Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Mis-Placed Love and Payments at PayPerPost

This week PayPerPost made a serious transgression.  There have been many claims of transgression from people and groups that disagree with the business model from spamming the internet to undisclosed sponsorships and more. 

But this week PayPerPost decided their priorities required attention somewhere else, and apparently chose not to pay their bloggers.

 

 

 

 

Hi Posties,
We recently lost our weekend payout folks to other commitments. I am sorry for the delay this past weekend in payouts, but we will be caught up by today. Moving forward, we’ll remain on track with payouts. Thanks for your patience, and I am very sorry for even the briefest of delays on payouts!
Karen
_________________
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Karen Allen
Director of Customer Love
PayPerPost.com

PayPerPost.com :: View topic - Payouts over the weekend

Now, as a blogger, I think that PayPerPost is an excellent way for bloggers to earn a living.  It enables a blogger to treat their blogging seriously and profitably from very early on. 

It also is a lot like crack for bloggers.  It enables bloggers to churn out garbage reviews and get paid for it.  PayPerPost has taken a number of steps to improve the quality of their blogger network from identifying geographic location (to screen out non-fluent english speakers) to recruiting high PR blogs (in hopes of finding people already trained in pushing out good content) to setting up PayPerPost University (where they will try and teach people how to be better bloggers, even though PayPerPost is not run by bloggers, but advertisers).

You Have to Pay Your Bloggers - First Priority

Regardless, PayPerPost should have never decided to not pay their bloggers in favor of something else.  That’s just very bad business.  I doubt this will harm them significantly this time, but they better not let it happen again or else they will likely see many little revolts.

PayPerPost and Potential Energy

PayPerPost has been back to the VC watering hole twice in the last year, despite running a cash rich business.  I personally believe that they have a huge amount of potential, but they often take detours that seem like they could derail the company.  This is probably smoke where there is no fire, but it could turn out to be very serious.

I have spotted and worked with a number of PPP’s flaws over the last year.  I have even tried to help them work through some of those flaws.  They have skipped working on those flaws and opted for glitz and glam many times.  As a disclaimer, this became so frustrating to watch that I launched my own beta program in a related industry.

I think that PayPerPost needs to succeed to help advance the blogosphere.  I think to achieve the goal of advancing the blogosphere, PayPerPost needs to step up its game, and be more responsive to their customers and more recently their talent.  If they do not do this, then they could face the peril of many internet start ups that bulldoze new ground on the net.  As Microsoft would put it, it doesn’t pay to be first or second, Third is where its at!

Uploading Web Pages for School

Over ten years ago, I took a class in college that taught me how to make web pages.  The process was pretty easy, but the way they taught us how to upload files via ftp back then was super tedious and over complicated.

Uploading files to a server is easy!  But they made it seem very hard to upload the simple little files to an ftp server.

Today, I received a call out of the blue from a friend of my wife’s.  Her friend is a teacher like my wife, and she was taking a class for school and had to upload a file to a school server via ftp.

I was surprised to see that more than 10 years later, schools are still providing the same convoluted processes for file uploads.  Its something like, go to internet explorer or Netscape and click here, right click there, type in your id and password, and type in your ftp address, spin around backward, right click again, now drag and drop things from Windows explorer into the browser window and hope that voodoo happens.

The thing is, for most people it makes no sense to drag and drop files into a browser window.  We just are not trained to use a browser for that type of thing (unless you take one of these convoluted tutorials and remember the 30 step process!)

There is a much much easier way to get files onto an ftp server.  Simply download the free open source software from FileZilla.  Install it on your machine, type in your username, password and ftp address in the input boxes and then let Filezilla automatically login and take care of things for you.  You will then be able to see the files on your computer and the files on your ftp server at the same time.  You can upload, download, delete, or whatever all from one screen.

If you are a student and confused by some silly process, do yourself a favor and get this program.  Its free, trust worthy and easy.  Don’t waste hours trying to figure out how to push a car uphill with a screw driver.

Just get this program and get back to work so that you can finish your project before you pull all of your hair out.

Earlier I tried to put together a video tutorial of this stuff using the crazy process that the school had recommended for my wife’s friend, replete with closed captioning and voice overs and lots of stuff.  The truth was I do this for a living and their instructions were hard for me to follow (plus full of holes).

That’s when I called my wife’s friend up and said, just do it the easy way, upload your school files with FileZilla!