devitry.com

Tech in the country. Programming & Technology inovations.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

PayPal Micro... a new era for premium digital content?

PayPal has quietly introduced micropayments for digital content. I would actually call it beta program for "mini" payments, because you still can't handle transactions under $0.07.. What they have done is reduce their fees from content priced between $0.07 and $12. These fees are especially noticable in the under $1 range. They don't advertise it on their site.. and they don't let you sign up anywhere directly that I can find. The new fees are ($0.05 + 5%) vs the old fees of (2.9% + $0.30)... Email me (left link) if you want to know more.

Webmasters who take advantage of this should easily be able to reduce their fees for low priced digital content, and still make more money. I've reduced my monthly premium fees for RunABot premium service (The only premium service I currently offer). I am thinking about what else I can offer in this lower price range.. it seems that most regular internet users have a paypal account, and I've already handled completely automated paypal integration for digital payment.. so it should be easy to make a new pay service... the question is what would people want to buy?

A handy chart of fees is here: PayPal Micro Payment Fees

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

The Googlebot to WebMaster feedback loop

There is a great new feature for Webmasters from Google! You can now find the top errors from the GoogleBot error log from when it spiders your site. It shows you what google is trying to look at and what problems it's running into. Great for figuring out which pages are getting errors and which pages are off limits.

However, Google hid it in a smaller beta project called sitemaps. To further frustrate people, they didn't give it any real name, only using links titled "Verify" and "Stats". So, I recommend you webmasters sign up for sitemaps, create at least a simple site map, then click on the "verify" link. You create a verification file to your site, to prove you are the webmaster. Then, after a day or so, google will give you a stats link with all the googlebot errors.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Full Moon..

There was a full moon this weekend. I think that's what led to an emotionally charged outing on Saturday. Does the moon really affect people that much? Or, it is just that people say out later when the moon is full?

My flagship site is back up and running after a forced retrofit of a moderation system. The site got more complicated than I remember, so it's taken me ages to get everything working.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Speedwell Forge Triathlon

Well, today I finished the big race of the season. I ended up not training all the much this year, so I was pretty happy when I still came through with personal record on the course. I don't have the splits yet, but my total time was around 2:56, which was 2 minutes faster then last time. Maybe I'll do more next year, or maybe I'll just try for longer running races.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Myth Busters

I think I've found my new favorite show. Why I hadn't seen this before, I dunno. These people try to prove urban legends could or could not happen. Next week, they are going to try to shoot up a car and make it explode like you see in movies. I get the feeling they like to blow up stuff.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Gas back down..

It looks like gas is back down under $3 in my area. As I've said before, I think that $3 gas is a major cut over point to alternatives. The main alternative of course being plug in hybrid, not hydrogen. Car companies don't want to make these because they know it'll create a mess when people start sourcing their car energy from electrical lines. Converting all the cars, adding new power plants, figuring ways to get road tax, even calculating the economy of these things is hard. I've heard a few press reports on these and they mention 200mpg car, which of course is completely misleading. PIHC's (Plug in hybrid cars) should have an efficiency rating in mkwh (miles per kilowatt hour) and and maybe list kwhg (kilowatt hour per gallon). That is, how far you can get on a battery charge, and how efficient the motor is at generating electricity. Of course, how much your battery can store is very important as well. Let's hope someone takes the lead on this soon.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

More frequent updates..

Well, since there have been some major changes on my other sites, I am going to try to update this site more. I finally got email to blog working, and that should make it easier as well. My main site, mytheme.com was basically shut down, and so I'm thinking about moving on to other things. Let me know if you have ideas for a big website!

Katrina Thoughts Being at home all day, I've been watching a lot of the Katrina coverage on tv and online. The Interdictor had a good personal story blog about what he was going through. Besides just donating to the causes, of course I'd like to do more to help these people. I've already signed up with a few organizations as a volunteer. I certainly have a few weeks or month free to help out. My mom had volunteered with the RedCross, but had many complaints about that organization. I don't want to just sit behind a desk and answer the phone and fill out paperwork. If you have any better ideas, please let me know.