I don’t know if you have heard about AboutUs.org before but it’s a wiki similar to Wikipedia.org, but it’s only for web sites. You can look up any domain name you like in AboutUs.org by typing aboutus.org/sampleaddress.com in your web browser.

There are three ways to get your domain name listed in AboutUs.org:

1. Wait until the AboutUs.org bot has spidered your site
2. Write your own page
3. Pay AboutUs.org $197 to do the page for you

To find out if it’s a good deal to pay for a page at AboutUs.org I pulled out my credit card and paid. To be honest I didn’t only pay just to be able to do this review, I really really wanted a better AboutUs.org page too . A good Aboutus.org page must be as good as a good MillionDollarWiki.com page or maybe even better

At their site they offer you the following for a flat fee of $197:

• Position yourself in front of more than 5,000,000 unique readers each month.
• Increase your results in the search engines.
• Point more traffic to your website.
• Create an amazing article that will tell the world about your business.
• Build strong relationships with the community.
• Develop ongoing dialog about you and your business.
• Generate another way for clients to find you.

I’m happy with the coach I got to help me build the page, but what I don’t like is that most of the stuff at my AboutUs.org page is copied directly from my site. Hey it’s a page about my site so it actually doesn’t matter…. Or?

The traffic they mention is not something I’ve noticed at all , but I guess it will take until the next pagerank update by Google to see some results on the search engine ranking. I think they should offer some kind of statistics for the people that upgrade their page because otherwise it’s going to be really hard to figure out if it was a good investment or not. Especially since it’s your wiki page that’s featured on their front page, not your actual homepage.

So, was it worth $197?

My opinion is that it’s not worth the money, but on the other hand people spend $100 for a page at MillionDollarWiki and then you don’t get any help building the page at all. At Aboutus.org I got a coach helping me at least.

If you can build your page yourself (i.e. you know the syntax) and have the time to do it then do that instead of paying $197. If you don’t know how to do your own page and really really really really want a better AboutUs.org page, then buy this service.

If you’re interested in having a look at my AboutUs.org page you’ll find it at aboutus.org/xaviermedia.com.

This is a guest post from the Xavier Media site LearnPHPFree.com.

Welcome to Beginning PHP!

So you have decided to start learning one of the most powerful Internet programming languages there is - Congratulations! Welcome to Beginning PHP, My name’s David and together we will start discovering why over 22 million websites use PHP to generate amazing dynamic pages.

So what is PHP?

PHP was created in 1995 by an independent software developer named Rasmus Lerdorf. His first PHP script was a Perl/CGI program that kept a log of each visitor that came to his site. The script then displayed how many visits he had received on each page. He soon started receiving emails from other web masters across the Internet asking how he did this (a “Counter” as this is called, were very rare back then.) Because of the interest in his script he started to develop PHP into a new language, by adding more and more features to his script. Eventually, he decided to stop programming PHP in Perl/CGI, and start constructing it with a more powerful language, “C”. Thus the interest in PHP keep growing as more features were added and soon other people started writing code for it. It is now one of the most popular languages on the Internet, with contributing programmers across the world.

Should I learn PHP?

As long as you want to…YES! There is not a person I can think of that would not benefit from the ability to post their own dynamic resume online, or have the capability to list their products or services on the World Wide Web (www). With knowledge of PHP you could do everything from running an Ebay Clone, to managing a Photography site, to building the next Xanga. Don’t get me wrong though, you don’t have to start the next Hotmail to find a use for PHP! It is just as important for giving small sites the leverage to succeed online.

Anything I should know before I start this course?

Yes - HTML. HTML (Hypertext markup Language) is the simplest formatting language on the web. While PHP, Perl, ASP, and others transfer and process information, HTML makes it look good. For example, think of Microsoft Word. What you type into Word is similar to the function that PHP serves - it supplies the data. But just typing text into MS Word doesn’t look very good. That is where the formatting features of Word come in. You can change the size, color, position, and look of the text in your document with the features of MS Word. That is what HTML does.HTML makes the information that you output from PHP look good.
So that is why I recommend having a basic knowledge of HTML. If you don’t know it already here are some good sites to help you learn this basic language.

What do I need?

This is a big question and mostly depends on how skilled you are with other aspects of the computer. PHP requires the core interpreter and function libraries that you have to get from www.php.net. No, window’s does NOT come ready for PHP programming. (Some Linux distributions do however.) This leaves you with four choices when it comes to setting up the PHP language so that you can start programming.

Install and compile the binary distributions for PHP and/or “Apache” web server on your machine. (Advanced) visit php.net for more information.

Install EasyPHP from EasyPHP.org. (Easy, but only features PHP 4 and has some problems with Advanced Programs/scripts.)

Install WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) or LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) on your own machine, or better yet, on some OTHER machine on YOUR network. If you are on windows you can visit wampserver.com and download the newest release. (Intermediate)

The way I Recommend: Buy some web space on a server that supports PHP and MySQL. (about $5-10 dollars a month). I highly recommend 1and1.com. They are like the “walmart” of hosting companies. (The largest in the world) they offer hosting for as low as $2.99 a month for 5 Gigabytes of space and 10 MySQL Databases!!! Don’t worry they don’t skimp on features ether! (Free Domain and “.htaccess” support!)

After all, if you are learning PHP you are going to be using it anyway… so you might as well buy hosting space and a domain now before the name is taken. If you already have a web site your hosting company may already have PHP install on your server. (Call/Email them to be sure.)
If you don’t want to pay for web space but want to put a site online I recommend that you look into some free hosting options like 100webspace.com or Dot Geek - or just choose the one that fits you from these lists: PHP Free Hosting List and PHP MySQL Free Hosting List.

But be cautious - they all have their non-monetary price!
Personally… I started out with Easyphp. It is a snap to install (it’s an .exe file) and will get you running fast. It worked great while I was learning PHP and coding small scripts. Then I shopped around and after looking at many different hosting companies like “BlueHost” and “godaddy” I finally chose 1and1.com for a place on the internet to host my first site. Recently I deleted Easyphp as I needed more power for my advanced scripts and took an old computer and installed XP and WAMP on it so that I can build and test my sites on my own personal network and then upload the files to 1and1. So the choice is yours, just remember that if you install a web server, you need to SECURE it BEFORE YOU GO ONLINE! Otherwise someone might use it to gain control of your PC!

When we moved this blog to a new IP address (so we host all our blogs on the same Wordpress installation) we also added Gravatars. If you post a comment in this blog and got a Gravatar you’ll see your avatar next to your comment (otherwise you’ll see the standard Gravatar).

Gravatars are globally recognized avatars connected to your email address. Whenever you post or comment on a site using the free Gravatar plugin you will see your avatar. This way you only have to upload your avatar once. It’s reminding me of OpenID since you only have to register once

Blog owners

Gravatars make if possible for your visitors to have their avatar next to their comment making comments more personal. Gravatars are really easy to install. Just download the plugin from the gravatar web site and use it. They got instructions for how to install Gravatars on must blog platforms (even a Blogger hack ).

If you like us are using Wordpress you can set a default gravatar in case the user hasn’t uploaded an avatar yet. So far you have to survive with the standard Gravatar avatar since we haven’t designed a default gravatar for our users just yet.

Visitors and people posting comments

Now you only have to register your email address and upload your avatar once to have your avatar next to posts in any blog anywhere as long as they’re Gravatar enabled. Post a comment in this post to try it. If you have registered and uploaded your avatar at gravatar.com you will see it next to your comment . If not point your web browser to www.gravatar.com and register. It’s free and the registration is really easy.

If you want to have multiple gravatars, you simply just register more then one email address on your account and you can have for example one “sad” avatar, one “happy” avatar and one “angry” avatar. This way you can show the readers your mod when you posted. Or you can register one avatar for each one of your sites depending on which site or blog you wish to promote by posting a comment.

At the moment Gravatars have been activated on this blog, Entrecard contests and Finding Public Information. As soon as we’ve tested the plugin we will activate it on all our blogs (same as for OpenID). Let us know if you like Gravatars or not.

The Logo Creator is a peice of software to make it easy for you to design your own logo (duh ). According to the web site you can design logos like if you where using Photoshop in almost no time at the fraktion of the cost for Photshop . The software costs only $29.95 which is incredible low if you can do what the web site promisses .

Got a Mac or PC? Don’t worry the Logo Design software is available for both Mac, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Included with the Logo Creator is also about 50 designs you can use, modify and change the way you want to easily create your own logo. You also get the right to sell the logos you design, which means taht for as little as $29.95 you can start your own design company . If you need to finance the purchase you simply just design two or three professional looking logos and sell them to newly started companies or web sites . If you sell more then just a few you can make it a profitable hobby .

You can of course buy different editions of the Logo Creator depending of what kind of logos you want to make. For example you can get the Corporate Logo Edition with 80 corporate logos, or the Business Mascot Edition with 50 customizable cartoon mascots.

Visit www.thelogocreator.com for more information.

Most of you all know about StumbleUpon and most of you also know that it’s hard to get the first few Sumbles to get some attention to your newly posted article. Now there’s a new way to get the first Stumbles to get some extra boost to your Stumble campaign. It’s called StumbleUdon and is an automated free Stumble exchange where you exchange a few stumbles with other members. You get somewhere between 5 to 15 free Stumbles each day (depending on how many visitors you’ve referred ) and you can buy some extra too if you want to.

To get really good results with this exchange you need to remember to submit quality content (and not spammy affiliate pages). One of my more successful articles got over 1000 visitors from Stumble by just using five free credits from StumbleUdon. That’s about 200% up!

I started testing StumbleUdon in the end of February and could see an increase in the visitors count already taht month. Compare March and January in this graph and you’ll see that it’s possible to make some really good traffic if you got quality content:

You can sign up for your own StumbleUdon account here.

Some suggestions to succeed with Stumbles

To get good results you need to submit quality content. A few things I’ve learnt is that Stumble users like content without “expiration dates” (i.e. content that’s valid today, tomorrow and maybe even next year) like for example Fun stuff from Google. News, contests, sweepstakes and time limited articles are not doing well at all. Numbered lists seems to be wroking well too