Update: Spuxy Studios

Just last month I launched my newest venture, Spuxy Studios. Spuxy, simply put, is a web consulting and development firm. We aim to provide low prices but unbelievably high quality work. Why? ‘Cause we love helping out small businesses.

Read more about Spuxy Studios here on The Orange County Register.

The Problem with Cloud-service Dependency

One major problem I’ve witnessed the past year is the growing dependency on cloud computing services–specifically AWS, a cheap and popular choice of many large social networks. When the service goes down, sites like Reddit and Formspring essentially have almost power to perform on both the frontend and the backend. As Amazon works to fix the problems, thousands of sites are inaccessible. How reliable are cloud computing services such as AWS? Is it healthy for a site to have complete dependency on these services? Cloud computing picked up popularity only recently, it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves in the upcoming decade.

10 (Awesome) TEDTalk Segments for Entrepreneurs

A fellow entrepreneur gave me a slight nudge today that motivated me to post today’s blog.  I think you will certainly find value in it as it incorporates some of the best minds of the 21st century.

Remember…..    The secret to learning as an entrepreneur is to mix equal parts of inspiration and perspiration. Hard work without a vision is futile, while a great idea without execution is similarly worthless. In these TED talks, you’ll find the inspiration you need and the know-how to get it done.

1. Seth Godin on Standing Out: What makes you so special? Seth Godin’s talk is all about why people just ignore the ordinary. In order to stand out, Godin says, you must be either bad or bizarre. Boring will not bring you success.
2. Alex Tabarrok on How Ideas Trump Crises: Economist Alex Tabarrok’s talk celebrates the practice of idea sharing. He explains that through free trade and globalization, we are now sharing more than ever to create a community that’s more healthy and prosperous than before.
3. Dean Kamen on Inventing and Giving: Get inspired by this master of invention with more than 150 patents under his belt. In this talk, Dean Kamen discusses the Segway, and takes a look at even more big ideas, including portable energy and water purification to be used in developing countries.
4. Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success: How does success happen, and why do people succeed? Richard St. John knows, and he’ll tell you in this talk. Watch the video to learn the lessons of success.
5. Tony Robbins: As an entrepreneur, your choices make a difference. You can impact the future of your business, an industry, a community. In this talk, life coach Tony Robbins examines the invisible forces that motivate your actions.
6. Derek Sivers: How to Start a Movement: Do you want to make an impact? Derek Shivers can show you how. Explore this talk, and you will see how movements really get started — with the power of two.
7. Itay Talgam: Lead Like the Great Conductors: Entrepreneurs must exhibit excellent leadership and management skills. You work much like a conductor — orchestrating different parts to ensure that they all come together like they should. In this talk, Itay Talgam examines how orchestra conductors can provide entrepreneurs with crucial lessons in leadership.
8. Gary Vaynerchuk: Do What You Love: Gary Vaynerchuk insists that there are no excuses for not doing what you love. If you’re a dreamer, but not quite yet a doer, Gary’s TED talk can give you the shot in the arm you need.
9. Alexis Ohanian: How to Make a Splash in Social Media: Make social media work for your venture with the guidance of Alexis Ohanian. Using the example of a humpback whale’s Web stardom, you’ll learn how to master memes and marketing in social media.
10. Richard Branson’s Life at 30,000 Feet: Find inspiration from Richard Branson, the entrepreneur who turned a record shop into the Virgin empire. This talk examines his career, near-death experiences, and some of his motivations.

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Part 2: Tips on Starting a Successful Forum

Make sure to read Part 1 before starting.

1. Forum Software – Choosing the right forum software can be a great time and money saver in the long run. I can testify from personal experience. It’s really a pain in the ass for you AND the members to go through a forum software switch. It screws up a lot of the permissions and makes your members reset their password (depending on the forum softwares). Right from the beginning, choose a software to stick with. I highly recommend vBulletin.
2. Post Exchanges - In my opinion, this is the easiest way to make your forum seem more active. Everyday, hundreds of webmasters are exchanging posts on forums. What does that all mean? To put it in a simple way, if someone leaves 20 posts on your forum, you leave 20 posts on their forum. When I first began my forum, I did ton of this, and received hundreds of posts. Without post exchanges, I doubt my forum would exist right now.
3. Organization - I hate unorganized forums. Forums that are hard to navigate, messy, and confusing can deter users away. Try not to make too many forum categories and sections. All they do is make the forum homepage longer and make the forum seem emptier. Unpopular/inactive forums should be merged with other larger forums.
4. Number of staff - Remove all unnecessary staff. If there is no moderation and managing needed, why are they even on the staff list? Don’t take me wrong though, staff can’t be really helpful. It’s just embarrassing if a guest lands on your forum and sees more admins and mods than active members.
5. Professionalism – Present your forum in a professional manner, with a good looking design, easy to read, good grammar, and nothing obnoxious. cuz no1 wantz to c u talk lyk dis. itz anoying lol

Well, there you go. I hope you really got something out of it. It’s sad to see forums (some with great potential and a great niche) die out really fast. I may make a part 3, depending on your feedback, so please vote.

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Page Titles Are Important to Forums

Page titles, most importantly the index page title, are crucial to how your website will rank in the search engines. Poor page titles can also turn away potential visitors. When a person is searching in Google for a ‘computer help forum’, they may find that the first 4 results have the following page titles: Computer Help Forum, PC Help, Computer Support Forum, and Silly Joe Bytes – Powered by vBulletin. While ‘Silly Joe Bytes’ may be an excellent computer help forum, odds are a general web surfer will pass over this forum because of it’s poor page title.

When choosing a forum page title for your index page, it is important to assign meaning to it. Don’t use a nickname or something you think is cool. It make work if you’re a celebrity like ShoeMoney, but odds are the general web surfer isn’t going to know who you are or what monikers you go by. If you have a computer help forum, then try to keep those keywords in your index page title.

Cleaning Your Page Title

When you install vBulletin, or other forum software, they often include a ‘powered by xxx’ in your page title. By including this in the default, they are lucky enough to get a few forum owners who either don’t care or don’t know how to remove it. Having a page title that says “Dog Forum – Powered by vBulletin” is not as friendly as a page title of just “Dog Forum”. First, the extra words in your page title will take away some of the authority of your main keywords. You want all your strength going to the keywords Dog and Forum, not Powered and vBulletin. And second, it’s not as attractive. Really, no one but webmasters knows what vBulletin is. If a 40 year-old single mom if browsing the internet, she might skip over your entry in Google simple because she’s unfamiliar with what vBulletin is and why it’s in your page title. She’ll just click the next site on the list with a better page title.

So how do you remove the “Powered by vBulletin”? It’s quite simple really. In your VB Admin panel, go to the template editor and select FORUMHOME. In there you will see:

<title><phrase 1=”$vboptions[bbtitle]”>$vbphrase[x_powered_by_vbulletin]</phrase></title>

Keep it simple and remove everything between <title> and </title>. Enter in the title of your choice, such as < title >Computer Help Forum< / title >. It’s that simple. By doing this, your forum will keep the remaining page title structure and edit the index page title only.

As for phpBB 3.0, if you want to edit your page title you need to open the overall_header.php file in your styles/template name folder. You will see a line that looks like this:

<title>{SITENAME} • {L_MCP} • {L_UCP} • {PAGE_TITLE}</title>

From here you can add/edit anything between the < title > tags to create your own custom page title.

In conclusion, having a clean, user friendly page title is very important to the success of your blog. Not only will it move up the SERPs quicker because you have targeted keywords in the title, but you’re forum will appear more approachable to the general browser.

If you are running vBulletin and have the money, I HIGHLY suggest purchasing vBSEO. It will take care of all things SEO related, and will make your life that much easier.

I’m still alive.

I wanted to apologize for the lack of posts and updates on the blog. Summer break is coming to an end and I’ll be returning to high school in less than a week. Although my plan this summer was to work on several projects and work to make some serious dough, I put my priorities straight and spent a great part studying for the SATs. The two ‘large projects’ I have posted earlier on will have to be delayed for probably a long time for several reasons. First reason is that my funds are very low right now. The economy sucks. Another reason is that junior year is coming up for me, which is notorious for being the hardest year in high school. I’m going to have to really focus on school, despite my hatred and laziness.

FBLA – As some of you may have known, I entered two competitions this year for FBLA: Internet Application Programming and Web Site Development. I’m happy to announce that I placed 5th place in the state of California for Internet Application Programming, and 2nd place for Web Site Development (which was enough for me to go to nationals). Unfortunately, I lost in the preliminaries in nationals. I definitely plan to go for round 2 next year.

Spring Break is almost here!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, and to be honest, nothing too exciting has happened. Like usual, I’m pretty much busy with school and homework, leaving little time for any significant work in development. My grades are lower than I want them to be, partly because of my terrible start of the semester thanks to FBLA.

During January and February, I was busy working on two big projects for FBLA, aka Future Business Leaders of America. I entered two events: Web Site Development and Internet Application Programming, which literally sucked hours upon hours of my time. Good news though– I have made States for one of the events. I’m not sure about the other one yet (results are not out yet), but I am CONFIDENT that I have made States for that event too.

Lastly, I have a major project in the workings. Still in the very, very very early stages, but I am VERY excited! Hopefully, I will have proper funding to really get it off its feet. More details to come! (:

Where my $62,000 went.

Despite the rumors of how loaded I am with money, in reality, I’m close to being broke. No, I didn’t go on a $62,000 shopping spree online, no I didn’t spend on a car. I spent a crapload on helping out my mom and grandparents. Especially in tough financial times, almost everyone is struggling. When $62,000 fell from the sky in front of me, I was extremely happy at first, but then I realized that I should take this blessing and help my family out. $15,000 was taken by the government (damn IRS), $12,000 went to my parents, $5,000 went to bills, $7,000 went to my grandma and family, but only $13,000 has been invested in other projects. Basically, I have about $10,000 remaining, which is proving to grow smaller and smaller as I am about to spend a huge chunk on a few projects of mine that are soon to come.

But it’s all good, cause I got my friend, eBay: