The Bestest Blog of All-Time

I am very proud to announce the commencement of voting for "Bestest Blog of the Year." . Not only is this a huge deal for anyone who has followed this site, but it will symbolically mark the transition from Bestest Blog to Blankest Blank ! The process is super simple. There are 105 blogs in the running. Go here and vote for them on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 is the worst, 5 is the best). If you want to make your vote count 3 times as much, be sure to register first. Voting will end 2 weeks from today, August 6th (which also happens to be my 2 year wedding anniversary) and winners will be announced on August 7th. The winner will receive (at least) a $50 cash prize! They will also have a link to their blog featured on the Blankest Blank Home Page for the next year (until the next blog of the year is decided). The overall top 10 blogs (including the winner) will have their link featured here at Bestest Blog (replacing the Blog of the Month and Featured Blog in the top le

Wow, that was surprising painless! You can now register for BlankestBlank.com. Currently there's not really any reason to other than to help me make sure it is working. But VERY SOON (we're talking hopefully today) the votes of registered users will count 3x as much as guests. So if you want your own site to win, registering is your best best! Let me know what you guys think! I keep adding new stuff all the time, and I love whatever feedback I can get!

Well, I am very happy to announce that the project I've been toiling at for about a week seems to be in working order. May I present to you The Blankest Blank Blog Directory . This is a link exchange directory kinda like the one here but with a bunch of new features. Let me tell you about them. Automatically Add Your Link : This directory is completely automated, once you fill out the necessary form your link will appear IMMEDIATELY. No more waiting a week for me to add it by hand. Best Blog of the Day : After we finish the contest for "Bestest Blog of the Year," anyone who has joined (or joins afterwards) the directory will automatically be in the running for "Best Blog of the Day" from here on out. Instead of me and guest bloggers choosing them, winners will be chosen democratically by whoever has the best score! Winners of this award will have a special link on the Blankest Blank home page , a special icon next to their link in the directory, and the

Well, maybe I mis-titled. I had a great weekend, but didn't have much time to work on the site. In case there was any doubt, I have successfully made it so that registered users have their votes counted 3 times more than guests. That way the casual visitor can just wander through without the hassle of registering while the dedicated visitor can register and make a little more out of their voting. Just over the weekend I already got 15 new registrants which is pretty awesome! I hope to have the "Bestest Blog of the Year" contest (details a few posts down) done within the next week. I've set myself the deadline of August 1st, which I'll absolutely meet, but I hope to have it done well before then. In any case, no matter when it starts you'll have plenty of time to vote. Also, today I started a new category up: the most fun game . All these games are free and a lot of fun. WARNING: do not attempt to vote for games unless you have some free time on you

Well, today I finally found what I was looking for. A great PHP login script to use on my site. There's the link if anyone is interested. I knew something like this had to be out there, and I was right. It is a preprogrammed system where users can register, login, retrieve forgotten passwords, etc. If this site ever gets really big (cross your fingers), I may require people to register before they are allowed to nominate or vote at all. In the mean time though, I plan on enticing people to register by making registered users votes count 3x as much as a guest. In the long run, you'll also be able to make your vote count even more by consistently voting for winners, nominating eventual winners, and another contests and activities. I wanted to make sure I got this implemented before the big contest (see below) starts. That way if your blog is in the running, you can register, and make sure your vote counts extra!

Ok, so I thought it'd be fun to take another look at the Top 10 in the voting for best blog over at my new site . The #1 blog at the last update got about 50 clicks in 3 days out of the deal, so let's see who's on top this time: 1. Flip This Body : 3.33 2. Blog About Your Blog : 3.17 3. Here Comes a Storm : 3.13 4. Doctor Anonymous : 3.11 5. Peggy, as she is : 3.08 6. Random Acts of Kindness : 3.05 7. Shoe Money : 3.04 8. Skittles' Place : 3.03 9. Critique My Blog : 3.02 10. It's a Blog Eat Blog World : 2.93 I'd have to agree with this list to the large part. I gave every blog on this list a vote of "5" myself. By the way, if you've already voted for best blog , know that you can vote again. I reorganized my database a bit, and as a result, I had to erase the database that kept track of who already voted. THE BIG CONTEST! Also, I mentioned a few posts ago that I'd be having a competition to find out who is the "Bestest

Well, this morning I opened up a 3rd category over at Blankest Blank . That is the category of funniest video . I've already nominated about 10 of my own recent favorites from StumbleUpon, so let the funniest video voting begin. If you have a favorite of your own, please feel free to nominate it , whether it's hosted on YouTube, or embedded in your blog, it doesn't matter, so long as at least YOU think it's funny! Enjoy!

I just thought some of you might be interested in the early results of voting for the best blog . When voting ends, there will be an official results page, but I just thought you might be interested in seeing things so far. I'll just do the top 10 so far. 1. Boing Boing , score is 3.44 2. Blog About Your Blog , 3.40 3. Flip This Body , 3.29 4. Micro Image , 3.27 5. Here Comes a Storm , 3.24 6. Doctor Anonymous , 3.19 7. Critique My Blog , 3.14 8. Shoe Money , 3.07 9. Peggy, As She Is , 3.06 10. The Ordinary Adventures of Tomas , 2.95 So congrats to the early leaders, all of these are very good blogs if you are interested. This is the top 10 out of the 69 submissions I've received so far! Otherwise, things are coming along. I am still working on that directory, as well as a login script and other things. The voting pages are looking very nice and would love to hear some opinions on that. The Blankest Blank Forum has a couple of threads going and is picking up s

Well, one of my regular readers R2K helped me out with a bug even if he didn't mean to. Well, R2K submitted his blog multiple times into the running for Best Blog . Although I'm sure he didn't mean to, this is an obvious no-no, but it needs to be prevented on my end. Once a blog is submitted its submitted, if it is submitted again (even if by a different user), there needs to be an error message that pops up stating such. This is a very easy fix, it's more tedious then anything, and first on my agenda today. The one vote per IP address concept came out very nicely. If you want to see a really nice addition to the site that I made, you'll have to vote through ALLLL of the funniest jokes or best blogs (currently about 20 and 60 of each respectively). After you check em all out, it makes it REALLLY easy to go back and give an extra look to the ones you liked the post. If I could get a couple of people to check out this feature and report back to me, it'd

Blankest Blank dot com Well, I decided to keep the updates coming on this site because the number of submissions and votes seems to be growing as I do. If you are just checking in, be sure to read the previous couple posts before this one. All great blogs please move to the front of the line My first priority of the day is to rework the ordering system. Currently, when you log on to the page to vote for different categories, the order the sites are presented in is completely random. Thinking about this, I decided it wasn't completely fair. After all, shouldn't the ones that are voted to have a better score than the others receive more hits? But by the same token, I don't want the best to be first, the 2nd best to be 2nd, etc., because then you are biased as a voter, knowing what others thought of the site. So, I needed to find a way to give preference to the highly voted sites, but still keep it kinda random. So, the way I am working on accomplishing this is by gener

Well, yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of "Bestest Blog." Yep, it was one year ago today that I featued my very first review . 2000 blogs, over a half million page views, over 100 reviews, and 366 days later this site has fizzled out. While this page was great in its hey-day, it's popularity exceeded my ability to keep up with it. Even with the help of some wonderful guest reviewers, adding over 100 links a week and other site maintenance called for 20+ hours of work a week, on top of my full time job. So, in my mind, I went back to the drawing board. This blog was doomed from the beginning. Its setup required me to do everything by hand. So, I did some research and figured out that PHP combined with MySQL was the optimal way to make a site like this more user-driven and automatic. Inspired by sites like StumbleUpon, I decided to take it just beyond finding great blogs to read every day, but to find cool images, videos, games, resources, and any other kind of

UPDATE (6/28): I spent all day taking the code explained below for submitting and voting on the funniest jokes to make it super easy to add new categories whenever I want. So, I went ahead and added a second category best blogs . I already submitted my own blog, plus I submitted the top 10 premium blogs over to the right, just to get things started. You can submit your own and start voting whenever you want! Again, please leave a comment here if you find any bugs or have any comments. Thanks! -------------------------------------------------------- All right, so I've been a little secretive, a little bit on the hush hush as of late. But the good news is that I've been working hard on a new site! Your initial response is hopefully one of sorrow, for you are fearing what will happen to this site. Well, don't worry because my new site will INCORPORATE the ideas and awesomeness of this one, plus add so much more! The site is called BlankestBlank.com . Although i

FreshTrends.com is one of the internet's foremost body jewelry websites. When I first read the URL I thought it said "FleshTrends.com". With an L instead of an R. I think both names are great and would work great as a combo. My friend's brother is really into tattos and body jewelry and it looks really great on him. I wonder if he's ever been to FreshTrends.com...I'd be willing to bet that he has been. If you're like me and body jewelry is a little too much for you personally, but you still support the cause, perhaps a t-shirt would be a better purchase.

I think that I had a genius new idea for a web site. Don't worry Bestest Blog fans, because the previous concept of Bestest Blog will be incorporated into an overarching bigger and better idea. I am still reading up on MySQL and PHP, but I am going to try and enlist the help of a few friends if they think the idea is good and get a prototype goin. Stay tuned!

Well, as many of you know, my wife and I just moved into a new house. We had to makes a lot of changes...new carpets, new countertops, a new paint job. One thing that we mutually decided didn't need to be changed at all were the venetian blinds in all the bed rooms. They're so simple, yet still look very very nice. They keep out the sun or let it in, whatever you want. Plus, you can get them in just about every color under the rainbow. We're thinking about adding them to the rooms that didn't have them already (bathroom, kitchen, living room). This has been a sponsored post.

So, yesterday I ordered on Amazon.com a book about PHP and MySQL. From what I can gather from some preliminary tutorials, this would be an excellent way to automate people adding links to the directory. It's possible that I may be even able to automate checking the reciprocal link for the exchange, as well as alphabetizing and sorting and what not. In any case, it is a great tool to learn for a budding website specialist like myself. I'd definitely like to make another run at making this site great, but I can't do as much work as I used to (checking and adding by hand 100+ links a week ended up being about 10 hours of work). So, we'll see how it goes...

What is crm? Well, first off, crm stands for customer relationship management. It's the idea in business that if you want to increase your profits you need to maintain a very happy customer base. Companies likes AIMPromote offer crm software (customer relationship management software) to help ease the burden of pacifying a insatiable group of consumers. AIMPromote is also a leader in lead management (pun intended) and offers a very comprehensive lead management software package. A lead is a term referring to one company or individual referring (or leading) customers to another company. Say you own a mortgage company and you want to pay Joe Blogger $100 for every successful mortgage applicant he sends your way. Well, $100 is a lot of money. It's not enough to do lead tracking by giving new users an optional field to enter their referral. Most users will skip over this optional field. You need a more sophisticated software program to assist in mortgage lead management.

For wasting 4 weeks of my blogging time when I was supposed to be making my big comeback! The least you could've done was shut me down permanently so I don't feel torn between coming back to work on this and the new projects I've started. Oh well, I guess I've got some decisions to make. More on that later.

May 1st was going to be the date of my big comeback. Well, that day came and went while I am sitting under review (edit: for what turned out to be 4 weeks) for seemingly no offense. I miss my blogging friends, but I've also been learning a lot about search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, and PPC arbitrage. If I do come back, at least I'll have a lot of knowledge to share with everyone!

I don't think I've ever done a Pay Per Post that was as on topic as this one is. Scratch that, I know I haven't done one as much as this. This is the kind of site that if I had stumbled on to it outside of the world of Pay Per Post, I would've written about it anyway. Well, no harm in getting paid a few bucks to do something I would have anyway. The BloggersChoiceAwards.com site is web awards site where you can nominate your favorite blogs and vote for them. I nominated myself for the "best blog about blogging" and the "best blog of all time". What's that? You think it's a travesty that I'm in the "best blog of all time" category. Why don't you try googling it ? You can vote for me if you want (or not)! I'm not exactly sure when the voting ends, but hey, don't dawdle. Get your site up there today. I am pretty sure this site is another one in the long line of Pay Per Post blogging off shoot pages (i.e. Ro