I know what I’m doing tomorrow - Friday night - at 9pm. I will be behind my computer, on Facebook, to set up my own vanity URL. Indeed, Facebook is finally allowing users to get their own usernames.

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names.

It’s a good thing to have your vanity URL if you care about personal branding. However, if you’re one of those online privacy freaks, that might not be a good idea…

You will be able to create your Facebook vanity URL on Friday, June 12th at 9.01pm PST by visiting http://www.facebook.com/username/

If you’ve been on planet Earth within the last 6 months or so, you most likely heard about Twitter.

I’m not going to go into details about why you need to be on Twitter but just let me ask you these few questions:
- do you think email is useful to your business?
- do you think a website is useful to your business?
- do you think social media is useful to your business?
- do you think blogging is useful to your business?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, well, I have to be a little bit in your face and tell you that your business is going to fail. If you don’t take advantage of these tools right now, your competition will, and they will win!

Let’s go back to Twitter… You might not understand Twitter yet. But that’s fine, right now, I’m not asking you to understand it, I’m just asking you to create an account and start using Twitter, just a couple minutes everyday.

It is important you create a Twitter account now so you can register your brand/name before someone else does! Twitter URLs will soon be as valuable as a website URL!!!

It took me a couple months to understand Twitter and really enjoy it and use it as you’re supposed too. These days, I spend hours on Twitter everyday. Yes, hours! Twitter is a great way for me to generate revenues simply by talking to people, and sharing information.

I have about 14,000 people that follow me on Twitter. At any given time, when I say something on Twitter, I can direct about 200 of these people to any website I want. Isn’t that just amazing?

Anyways, I guess the goal of this post was to briefly introduce you to Twitter.

If you have any question or any doubt about Twitter, just ask me and I will do my best to help you out.

If you’re already on Twitter, please follow me http://twitter.com/SebastienPage

Tweet you later ;)

How Did I Find Out There Was A Problem?

I check my Google rankings for the term “iPhone blog” on a daily basis. iPhone Download Blog (my iPhone blog) usually ranks #4. Last Monday though, it was nowhere to be found! Doing a search for “site:www.iPhonedownloadblog.com” showed me I had 27,000 pages indexed but again, the homepage was nowhere to be found. Hmm, that doesn’t smell good…

I then went and checked my Google Webmaster Tools account. It usually helps me figure out quickly if there is anything wrong with any of my sites. Usually, everything is fine. From time to time, I get a little error on one or two of my sites, which in most cases can be fixed simply by generating a new sitemap and resubmitting it to Google.

Last Monday, I completely freaked out when I realized that all my sites were showing errors! All of them! I thought it was very strange but I soon realized that my server had been down for a few minutes the day before and I figured that Google must have tried to crawl my sites at this time and was then enable to do it. I simply resubmitted all my sitemaps thinking it would do the trick.

What the Hell Happened?

As a measure of precaution, I checked Google Webmasters Tools again a few minutes later and saw that Google, once again, was giving me errors. The issue was obviously bigger than I thought. I decided to look into the problem more deeply and realized that Google was giving me a 403 error, which means:

The server is refusing the request. If you see that Googlebot received this status code when trying to crawl valid pages of your site (you can see this on the Web crawl page under Diagnostics in Google Webmaster Tools), it’s possible that your server or host is blocking Googlebot’s access.

It was clear now. DreamHost, my hosting company, had restricted Googlebots from crawling my server. I had had the same problem with DreamHost before so it was just half a surprise…

How the Hell Do You Fix This?

The first thing I did was sending a support request to DreamHost. I tried to be kind in my email but I was really furious. I think it’s very unprofessional of them to block access to my server to anyone without even notifying me. A few hours later, I didn’t have an answer yet… DreamHost is usually fast at replying, but I guess they were not that day…

So I sent them a second support request email, a little more spicy than the first one. A couple hours later I received this email:

Hello Sebastien,

I sincerely apologize for this! This was handled incorrectly, and NOT according to our own policy. It looks like a few days ago you wrote in regarding server performance. It appears part of that was actually googlebot slamming your sites. This was blocked to preserve server stability (which is normal troubleshooting), what didn’t happen, and SHOULD have, was that you were not notified and told how to deal with this. I’ve removed the block, but please see the following article:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Bots_spiders_and_crawlers

There is a way to slow down googlebot without killing your search results OR the server. This is the preferred approach. We obviously don’t want to hurt your sites.

Again, I apologize for this, and if it helps any, it looks like just an IP range was blocked, and whoever was troubleshooting the server wasn’t really *trying* to block google from your site…just an IP that was causing problems for everyone.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks!
Jeff H

Alright, fair enough… What can I do anyway? So this part of the problem was handled but I needed to tell Google everything was back up so it can start crawling my sites asap.

I resubmitted all my sitemaps again. I also wrote a few new posts on my iPhone blog in order to “prove” Google that the site was still alive and doing well. Finally, I linked to my main sites from various other websites in the hope it would help speed up the crawling process.

Googlebots came back and crawled the sites. The next day (on Tuesday), iPhone Download Blog was back in Google’s search results but it was ranking at about #35 for my keyword. I realized that even though it was back in the index, Google didn’t have a cached image of it yet. I assumed that it would come back and crawl the site again and then generate a cached image.

On Wednesday, still no cache! It was ranking slightly better though, showing up on the second page. Still far from what I was looking for, but at least it was progressing a bit.

On Wednesday night, the homepage completely disappeared from the index again. While some may worry about this, I am now used to it and I know what it means. It means that Google has crawled your site again and it is generating a cached image of it. This usually happens when you create a new page. Google will crawl it, rank it, then it will disappear from the index for a few hours, and finally it will come back for good. It’s like Google is hurrying to crawl it, but then takes its time to analyze it and make sure it’s not crap.

I went to bed that  night confident that my site would be back on the next morning when I get up. Sure enough, it is ranking again, as good as ever, this morning. Yeahhh!!! All my other sites are back too.

What’s the Moral of the Story?

Well, the moral of the story is that you should check your sites often, if not daily. You should make it a habit to check your Google Webmasters account to make sure there is no problem. If there is a problem, identify it and hurry to fix it. Google Webmaster Tools is a great help for this and if you haven’t created an account yet, I suggest you do now.

This little adventure cost me about a 40% decrease in traffic on my iPhone blog. Yes, it hurts! I haven’t measured my other sites loss as they are not as important as my iPhone blog. My money-making sites rely on PPC to drive traffic so it wasn’t a big issue for those sites.

I’m still pissed at DreamHost but you get what you pay for… I considered moving my sites to a new hosting company but it would be a nightmare. I have over 20 sites, most of them being database driven. My technical skills are just not sharp enough to do all this by myself. I guess I’ll stick with DreamHost until something really major happens.

Working From Home Made Me Lazy

That’s true, I’m a lazy ass these days… But I’ve got a good reason why I’m lazy though. I wrote 2 ebooks, both of them in a very specific niche, and I sell them through affiliate marketing (on ClickBank to be precise). One of those ebooks works alright, making me a few hundred dollars every week. The other one actually pays my bills, usually generating one thousand dollars per week in net profits.

When I first quit my job, I said to myself that I would develop one new ebook/affiliate program every month. At the time, it seemed like a very realistic goal. Writing an ebook can take up to 2-3 weeks, assuming you know what you want to write about, and putting up a website with a sales letter takes less than a week.

My laziness started to appear when I realized that my 2 current ebooks make me enough money to live pretty well. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to bust his ass off to make tons of money. However, if I feel the financial situation is getting tight, I will work day and night to make as much cash as possible. I suspect there are lots of people like me in this world. We’re not hard workers; we’re smart workers.

So what do I do all day? Tough question to answer as I’m not even sure myself. I pretty much spend all my day online, reading news/blogs and on Twitter of course! Not very productive at all… Occasionally, I will take a walk to the post office to send back a Netflix movie. I also go to check the surf on a daily basis, and if there are waves, I will go out and surf for a couple hours.

The Negative Health Benefits Of The Internet

I am starting to realize that spending so much time in front of my computer all day is bad for me. Physically, I’m not as healthy as I was a year ago. The most obvious symptom is that I am constantly tired. I get up at 7.30am, and turn on my computer within minutes. One hour later, I will already be yawning. I was in Costa Rica for the last 2 weeks and I just spent a few minutes a day on my computer during that time. My energy level went way up right away as I used the computer less and less.

Another symptom of the perfect “work at home dude” like me is back pain. I have a laptop and I spend most of my time on the couch. It is very comfortable but it’s not a way to work. My girlfriend bought me a nice office chair to go with my desk but I rarely use it. I constantly have this pain in my lower back; nothing a good yoga session with Tina can’t fix, but it’s still a growing problem that I need to seriously take care of.

I think the internet is also making me socially retarded! When I worked at the office, I had to go out of my house every morning, walk to work, talk to my coworkers and talk to clients. In short, I had human interactions, which are vital to your social insertion… What do I have now? Twitter followers and RSS subscribers! It seems a little pathetic to me.

Being Your Own Boss Is Stressful

When I worked for the man, I used to think that working for yourself would be much less stressful because you wouldn’t have to deal with so many frustrating situations and that you could do whatever you want. I was partly right because now that I don’t have anyone to report to and no one to deal with, I have a much less stress to deal with. However, I have a whole new stress to cope with now: the stress of the paycheck!

If you’re currently employed, you probably don’t stress much about your paycheck. You now that twice a month, you will get a nice check for a defined amount you already know. You are paid the same amount every 2 weeks, no matter what (this applies if you’re a salary employee of course, which I used to be). I didn’t worry about my paycheck before. I knew that 2 or 3 months from now, I will still be making the same amount, and it was really reassuring.

Now I stress a lot about my paycheck because it is completely depending on my results. I am constantly looking at my emails to see if I received this magical email from ClickBank with the subject line “CB Sale”, telling me I just made another $40. Sometimes I have good days where I make $400. Sometimes, like 2 days ago, I have bad days where I make only $50. The most stressful to me is when I have a series of bad days. It completely freaks me out, until everything starts working again and making it up for the last few slow days.

Give Me Some Of That Internet Money

I do 2 simple things for a living: I have my affiliate programs; and I write for my iPhone blog. When people ask me what I do now, I just answer: “internet”. This short and simple answer is usually enough to satisfy the person asking you this question. I choose to answer this because I can’t put a real title on what I do.

Sometimes, if the person is genuinely interested in what I do, he will ask me more details. Explaining online affiliate marketing to a non-business savvy person is kinda hard, even though I try to simplify it as much as I can by saying that “I sell electronic reports and I blog about technology”.

A good definition of what I do though is that “I make money online”. I try not to use this term though because I think it sounds very cheesy. When you say you make money online, people think something like “oh yeah, just like the scammy late night commercials about how I can make money online working 4 hours a day”?

My friend Kayle is funny about it and always asks me to give him “some of that internet”, just like in the South Park episode where the kids try to make money online by having a video of Butters on YouToob.

Two Weeks Later…

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I first started writing this post and things have changed a bit. First, I worked on a new website that is now live and generating additional revenues. This website is part of my previous post about how to hit different niches with the same product. This website doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s still extra money.

The second thing I did is trying not to spend as much time in front of my computer. I now get off the internet for a few hours to read a book or a magazine. I am also starting to run! If you knew me, you wouldn’t believe what I just said, but yes, I do run for a couple miles and I kinda like it. It definitely boosts my energy level.

For the last two days, I haven’t been working from the couch. I put my laptop on the kitchen table and work from there. It’s really comfortable and I get to see what’s going on outside.

Finally, in order to fight my anti-social behavior, and after talking to my therapist who confirmed I need to interact with others (duh!), I am looking into participating in a Toastmaster club. This would definitely help me meet and talk with others.

I guess the goal of this post was to bring me to realize that I can’t just sit around all day and do nothing. I have this great opportunity of making a ton of money and I should take it because it might not last long.

Before I explain you this trick, let me give full credit to Ruben Yau for actually coming up with it. I also want to thank Ruben for replying to my comment/question on his blog so quickly.

As stated above, Google Analytics doesn’t let you see from what specific page your visitors are coming.

For example, instead of showing this as the traffic referrer:
http://digg.com/apple/How_to_install_ipa_files_on_iPhone_and_iPod_Touch,

it will just show you this: Digg.com

That’s not very useful information…

The solution to view the full URL of the referring site is to implement a simple hack that uses filters to place the referrer into the User Defined Report.

Instructions:

Go to your Google Analytics account and click on Filter Manager > Add Filter, and enter the following information:

Filter Name: Full Referrer (or whatever you want to call it)
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Referral (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: leave blank
Output To -> Constructor: User Defined $A1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

It should look like this:

Now, if you look at your Traffic Sources, you usually see this:

Too see your User Defined Report containing the full information about the referring sites, click on “Visitors” in the nav bar and choose “User Defined”. You should get something like this:

That’s it! Pretty easy, yet very useful.

On his site, Ruben also explains another option involving tweaking the Google Analytics code, but that seemed a little too complex for me, especially given that this method works perfectly.

Now I’d like to see GA implement this without having us use workarounds. That’s a basic feature that should be included in GA by default. Oh well, with Google, it’s take it or leave it, isn’t it?

I want to talk to you about how I am extending one of my products to different niches. By the way, this post is for people interested in web/affiliate marketing. If you’re not into it, you will find this post worthless.

About 5 months ago, I wrote my first ebook and created a website/sales letter for it. I sell this ebook through ClickBank, which allows me to take advantage of their huge network of affiliates. As a side note, to date, affiliates generate about 40% of my sales for this product. The product in question is a health-related ebook, some sort of “how to cure XXX in 60 days”. Sales are doing great so far!

While I was writing the ebook, I realized that it could hit 3 different niches. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Should I try to hit these 3 niches on the same sales letter? Or should I create different websites and sales letter aimed at each specific niche? It didn’t take me too long to make my decision to create 3 different products.

Creating different products has the advantage of you delivering exactly what people are looking for when they come to your site, which is the most important thing. You know how it is, people come to a site and if they don’t see exactly what they’re looking for right away, they will bounce. By creating different websites for each niche, I avoid this problem.

What’s great about this technique is that it doesn’t take much time to create the additional sites. Simply copy/paste the first one you created, then change the main keyword.

Let’s take an example. Imagine you write an ebook about “how to cure swine flu”. You will create the website around the “swine flu” keyword. Additionally, you should create 2 other websites to focus on “how to cure H1N1″ and “how to cure influenza A virus”. This way, you will cover every terms people will look for on Google and you will deliver content targeted to these people. The websites as well as the ebooks will be the same, except you will replace “swine flu” by “H1N1″ and “influenza A virus”.

Last week, I created the second website of the series. It was approved by ClickBank on Thursday and I already made a few sales out of it. My goal this week is to update the website and the ebook with the 3rd keyword and get it approved by ClickBank to start generating revenues from it.

As you can see, this is a very simple technique that allows you to increase your reach and hit different similar niches with the same product without reinventing the wheel.

I look forward to reading your thoughts on that :)

Adding these 1001 Twitter users who will auto-follow or follow you back will not do you much good because they are not genuinely interested in your tweets. Like you, they mostly want to collect massive amounts of followers.

Social News Watch’s post about the “top 237 Twitter users who will follow you  back” inspired me to create this list and to take the things a little further than they did.

You’re obviously free to do whatever you want with this list but you will hopefully not use it to twamm (Twitter spam) people. I guess Twitter users are smart enough to recognize twammers and block them anyways…

How to get more Twitter followers? Start following these people!

If you want to be added to the list, simply leave a comment with your Twitter URL. Please consider following me on Twitter. If you’re not some kind of spammer, I will follow you back!

This article on DoshDosh highlights the fact that you may have some high traffic pages on your sites but for some reason, you never thought about using them as a “money page”. For example, let’s say you have a great post on your blog that you wrote over a year ago that gets 300 to 400 visits a day. If you haven’t optimized this page to turn it into a money page, you might be losing money.

What’s your goal?

First, you have to figure out what you want to do. Do you want to make sales or do you want to get more subscribers for your newsletter, RSS feed, or more Twitter followers? In my case, I wanted to get more RSS subscribers to my iPhone blog and Twitter followers.

Identify your money pages

Once you have determined what your goal is (sales or subscribers), you have to find out what these money pages are. I went to Google Analytics and simply searched for the Top 10 most visited pages on my site, besides the homepage. It appeared that 9 out the top 10 most visited pages on my site were blog posts I had written months ago. I found out that visitors to these pages come for one specific topic but they usually don’t look around the blog and either bounce right away, or stay on these pages for a few minutes then leave. Over 90% of these visitors were new visits, which means they had never been on my blog before.

Turning these pages into money pages is very important because if I don’t act right away on these new visitors, chances are they will never come back to my blog again. Looking at these few stats, it was really clear that my goal to turn them into RSS subscribers or Twitter followers was spot on. These people came for a specific reason and sticking a big Adsense block or affiliate offer in their face wouldn’t change anything.

Optimize your money pages

So now you’ve identified your money pages, it’s time to pimp them according to your goal. In my case, it was really simple, what I did was adding the following blurb right before the beginning of the post: “If you like this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter“. Simple, direct, and not too intrusive.

If my goal here was to make money, I could have added a 360×280 Adsense block, or a banner for an affiliate program.

I also analyzed what specific keywords and key phrases these visitors were typing in Google to get to these pages and I made sure that each keyword for the top 50 queries was somewhere in my article. I also made sure that I had added a good meta description for each article, using the top keywords. This will definitely secure my top spots in Google for these search terms.

Finally, I added a little Digg icon on each of these pages to increase my chances to be dugg.

Read DoshDosh full article

I really flew over what DoshDosh wrote, so again, I really recommend you read his post because it’s much more complete than mine and full of good advice.

I just finished implementing the changes to my pages. It took me about 30-40 minutes so I obviously haven’t had time to measure the ROI for this but I’m convinced that it can only benefit me.

As usual, if you liked this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on the bird!

I started a site called iPhone Download Blog to replicate what I had done with iPod softwares. At first, I set up the blog like a store and only had products for sale. I didn’t have content per say, except descriptions of softwares. So I started creating content just so search engines could see that my site was legit. I expected to write just a few articles but I quickly got sucked into it and started blogging about the iPhone for fun.

I found my niche

I had an iPhone so I knew what I was talking about, I wasn’t just bullshitting people with some useless content. In the same time, I started hacking my iPhone and learned how to jailbreak it. I wrote mostly about this topic, and I started realizing people really liked what I was doing, and most of my traffic was coming to learn more about how to hack their iPhone and how to get the most out of it. That’s when I realized that I had found my niche.

I was spending a lot of times reporting about iPhone news; the same news that most other iPhone blogs were already talking about. At this point, I kinda stopped blogging about iPhone news. It was pointless. I was clearly wasting my time. So I really cut back on the posting of iPhone news and I didn’t notice a traffic decrease at all. It was very stable. I received a few emails from die hard readers who were pissed because I wasn’t posting news anymore so I wrote a post explaining what the situation was. I was pretty honest and told them that people were obviously not coming to my blog to read iPhone news and that writing these articles took a lot of my time (sometimes up to 2-3 hours a day). Looking at the comments I had on this post, I think people understood the situation and were cool with it.

These days, I still write about iPhone news from time to time when it’s a big deal or when I feel like it’s important but I mostly focus on my niche: iPhone hacking.

I hired free staff

In the meantime, I posted on my blog saying that I was looking for writers/bloggers to join me. I thought that even though people mostly came to my blog to learn how to hack the iPhone, it wouldn’t hurt to have other people blog about news, applications, and other stuffs. For a while, I had 3 bloggers that were posting quality content, but like most bloggers, they got tired of it and after a few months, they completely stopped writing for me.

What was really cool is that these people were writing for free. They were writing very good content, which to date still drives large amounts of traffic.

Today, I have only one guy who writes on a pretty regular basis about iPhone applications. I also have a few people applying to write for me every once in a while but it’s very hard to find good bloggers. I’m really not looking for quantity anymore. I’m all about quality now!

What about money?

When I started my iPhone blog, my only income stream was the Regnow affiliate program to sell iPhone softwares. I have to admit that it was performing very poorly. Let’s say that a $100/month was a good month at the time.

Then I set up the blog with Adsense. It was working ok, making about $10/day on average. The problem with an iPhone blog is that visitors are young and are pretty much adproof, meaning that they don’t even see the ads anymore because they are too used to them. I tried optimizing my ads but it didn’t improve things much. Then I heard about The AdSense Code, a best-seller by Joel Comm, a pretty successful internet marketer. I bought it from Amazon and implemented a few of the techniques described in the book. Results were astounding. I went from making $10/day to making between $20 to $30/day, sometimes more.

The last few months, my checks from Google have been between $700 and $800. I created a special banking account for all the money I make with Adsense and it is my girlfriend and I’s travel found. For example, we’re going to Costa Rica next month for 2 weeks and it’s all paid by Google Adsense!

I also signed up for 2 other affiliate programs: one to sell iPhone screen protectors and one to sell custom iPhone skins. The first one brings in about $150/month and the other one about $100/month. Not too bad considering that I don’t have anything to do at all for these.

The biggest move was probably to set up an iPhone store where I sell hundreds of accessories for iPhone. The best thing is that, again, I don’t have anything to do at all. It’s all managed by a third-party company. They set me up with the store integration, they add products as they come, they take care of billing, shipping, and customer service. I basically have nothing to do but sit back and wait for my monthly PayPal payment. The iPhone Store brings in another $150/month on average.

I used to be an affiliate of the iTunes App Store as well, which started working very well for me but the assholes at Apple cracked down on every affiliate that had an Apple trademark in their URL. Since my URL contains the trademark “iPhone” (www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com), they suspended my account. I wasn’t the only one having this issue. Many other iPhone and iPod blogs had this problem and were forced to stop marketing the App Store applications. Why would Apple do such a thing? I have no idea, but all I know is that they’re leaving a lot of money on the table by doing that.

Where am I today?

Things are doing pretty well for my iPhone blog these days. I get about 12,000 unique visitors a day on average and I usually spend a couple hours a week working on it, except when there are major events such as the release of a new model, new firmware, or a new jailbreaking or unlocking method.

If I add up all the revenue streams from this blog, I make an average of $1,100/month, which is more than decent. I really want to keep growing the site without compromising its integrity. I think it’s very important to stay true and don’t be a total sell out.

I had heard about Open Office before but I never gave it much thoughts. I already had Microsoft Office installed on my computer so why would I look elsewhere? But this time, I had a good incentive to look around for free Office alternatives, simply because I didn’t want to spend a few hundred bucks in a software I rarely use.

Reading the Open Office website, it seemed that it offered everything I was looking for. Again, I’m not a heavy user. I simply need to type text documents or create simple spreadsheets every once in a while, but no major documents requiring all the features of MS Office. My main concern was that I should be able to edit and create .doc, .xls, and .ppt documents. It seemed that I would be able to do that…

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

I did a quick search for Open Office reviews and everybody seemed really stoked about it. The only complain people had was when trying to use Open Office for project in collaboration; not a big deal since I don’t do this. So I finally downloaded a copy of Open Office and installed it on my computer. The download and installation process was easy and quick, and in less than 5 minutes, I was running the full suite on my PC.

First thing I did was trying the word editor. It really looked and felt like MS Word. I created a .doc document, and opened an existing .doc document from my computer. Everything worked just fine. I did the same test with the spreadsheet editor. Same positive results. Then I noticed a little icon that enables me to print my documents to PDF. That’s an additional feature that I really like about this Open Source thing.

What do I like the most about Open Office? It’s FREE! Not “free” like in these sneaky softwares that you download thinking it’s free to be bugged later with countless reminders that you need to upgrade to a paid license. No. It’s free as in 100% free. You can do whatever you want with it. You can install Open Source on 1,000 computers if you feel like it; it will still be free.

OpenOffice.org 3 is free software. That means you are free to download it, free to install it on as many PCs as you like, free to pass copies to as many people as you like. You may use OpenOffice.org 3 for any purpose without restriction: private, educational, public administration, commercial… Free, really free.

Great! So I had my Office suite ready, now I had to find a good HTML editor. I looked online but I didn’t seem to find anything good. Maybe my search queries were the problem. So I asked the Twittersphere for advice and got a few replies back pointing to different options. After looking at them more in details, I chose to go with Kompozer. It’s not as friendly and complete as DreamWeaver but that will do the trick. After all, this is for my netbook and I don’t expect to edit many web pages while on the road.

I still needed two additional softwares to have a fully operational netbook: image editing, and email. I didn’t have to do any research on these 2 as I had previously used GIMP and I had heard many good things about Thunderbird. I downloaded these two and installed them as well.

I haven’t had the opportunity to use these open source softwares much but from what I see, they will do the trick and will perfectly suit my needs. Now I really need to add more RAM to this poor little Lenovo S10…