (so upload them to your host and edit via FTP).

….

A few other tricks:

….

Notice how the URL to my pages are www.dropbuy.com.au/about instead of www.dropbuy.com.au/about.php?

Download this file (make sure it is name “.htaccess” only) and upload it to your root directory. It’s a .htaccess file which basically tells the server to treat /about as going to /about.php.

….

Need to change the page titles dynamically?

In your header.php file replace the title tags with:

…and change the title to what you want for your main page.

Then in each other file (e.g. about.php), add this at the top: < ?php $title = "About :: Drop Buy"; ?>

….

Want to change the link colour to tell people what page they’re on?

If you click on the “About” you will notice it goes to the About page and highlights the About page which helps notify the user as to which page they’re currently on.

Add this at the top of your header.php file:
< ?php
/* Set a value for $PHP_SELF (for v4.2+) */
if ($PHP_SELF == "") $PHP_SELF = $_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"];
?>

And then for each link add this code:

Then in you CSS file add styling definition for the class .herebar, e.g:

So what that does is it looks at what the current page is and if it is the About page then it adds the class="herebar" to the link, otherwise it adds class="contentsbar". So you just use CSS to say: highlight the text if it’s class is “herebar”.

….

Erm, damn even that simple stuff sounds pretty complicated when writing it down lol.

Hope it helps you somewhat and was understandable enough

Sorry about the messy display of code. For some reason WP was spitting out all sorts of random things, so I had to create images of the code.

I’ll post some updates on Drop Buy in the coming days/weeks. I have some more fun ahead of me trying to implement a blog and a few other little features.

edit: Now reading through this great tutorial. And these, ones.

Nathan Waters
PHPerifically something

Who would have thought that online community forums could be so cut-throat!

As you may know, I’m a common lurker and poster (username: nado) at 4 young entrepreneur forums (sorted here in alphabetical order):

• EntrepreneursTalk.com (run by Scott)
• NetpreneurForums.com (run by Khalid)
• YoungEntrepreneur.com (run by Adam & Matthew)
• YoungGoGetter.com (run by Eric & Travis)

But those four are by no means the only young entrepreneur focused forums on the Net. I’ve been seeing a new forum popup every single week and some other great ones that I just haven’t yet got into (either because they are new, have little post activity or just aren’t for me) include the Blogtrepreneur Forums (run by Adnan), YoungEntrepreneur.com.au (run by Chris), EntrepreneurLounge.com (run by Jamie), NetBusinessTalk.com (run by Spencer Fry), YoungCeoForum.com (run by Maurice), GoBigNetwork.com (run by Wil) and many more.

Some offer something a little different than others, some have more traffic than others, some have better moderation than others, some have better content than others and some have better members than others. But of course any community forum requires a community to grow, so there tends to be some competition to grab new members and retain them…

OK, I’m going to try and keep this as unbiased as possible and let you decide

I’m a mega forum-addict and so I tend to spend more time on the forum with the most post-activity, which also generally means it has more members. Currently that forum is and has been YE.com which I’ve been registered with since mid-2005 and have over 900 posts.

However YE.com has been plagued with a couple of problems such as SPAM, lack of moderation, lack of features and a diminishing sense of community where the admins/mods seem to only show up to ’solve’ an escalating forum issue. In recent months the problems have been slowly getting better, until about a week ago when this thread went live: Adsense websites for sale. Have a read through it, as it’s a long story.

Basically a guy from New Zealand (username: F360) who I chat to every now and then via instant messaging was selling a few websites he had as he had been banned from Google Adsense (which was later found to be a mistake on Google’s behalf).

Within days after this thread… F360 (501 posts), fattony (389 posts) and iGROWyourBiz (134 posts) were all banned with apparently no publicly-released reasons.

Exactly… WTF?

Daniel (aka akula) posted this thread: fattony - unban him, which is also worth a read (esp akula’s reply).

The vibe I get from Adam (one of YE.com’s admin) is that those 3 members were promoting other competing forums for young entrepreneurs and so were banned and shut-out. But you can make up your own mind from the threads

The point of this blog post is that a community forum only exists if there is a community. I believe that stereotypical fierce business competition cannot and should not be applied to online community forums. Admins need to be focused on enhancing a sense of community through involvement and member wants/needs rather than focusing on competing with other forums for members.

What I’m after in a young entrepreneur forum are (in order of importance):

1) a sense of community
2) helpful responses
3) intelligent members
4) admins that respond to the community’s desires

btw, I’ve been spending a lot of time on YGG after that incident. I have absolutely no influences in any direction, but having got back into the YGG forums I am yet to see a single thread which Eric or Travis (the admins) haven’t been involved in, I am yet to see a single piece of SPAM, and I’m loving the additional features.

Nathan Waters
Always Looking For a Forum High

I’m not sure if I’ve written about this on the blog before, but it’s something which has been plaguing me in terms of putting a large dent in my funds, and a larger dent in my online business activities due to unproductive Internet speeds.

Who’s the culprit? … Chariot NetConnect: www.chariot.net.au

(eek, just writing the name makes my blood pressure rise)

The Story

The story begins when moving up here to uni. As you can probably guess, being an online browsing/business/technology junkie means that I tend to be quite a heavy Net user especially with the recent emergence of podcasts, vidcast and all sorts of knowledge-juicy media.

Back home (Moruya), we were on a 512kbps connection with a download cap of 20GB and paying $50 a month. That bandwidth would be maxed out for most of the day as I downloaded and browsed, while my little brother played Warcraft3 24/7 (sad I know :)). It was also quite easy for me to go over that 20GB cap in a month and be shaped back down to 64kbps.

Uni begins…

Either I or my mum decided that it would probably be better for me to live on campus at least for the first year, so that I’ll meet a lot of people and make some good friends, which I know I have done more-so than a few people I know who live off-campus. So I moved up here and settled into Campus East (located in Fairy Meadow, about a 20min bike ride from the actual Uni).

It’s not too shabby here, there’s about 500+ people so it’s always lively. There’s 2 big screen TV areas, a gym, a couple of big open soccer and footy fields, a big dining room, and is about a 3min walk to the beach… Although I must admit that the beaches up here are about a 1/10 when you compare them to any beaches down south.

Where it completely sucks is in the prices.

I’m in catered, so that’s 19 meals a week. I think catered is the better option as otherwise I think I either wouldn’t eat or I’d end up eating complete junk food. The only problem is that it costs $200 a week. If I shared a house/apartment with a few people I could probably get through the week on around half of that. But otherwise considering I don’t have to cook, buy food, washup, clean my room, pay for water or electricity etc, it’s alright.

However, Internet access at UOW is completely primitive. To be able to use the ethernet port in my room to access the Net I am charged $14 a week!

Now since my computer was smouldering for the first two weeks of Uni, I was using the computer lab here to check emails etc using my Uni Quota. The Quota they give you is 100MB of download over 6 whole months! The thing is that it’s quite easy to “download” 100MB of data in a day while just surfing websites. So before 0-week had finished I’d used all that quota. Woohoo, I now can’t access any external sites at Uni. I tried to get more quota was denied… maybe they don’t like me browsing the YE forums

So when I’d managed to fix my computer and I’d run out of quota, the campus offers only one option for me to get net access from my room… through a company called Chariot (dead-company-walking!). I’ve since found out that every single UOW campus have this same setup and only have the one ISP to choose from.

What are the prices you ask?

Don’t look at the prices on Chariot’s website, they charge totally different prices for students.

You should make sure you’re sitting down to read this…

Plans Available to Students:

- $1 per hour
- $25 for 500MB (once off, NOT per month, if it runs out you have to buy more)
- something in between (can’t find the price sheet currently)
- $132 for 4GB (same as above and is the maximum download limit available)

Connection Speed:

- 256kbps… the slowest ADSL broadband speed possible in Australia

“OMFG WTFH FBS!”

Yep.

Why not go wireless then? … Well I looked into that and there are only a few providers available in the area. I believe Telstra is the only one available currently, but if you checkout their prices they’re actually worse! Another company is Fish Telecom, whos prices are a lot better, but I would need to fix an antenna on the roof and run a cable out my window and up the wall for it to work. The likeliness of that being allowed is pretty slim.

So I decided since I often hit the 20GB per month mark, a download option would end up costing me around $660 a month. Hmm, I think I’ll go the $1 per hour system.

That ended up being a bad move. Since not only do I tend to download a lot, but I also spend a lot of hours on the Net. I’ve since decided I have to stop downloading things like Diggnation and transferred over to the 4GB option.

Fast forward 3 months and I’ve forked out around $600 for Internet access. That’s around $200 a month. Imagine what kind of plan I could have got for that amount!

The Action

Now I’m not the stereotypical student who protests about everything and anything, but you’ve got to agree with me that this is a monopoly.

So I’ve been complaining to the max.

I’ve contacted the head of Campus East, but he wasn’t terribly helpful and basically said to fill out this survey of the accommodation services (the same one I’m sure they’ve been running for the last couple of years). I’ve also contacted the Uni and the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).

And to top it off last Friday I had a meeting with an IT staff and accommodation services staff at Uni. Well that was very interesting and I sense many shady deals and contracts in the background here which I plan to get to the bottom of.

To cut the meeting short, they basically pulled out some abusive (definitely not threatening) emails I’d sent to Chariot after their replies to previous emails I’d sent were frustrating. Funnily enough in one of the emails I mentioned that hopefully they enjoy the ACCC knocking on their door. So I believe Chariot must have shat themselves and then forwarded (is this a breech of privacy?) the emails to the Head IT Support Guy to “sort me out” I presume… So they are basically trying to blackmail me.

Rather than kickup a protest, they’d prefer me to keep it quiet and go through the “appropriate channels” which I am yet to be told about… who else do I need to complain to?!

I mentioned I could quite easily setup a petition/survey and have on-campus students voice their opinions, but that was quickly shut-down with comments like “petitions do very little” and “you don’t want to be known as that kid from campus who kicked up a fuss about everything”. Hmm, I don’t really care… I’m still going to setup a petition.

I’ve also setup a thread on the Whirlpool Forums and through there I got into contact with a guy who runs Fish Telecom (who also do wireless). He was saying that they’ve been trying to lobby to be able to compete with Chariot in the campuses for a few years now. So obviously there must be some kind of ridiculous contract in place between Chariot and UOW and some big kickbacks in place for the Uni.

Very shady, very dodgy… but I’ll get to the bottom of it.

Nathan Waters
Net Activist?

All I can say is “wow”, this is an awesome resource. Steve Pavlina, the one-stop guy/blog for all personal development information, has just posted a very lengthy, but very informative article on how to make a good living income from blogging.

He goes through steps he has taken to grow his traffic and income from 0 to substantial levels after just 16 months. He now receives around 1.1million visitors per month and generates around $5000 per month mainly from Adsense.

I will briefly list a few of the things he wrote about, but be sure to checkout his post for more detailed explanations.

Be web savvy

You need to know the basics of blogging. This doesn’t need to include PHP, MySQL or other complicated programming (although basics in these wouldn’t hurt either). But you need to know things like RSS, comments, pings, trackbacks, SEO (search engine optimisation), tagging, traffic stats etc.

Take risks, try new things

Don’t be scared of failing and always be prepared to adapt to change. Experiment with new ideas or sources of income generation. The blogosphere is a rapidly changing beast so you need to stay ahead of it or get gobbled up

Have an income-generation strategy

Write it down. How much do you want to be making in X months time? How will you do this? What sources of income will you use? Affiliate programs, PPC programs, sell products/services?

Traffic… a must have

Income won’t come without traffic. Steve has some very simple advice for how he built his traffic:

1. Create valuable content
2. Create original content
3. Create timeless content
4. Write for human beings first, computers second
5. Know why you want a high-traffic site
6. Let your audience see the real you
7. Write what is true for you, and learn to live with the consequences
8. Treat your visitors like real human beings
9. Keep money in its proper place
10. If you forget the first nine suggestions, just focus on genuinely helping people, and the rest will take care of itself
11. Blog Carnivals!

Don’t blog for money

Don’t do it. Blog for other reasons before blogging for money. Only 1% of bloggers actually make a living from solely blogging, so the probability of you making money is very slim… don’t set your sights on the dollars or it’ll affect other areas of your blog such as article quality and just general motivation.

Multiple streams of income

Having more than just the one income stream is very important. If one happens to fail overnight, then you will always have something to fall back on. The regular methods are mentioned including Adsense, Donations, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMalls, Amazon and LinkShare.

Choose a niche, in something you’re passionate about

Write a list of all the things you’re passionate about, if one of these fit into a large niche and there is little to no competition, then you may very well have a winner. An integral part is having the passion, as it will help keep you motivated for those many months where it seems your efforts get you no where.

Luck and timing

This is my own little point, but I think it holds true for almost any blog or site. There is so much competition between sites on the Net and the area is so rapidly changing, that involves a great deal of luck and just the right timing to build a site from nothing to a successful traffic-generating and income-generating machine.

One major thing I did take away from reading the article was that Blog Carnivals are a great way to build blog traffic early on. I haven’t actually tried out a blog carnival, so I’ll have to give it a go soon and report back on the results.

Nathan Waters
Traffic <> Income