When I first got into building businesses and websites online, I had no idea where to start…  I didn’t know the first thing about ‘Virtual Property.’  I had to teach myself everything…  Thank God I found WordPress when I did!

Naturally, the thing that sparks most people’s interest about starting an online venture is the idea of making a few bucks online.  So naturally, I started looking!

After fiddling around with Adsense and certain CPA ads, I decided to try my hand at something a little different: website flipping.

Website flipping is a bit like house flipping, only it’s with virtual property (aka websites).

By now, you’re thinking that I’m going to drag this out and tell you some long, stupid story about how I made lots and lots of money by doing something as easy as tying my shoes…  But I’m not.

Instead, I’m going to introduce a friend of mine who does make a living flipping websites.  His name is Ryan Moran (@ryanmoran).

Ryan is a smart cat.  In fact, he’s one of the few I still like to learn tips and techniques from.

You see – you’ve been told that you need to build websites, choose niches, and do all the hard work to get websites and businesses started, but I want you to watch as Ryan proves that you can skip all of those steps and have instantly profitable campaigns…

Check out this video:

http://nethackz.com/etycoon

In the video you’ll see how you can skip all of the hard steps that monopolize your time and keep you stuck.

No need to opt into anything, just fire this up and the video will start playing automatically:

– Jason

P.S. Ryan is holding a webinar in a few days where he’ll be teaching exactly how he skips all the hard steps and still rakes in the dough. And for every person that registers for the webinar, $1 is being donated to the Haiti Relief Effort. Do yourself and the people of Haiti a favor by registering for the virtual property webinar after you watch this video:

http://nethackz.com/etycoon

After a few years of building computers and servers, I’ve collected a lot of stuff…  I had thought about purchasing a 4 post server rack like the ones here on Amazon, but decided against it…

I decided that I wanted to put one together myself…

Looking back, it’s probably more expensive to do the DIY thing, but it’s ok.

I can’t remember if I ever shared this with you, but it’s an awesome tutorial on how to build a server rack for your house or your office, without having to pay thousands of dollars!

Admittedly, it isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever put together, but it works and exemplifies the geek in me :0)

For about $150 and 3 hours of work, it’s entirely possible to put together a stand-alone unit to house all of your computers/servers.  I, for instance, have my email server, web server, media server and file server in this bad boy.  There’s also a rackmount network hub, modem and monitor hanging off the side so I can monitor vitals…

Anyway, here’s a link to the original how-to article:

Deadly Computer Blog » DIY ~20U server rack.

I don’t know that I’d attempt to build one myself again.  Racks have really gotten pretty cheap and you can get something fairly inexpensively if you shop around or buy something through Amazon.

Project management software is big money.  For you to have something custom developed, it would run well into the thousands of dollars.  If you decide to go the hosted route, expect to pay about $50 a month for decent stuff.

In this how-to podcast, we’re going to show you how to build your very own project management suite.  Your clients can log in.  Your people can log in.  Everyone can keep tabs on what’s going on, upload files, send emails, and all sorts of other fun stuff.

Here the podcast notes:

• We’re going to be using Collabtive
  • Install instructions:
    • Unpack the Collabtive archive in a directory of your choice.
    • Next, upload all the files to your webserver.
    • Make the following files/folders writable:   /files    /templates_c    config.php
    • Then open the installer in your browser.
    • Point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/collabtive_dir/install.php to do that.
• Commercial offerings and other services
  • Basecamp
  • GoalsOnTrack
  • GoPlan
  • ActiveCollab
  • Jira

All set!  Let me know what you think!

Building your own web server is cool – but oftentimes it requires you spend weeks checking out tutorials and how-tos.  What ends up happening is you find something that looks like it’ll work, get half way through it, and then see it isn’t what you need!

This tutorial is going to show you how to set up a complete server inside VirtualBox, Sun’s virtualization software.  You can do it on Windows or on your Linux machine without having to wipe out your existing operating system or have to dual boot.

It’s going to consist of two videos – one demonstrating how to set up Ubuntu on top of VirtualBox and the other running Putty and EHCP.  EHCP is responsible for setting up PHP5, Apache, Webmail, Email and all the other libraries you’ll need to run a fully functional web server.

Here’s what you’ll need.  The videos are below this little list!

• Download and burn a copy of Ubuntu Server
• Download and install VirtualBox
• Set up VirtualBox for running Ubuntu
• Install Ubuntu by booting up your virtual machine instance

• Install Putty on your Windows machine
• Login to your server using Putty
• Run the EHCP install
• Navigate to http://your.ip.address/ set everything up like a normal web hosting control panel!
• Start adding sites through ftp and phpmyadmin!

And here are the videos that show you how!

• How To Install Ubuntu Inside VirtualBox
• How To Set Up Your Virtual Web Server Using EHCP

Let me know your questions!

Most generally, the money you make with your website is from advertisers.  The most recent trend, aside from text link ads, is 125 x 125 pixel banners.

Today, I am going to show you how to install and deploy your own private ad server using OpenX.  That means you can sell your own ad and keep 100% of the profit!  This ad server is going be capable of running any size banner ad or text link you need to serve.

nH005 – How To Build Your Own Ad Server shownotes:

• Intoduction to OpenX
• Other ad servers and ad networks I mentioned
  • Buy Sell Ads
  • Text Link Ads
  • WordPress Ad Server Plugin
• The install process
• OpenX tutorials

Enjoy!

RSS readers are a dime a dozen.  My personal favorite is Google Reader.  It’s got great integration and support which makes keeping up on news all the more easy.  But to me, that’s a whole lot of data that I could use more efficiently if it was on my own server!

Today, we’re going to show you how to set up your very own server-side RSS reader.  It’s going to poll the feed list every 30 minutes and display the new items in a nice, ajax style list so you can get through them quickly and efficiently.  It will also have a search function so if you forget a piece of news, you can search for it.

The open source software that we’re going to use is Rnews.  Its a feed aggregator that works really, really well.  There is a Firefox plugin available at Sourceforge so you can post any blog or RSS feed directly to your server.

The concept is relatively simple through the web installation wizard…  Here’s the install instructions:

Last week, I talked about what some of the problems were with using social bookmarking services on the web.

Personally, issues I have are that the good services charge and all your information is sitting on someone else’s server!

Today, I am going to walk you through setting up your own social bookmarking application that you can open up to the world, or you can close off to yourself.  Either way, all you data is going to be safe and secure, and you’ll have your databases for backup!

For this tutorial – we are going to be using Scuttle – the open source bookmarking app.

1. First and foremost – download Scuttle
2. Extract it to your desktop
3. Upload it to your webserver, whichever folder you want it to live in.
4. Create a database and import the .SQL file found in the scuttle folder to create the necessary tables.
5. Edit Scuttle’s config.inc.php.example file to your own parameters
6. Set the permissions on the /cache/ directory to 0777
7. Go to the url!

Here’s a video tour:

Now, with Scuttle, there aren’t any admin screens or any way to protect against spam.  There are Scuttle versions such as SemanticScuttle which provide a capcha like question for a user to answer before they sign up.  It should work and I am testing it as we speak..

If there are any questions or thoughts, please let me know!  There are two other server side bookmarking apps that I’ll be covering in the next couple posts, but if you know of any – please feel free to jump in!

Jason

This video podcast will show you how to set up Ubuntu Server as a virtual operating system. That way you can build applications or websites without taking the time to continually upload and download files from a web server!

Things you’ll need to get your web server  up and running:

• VirtualBox
• Ubuntu Server

Once that’s set up, head over to this post to see how to install EHCP.