For a long, long, long, long time I’ve been talking about doing a new custom design for this blog. It was one of my 2008 goals to finish and launch this design, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally here!? If you’re reading this from the RSS feed, come on by and check it out.

This new design was built entirely from the ground up, so there was no modifying a theme, and there is nothing else like it out there. I’m still using Wordpress as the software that runs everything in the background. I was the one that designed the site, and had a developer code up the site and integrate it into Wordpress (Thanks Mubs!). Let me give you a complete walkthrough:

Featured And Standard Blog Mode

You’ll see on the homepage that there are two blogging modes, featured and standard. By default you come to the site seeing featured blog mode. This is simply the headline for the post, and a quick little intro paragraph about it. At the top of the page the most recent post is featured.

If you go to standard blog mode, you’ll see that it’s just like a regular blog, and shows the full versions of the last 10 posts.

I think the featured mode is more unique and looks cleaner, but I know that some people will still prefer your standard blog, which is why I decided to offer both.

Single Post Page

I spent a lot of time making a regular post page look good and work effectively. At the top of each post page you’ll find the “featured” box which just shows you the headline, a big featured image related to the post, a quick intro, the author, how many comments, what categories it falls in, and the ability to promote the post through a variety of social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

At the bottom of each post is where I really spent most of my time. The first box you’ll find under a post is the “Save/Promote This Post” box. This is simply a box with some social media buttons, as well as a Digg button on the right which shows how many Diggs the post has.

Below that box you’ll find the “Related Posts/Subscribe” box. This is a clean format which provides up to 5 related posts to the one you’re reading, as well as a few links to subscribe to the sites RSS feed. I hope this helps out with increasing the number of RSS subscribers. If you haven’t already subscribed to my feed, make sure to do so.

Below that box you’ll find the comments section. I really cleaned this up a lot. FIrst of all, comments and trackbacks are now separated (you’ll find trackbacks at the bottom of the page). Each comment is now in a separate alternating color comment box to make things much more readable. Each post also cleanly shows the name of the commenter (linked to their website), the date, and their avatar. The avatar information is being pulled in from Gravatar, which is a site that allows you to create an account and show your avatar at many sites, linked by your e-mail address. Wordpress 2.5+ has Gravatar functionality built into it, and I think we’ll see more and more sites supporting it, as well as more and more commenters using it. If you haven’t added your Gravatar yet, head over there and open a free account.

Another cool thing I can do is utilize a “promote” feature. If I’m writing a post in Wordpress, I can add a custom field called promote, which will automatically add some code next to the headline of a post. Right now it will make a StumbleUpon badge appear, but that can be changed to whatever I want. This will hopefully increase social media submissions on posts that are really worth it.

Sidebar

On the sidebar I’ve cleanly made sections to show the categories of the site, a few my recent posts, as well as 5 of my most recent Twitter updates. I’m hoping the usage of the Twitter updates will increase my followers. Feel free to follow me on Twitter if you aren’t doing so already.

Advertising

This is something that will most likely be tweaked over time, but I’ve built in advertising in a pretty effective way. First off I want to note that all my ad serving is being done by Google Ad Manager. Ad Manager is a pretty powerful FREE ad server, it’s still in beta, so you’ll need an invite to use it. I come from a background using Doubleclick as an ad server, as well as having used OpenAds, so it may be a little complex to use for some at first, but I felt right at home.

So my concept in advertising right now is when I’m ready to sell an exclusive “package deal” to an advertiser
. What I mean by that is basically a site takeover, one advertiser would get all of the ad spots on the site for a premium price for a set amount of time. This will allow an advertiser to get very effective advertising. There are three set spots for an advertisement on a page right now.

There is a top small banner in the red bar, a 250×250 in the top of the sidebar, and a long thin banner either after the third post on the homepage, or between the save/promote box and related posts box on a single post page. An advertiser would be able to get all three spots, as well as a link in the RSS feed at a flat monthly rate. The spot would be exclusive to that advertiser and no other ads will be run.

I will likely be slightly changing around the sizes and/or positioning of the ads for something for effective (or to meet IAB guidelines). When the blog is generating more traffic, I would change the format to include more ads, and not provide exclusive deals. If you’re interested in doing an exclusive takeover for a month, contact me.

Bugs

There are a few bugs here and there (Mostly IE6 stuff) that I already know about, and will work on fixing over the next couple weeks. If you happen to find something, please make sure and let me know.

Suggestions/Feedback

I really hope you guys like the new design. I put a lot of time and work into launching this, and I hope it will be better overall for the growth of this blog. If you have any suggestions or feedback, I’m all ears. You can either contact me directly or post a comment below.

This past weekend I attended the Spring Meet from the College Park Tuning club at the University of Maryland. They run this event every year, and it has gotten quite popular. The last time I had gone was a few years ago, and a good amount of cars showed up, now it’s in the tune of 1,000’s of cars.

Every car that attends, also submits at least $1 or a can of food that is donated to charity. Last year over $5,000 was provided! I ended up showing a few hours late, so apparently I missed out on a lot of cars, but there was still a lot of people there, and well worth the hour drive. Take a look at the pictures:

Here’s my Viper as well as my buddy Jason’s RT/10:

A custom Dodge Charger limo:

The event had a mobile dyno, here we can see a Firebird getting some numbers:

Nice blacked out Porsche:

A few nice Nissan 350Z’s. The blue one has a Veilside widebody kit on it:

This was one customized Hummer with an awesome suspension on it. No detail was untouched:

Here’s the system in the back of the Hummer. The picture does no justice, but the subwoofer (An MTX Thunder Jack Hammer 9900) in the car is absolutely huge. It’s 350lbs, 22″, and capable of being louder (in decibels) then an airplane engine! I believe it costs about $6,000!

Continue Reading »

I just ordered a mothers day gift for my mom, and I think it’s one of the best things you can get out there in terms of perfect for the parents type of gift. What exactly is it you may ask? A Kodak EasyShare WiFi digital picture frame. What makes this so great? For people that don’t live at home with the parents, you can simply upload pictures to a Kodak photo gallery, and they show up on the picture frame. How awesome is that!?

With my brother going to college next year and me living a few states away, this will be a great way to send our mom our latest pictures without her having to do anything. She simply plugs it in, connects it to the network and it’s good to go. It even has an MP3 player and built in speakers so we can also include video!

I can’t see how any other mothers day present can top this! I scoured around the net for the best deal, and ended up purchasing at Buy.com. I paid $138 with free shipping. I got $10 off for using Google Checkout for the first time.

What did you get your mom? I just hope she doesn’t read this post!

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time working on the new design for this blog (Which I hope to launch as soon as next week!). One of the parts I was working on was a “promote” feature, where I could choose to put some sort of social media promotional button on the top headline of a post in order to better promote people “voting” for a post. I was planning on using your standard Digg badge that we’ve seen everywhere, but then I really thought about something that bothered me about Digg.

I’ve had posts that generate a good amount of Digg’s, but they happen over time. Digg works more like a popular “news” site in the fact that content has to be Dugg enough times within usually 24 hours or less to make it on the front page. That why I really like StumbleUpon.

It can literally take just one stumble to get content to generate some good traffic. Then say two months later, somebody else randomly stumbles your post…traffic can generate again. It’s not always just a one-time surge, it usually lasts a few days, and then can continue to bring traffic over time. For this reason, I decided to give it a shot and promote StumbleUpon over Digg for this section (for now). I wanted to use an SU badge, but there wasn’t really anything out there…so I made one:

It follows the same design as the Digg badge so that people recognize it and are more willing to click it. Feel free to use this on your site if you’d like. I will probably do a couple of sizing variations, while I’ll update on this post in the future.

If you have seen or made a StumbleUpon badge, feel free to let me know so I can link to it from here.

Also, feel free to add me as a friend on StumbleUpon, you can find my profile here. I sometimes forget to stumble things, but I generally try to if I really like something I see on the net.

Oh, and make sure to Stumble this post

While the title of this post may seem like this would be some sort of paid review, I am actually writing about a company from personal experience. I love to speak out about companies that I have good experiences with, because I want others to do the same.

Many of us are business owners, or people that are thinking about starting a business. Many times cash is a hurdle, and many times getting somewhere between $10,000-$100,000 is enough to overcome that hurdle. Or say you want to buy a car, dealing with your bank or a company like Capital One Auto Finance can be a huge hassle, especially if you’re not buying from a dealership, as there is a lot of back and forth.

When I was buying my Dodge Viper, I was also selling my Corvette at the same time. Since I wanted to pay cash for the Viper, I also wanted to make sure I had a safety net of money in case it would take me longer than I thought with my Corvette. I started to look for a loan option with a low APR, and came across a company by the name of First Again. The concept behind this loan company is awesome, and here’s why:

• You can only get approved for a loan if you have excellent credit
• Since they only accept people with excellent credit, it enables you to get way lower rates. I got at least 3% lower than what I could find for a used car from an actual person.
• It doesn’t matter what you use the loan for. You can use it to finance your business, buy a car, pay your credit card bills, do home improvements, etc. They call it an AnythingBill.
• Your loan comes in the form of cash. You don’t have to get a check to write out to a particular person or play any sort of waiting games.
• If you apply for a loan, and get approved, they transfer money to you right away. I literally applied for a $10,000 loan, got approved, and the next day I had $10,000 extra in my bank account. This was a huge selling point for me.
• There are no fees for paying the loan off early. I ended up selling my Corvette two weeks after getting the loan…I simply paid off the total loan right away, ended up paying that first months interest, and that was that. It was quite cheap for the peace of mind that I took the loan out for.

This was by far the best loan experience I’ve ever had, and I can easily personally recommend First Again for your next loan.

If you have any other companies that you recommend, post a comment and let me know (let me know why as well)…or if you’ve used First Again, let me know your thoughts.

Thanks to a post on Autoblog, I found out about Lexus offering a performance driving school…just an hour away from where I live! There are two different programs to choose from and 4 different locations. The locations/dates of the academy are the following:

• May 9th-11th - Joilet, Illinois - Autobahn Circuit
• May 30th-June 1st - Fontana, California - Auto Club Speedway
• June 27-29th - Summit Point, West Virginia - Summit Point Motorsports Park
• July 11-13 - Hampton, Georgia - Atlanta Motor Speedway

There are two different programs that are available:

Regular Driving Academy

This is a 2-hour session that is absolutely free. It’s by invitation only, but you’re able to register and put yourself on a waiting list to try and get in.

You’ll learn some of the basic fundamentals of high performance vehicle handling. You’ll have a chance to drive Lexus IS 250, IS 350, GS 460, and GS 450h. Afterwards you’ll be able to ride in the passenger seat with a pro driver behind the wheel, and experience a hot lap in Lexus’s new 416hp IS-F. You’ll also be provided with a meal and snacks/drinks anytime during the day.

Ultimate Driving Academy

The ultimate driving academy is a 4 1/2 hour event and costs $295. This is the one I’ll be doing (If you’re going to the Summit Point event on Friday June 27th, let me know). There’s quite a bit more that you get over the regular driving academy:

The ultimate session is focused on advanced competitive driving skills, utilizing Lexus’s 416hp ~$60,000 IS-F. Part of the time is spent at the chalkboard going over grip dynamics, contact patch, line theory, the 100% rule, and more. Then you’ll compete in a relay rally race where you’ll work to get the best team time on the track. Afterwards, you’ll get behind the wheel with a pro driver in the passenger seat providing personalized coaching and technique instruction to shave those seconds off of your autocross times. Then you’ll do a lead/follow event on the track, utilizing braking and acceleration skill. You’ll also have a chance to sit in a hot lap with a pro driver. The event also includes a premium gift bag, award ceremony, 2 meals, and snacks/drinks throughout the day.

For those that have looked into race driving schools in the past, you’ll know that everything you’re getting for $300 is quite a bargain.

I’m very excited for this event, and will surely be taking some video and pictures to post here.

For earth day, part of the effort that the company I work for did was to make a bunch of the closest parking spots in the garage reserved for hybrid vehicles. As a joke, I thought it’d be funny to take the extreme opposite car and park it in one of the spots. I only parked it for a couple hours, and within 30 minutes I already got a parking violation. After I moved my car, the spot was open for the rest of the day as I guess there were no other hybrids in the garage…so no harm no foul

Last Friday I had a Corsa catback exhaust system and Random Technology high flow cats installed on my GTS Viper. The reasoning behind doing this was three-fold:

1. The new Corsa exhaust looks way better
2. The new exhaust sounds way better, and is much louder. It’s a V10, it should be loud!
3. Performance gains The new setup should have added about 25-30 horsepower to the wheels. That should give the Viper about 410whp (estimated), which is about 475hp to the crank (estimated).

Since video blogging is the new thing lately, I made a little video showing you the before and after…as well as my buddy’s Viper which has a full exhaust system (including the headers). Enjoy!

Some of you may remember the horrible shopping experience I had a couple weeks back when trying to buy an exhaust for my Viper. I ended up buying the catback exhaust, as well as high flow cats from PartsRack…who specializes specifically in Vipers. The owner, Jon, went out of his way in all aspects of the sale to really help me out and make sure I was getting everything I needed.

He kept me up to date, and gave me various options to help reduce costs of shipping. On top of that he gave me a multi-part discount, and threw in an extra little freebie part I had asked for ($40 value). I received a call a day later letting me know the high flow cat I had ordered that he had was actually damaged (didn’t affect the performance), and that he would give me the better/more expensive ones (which cost over $100 more) at no cost if I wanted. While I appreciated the offer, I decided to wait it out because the more expensive ones would give a raspier sound…and wouldn’t make a difference performance wise unless I was pushing out over 650hp.

I received e-mails with tracking numbers, it was pretty much everything I wanted out of an online purchase. The above and beyond experience is when I received an envelope in the mail which included this:

Jon had sent me some freebies, a little Blue/White Dodge Viper keychain, diecast toy, and sticker. This was awesome, considering that’s my actual car! The business card included said “Compliments of JonB at PartsRack”. This is going above and beyond, and while this little package may have cost Jon like $10 or whatever, it will definitely keep me as a customer…and I will recommend him to others. We can see it was enough for me to make a post about it!

While this is not something I would expect every retailer to do, I think it’s definitely something that niche retailers should think about. PartsRack sells parts specifically for Vipers, his business is considered very niche. It’s important to do things like this to stay in-tune with your customers. Sometimes not being a huge retailer, Jon may not be able to offer the best prices, but he knows his stuff and can make sure you are ordering what you need, and you will get taken care of.

Well done Jon! I know I’ve learned something.

On April 1st eBay moved off of Commission Junction, and onto their own platform for managing their affiliate program. Their new platform goes by the name of “eBay Partner Network” (EPN). This was potentially a great move by eBay, offering more direct support, better reporting, better tools, more customized administration, etc.

Now it’s 15 days into the new program, and from what I’ve seen, there are some potentially major problems going on with the program in the name of revenue earned by its affiliates.

Revenue Issues

The biggest issue seems to be the amount of revenue generated as compared to the previous CJ program. My own personal experience shows the same issue. I normally generate at least 1 transaction per day, and average about $2-$5+ per day. I converted my links over to the new program on April 1st, I didn’t see my first transaction until April 10th. It’s now April 15th, and I’ve generated 6 transactions for a total of $6.80 or a $2.27 EPC. On Commission Junction I would generate about $10-$15 EPC. So we’re talking about a pretty drastic difference here. I don’t want to come to any conclusions based on my experience just yet as I’d like to wait it out until the end of the month. Expect an update to this from my end come early May.

This seems to be quite a bigger issue, and eBay seems to be somewhat ignoring it. If you take a look at their partner network forum, it just has a ton of posts with people complaining that their revenue is way lower than what it was on CJ. One thread with the title “Has anybody seen and commissions or leads yet?” has 237 posts (at the time of this writing). eBay representatives have responded, basically saying that there is no problem, but they will continually monitor everything to make sure nothing is wrong.

I don’t like to use myself as an example for the issue since I really don’t do that much in affiliate sales just yet, but I’m happy to use others to prove a point:

Username flyinglotta: This user is one of the bigger affiliates posting on the forums, that was doing about $500/day when the program was on Commission Junction. He is now seeing a 50% drop, doing about $250/day, a loss of close to $8,000/month. You would think that an affiliate generating this much would be able to get some sort of personal support from eBay, but he can’t even get a direct e-mail address or phone number to get help. He’s forced to wait on public answers on the forum from representatives that probably need to have a lawyer go over any response they give before they post it.

My other concern in this realm is that there is no third party anymore. What I mean by this is that there is no company overlooking to make sure commissions are accurately paid out and tracked for. Essentially an auditor. eBay could realistically just do whatever they want and pay whatever they want, and nobody could really argue with that. Commission Junction was the third party before.

Contact Issues

There are all sorts of stories similar to this not only on the eBay forums, but also on other forums. One of the arguments eBay is using is that there are thousands of affiliates, and relative to that number, not enough seem to be contacting them with issues to make it an issue. The other side of this story is that not everybody is complaining on their forums, and there is not exactly an obvious way to contact eBay.

The forum link is only on the dashboard homepage. Not everybody wants to post publicly. There is no “Contact” link of any kind in the admin section…making it a bit hard for somebody to complain. The only thing that I have found to contact eBay directly was to go into the help section, click a category, which will also have a link to contact them if it doesn’t answer your question. I did this earlier this month, only to receive a canned response that didn’t answer my question, and was obviously outsourced and not somebody directly working in the program.

Report Issues

I think there is a lot of room for improvement on the reports that eBay offers. Now that everything is in-house, reporting capabilities should be way better in terms of tracking where links are coming from, what is being bid on, where they clicked to bid, etc. I don’t want to get into this right now because eBay seems to be working to continually improve the program, and I have a feeling this will be worked in the future as there are now more affiliates to give feedback.

Are There Really Issues?

I think this is the question of the day. I think there are generally enough complaints from people that literally have switched over and are seeing lower numbers after the switch to say that there is a problem. At this point in time, it’s less about the affiliates like me who think there are issues as I don’t do high enough numbers to make an example…but some of the bigger guys seeing a difference and complaining should say something is up. I think for the smaller guys, we should give it the full month before starting to really complain there is an issue.

For now, those of you having issues, please respond to this post with a comment (there is no need to register, so it’s easy to post) and give a little background on the issue you’re having. The most important information you should post is the following:

When did you change your links to the new program?
What were you averaging per day in February and March 2007?
What was your EPC for Feb and Mar 2007?
What kind of results comparatively have you been seeing in the new program?

Maybe if enough people respond and comment, and compile it one place, we can take it to eBay and make some changes.