• VMware Technology Network – Appliances – straight from VMware.com
• VMware images at thoughtpolice.co.uk

You’ll be able to find many different appliances and images. Some of the more popular downloads are: Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian), FreeBSD.

Also check out VMware HOWTOs also at thoughtpolice.

Snippet from the article:

“I’m still struggling to understand how this could have happened,” said a sober Tony La Russa during a press conference following Game 5. “It seemed all but certain coming into this series that we were going to be a part of something truly special, that we would easily put the finishing touches on a magical season that inspired millions of fans around the country, but instead we somehow ended up winning.”

“It’s disappointing, to say the least,” La Russa added. “We were rooting for the Detroit Tigers just like everyone else.”

I came across this brilliant blog post while reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog. The article is storytelling in photo form. Amateur Gourmet takes pictures and adds captions. The result is a story look like a comic book. It’s very interesting idea and I hope to see more of it on other blogs in the future.

One of the best blogging ideas I have ever seen. The most creative blogging idea I have seen in a long time.

What’s the fuss: this brilliant blog post from Amateur Gourmet.

MY TEAM JUST WON THE WORLD SERIES!

Cardinals beat the Detroit Tigers 4 games to 1 to win to 2006 World Series championship.

The Cards won Game 5 thanks largely to Weaver who threw 9 strike-outs. Cards beat the Tigers 4-2 in Game 5.

This is the St. Louis Cardinals’ 10th World Series championship title.

Time to celebrate! I’m outta here!

Here is one of my favorite quotes. I find this proverb very inspiring in many ways.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb

What this quote means to me

The message I get out of this is that it’s never to late to accomplish the things you want to accomplish.

In every day life we all have things we want to do. Maybe our personal goals or something we have always wanted to do, some place to see, or something to accomplish. We could have tried to accomplish it sooner, which may have been a better time, but we can still accomplish those things today — now. This quote inspires me to get out there and do all the things I want to do.

The investor in me views the trees as investments. The best time to start investing was 20 years ago. The second best time to start investing is now. There’s another quote regarding investing that also fits with this: “It’s not timing the market, it’s time in the market.” Time in the market basically means the longer you have investments, the longer your investments have been growing and making you money.

Inspiration

Overall, I think this is a great inspirational quote. We all have trees we want to plant. We shouldn’t give up hope, since we can still plant our tree today.

SedoParking.com allows you to park your unused domain names and earn money. Sedo also allows you to sell your domain names with the asking price of your choice.

Each visitor to your domain name hosted at Sedo Parking will see a “parking” page full of advertisements and a search box. You can select the keywords you want your domain associated with (eg. Trading, Business, etc.), as well as 3 categories your domain name or web site should be listed under.

You get paid each time a visitor clicks an advertisement on your domain’s parked page.

My Experiment with Sedo Parking

I own a lot of domain names and the majority of them are not currently being used. Some of my domain names are in use, but not being used effectively. My experiment with SedoParking is to see how well SedoParking performs in terms of impressions (hits or visitors to the site), and Sedo’s pay outs for ad clicks.

Currently I have 9 domain names listed as SedoParking.com. I have just added these domains and I have yet to see any real or useful statistics information.

The goal of my experiment is to gain statistical information regarding the click-through, pay out, and impression performance of parked domain names. I have many questions and this experiment should help to answer most or all of them.

Some questions I have: Is it better to park an unused domain or to develop a site quickly / cheaply / poorly? How much money will Sedo generate for my parked domains? How does Sedo compare with other domain parked services? I cannot find out the answer to how Sedo compares with other services until I sign up with a competing service such as GoDaddy and park one of my domains there.

Why SedoParking?

SedoParking.com seems to be the premier domain name parking service in which you, as the domain owner, receives a majority of the advertisement revenue your domain name generates.

I have also listed each domain as being “for sale” with the maximum price allowed, which is $10,000. As a domain name seller you have absolutely no obligation to sell your domain. But, if someone offers me $10,000 for some of my domains I would be heavily inclined to sell.

Also, SedoParking.com displays ads using Google’s advertising service. Google is the king of internet advertising. I display Google ads on some of my other websites using my Google AdSense account. I would like to see how well Sedo and Google ads perform on these parked domains – part of my experiment.

My Initial Thoughts on Sedo

The account creation process is extremely simple and there are no setup fees whatsoever for the domain parking and domain selling services. No initial fees is a definite plus.

The domain management page displays a lot of stats and you can customize your view. I am currently using a customized view which displays the following: domain name, current keyword, unique views, clicks, $ per click average, click rate, and total revenue. These items are displayed for each domain name I have parked, allowing me to compare different domains, keywords, and categories and how they perform against one another.

Related Links

• SedoParking.com – park your domain names and earn money
• Google AdSense – display Google AdSense ads on your website or blog
• GoDaddy – register new domains, park domains, many additional services

Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting high placement and rankings on search engines. Higher placement means your website will come up higher in the results pages. More web traffic will be driven to a site with high rankings. More traffic means more money.

Search Engines

The main search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. SEO is primarily concerned with gaining high placement on these engines. Other search engines and directories include: Alexa and DMOZ Open Directory Project. The list goes on and on.

Google

Google is the most used search engine. Thus, you should spend a majority of your time optimizing your site for the Google search engine. Google uses PageRank to rank individual pages based on a combination of content, keywords, linkbacks and updates. Linkbacks are how many other sites are linking to your site or pages. Google monitors sites for updates — the more often your site is updated, the higher your site will rank.

Google Page Rank

Your Google PageRank (PR) can vary from 0 to 10, or N/A. PR of 0 means your site is in the PageRank system, but it has virtually no linkbacks and weak content, keywords, and few updates. PR over 5 is good. PR 8+ means your site is doing everything right and traffic is flowing in. If your PageRank is N/A this means your site is not even in the PageRank system. This likely means your site has poor content, keywords, linkbacks, and updates.

Improving Your Content

The content of your site determines not only if your site will show up in search results, but also it’s position or ranking. If your site is about widgets, you better have a lot of content, information, data, and articles about widgets. If your site is about the stock market, your site may include a brief history of the stock market, company data, stock prices, and stock broker information. However, your site does not need many different sections or areas of focus. The depth of the content is important. A 10-page article will usually contain more search engine relevant content than a 1-page article.

Improving Keywords

Keywords are associated with search queries. You need to choose keywords that are relevant to your site, and that complement your content. Keyword density is also important. Keyword density is the amount of times your keywords appear in your content. This can be calculated as a ratio. The higher the density, search engines think your site has more relevant content.

Gaining Linkbacks

Linkbacks are other sites that link to your site. For example, 10 different stock market message boards link to your article about “Beginning with $5000″ for new traders and investors. If these 10 stock market message boards are indexed by a search engine — for instance Google — your site (or your article) will have 10 links to your site. The more links, or linkbacks, your site has, the higher your site will place on search results pages and in the Google PageRank system.

Update Your Site Often

Updating your site on a regular basis is extremely important. Search engine robots will contstantly scan your site. One thing the robots look for are changes to the site — new articles, new sections, updated news, new downlods, etc. Differences to the site — changes, updates — show that your site is actively used.

Helpful Tools

The following sites can help you improve your search engine rankings or see your current rankings.

• URL Trends – displays a lot of stats from various search engines and social networking sites, as well as showing your sites past history.
• Alexa Traffic Rankings – see how much traffic your web site receives
• Check your Google Page Rank

Here is a snippet from my review of Trading In The Zone by Mark Douglas, found at my trading blog Trading Winner:

Trading In The Zone by Mark Douglas examines the mentality and psychology of successful and unsuccessful traders, understanding our trading actions, and shows us how to strengthen the psychological aspect of trading. “In Trading In The Zone”, Mark Douglas shows you how to analyze your mental strengths and weaknesses when you make trading decisions. He then shows you how you can correct flaws in your trading mentality and habits. The ultimate goal of Trading In The Zone is to eliminate trading based on emotions.

Read my full review of Trading In The Zone

In case you missed the first part of my introduction to stock trading and investing, you can find it here: How I Started Trading – Part 1.