Stephan Miller

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I went off on a tangent last night and built this. It only took a few hours.

When you enter a term and hit go, it preloads all of the search engine links for you so you can click them and have the results open in the frame.

Please give me any comments, suggestions, new categories or new sites that Dir23 needs in the comments and have fun!

Cover via Amazon

I think it is quite ironic that I am writing this post while trying to avoid writing a post. I know why I searched for the topic in Google and while I tell myself it’s to increase the my writing output, I know for a fact that in order to increase, I just need to do it.

Lately I have been testing out both Wikidpad and The Journal. While I used to write more longhand, now I do most of it on the computer. I find it easier to find things I have written and [...] Continue Reading…

Image via Wikipedia

I use Flock. One reason is that some plugins I would have to install are built in. Another is that Flock doesn’t use Live Bookmarks. The last time I checked, you couldn’t shut these off in Firefox. This post should show you how to make it run a bit faster.

So if you bookmark a site in Firefox and the site happens to have a feed, it’s coming along whether you like it or not. And Firefox will periodically update the feed at the expense of performance.

While it probably doesn’t cost much, but there is still the principle [...] Continue Reading…

I meant to get this up for Christmas day, but then I just stayed off the computer and internet all together, which I think was a good choice.

Here is where 4% of our Christmas batteries went to. It was a toy we bought at the last minute and was a hit. And now, for the most part, he sings songs from the BackYardigans:

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Image by eristoddle via Flickr

A feed reader is supposed to speed things up. You don’t have to visit the blog to read what’s been published.

That’s how mine started and somehow I have managed to collect over 2000 feeds which I have categorized along the way:

Advertising
Affiliate
Blogging
Design
Developer
Forums
Internet Marketing and Make Money
Money (finance)
Productivity and Freelance
SEO
Social Media
Tech
Thinkers
Upcoming and Memes
Wordpress
Writing

Didn’t mean to do this. It just sort of happened that way. It is impossible to read 2000 feeds. No matter which feed reader I use, it’s click, wait while the reader semi-locks-up and then read. So here is what I did:

Step 1: Export each [...] Continue Reading…

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

“You can’t comment on that post. It’s two months old. It will look like spam.”

“Damn! A year old, can’t like that one. It is so last year.”

“Shoot! That software looks a lot better than the program I am currently using. Time to try it even though I have only used the other program for a week.”

Over the last weekend I downloaded some desktop meta-search software. I haven’t used software like this in a few years, ever since Google got a bit better at finding the sites I needed. What it does [...] Continue Reading…

Image via Wikipedia

Your duties as a blogger may get confusing after a bit. Initially, you may have started with a simple plan of posting every day and leaving 10 comments on other blogs each day. My little trip into blogging started that easily.

Eventually you will run into a lot of things that may help your blog and you will try them out. I did that also. Wow, a little bit of extra work can go a long way.

Then you get to the point that you can no longer categorize any of the activities you are involved in. But you [...] Continue Reading…

I remember starting out with Twitter a few months ago. I had made fun of it up to that. Had no use for it. But then I read an interview of a blogger, can’t remember who know. And he said that joining Twitter was the best thing he ever did to promote his blog.

So I decided to give it a try. It took a while. The “What are you doing?” question is very deceptive. If all of your 140 character tweets answer this same question, you are missing out on some valuable uses: brain farts, things found online, blog [...] Continue Reading…

This is now one of my favorite sites. It gained that status over the weekend.

I like software. It is responsible for most of the work I actually get done. Without it, I would have to do everything manually. Other people use employees to expand their business. I use software.

Every now and then I hunt for software. A tool I need. Sometimes I find it and sometimes I don’t. And sometimes I have 54 options.

Software is supposed to save time. But sometimes finding the right tool can take a lot of it away. That’s where Wakoopa comes in.

Wakcopa suggests software [...] Continue Reading…

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ground Zero
I started out selling on Ebay. I didn’t know much more than HTML. I knew nothing about SEO. And I knew that some people had made money with affiliate programs. It was sort of like being a freelance salesman.
A Year Later
I started playing around with PHP. I had bought my first domain. And I was learning SEO. I had yet to make more than a few hundred bucks in a month from affiliate programs but it was a start.
After Another Year
My day job was my second main source of income. But my sites [...] Continue Reading…