Scarborough Campus Files (SCF) is a newly-created organization whose goal is to create an online/digital yearbook of student life, clubs, events, graduates, and faculty at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This yearbook will be launched on a website and sold as CDs afterwards.

You can find out more about SCF over at http://scfonline.ca.

I’m actually the Vice President of Information Technology for SCF and the IT Team played a big role in getting the site all setup (details of which I will share at another time). SCF decided to hold a logo contest and here are the quick facts.

Prize: $50 gift card at Scarborough Town Centre, recognition in the yearbook and credits
Requirements: Logo must include ‘SCF’ or ‘Scarborough Campus Files’. Logo has to be vector format.
Deadline: March 21st, 2008
Send in entries to scf@utsc.utoronto.ca

Good luck and be sure to tell your friends who may be interested to get designing!

Laptop - Toshiba Satellite A200-AH5
Intel Core Duo 2.00GHz
1024MB Ram Original (upgraded to 2048MB)
120GB Hard Drive Space
15.4″ Glossy Widescreen
Windows Vista Home Premium

LCD Monitor - Dell 2005FPW
20″ Matte Widescreen LCD
1680×1050 Native Resolution
16.7 Million Colours Support (one of the few LCD panels that can truly support the full 16.7)
IPS Type LCD Panel (almost perfect viewing angles with no colour distortion, support for 16.7 with no dithering)

The laptop I got for around $650 with a $150 gift card I received as a gift from one of my high school teachers. It’s great for it’s use. I bring it to school as a portable and bring it home as a desktop. It’s a very fast machine after upgrading the ram to 2GB. The computer really wasn’t sufficient with only 1GB running Vista. The build quality is more or less solid and it does it’s job nice. The only real gripe I have with it is the awkward bilingual keyboard(which I’ve gotten used to by now) and the glossy outer casing. The glossy coating on the outside is a fingerprint magnet and always gets dirty.

The monitor I purchased used for only $200! One of my best hardware investments I have to say as having the second monitor has proved invaluable. This has got to be one of the best LCD monitors to hit the market. Unfortunately they are no longer being produced. It’s a 20″ LCD built with an LG IPS panel. There are 3 main types of panels used in LCD manufacturing: TN, MVA, IPS. TN are the most widely used as they are the cheapest to manufacture. The problem with TN panels is that they support only 16.2 million colours and it simulates the rest of the colours through dithering. Also TN panels have horrible viewing angles which distort the image when you don’t look at the screen directly. IPS is basically the opposite of the TN panel and are the best panels you can get in LCD monitors. The Dell 2005FPW has been compared to the Apple Cinema displays which retail for almost $800.

When I went to look for a new LCD for a dual monitor setup I knew I wanted this one so it took months of researching and searching before I was able to find a seller who was willing to give his up. Now that I have it, it was well worth the effort. The monitor is amazing. In that last picture you see that the 2005FPW can tilt 90 degrees and have a very high vertical resolution which is great for browsing websites without scrolling. The monitor also has height, tilt, and rotate adjustment capabilities so it’s very ergonomic and you can adjust it to just about anyway you need to have it.

Do you have pictures of your computer setup? Feel free to share them with me! As a fellow computer geek, I love seeing other setups as well.

I knew that building an eCommerce website from scratch was not a real viable solution as eCommerce websites are complicated things. You have to take into account security, transaction processing, admin usability, and a slew of other things related to the storage and retrieval of information in databases. osCommerce was the first open source solution that came to mind but I’ve heard many things about osCommerce. Many not so good things about osCommerce that basically eliminated it as a solution for this client. This was when someone from the SitePoint forums referred me to Magento.

When I went to look at Magento, I was blown away. The beautiful, yet simplistic design of the Magento homepage was the first thing that caught my eye. Delving deeper into the application itself, I find myself confronted with a feature rich- yet clean eCommerce package. The admin control panel is also quite a thing of beauty as well! It doesn’t present you with a million of options, instead there is a nice navigation system at the top that breaks down the management of your eCommerce website into small and manageable bits. You can have a look at the demo of the admin backend right over here: http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/index.php/admin/

I had to ask myself, this thing can’t really be free can it? Open-source free? This will probably confirm it. Indeed Magento is free as in open-source free!

PS. I must’ve had a freudian slip writing this, as after proof-reading this entry, I noticed I spelt Magento as Magneto the entire time. But again that might just happen when your name is too close to a famous Marvel comic villain.

I’m not going to make and list all my elaborate goals. Instead, I want to keep this one simple for now and take it one step at a time. I’ve always have trouble keeping up with this blog so my goal for this month and beyond is to at least hit 2 digit figures in terms of blog entries.

This might seem like a small and stupid goal but looking at my archive of blog entries by month, you can see this seems to be a trivial goal for me to reach. March 2007 was the only month I’ve reached double digit blog entry figures! That seems quite pathetic, so hopefully I’ll make my way to break this trend.

Wish me luck!

mp3Upload.ca
mp3Upload is a website that allows users to upload mp3 files and share them freely with their friends. The idea spurred out of my mind one night and about 3 days later the design was made, domain registered, and backend created! The goal was to create a simple and intuitive user interface that quickly allowed users to do what they came to the site to do, upload mp3 files.

Many people who I’ve talked to after using the website can attest to the ease of the user interface, so I’m happy that I was able to achieve that. The site has a no frills upload form and once the mp3 has been uploaded, he or she is redirected to a page where they can share the links to allow their friends to listen or download the mp3 file they just uploaded.

Right now the site is only monetized through Google AdSense, making minimal coin here and there. As always though, it’s always recommended that you don’t rely on just one source of income. The beauty of the site is it has a lot of room for expansion. My plan in the future is to implement a premium membership system which will allow users to keep playlists of mp3 files, view mp3 files they have uploaded, search our database of mp3 files (by genre, title, artist), and also freely browse through the latest mp3 files that are uploaded onto the site. This premium membership will be subscription based most likely broken down 1 month, 6 months, 12 months, and “lifetime”.

Of course, the service will still be available for free, you just won’t be to access the extra features. This will hopefully introduce this second source of income from the site, making the revenue from it less reliant on just one source.

SiteProxy.org
SiteProxy.org is a free anonymous web proxy that I purchased off the DigitalPoint forums for $150USD. Actually it was a network of about 8 other proxies! You can view all the other sites by looking at the “Try these other proxies” box on the right. I basically revamped the design of all of the sites I purchased to use this new standard format for all of the proxies. They are all managed through a single set of files which allows me to easily add sponsored links or new proxies across the entire network when needed.

The idea of having a network of proxies is so if one is blocked, your users can go to your other one. Also having the network allows you to easily share traffic across the network of proxies you own. So by promoting one proxy to get a lot of traffic, you can push some traffic around to your other networked proxies as well. I’m hoping to hold onto this for awhile and try to get some more traffic to the network and eventually resell it for a nifty profit!

In terms of expansion, the only real expansion that I see useful here would be to add more sites to the network as traffic grows. This gives you more web properties which is more attractive to a buyer who might be looking to buy a proxy network.

Those are the major things that’s been going on with my online investments. I’ll keep you updated with the progress of these sites as they come!

Nothing too exciting. My Canadian Money Market made $4.17 and goes from $1,210.82 to $1,214.99 and my US Money market made $1.12 and goes from $1400 to $1,401.12. The beauty of investments is that now the money I made from these, gets reinvested back so that next month the idea is to make a little bit more and a little bit more.

Online wise in January, the highlight of RapidWire and ProfileRenew sales for $2300 was the big thing and also my Google AdSense payment came in at about $150. This will probably be the last of payments I get from AdSense for awhile since RapidWire was what drove my AdSense earnings. No matters. I have also worked and completed my newest site! But that is for another post.

This is a pretty standard investment, I also have a chunk of my savings from my Canadian funds invested in a Canadian Money Market Fund. I find it easy to just move some money into these investments when I have no real use for the money because instead of getting little to no interest from the bank, investing in the fund at least gives you decent return on your money every month. I get around $3-4 a month from the $1000 I had initially invested in the Canadian money market which otherwise would’ve gotten like $0.01 if I just left it in the bank. Every little bit counts!

Money market funds are usually comprised of investments in different categories. This is what makes them relatively stable investments. The US money market fund I purchased had a minimum of $500 investment which is pretty much standard for most of these more simple type of investments. Looking at the informational PDF gives me some information like the current yield of this US money market fund is 4.35%(Canadian money market fund is at 4.15%) and that since the fund’s inception it has a trailing return of 3.42%(Canadian money market fund is at 4.99%). Good enough for me! What it will do is, at the end of every month, the return that is made from the investment will be reinvested into the fund automatically without me having to do anything. So this is a great way to get extra change from the money that lays in your account.

To give you an idea of how much I’ve gotten back from my Canadian money market fund investment, I initially invested $1200 into the fund in October. In October I got a return of $3.53, November $3.42, and December $3.87 bringing the total to $10.82. Not a lot but like I’ve said before, this is from money that would otherwise be doing nothing sitting in the bank.

ProfileRenew
The first site I sold was called ProfileRenew and it went for $300. ProfileRenew was basically a free MySpace resource website. It allowed users to come and get free graphics, codes, and just about anything else to help make your MySpace profile look spiffier.

It didn’t really work out as I had planned and due to lack of time, was not able to promote or update the site. Traffic and revenue were minimal and made me decide to just get it off my hands.

RapidWire
The second site I sold was called RapidWire and it went for $2000. Now this is a huge milestone personally for myself. I’ve sold many sites before but they were always in the $xxx range. Never have I sold a site in the $xxxx range and this was what got me really excited. It is my biggest website transaction to date. RapidWire is basically a free anonymous web proxy. It allows users at work, school, or where ever else there are internet filters in place, to bypass these filters and view these sites.

The site has made me around $4000 in revenue over the 2 years of running it (almost enough to pay for my first year university tuition!). But recently the site was plagued with server problems and both traffic and revenue took a dive. So I made the decision to sell it, which in my mind I still believe was the right choice.

The wrong choice was not selling it for enough! My biggest mistake for RapidWire came at the very end. I was too impatient and I decided to lower the BIN price from my original $3000 down to $2000. Now that I look back at that decision, I knew that was a mistake, and that RapidWire could’ve sold for BIN price easily had I been more patient. Lesson learned.

Regardless of the mistake, I am very excited and happy to break the thousands milestone. With this extra cash I hope to make various investments both online and offline. I will keep you informed with exactly how I have or will invest my money as well as posting up exact figures and all those juicy details!

The phrase is “investing in dot.com”. Although it might not be a really popular search phrase, I honestly don’t know, it’s great to know that the new focus is already being crawled by the busy googlebots already and that the blog is getting a nice ranking at the top position!

Also considering that there are roughly 300,000 other results, I am quite happy with this. My other site Imusion Studio had top ranking keywords for “Free ProBoard Skins” and “Free InvisionFree Skins” each with about only 200,000 other results but recently has dropped in ranking unfortunately. These two top spots really helped Imusion Studio get a lot of organic traffic. So hopefully this blog will rank highly for some other more popular phrases and drive some organic traffic over as well.

Ranking highly for keywords is vital because it helps bring FREE traffic to your blog or website. This free traffic you can then find ways to monetize, through ads, membership sales, product sales, or whatever method of revenue.