I’m heading out in a few hours for Yanik’s Underground Online III Seminar in DC.  His Seminars are always interesting.  Seminars are a great place to meet and network as you may have already heard.  But this seminar was a great turning point for me in focusing my business and efforts online.  If you’re going to be there shoot me an email or post a comment here.  I’ll be spending most of the time there partying with the speakers.
I’ll be hard to contact for the weekend.  If you need any type of support jump to jetpackedsupport.com and I’ll get with you asap.

Todd

I was just received an email from one of our Jetspinner users who is using a fairly obvious but effective trick for spinning articles with a thesaurus.  Until we add an AJAX thesaurus in Jetspinner 2.0 this is a great solution to help you come up with alternative words and phrases:

“I use ‘Word’ and the built in thesaurus to get other words with the same/similar meaning… It’s quick when you get used to it just put the curser anwhere in a word and press SHIFT and F7 and it pops up with suggestions….” – Russell

Thanks for the tip Russell!

If you have any other ideas or tips for users post them as comments here and I’ll post the best ones as their own posts.

Happy Spinning,

Todd Dickerson

I actually stumbled across this method completely by accident, not that what I did was accidental, but I had no idea that i would reap the benefits that I did. For the longest time I have been a designer at heart, graphic, print, apparel, interfaces, I just love to design. I also love to blog, so it was a no brainer that I would be modifying, and redesigning the look of my website, over.. and over again. First I started with a simple theme someone else created, just changing the colors and images. Then I moved on to totally restructuring other theme designers’ themes and layouts. Finally I got around to creating my own. Now I’m no expert coder so I had to pay someone to code the layout I came up with, but it was still all worth it. My first theme completely created from scratch was called “Shooter Red”. I initially was just going to use it as my site layout, and not let anyone else use it, but then I thought about how I feel when I go to a great looking site and hope they offer the theme for download, but they don’t. If someone loved the look of my site, I wanted them to be able to use the theme as well. But before I could prepare the theme for distribution, I lost time to keep blogging on my personal site and Todd Dickerson and I started on the development of our relaunched company “Jetpacked”. While we were busy developing the first two tools of the JetTools suite, I found some time to prepare the theme and created a section on our site for “WordPress Development”. I posted the theme for download there, and also did a “Shooter Blue” version as well. To let the community know about the theme release, I sent a few bloggers messages and wrote a little bit about the themes. That’s where it started, word of the “Shooter” themes spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and theme directory sites. Our site saw traffic go up steadily by the hundreds. But not only that, we started to see that we were gaining back links by the THOUSANDS. Feeling pretty good about this method, I decided to have a go at a second wordpress theme. In no time I whipped up a theme I called Infonightly, it was a simple 2 column “web 2.0″-ish theme. But I did something a little different this time as a test. I didn’t tell anyone about it, didn’t submit it anywhere, to this day it’s not even on our site! What I did was partnered with a site owner that offers wordpress themes for a fee. And we created a “Sponsored Theme” section on his site. In this section was a free download to my newly created infonightly theme. To this day the theme has been downloaded more than 4000 times. Resulting again, in thousands of back links.

Creating or modifying themes is relatively easy if you have any experience with HTML and CSS. Keep in mind you don’t have to create a theme from scratch to distribute it, you can simply modify someone else’s (but do something effective and noticeable, don’t be a sap and change the header color and redistribute it, I’ve seen a lot of these and it makes me angry every time). If you don’t have any experience doing this, and you’re not willing to learn how, there are plenty of individuals and companies that will be happy to design and create a theme for you to distribute. (for a fee of course).

If you would like to gain thousands of backlinks from releasing your own wordpress themes, contact me.

If you’re a blogger, you’re probably using wordpress, but no matter what platform you’re on, you really have only three choices to theming your site. Choice number one would be using a free theme found on a site like themes.wordpress.net, or provided by someone who creates free WordPress themes. Choice number two would be to edit an existing free theme provided by one of those sites, inserting your logo, changing the colors, background images, etc. But the third choice, the one I want to talk about, has so many benefits that I think the majority of people don’t really know about, and that’s having your own unique theme custom made for your blog. Here are just a few of the benefits:

CSS Galleries and Showcases
I have had A LOT of traffic come from CSS galleries on some of my past sites and blogs. Nobody will submit a site layout that they’ve already seen to a gallery, so having a completely unique and great looking theme and layout will get you linked and into just about any showcase.

Uniqueness and Brand Security
What happens when you’re using the same theme thousands of other people are using? Most people will not remember your site from the others, and you wont stand out unless you write some seriously breathtaking content. It’s always beneficial to have a theme nobody else has, it stands out, and your site will be remembered 20x better.

Distribution Options
When you create your custom theme, or have it made for you, you can have the option of distributing it through theme showcase sites. But not only that, there are dozens of bloggers just waiting to blog about your new theme. Buzz around the blogosphere is never a bad thing. Distributing a free WordPress theme is an easy way to get increased traffic and hundreds if not thousands of back links.

If you don’t know how to create a custom theme, there are people that do (for a fee of course). If you ask me, it is 110% worth the time, effort, or money to do it or have it done. I am available for hire, so to have a custom design created and/or coded for you, you can email me at Jason@jetpacked.com, or you can check out one of the following sites to see if they fit your needs.

- XHTMLized
- CodeYourDesign
- The Blog Studio
- Business Logs

A few days ago I made a post about ruining my MacBook by spilling water ALL over it. This morning I was checking my statistics and noticed that more than 1 person was searching google for the terms “water on macbook”. Someone besides me had unfortunately done the same thing I had done. Because I’m not the only one, I decided to put a guide together on how I saved my MacBook.. That’s right, It still works after being pretty much soaked in water.

What to do:

Right after the spill, turn the MacBook off and turn it upside down, this way the water that’s on it doesnt keep soaking down into the hardware, gravity is your friend here. Get as much of it off with a towel (still holding it upside down.) After you’ve gotten all the water off (that you can see at least), find a blow dryer and blow dry the keys and inputs on the side as best you can. After this, just leave it in a dry place for a day or two to fully dry out. It should work again within the next few days.

What not to do:

DO NOT take it apart thinking it will dry out quicker and better. I tried to take mine apart and it was the biggest hassle, screws would not come out, and now my casing is bent, and my click button below the trackpad is messed up, it still works, but I have to press it just right. Leave all of the disassembly to Applecare. The only reason I tried doing it myself, is that I don’t have Applecare.

DO NOT send it off to Applecare while it’s still wet, if it doesnt work after a few days, give it a few more until you are completely sure it is completely dry, then send it off to Applecare and tell them it just stopped working, if it’s water, there’s no way they can tell and they’ll assume the logic board just failed (it’s pretty common with MacBooks). Thanks to Mephux for this bit of information.

If it happened to you, good luck and I hope it works again like mine did. If it hasn’t happened to you, be thankful.

I’ve thought about this for a while, and I think it could possibly work, and work well. I’m not afraid to give my ideas out because innovation needs to be shared. The idea is to have an ad-free blog. Most everybody wants to monetize their blog these days, and they do so by selling or displaying ads on them. But what if you didn’t have to? What if you wrote good enough content where people would pay for a membership to read your blog? Think about it, you could have a completely clean site, free of any bulky and annoying advertisements, and get $1 a month from your readers which would let them free browse your content every month. Got 20 readers? That should pay for your hosting. Got 10,000? You would get ten thousand dollars every month. I think I personally would pay one dollar a month for a membership to blogs like TechCrunch, YoungGoGetter, PaulStamatiou, etc. This model has a lot of upsides, cleaner designs, no more annoyances, it’d be more like people are paying for an ongoing book. But on the downside we’d run into a few problems, like linking to your articles from social sites like Digg, only registered users would be able to view them. I may try this model later on with Massive. Anyone have any opinions on this?