The Twisted Writer

I have an old Linux server that sits, sad and muted, unused in a corner. I decided to blow the dust off of it, and see what I can wrangle out of it.

For the morbidly curious: it’s a Fedora Core 1 install, running on a Dell Poweredge server. It has a crusty old hard drive installed in it, that contains some data (nothing very useful any more, really) that dates back to 1997. It has several installs of Python — ranging from 2.3 to Stackless 2.5. At various points, it’s had Plone, Zope, and even some (gasp) Perl scripts running on it. It itself was originally a RedHat 5.0 install.

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Cake or death:

If you have any Web presence — and you try to make money off of it — you know that the adage that you need traffic to make money is 100% correct.  There’s many ways to get traffic to your programs, websites, or offers, some of which rely on creation of lots of content or spending time at traffic exchanges generating clicks to earn page views.

I’ve created a new program that will make some of that work easier.  I can’t make creating good content any easier — because, frankly, it’s not easy at all in the first place — but I can help drive traffic by gathering tools together into a usable, easy resource.

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The past two weeks have been hectic and a little more than frenetic as my family and I moved 2600 miles from New Jersey to Montana.  That’s right, I traded in the traffic jams and hazily polluted air for life on a horse ranch.

My daughter’s enrolled in school, resumes have been fielded, and a few quotes have been given to prospective clients, so I think all-in-all it’s been a successful transition.

Over the next few days, I’ll be working on building up the content on my “corporate” site, Tempest Networks, where I’m offering consulting services for Web design and application design, as well as Web hosting services.

I’ve seen a lot of these “viral networking” websites that are designed to get traffic to your web site.  I’ve also seen a bunch of websites that help (or at the very least, provide tools) to build your referrals in places like traffic exchanges and other online tools.

Since I’ve run into some difficulties during the editing of my latest novel, I’ve returned to programming to help clear my mind of some of the clutters.  I decided to toss my hat into the ring with my own viral networking, list building, downline building web site.

I don’t think I’ve seen a site that tries to do all three of those at one time … so that makes this one an innovation .

Anyways, you can always look at it at TheViralBuilder.com.  For the curious out there, it’s written in Python, uses a Postgres database for it’s backend, and uses an ancient (but extremely efficient) Web Application Server/Framework called SkunkWeb.