OS Webmaster Community - Blogs

Survive Outdoors Site Update

firestarter — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:41:08 GMT

Survive Outdoors is going to have an new page added under title 'Health' It will have information on how to fix broken bones, stop bleeding in open wounds and information on snake bites an etc will be finished in about 2 days give or take. Also food collection page is complete!

Survival kits updated features my personal kit and soon to be car survival kit incase your ever stuck in a blizzard or something like that. Mini survival kit and two retail kits that are great values and are small and lightweight! PLus have many needed items!

Site take down.

firestarter — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:44:37 GMT

The old site I had is now a scrap yard it's just a left over site plan. Now it's converted to a outdoor survival site at www.surviveoutdoors.co.nr come and visit and learn about outdoor survival and what it takes to survive if ever lost!

Private Ad Sales

OS-Mark — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:48:34 GMT

I've come to face the reality that while PPC systems like google adsense are good advertising programs for publishers (especially us lazy ones) its usually not going to be the best way to monetize a website.

FEES: don't know what googles fee is per click but I'm sure its a healthy one. Link brokers usually eat about 25-50% of you revenue, safe to say google would do the same. (feel free to enlighten me if you can find this information from a reliable source)

Here are a few quick points from my experiences in the last year with monetizing 1 site in particular.

RELEVANCE: using any 3rd party ad system means your subject to running irrelevant ads, which can devalue your site to your visitors. Sure you can filter, and screen advertisers but thats becoming effort already... may not be worth it for a couple dollars a month.

EFFORT: selling ads yourself manually is much more challenging and time consuming. Programs like adsense take minutes to setup and start earning. Private ad sales can take hours, days, weeks, and is usually ongoing eventually leading to a "sales staff".

AFFILIATE EARNINGS: If you can find the right product for your market, affiliate earnings can be as easy to setup as adsense but generally give a better return... again depending on your market, and the product(s).

So that brings me to a choice, after using mostly adsense, doing some private sales (about 4 hours time) and working with TLA (1 hour per month) my choice seems clear.

here is a rundown for year, time invested, how much of my sites are running the ads, and a rough revenue.

Private Sales
4 hours in 1 year
reaches 1% of my network
Earns the most revenue, about the same as TLA.

TLA
1 hour per month checking stats
Reaches 5% of network
Revenue Doubles Adsense

Adsense
1 hour per month checking stats
Reaches 94% of my network

In my eyes private ad sales is clearly the way to go, no commissions and much more generous returns. Plus you can get more creative with the ads, like links certain words in an article or post etc.

if your looking for extra cash and think you could get some exposure for my ad sales campaign, drop me a PM I'm happy to pay a nice commission.. I would much rather it go to you than google ;)

My Adventure into the gaming realm

OS-Mark — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:22:44 GMT

These days when I look at starting a new venture online, I evaluate how much traffic I have access to for a specific niche and go from there. A few months ago I started an anime topsite, for no reason other than I already had enough anime webmaster traffic to do so.

Basically i ran a single, effective 728x90 banner on the anime section of itopsites for 2 months to get the ball rolling (no other promo was done). This helped me get the topsite populated with the first 100 members or so. Then I pulled all advertising, tweaked the SEO, sat back and let the topsite promote itself. Now after 5 months, the topsite is up around 450 active members (no spammers) and is growing virally at a healthy rate.

Now its time to get into the market where I have the most traffic :fight I've partnered up with an old friend of mine who made his fortune promoting online casinos (check out his MMO topsite contest running in the design contests area), to create a network of gaming (video game not gambling) sites and services. One of the services in particular I am very excited about because it appeals to gaming webmasters and really does offer a valuable service... I think anyway :shucks I cant really post any details quite yet, but I will soon once I get a few wrinkles ironed out next week.

Premium Membership Mod - FOR SALE NOW (V1)

Go_on — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:28:18 GMT

Hello,
It is time to sell my Premium Membership mod for the Aardvark Topsites PHP script.
The mod is the only one of it's kind and it did cost a lot of money to have it made, but now after a few months of testing, it's time to sell some copy's!

The only mod that can turn your toplist into a goldmine!

The Premium Membership Mod
About:
with this mod you can have a extra member group in your topsite system. This group (you can call it Premium, VIP, Gold members .etc) has a few extra options, like different (Top)table files and the ability to set a different banner size for this group. A normal member could buy this special membership with a paypal account. He would just have to login into his Cpanel, set the amount of days he wants premium and checkout!

Features:
In adminpanel:
* Admin can select a bigger/different banner size for premium members
* Set Auto Approving Membership On or not
* Set paypal account
* PayPal Invoice Description
* Fill in paypal token
* Set price 1 week
* Set a discount for certain amounts of weeks
* Approve or dissaprove bought premium membership (only when setting Auto Approving Membership is on OFF)
* Manage premium members
Examples:
Image
Image

In user Cpanel:
* Buy premium membership
* If bought, see amount of days left.
* Have different banner size, if the admin has set a different size for premium members.
Examples:
Image

In system:
*Different (top)table skin files for premium members.

Aardvark versions:
Made for 5.2.0 and 5.1.2

Topsites using this mod:
EternalGameList.com
Animerankings.com
Top100-SOLAR.it
Mmolist.net
These 4 are the only ones have the rights to use this mod!

WARNING:
The mod contains a few skin files, like the (top)tables files for premium members, but the layout is based on a the Fusion skin. You will have to understand that these websites above have edited these skin files, so that it fits there own (custom) skin.

Price:
$75
I know it is a lot, but believe me only toplists with a certain amount of visitors will have members that buy there premium/gold/vip or watever you wanna call it. So if you think it is to much, i understand, but when you really know you can earn money with this mod, you will buy it!

Copies left:
Slot 1 - SOLD
Slot 2 - SOLD
Slot 3 - SOLD
Slot 4 - SOLD
Slot 5 - for sale!
Selling this mod to only 5 people atm.

Questions?
Wanna know more about this mod?
Send me a Personal Message :)

Wanna buy?
Send me a Personal Message :)

Greetings,
Matthieu de Groot

MMOFLY.COM - Sell wow gold, eve online isk, lotro gold, Lineage 2 Adena, ffxi gil, eq

onlinegame — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:55:03 GMT

MMOFLY is an exchange site designed specifically for game virtual currencies and items trading.

We are trading mmorpg virtual currency ,World of Warcraft account or goods with all of the player. Such as trade world of warcraft gold, guild wars gold, Maple story mesos and Final fantasy XI gil, if you want to Sell WOW Gold, Sell LOTRO Gold, Sell Maple Story Mesos, Sell Anarchy Online Credits, Sell EVE Online, Sell Lineage2 Adena, EverQuest II platinum, Sell FFXI Gil or Sell Guild Wars Gold you can choose us. We will give you a suitable price.

Our specialty is to make a long-term relationship across multiple game players. In meeting the demand of game players to sell, sell and trade in-game currencies and items, MMOFLY offer players with fast transactions, 24-hours customer service and transaction security guaranteed.

If you want to sell virtual currency gold for you play game expense.you can choose us.we will give you a suitable price.

Welcome to http://www.mmofly.com

woo...party and stuff...

fad3d — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:48:36 GMT

Well i have been gone a lil while again. life just gets the better of me x_X;

Where to start?
Well...im jobless, quit my job the other week due to the way i was treated by the manager.
My bank is buggerin about with me, which is never fun, and lifes just poo in general atm.

Im hopeful though!
Im applying for a job in the police force and also to work at the Hospital near me, so hopefully i will get a job fairly soon in 2008.

Heres to a crappy year, and hopefully a better next year! :Da

Learning PHP from the ground up - Easy Dynamic Pages

OS-Mark — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:16:53 GMT

Part1 .:. Part2 .:. Part3

If you've gone through the first 3 parts of this tutorial its time to put some of this into practice! In this installment we're going to build a basic web page with dynamic content, basically we'll have 1 file which will contain the header, sidebar, and footer. Then in the middle of the page we'll "include" the content.

In order to do this we're going to use a "query string" in the URL. You have probably seen these in almost every website you visit, lets take a look.

osempire.com/somepage.php?content=1

in the above URL we see a '?content=1' this basically means that this URL is setting the value of content to 1. At this point it wont do anything, but with a simple few lines of PHP it can produce a page of dynamic content.

so lets start by creating a file called somepage.php (though you can name it whatever you like) Put only this content in for now.

PHP Code:


			




echo $_GET['content'];



?>

now go to your somepage.php and in the URL add the query string like so:

somepage.php?content=hello!!

this will display hello!! in your browser. Pretty simple right? lets take a quick look over this.

The $_GET['content'] variable looks to the query string in the URL for the value of 'content' this allows you to display anything you like on the page just by changing the URL. This is a very basic example of a "dynamic web page".

Now lets go a little further. instead of simply echoing the value of $_GET['content'] to the page lets use an if/else and a couple variables to do something more interesting.

PHP Code:


			


//first we check the value of content



if($_GET['content'] == 1) {

echo "Yes indeed, the value of content is 1!";

}



//if the value of content is not 1

else {

echo "nope, the value of content is not what we wanted."; 

}

?>

now if you go to somepage.php?content=1 you'll see the appropriate message displayed. Change the value from 1 to anything else and you'll see the other message.

Now lets look at how to include a page of content into this somepage.php of ours.

we're going to use the built in PHP function known as include(). Not surprisingly, its job is to 'include' another file.

so lets try this, create a new empty file called firstpage.txt and put the following content in.

Code:

Hello World

this is my first page created using PHP and HTML! I hope it works...

to keep things simple for now, upload this to the same directory as your somepage.php

now edit somepage.php so it will include this new text file. We'll take out our earlier practice code.

PHP Code:


			


include("firstpage.txt");



?>

alright so that was less than spectacular, but it works right? lets take it a step further... before we include our content page lets add a header footer and sidebar to somepage.php

PHP Code:


			




This is my page





This is the header



This is the sidebar







include("firstpage.txt");



?>



Footer

You'll notice that we opened the 'content' div, then put our PHP include, then closed the content div. You'll also notice I did not include any CSS, I did this only to keep things simple, this is not a CSS tutorial if you need help floating a sidebar feel free to post a question in the coding forum

Now this is all working fine and good but its still not a dynamic page because all it does is include firstpage.txt, lets change that to allow the "query string' in the URL to decide which page is shown.

PHP Code:


			
//Lets store the value of $_GET['content'] in a variable called $page so its easier to read.



$page = $_GET['content'];

?>





This is my page





This is the header



This is the sidebar







include("$page.txt");



?>



Footer

now if we point our browser to somepage.php?content=firstpage

we will see the content of our text file included into our layout. Because this is dynamic we can make a new text file called secondpage.txt and include it into our layout using somepage.php?content=secondpage

Now if you dont put any value for content (for example just go to somepage.php) you will see an error, this happens because PHP is expecting to include a text file that doesnt exist, so we will use an if/else to display a default page. We will use the following line to check if the $page variable has a value or not. The ! in front of the variable name is a check to see if the variable is empty. If it is empty it will display a message (or you could include another file), if $page does have a value, skip ahead and try to include the appropriate text file.

PHP Code:


			
//Check if $page is empty

if(!$page) {

echo "welcome to the main page";

}

//if $page has a value try and include the file

else {

include("$page.txt");

}

The final file might look something like this:

PHP Code:


			
//Lets store the value of $_GET['content'] in a variable called $page so its easier to read.



$page = $_GET['content'];

?>





This is my page





This is the header



This is the sidebar







if(!$page) {

echo "welcome to the main page";

}

else {

include("$page.txt");

}

?>



Footer

now we can build a plain HTML menu to point users to our available pages.

somepage.php?content=firstpage
somepage.php?content=secondpage

And that is one way to build a simple dynamic web page, separating your content from design, and keeping 1 file for your layout. This means you can easily change your entire site wide layout simply by editing your CSS and HTML found in somepage.php

Don't worry if this all doesnt make sense right away, a little bit of time spent playing with it and it will sink in... I promise.

In the next installment we'll look at how to do this a little bit different, we'll store the content in a variable, as well as a title tag and meta tags so we get some SEO value out of all these new pages. We'll also look at using MySQL database instead of individual text files to store all of this data. :) If youhave questions about this, do not hesitate to post a comment below.

Happy coding!

5 Simple Steps To Build Better Banner Ads

OS-Mark — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:53:24 GMT

Lets take a look at a few techniques to build more effective banner ads.

1) Logo - always include the logo for the site your promoting, and don't alter it. Even if the banner never gets clicked, building "brand familiarity" with each banner impression is important.

2) File Size - Keep it as small as possible, preferably under 20KB. The faster your banner loads, the more time the user has to see it.

3) Animation - from subtle to zany... animation does a good job grabbing the viewers attention, even if its only for a second. Banner ads are advertising, and a good ad attracts the eye.

4) Call to action - one of the most overlooked elements in a good banner design. Informing the user to "Click Here" or "Register" really does work, believe it or not, not everyone knows they are supposed to click on a banner ad.

5) Colors - How often do you see a white banner ad? not very often I bet. The reason is simple, light text on a dark background stands out more. Articles and content should be like a newspaper or book (dark text on light background) but ads should be like a good print ad which is the opposite.

Take these 5 steps into consideration for the next banner ad you create, I can almost promise it'll bring better results to your ad campaign.

Learning PHP from the ground up - if statements

OS-Mark — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:27:33 GMT

If your just getting started with PHP be sure and check out the earlier posts in "Learning PHP from the ground up"

Part1 .:. Part2

Part 3 if statements

If statements are incredibly useful, and quite easy to pick up on. Once you have em down you'll often wonder how you got by without them.

Lets get started..

On the first line we make a comparison between the brackets (), then if the comparison is true PHP will execute whatever is between the curly braces {}

here is an example of the construct simplified with no comparison and does nothing.

PHP Code:


			
if() 

{

}

in the following example we'll check to see if $something is equal to 1.

If $something does equal 1, we set a variable called $foo to a simple line of text. If $something does not equal 1 it will skip what is between the curly braces {}.

PHP Code:


			
if($something == 1) 

{

$foo = 'yup, something is 1';

}

Take note that when doing the compare part of the if construct we use 2 equal signs side by side ==. This is the way comparisons work, you can also things like greater than, less than, greater than or equal to etc in your comparisons if you like.

We still havent told PHP to print anything on the screen yet, so lets use echo to print some text (we'll print the value of $foo) on the screen.

PHP Code:


			
if($something == 1) 

{

$foo = 'yup, something is 1';



echo $foo;

}

Now when you run this script nothing will show up on your screen, the reason (as you may have guessed) is our if statement is looking at the variable $something which does not yet exist and can't equal 1. So the comparison in our if statement returns as False and does not execute the code between the curly braces {}.

To make it work we simply need to fill the variable $something with a value of 1. We'll do that on our first line, it must happen before the if comparison.

PHP Code:


			
$something = 1;



if($something == 1) 

{

$foo = 'yup, something is 1';



echo $foo;

}

now when you run this script it should print our line of text.

yup, something is 1

Working good so far? good lets look quickly at some of the finer points in this example.

we use echo to output (or print) our text to the screen, we can also easily use the "Print" construct, it works very similar to the echo method.

example:

PHP Code:


			
$something = 1;



if($something == 1) 

{

$foo = 'yup, something is 1';



print $foo;

}

You'll notice that we used single quotes '' only around the string of text, they are not needed (optional) when your working with integers.

Lets say we wanted to use text instead of integers for our comparison.

example:

PHP Code:


			
$something = 'PHP Basics';



if($something == 'PHP Basics') 

{

$foo = "I am learning $something";



print $foo;

}

notice we now use single quotes around 'PHP Basics' because it is now a string of text. Also notice that when we set the value of $foo we used double quotes "". This is because we added $something as part of the value for $foo, basically the double quotes allow the variables value to work in a string of text. If you use single quotes instead of the double it will treat the variable as a only string of text and simply output $something.

Try both examples if needed so you have an understanding of which quotes to use and when its an easy thing to see but I found it hard to explain.

variable inside single quotes printed literally.

PHP Code:


			
$something = 'PHP Basics';



if($something == 'PHP Basics') 

{

$foo = 'I am learning $something';



print $foo;

}

Now lets put together something that makes use of all this and introduces an "else". I have added comments to explain whats happening along the way.

Try changing the value of $something to see the else part working.

PHP Code:


			


//Set the value of $something

$something = 'PHP Basics';



//Check to see if $something matches

if($something == 'PHP Basics') 

{

//if the above is true set the value of $foo

$foo = "I am learning $something";

}



//If the if statement above was false set $foo to this instead



else

{

//used single quotes so the variable name would be printed

$foo = '$something did not match';

}



//Now that all the comparisons are done print the value of $foo

print $foo;

Next Time we'll build on this and look at using variables from Forms and URL's to build dynamic content. It's quite easy, and oooh so cool.

If your just getting started with PHP be sure and check out the earlier posts in "Learning PHP from the ground up"

Part1 .:. Part2

Some helpful links to the manual regarding echo, print, and if contructs.
http://ca3.php.net/print
http://ca3.php.net/echo
http://ca3.php.net/if
http://ca3.php.net/else

The long awaited Screenshots (webhosting)

Go_on — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:49:42 GMT

Read my latest (sad :( ) news about this project:
http://www.osempire.com/community/blog.php?b=17

Here are the screenshots + banners i designed.

Attached Thumbnails

So-Called Lifetime Links

evilfurby — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:57:57 GMT

In the past year I can easily think of 5 instances where I bought "lifetime links" on websites for a relatively low price, only to have my text links disappear from those sites only a few months, sometimes weeks, later. I guess there's a number of reasons that this happens. Either the webmaster is untrustworthy, or the site gets sold without any contractual notification on advertisements, or the rare case of a mistake lol.

Note to self: The old saying of "It's too good to be true", is true. "Cheap lifetime text links" often turn out to be expensive monthly text links.

Hosting news - not good

Go_on — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:14:16 GMT

Bad news :(
My friend needs to move one of his servers to another datacenter, so he doesn't have any money left and time to get a server for www.roadhosting.com and help to set it up!

So now i got the domain www.roadhosting.com and a design, but nobody that can help me put the design into a weblayout and help start this all....

Somebody interested, helping me?
I think i still have to start with resellers now...

Design:
http://www.osempire.com/community/blog.php?b=19

fg,
Go_on

[Photoshop CS3] Pixel Blast Tutorial - Part 1

fad3d — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:01:04 GMT

[Note: This tutorial will most likely work on older versions of Photoshop]
-----------------------------------------------
Welcome to the first part of the Tutorial of mine posted on OSempire!

The aim of this tutorial is to create a simple but affective Pixel Blast like effect for you to use for well... anything really.

First off, create a new image with the following:

Next thing we need to do is make sure that your Foreground & Background colours are set to the default colours (black and white). Press SHIFT & D together to reset them to the default colours.

Now we can get on with the more interesting part. We shall now be creating the basis of the Pixel Blast.

On the top of Photoshop, you should see a Drop down menu called "Filter" Click on it, and go down to "Render" then to "Clouds"
Tip - to get a different end result, click on "Difference Clouds"

Press CTRL & F a few times to repeat that process. You should end up with something like this:

Next, click on "Filter" at the top of Photoshop, then go down to "Pixelate" then to "Mezzotint". A box should appear and on the dropdown, select Short lines like so:

Click ok, and you should now have something like this:

Next we are going to Blur the image (You'll see why soon enough)

Click on "Filter" then go to "Blur" then to "Radial Blur" a box like the one below should appear, set yours to the settings in the pic:

As you can see from that, it has vastly turned into a blast of pixels!

Thats it for part 1, in part 2, we shall be adding a nice colour effect to it.

Experiment with what you have learned so far!

No! Why is it not going well!

firestarter — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:57:49 GMT

It seems there are only about 5 commited players in RS that seem to take the clan seriuosly.!.!. If anyone knows any RS players or you are one your self- please join us!

Also the site is going to be taken down soon because I dont have time to keep it up and running and also manage my life and my playing the game so in game we are Miners of Zamorak.

I am Crusher2882 in game so for now on this site will be basically hibernating.