• The Matrix
• Spider-man
  Spider-man 2
• Nanny McPhee
• Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
• Hitch
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Wedding Crashers (doesn’t support fast worwarding … maybe improved with xbmc 2.0)
• Old Boy
• Crash
• History of Violence

Movies to Get in the Future:

You can use CSS to show images instead of text.

This is is useful because that way you can have a simple HTML document as your primary document, and make all the changes via CSS through an external style sheet.

Basically you define an element, then add the text between them. When you define the element, just make sure the backrground image is what you want to see. Then you can next another element inside, and make sure the “text is off so you can see the background image.

Voila!
A better explanation with examples can be found here

Alternatively:
Negative Indent Trick: Rather than using a second element to “hide” it, you can just use the indent trick and indent it so its not visible … but still visible to screen browsers

Outside the incestuous pool of “Internet Marketers”, there are actually two great examples of the “Web2.0″ sites which operated on the usual principles — and turning out to work just fine.

The formula appears to be: Captivated interested audience + valued product/service + relevant call action == high dollar value ‘purchase’ x massive conversion == high ‘profits’.

1) Penny Arcade: Child’s Play
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Through a giant blog audience, they were able to capture a common interest in helping sick kids — through gaming. Realizing that it sucks to be sick (especially when you’re a kid), they were able to galvanize an audience who are obviously devotees to gaming to all pony up cash to buy gaming stuff for kids in hospital.

The interesting thing is that 1) they directly asked for donations and 2) they were able to use Amazon to help with the project — specifically to order the games, and then ship the games.

The formula appears: Captivated interested audience + valued product/service + relevant call action == high dollar value ‘purchase’ x massive conversion == high ‘profits’.

Captivated audience: Penny arcade readers — readers who are gamers.
Valued product/ service: The charity — buying games for kids
Relevant call to action: Please give money so we can buy games for kids who are sick
And the result: $$$ result. And of course great beneficiaries of it all … the kids.

2) 37 Signals “Getting Real”:
——————————–
Similar story here. Large audience (?20k readers?) + high value product/ service + relevant call to action == $$$.

Captivated audience: Programmers / designers / web businesses
Valued product or service: Getting Real — an ebook(!) about how they do what they do … and they’re doing it successfully: basically how they created several web applications from scratch — quickly, effectively, and profitably. (?bootstrapping anyone?)
Call to action: their roll out involved letting their audience know through their blog, “buzz”and word of mouth … no affiliate marketing involved, and a limited sales page. No guarantees or any of the usual stuff involved. Interesting…

Kottke.org seems to notice it as well
1750 x $19 == almost $20k in just a few days.
Apparently 400 000 people have used their products, so this is a pretty abysmal conversion. 2 / 400 == 0.5% — but they really haven’t employed any of the standard marketing techniques.

The best part of the 37signals story is that it directly fits into the micro / DIY publishing arena that is the direct equivalent of what an “ebook” is!

he whole ebook phenomena is tarnished in broad strokes by junk info merchants … but success stories like 37signals clearly gives it legitimacy.

And when it boils down to it, its obvious that its a profitable road for everyone involved.

Sitepoint.com — appeared to notice it a long time ago. They started as a site for ‘tutorials’and the like … but just a few years ago started self publishing. Granted, its not electronic, but Voila … direct marketing + internet == profits.

A way to check out the CSS easily is to do the following:

1. Download the file completely through the firefox browser.
2. Download any extraneous css or image files — sometimes the images files are not downloaded automatically because they are called through the css file.
** use “Flash Got” to manually download all of those files at once if possible.
3. Use dreamweaver open the “index” file
4. Dreamweaver will be able to examine the different containers, divs etc easily.
5. By cross-examining against the CSS file itself you will be able to tell which containers have which graphics — and therefore how to get the “look” that is needed … often achieved through “background” files.
6. Firefox on the laptop has the “Developer” tool through “Tools –> Developer” … can use it to examine CSS. But ALSO to actually change CSS on the fly.
7. However, this is only worth knowing and doing after you’ve examined the above in dreamweaver.
8. By “Changing CSS on the fly” you will be able to see exactly what stuff does what — and what positions do what.

Although a lot is made of the trickiness of doing things through tables, it is an involved thing to do curved boxes in CSS.

See the delicious bookmarks for more resources, such as this article on sitepoint.
There are at least two, sometimes three divs (or spans, or classes, or whatever — apparently this article discusses the differences.)

1. div #1 that often has the “background image” that is repeated in the “y” axis that contains the right and left edge of the ‘box’.
2. div #2 that has the “background image” that is that the top border of the box
3. div #3 that has the “background image” that is the bottom border of the box.

Pronet Advertising has a good example.

Some websites just use #2 and #3 to create solid tops and bottoms (but no fancy ‘left’ and ‘right’ borders through the same graphic) — see Movable Type

In movable type, they don’t even use separate ‘div’s … rather, they use CSS to change the h2 of the box, which has a “background image” which is the top border of the box; the container actually has the bottom border.

I have tried it as well … see in the files.

How often does it actually happen?

THe article says that by calculating the percentage payout 90M by the total revenues, its probably less than 1%.

I suppose its a relative account of things, but of course the wider question is how does Google do in actually policing click-fraud?? How well do its engineers and technology do this?? Is it getting better?? Worse? etc etc.

Since Ad-sense is the only method of revenue (the largest probably) this is a large issue.

I wonder who else will pick up on this?

Link: TheHungs.org

I have started a new family website, since a baby is on the way.

That way, the hope is that it will offer more functionality, extensibility, and flexibility (in short, more fun) than a simple “gallery site” for pictures.

Good hosting plan too:
Dreamhost.com –> “777″ code –> $9.95US for one year: 20gigs of space, 1Terrabyte /month of transfer. The equivalent of a “level 1″ deal. Here are the details

Still waiting for the domain to go ‘live’. At that point can start doing stuff with it.

Plan: at a minimum
1) Get Wordpress Blog going — done
2) Get a nice family-oriented theme for WP ( )
3) Get a gallery plug-in (*DONE — not quite working yet)
4) Upload some pictures already! (*DONE — vegas pictures … some of them … are up)