Archive for the ‘Sponsored’ Category
A New Writing Community Site is Looking for a Few Good Writers
Written by John Erianne on January 8, 2009 – 2:12 pm -There’s yet another writing community site making it’s debut online. Life123, like every other writing community site offers articles on many different subject. Everything from the usual topics about freelance writing to shaker style furniture. What’s different about this site is that the articles seem to be mostly written by a paid staff, although they are actively encourages writers to join their community and participate in writing articles (I saw know indication that “community” writers are paid for their articles, unlike other writing communities like Suite101 or Helium that have a payment structure of one sort or another).
The weird thing about this site is that this outfit is not marketing itself as an alternative to other writing community sites. Rather, it’s marketing itself as an alternative to Google. The pitch is, if you’re too lazy to use a search engine to find information about a topic, you can come to this website and find an article that will satisfy your query. It’s a creative argument, but ironic and ultimately misguided if you ask me, since the website depends on search engines to drive traffic to the site and is very new so there’s not a great abundance of topics/articles in their database. This is just another writing community site to me. I can’t see where they are filling a niche.
It’s a nice looking website, though, I’ll give them that. Very slick design. Colorful, without being gaudy. Decent menu/navigation system. It scores points for not looking exactly like most similar websites. The content writing quality isn’t bad. Far better than Helium, but not quite as good as Suite101.
We’ll just have to see if this site catches on.
Performance Testing for High Traffic Community, Forum and Publishing Sites
Written by John Erianne on January 5, 2009 – 9:09 pm -Content may be king, but what’s a kingdom without without it’s vassals? In other words, no matter how good your content, any problems you may have in delivering that content may drive away your visitors/consumers. That’s why, as your website grows you may, at some point, benefit from performance or Load Testing.
A performance testing service will typically offer website monitoring or network monitoring to see how your networks, apps, and databases operate under stress and watches for any problems that can monkey up the works. This type of testing can be very important for site that have a lot of concurrent users — such as social networking sites, discussion forums, e-commerce sites, auction sites, and CMS-driven publisher sites with a ton of subscribers. performance testing typically will generate virtual user groups and run them through a system under varying conditions to see if the website meets it’s performance goals and checks for traffic bottlenecks and other problems that can prevent a website from living up to it’s full potential.
If you host your site on your own webservers, you can purchase a decent load testing software program for less than what it costs to by most publishing software. And if you don’t own the servers where your website is hosted, there are plenty of private companies you can contract for a reasonable fee. Some web hosts even provide these services.
Summertime Fun in Wildwood, NJ
Written by John Erianne on December 30, 2008 – 11:27 am -People who aren’t from New Jersey just love to poke fun at my home state. They act like New Jersey is just one big garbage heap with nothing to do. Like the only thing we have going around here is crime, murder and gang violence (well… there is a lot of that in certain places, but I’m not exactly walking around fearing for my life).
Well, if you’re planning a getaway, you could do worse than a week in New Jersey. There’s a little bit of everything here. And you haven’t lived until you’ve been on a Jersey Shore beach Vacation
Take Wildwood, for example. Just one of New Jersey’s many beach resort towns, it’s home to the world-famous Morey’s Pier and water park. As amusement parks go, Morey’s is a pretty fun time. With 3 separate amusement piers and 2 beachfront waterparks, there’s something for all ages.Whether it’s the Sky Coaster or the Sea Serpent, the Formula One Raceway, or the simple family fun of miniture golf, if you can’t find something fun to do, you must be a corpse. There are plenty of fun things to do in New Jersey Forgetaboutit!
And until January 9th, Morey’s is offering 40% off on season passes to all their parks as part of their annual holiday promotion. What could be better than that?
