Archive for September, 2011
Posted on September 28, 2011 at 3:17 pm, by Varial | |
Following yesterday’s announcement that we will be sponsoring BarCamp Saskatoon, we thought this would be as good a time as any to announce another event that we will be sponsoring this fall — the Halifax Pop Explosion.
Halifax Pop Explosion is an international music festival and conference that presents 150 bands in 18 venues over 5 days to over 17,000 fans and industry delegates from around the world.
Varial is pleased to be a long time sponsor of the Halifax Pop Explosion and encourages you to take part in the event which will be held in Halifax on October 18 – 22, 2011.
For more information and to view this year’s festival lineup, please visit: http://halifaxpopexplosion.com/
Posted on September 27, 2011 at 2:11 pm, by Varial | |
We are pleased to announce that we are now an official sponsor of BarCamp Saskatoon, an event designed to bring together people who love technology to talk and to learn.
This year’s BarCamp is being held on Saturday, November 5, 2011 from 12pm-9pm at VendAsta.
For more information please visit: http://www.barcampsaskatoon.org/
Posted on September 21, 2011 at 3:27 pm, by Varial | |
When launching Ominocity, our local music blog, we had a clear strategy for how we would monetize the site — advertising income from Google AdSense and direct ad sales and affiliate income from TicketMaster and iTunes.
Prior to launching the site I posted a pre-sale code to a NOFX concert along with my TicketMaster affiliate link in my Facebook status and made $50 in commission from a single status update. If I could make that much from a Facebook post, just think of what I could make when we launched the site! Well, TicketMaster got the last laugh and cancelled their affiliate program the week we launched. Efffff!!!
With TicketMaster now out as a revenue source, it looks like we will have to rely a lot more on iTunes. Do people even buy music anymore?
Fortunately the iTunes affiliate program covers more than just music. You get a 5% commission on any album, movie, TV show, iPhone or Mac app sale that you refer. Their cookie lasts for 72 hours so if a visitor clicks on an album link and then ends up buying an iPhone app, you still get credit for the referral.
We applied to the iTunes affiliate program, was accepted in, and bought a couple apps using our affiliate link to test it out. Days later our LinkShare account still showed no sales. WTF?
It turns out that iTunes has affiliate programs for pretty much every country they sell in. We signed up for the main US iTunes program so when I bought apps through the Canadian store, we did not get credit for the sale.
While this wouldn’t be a big problem for Ominocity, since we could replace links for the US affiliate program to Canadian affiliate links since the site caters to a Canadian audience, this would be a problem for our technology blog which has a vast international audience.
While searching for a solution to this problem I stumbled upon GeoRiot, a service specifically designed to resolve this issue. With GeoRiot you swap out your iTunes affiliate links with special GeoRiot links which detect the visitor’s location and directs them to the appropriate geographical iTunes store.
You simply enter in your iTunes affiliate information into GeoRiot’s system for each country that you are accepted in and then GeoRiot takes care of rest. So, if a US visitor clicks your GeoRiot link, they will be directed to the US store and the commission for the sale will appear in your US affiliate account.
In exchange for providing this service, GeoRiot skims a small percentage of your clicks, but never for your base country, so while GeoRiot will get a small percentage of your referrals, you will never make less with GeoRiot than if you used a single iTunes affiliate link. Further, GeoRiot tries to skim only in countries where you are not accepted in an affiliate program to prevent from costing you a sale!
Using GeoRiot is really a win-win. You will make more money by using their system since your affiliate links now credit you for sales in all countries you are accepted in and their skim ratio is very fair and will never cost you more than if you had just used a single iTunes affiliate link. The service is designed to make you more money — and it will!
For more information on GeoRiot, please check out: http://www.georiot.com/
Posted on September 15, 2011 at 9:00 am, by Varial | |
Since launching a daily posting schedule 3 months ago, our tech blog has seen a lot of growth and success. Our app recommendations have been considerably popular, to the point in which we have decided to branch those off into their own website which we are now developing and will launch at a later date.
Further, we have decided to switch from a daily posting schedule to a weekly posting schedule, to allow more time for us to prepare more in depth articles for our readers.
We hope you enjoy the many articles we have planned for the upcoming weeks!
Posted on September 14, 2011 at 12:53 pm, by Varial | |
Last month we introduced our readers to Elegant Themes, a premium WordPress template club that we highly recommended. This month we’d like to showcase Rocket Theme, a premium theme designer that offers template clubs for Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, phpBB, and Magento.
You can join each template club for as little as $50 which provides access to Rocket Theme’s entire back catalog of templates with new themes being added each and every month. Developer licenses are available enabling web designers to re-sell customized versions of these themes to their clients.
Be sure to check out Rocket Theme if you plan to launch a website powered by Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, phpBB, or Magento in the near future!
Posted on September 14, 2011 at 12:17 am, by Varial | |
Our Apollo, Luna, and Poseidon servers will be rebooted momentarily in order to apply an upgrade to their kernels. Services will be offline for roughly 5 minutes as the servers reboot. Thank you for your patience!
Posted on September 13, 2011 at 7:48 pm, by Varial | |
When we launched Ominocity, our local music blog, we spent considerable time searching for the best Facebook Connect plugin for WordPress to allow visitors to comment and interact with the site without having to create an account. We tested pretty much every Facebook Connect plugin we could find and settled on Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin by Socialable which was the most feature full plugin available.
While many Facebook Connect plugins just swap out your comment system, Socialable’s Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin automatically creates an account for the visitor when they connect to your site through Facebook. Not only can they leave comments as their Facebook profile, the plugin also allows them to “like” posts, and offers widgets for you to display recent visitors, fans of your page, and recent activity on your Facebook page.
Socialable’s Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin can be downloaded for free at: http://www.sociable.es/facebook-connect/
Posted on September 12, 2011 at 9:42 pm, by Varial | |
After viewing several office spaces last week, today we signed the papers and will be moving into The Two Twenty (220 20th St W) on September 15th. The Two Twenty is a community of like-minded businesses operating within the same building and features a gourmet coffee shop, private offices and studios, and a co-working lounge. Varial will be moving into a private office on the 2nd floor of the building and we will likely spend a lot of time mingling in the co-working lounge on the main floor. We look forward to moving in and networking with all of the freelancers, designers, developers and artists working within the building!
Posted on September 8, 2011 at 10:00 pm, by Varial | |
The awesome, life saving, password management application 1Password is now available for purchase on the Mac App Store for $19.99 (50% off the regular price) and includes a free upgrade to version 4.0 when released.
AgileBits has advised that 1Password v4.0 will only be distributed through the Mac App Store so current users who wish to upgrade should purchase 1Password from the Mac App Store now while at the reduced price to essentially pay their upgrade fee. Instructions on how to upgrade to the Mac App Store version of 1Password have been posted on the AgileBits forum.
If managing all your passwords for you isn’t enough, 1Password can also sync your data using Dropbox so your passwords are always updated across all of your computers and mobile devices!
