As you know on the web there are about three major ways that you can make money:

1. Sell a Product or Service
2. Accept Donations
3. Place Advertisements in your Content

Most of the web is attempting to sell a product or service to people. There are a few open source projects that take donations along with some other sites. And lastly in the blog sphere we operate mostly on advertising. Because I blog mostly to contribute to the community and not to make money I leave those pesky advertisements out of my blog. However if I was going to advertise I would definately do it with Amazons affilitiate program.

Basically with their affiliate program you are given a choice of serveral widgets you can place on your website or blog. If your visitor clicks on it and makes a purchase of anything on amazons website you get a cut. The percentages are broken down like this:

Some products on amazon are actually not sold by amazon, with those you get a flat 4%. There are some caps on this program though such as $25 cap on personal computers and downloadable digital media is capped at $1.50 each.

The application process takes about five minutes and is pretty painless, you can apply here. Now that you are an affliate you will notice when you go to amazons regular website a grey toolbar will appear at the top of the page. You can use this toolbar to track your sales and create product specific widgets. In my case I would want to advertise my book so I go to that page on amazon and then hit the "Link to this page" button to create a custom widget that looks like this:

This widget can have its colors and boardering adjusted to better fit your website or blogs theme. A lot of bloggers I know actually write book reports on books and then use these widgets to entice people to purchase. I'll do an update later on how well this particular widget does :).

Lastly they have some great pre built widgets for amazon searches, and popular products that might be useful. There is also an api to create dynamic widgets to adapt the product offering to the article you are presenting. Lots of people are reporting better results with the amazon widget than with even google adsense, especially when the product is closely associated with the website content. Good Luck.

Alright so I put together a little test for you guys to determine how much of a super nerd you are with .NET.

1) When you are at verizon and the lady at the other end is banging away at the keyboard for 45 minutes do you:
   a) Fume about how long it takes
   b) Wonder who programmed their crappy CRM
   c) Call up Verizons Corporate office to offer to reprogram their CRM for free

2) You just got married and your wife wants you to put 100 high res images on the web. You will need to resize all these to fit on the web, do you:
   a) Open up your favorite picture editor and resize all 100
   b) Write a program to do it for you
   c) Go onto codeplex and start an open source image editing project

3) When you hear a java vs .NET debate raging outside of your cube do you:
   a) Continue to get your work done because you have a deadline
   b) Forget about your project and get involved in this 2 hour discussion
   c) Win the arguement and then write a blog article about it that begins an epic flame war

4) If you had to live on an island for a month would you choose:
   a) A hot male/female companion
   b) An X-Box 360 with a plasma tv
   c) A solar powered laptop with a sat uplink to the internet

5) What is your favorite operating system
   a) Windows XP because you don't like change
   b) Windows Vista/7
   c) Windows Vista/7 Lite

6) I like to use (if they all apply pick c)
   a) Classes
   b) Interfaces, Abstract Classes, and my own generated Data Access Layer
   c) The DOM Directly, Mock Frameworks, and F# whenever possible

Scoring:

• A answers are worth 0 points
• b answers are worth 1 point
• c answers are worth 2 points

Scale:

• 0 - 3 = Nooblet. You really don't know that much but thats ok because people like you.
• 4 - 6 = You are able to expertly balance nerdiness with a normal life. You may even have a family and be able to carry on normal conversations that will never invoke the word instantiation.
• 7 - 9 = You have some serious super nerd tendencies. Although you are a god at work others may find you somewhat arrogant. You hope to one day have a family but are still looking for that steady partner.
• 10 -12 = If you scored in this region then you are over the top super nerd. You may want to seek counseling to help you score lower on this test. The bad news is that you are probably not datable at this range.

Before the flame war starts up I want to say I believe in test driven development BUT you really don't need unit testing for every single class that you create. I'm sorry but the AboutUs controller method seriously does not need a unit test. Those of you who are in shops where unit testing is forced on you then you realize how time consuming it can be to create good unit tests. Especially if your lazy and wait till the end of the week to make them. So for those of you who want to make reasonably stable applications and not have to create all this unit testing classes then you can try this:

So you'd place this code in one of your controllers and this would create a method attribute that you can use throughout your MVC Application. What that would like like is something like this:

Its that easy, and when an error happens your CustomErrorHandling Class can notify you in some way that there is a problem such as an email. I can't tell you how many times this has found deep errors in my system (stuff the unit testing would of never found). Now I am not saying get rid of unit testing, but you may just want to reserve it for mission critical stuff like making sure your ShoppingCart class is adding properly :D.

I just got off the phone with AT&T rep and found out all about AT&T's plans to allowing tethering and its not good. Basically they are going to sell an application later this summer that will charge you $30.00 a month to use tethering! That is in addition to the $30.00 a month you are paying for the data plan for a combined total of $60.00 a month for data. Combine that number with the lowest voice plan of $39.99 and you are looking at a $100.00 bill total for phone.

I was really hoping to combine my cell phone and my wireless card into a single unit. The nice part about the 3 G S tethering is you can recieve phone calls while you are tethered... but is it worth it.

As some of you may know i have been working diligently these past 12 months to complete the Wrox ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming book. After much hard work the book is finally out and is a great resource for learning how to use the MVC Framework. So what makes this particular book interesting as opposed to the half dozen other books on the same topic?

 The difference with this is:

• This is a paractical guide to using the MVC Framework
• We centered the book around a major project called TheBeerHouse available here on codeplex.
• There are several very useful modules including (Security, Eccomerce, Forums, Newsletters, Articles/Blogs, and Polls)
• This book is quickstart guide for ASP.NET developers to become proficient in the MVC Framework

What I like about this book which other books seem to lack is you can open up to a particular module and basically learn from the ground up how to do that particular function with the MVC Framework. If your sold on the technology and you want to reel up and use this stuff NOW then get this book! You won't be sorry. You can purchase it on amazon using the following widget: