EarthOnSale.com

I know, I know...

It's been more then a month since the last time I wrote this blog. I cannot say I have a good reason, but I can't neither say that it was for no reason neither.

So, here is my story...

Did you ever feel like stuck, like trapped for ever in your life, in your magic lamp with nobody out there to rub the damn thing and to let you out of the magic "circle of life".

No?

You're a happy man, I envy you and I hope that one day I'll feel like you.

If yes, then you really know how I'm feeling.

I'm having so much ideas lately, so many "great" ideas, but I haven't been able to realize not one of them.

Why?

Because it's just the way my (or better to say, our) "European" school system works. Even better to say, I'm living the today's man's life.

Imagine yourself knowing the right combination for the bingo, but not being able to bet the right combination. Just imagine yourself not being able to go to the damn store and bet for the right combination.

It's that simple and yet, that complicated to do.

That's the way I'm feeling while attending this college.

Computer science...software engineer...or better yet...me...

Yeah right, that's cool, but that's not what I am. I don't know how to do anything pratcial, anything that I'm going to need during the real life problems and projects.

And yet, here I am, attending this freaking college, an institution that's making me ready to be swallowed by the great "life" machine.

Work, work, work, sleep, pay the bills, work work work... for whom? For me? I doubt...

So, there you go, that's the reason I cannot learn (the crucial things, the college stuff), I cannot pay attention to classes, to the life itself.

Why? Beacuse I'd rather have me fail as "todays person" then to have me work all my life. For whom? For someone, I don't know for whom, but I'm certainly not the person I'll be dedicating my life to.

So, now that the drunkenness is stepping off, let's talk about the web site...

I'm broke. That's right, I'm broke and I don't have en ought funds noire the knowledge to keep me running or promoting this web site.

I have another great idea, but I'll leave it for some other day, when I'm not this "influenced by alcohol" (or better to say, drunk).

So, there you go, gals and boys, I've got an great idea and I'm still gaining the knowledge needed to realize it.

Once I achieve that goal, there's no obstacle big enough to stop me.

How does a 1000 Eur monthly income sound?

Not too much? Then you're not living in Europe, especially in the Eastern Europe.

Talk to ya latter...

...victory? Can I say it again?

I won't, but anyway, you can again Google me.

Feeling fine again, thanks for asking. The directory submission is a hard and time consuming work and considering the fact that I'm connected to the www through a 56k modem, you can only imagine how do I feel.

I want a medal.

See ya

...driving me crazy!

I really don't know what am I doing wrong!?

I was listed yesterday and today I'm not! I'm not doing any kind of spamming or illegal activities and yet, I'm not listed in the google index today!?

Whatever, the feeling of victory didn't last long and new battles are ahead.

Stay tuned.

...officially google me!!!

Yes, finally is my site listed at Google and if you use the "earthonsale" keyword (with, or without quotes), my site is the first on the result list.

Maybe you think that it isn't much, but it's a great achievement for me. There's one little thing - I misspelled the site description; instead of "...A computer science student..." I put "...AN computer science student...".

Damn, I should've known better, but anyway, the main thing is - I'm GOOGLE-able (I hope you understand what I mean)

Off I go, the feeling of small victories is really the best.

Pozdrav!

Is something definitely much harder then it is to pronounce.

Work work work....work...
Really hard and time-consuming work, but it's worth it. Every hour - a new experience.

Back to work...

Actually, I didn't go nowhere, but anyway...

The last few days have been very busy and I definitely have something to talk about.
Ok, here's what you'll read in this post :
- planet navigation finished
- loading time cut in half
- need more marketing

So, here we go...

I've spent the last 5 days trying to figure out a way of making a zoom+navigation control on virtual Earth. Believe me, you don't want to know how I felt the last few days. The feeling of having a plan, but not being able to even start it's realization, makes you feel very very useless, bad, nervous etc etc etc.
As I already mentioned (more the a dozen times), I'm not giving up, no matter what! (and I'm sticking with that)
I did my best in learning Action Script computer language and upgrading my slim knowledge of working in Flash.
It was a great challenge and I'm beginning to think about starting a web site about helping novice programmers and web designers - just like me.
The result - I'm kickin' ass with AS 2.0 (compared to my previous level of expertise ) and a navigation+zoom control is done!

You can now easily navigate the virtual Earth, zoom in and out of it (max zooming - 5204%, I don't think that it needs more zooming, but it can be expanded even more!). A user-friendly control I've developed, can be moved around the page and the features are:
- zoom in
- zoom out
- planet dragging
- scrolling across the planet (up, down, left or right)
- easy scale changing (100%, 200%, 300%, 500% or 900%, it's your choice)
- mini planet navigation - planet is divided into 9 areas, and you can have them displayed with just one click
- the nav+zoom control is movable - place it anywhere on the planet
- D-button - restores the planet view settings to default settings

Talking about improvements, huh!

The planet now loads twice as fast - optimization of shapes and Earth appearance resulted in a smaller .swf file size. Now even the dial-up users can enjoy exploring the virtual Earth after just a few seconds of loading!

Now, the not so cool news.

I need to do more marketing. More, more and more. I did some beta marketing the other day (when I wrote the previous post) and the reactions were... were ok. Most of people liked the idea, but some of them didn't. Well, everyone's got a right to have his own opinion and after all, who am I to tell them that they're wrong (and they are, this site is really cool, believe me )

After all these "tech" tweaks I've implemented, I think that the time has finally come for some serious kick-ass web site promoting!

Can now anyone please tell me how to do it?

Challenges, challenges and more challenges!

Don't worry, I'm just getting warmed up.

See ya!

Is rising!

Yesterday I had twice as much unique visits as I received during the whole month!

Nice, I must admit and it's good to know that there's a good future smiling upon this site.

Stay tuned, more marketing is on it's way!

...of this site is what comes next. Now that I've got some funds, I can begin working on spreading the word.

Stay tuned, you'll (hopefully) be reading about this site on some well known news site and don't be surprised if you encounter some flyers in Chicago and some other parts of USA.

Apart from the paid advertising, there are many persons I can rely on.
I've got family and friends in following countries: USA, Australia, Canada, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Italy and I think that I can count on their help with spreading the word.

Now, the tech part:

I'm reading a advanced Flash Actionscript with PHP MYSQL integration book in order to make a better payment system and to make the updating of available and unavailable places more efficient.

The problem of making a zoom control on the main page is still present.

Gotta LEARN, LEARN and again LEARN!!!

I'll add a sales graphic to the top right corner during the day and that should solve the real-time sales stats problem.

What? Charity? What charity?

Don't worry, I didn't forget - $54 are going to charities (I'm a man of my words). I'll wait a couple of sales more and then I'll decide where to donate the money.

Stay tuned.

(read the headline with a...I don't know, a Donald Duck voice maybe )

So I'm back on track with new purchases of virtual land. As I mentioned, friend of a cousin's best friend's neighbor's stepmother's son in law girlfriend along with some other friends decided to buy some virtual land.
I've sincerely hoped that the new land owners would be advertising some kind of a private web site, but they're all promoting either poker or sport betting. The animations they're using are rather interesting - a man producing fireworks on Greenland, a beach equipment on South Pole and a lighthouse between S.America and Africa. Quite interesting indeed.

I'm so happy that someone thought of this site as of a good thing to invest in and it resulted in 4 pieces sold ($160 go into my pocket ). GREAT!!!

Now the even more interesting part: a friend of mine who lives overseas decided to make a bet. He wanted to buy land, but if the piece of land doesn't pay itself off, then I'll have to give him back twice the amount invested. The amount of money he was willing to spend was around $300.

That was his part of the bet.

Then came my turn in specifying my terms of the bet. I wasn't in a good situation; I had to come up with something good, something rewarding (ego-rewarding and money-rewarding). So I did it, I came up with something:
I needed something that would definitely attract everyone's attention and the first flying object on virtual Earth is born - a satellite!

If he earns the invested money back thanks to this satellite and sales generated through it, then I would have that satellite back and available for re-selling.

He opened a amazon.com affiliate account and we can both track the progress of sales generated.

I think that these were the easiest $460 ever!!!

...came in recently and I'm so happy about it!

Finaly is someone getting interested in this site and considering the fact that I didn't do any marketing yet!!! (well, you know, friend of a friend's friend etc etc)

I'm so excited about it and I can't wait to see how will this end.

I must add a zoom control to the main page because the current way of zooming the planet isn't quite the best out there. So it means additional ebook reading, tutorials and video material to be watched. Well, one's gotta give in order to get something back.

Ok, this was a brief description of main events today.

Stay in touch.

So here I am, back here working on this project. The last 3 days were great and this opportunity of having 'my batteries recharged' didn't go to waste.

Our godmother (kuma) got married and it was a great event. Many good people, many old and new friends, all there to support our loved couple. It was great, but I don't want to bother all of you with details, instead I'm just going to say once again: IT WAS GREAT !!!

Best wishes to the happy couple!

Now, back to the site issues...

Xippo and GH guys are ok with the change of ad hosting duration. So, that's one problem less. There's still the issue with finding a merchant account and taking first steps in marketing this site.

I think that it would be better to first have a few more customers before going really, really public.

I have prepared a few media releases, mails and posters, but now it just doesn't seem like the right moment for all that.

Ok, off I go, there's so much work to be done!

Almost forgot, here's a nice thought my godmother e-mailed me today:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Gandhi

Ok, so here are some thoughts I've been having lately :

- Currently, I'm offering to host an 7x7px (without zooming) ad on virtual Earth for 7 (seven) years and I'm asking $60 per such ad.

Hmmm, look at it from this point of view :
- In seven years, the internet will probably not be anything like today. There's a great probability that almost every household will have a ultra fast internet connection and that a Pentium IV pc will be considered the same way the Pentium 086 pc is today.
- There is a big big big... big chance that this site will be a great success.
- One of many advantages of this site is it's ability to never look the same
- By hosting the same ads for 7 years, I would become my own enemy and therefore make it really hard to with time expand and upgrade the entire site.'
- Currently, there aren't many details (if any) on the virtual Earth and I'm even planning to reduce the existing amount of detailing in order to have the page load faster.
- A site like this one has a great potential and by "locking" it for seven years, that potential would be wasted. When it hits off, I'll be able to expand it and to plug in many more features that I have in mind.

CONCLUSION :

The blocks are under priced and I must do something about it. Well, I won't change their price, but I'll change the amount of time the ads will be hosted.
The new time period is 1 (one) year. I think that that is a fair amount of time.

So that's it, I'll change the Terms of Use and additional pages which contain the old amount of time the ads will be hosted.

There's the problem with Golden Hands and Xippo and I'll contact them and ask if they're ok with these changes.

Anyway, don't forget that no changes are final and all of the changes are done for the better of the site.

I'm going to Kragujevac tomorrow and I'll be away until Monday. Since I don't have a pc there, the blog won't be updated until I'm back.

Ok everyone, see ya soon!!!

ENABLED!

But they are not yet processed the way I would like them to be. There's another problem - registering a company. That's definitely going to take some time, so until that's finished, I'll be accepting payments the same way as before - through MONEYBOOKERS

Certain emails and conversations I've been having with my friends lately are making me to think again about space pricing on virtual Earth.

We'll see...

suspended at the moment as I'm currently registering a merchant account with moneybookers, so please be aware of that. I'l be posting another link for payment in a couple of hours.

Thanks

The rumor is that the local authorised Audi, VW, Porche etc car dealer is considering the option of advertising on EarthOnSale!!!

So, nothing is sure right now, but I'm holding my fingers crossed. I still have to hear back from cousins in the USA and find out if they found some more iteresents in advertising on EarthOnSale.

Denny hasn't still registered a web site and Xippo bar guys still haven't fixed their website.

Ok, off I go, it's been a really busy day.