Linode Promotional Code: The Scoop

Why I was interested in signing up for Linode

I just signed up for Linode yesterday. I’ve been interested in switching hosts away from Bluehost for quite some time for a number of reasons, the most important of which is speed. Bluehost hosting has just become unbearably slow. For those of you who don’t know what Linode is, it’s a virtual private server (VPS) hosting solution, which means that it simulates a dedicated server. That is, there’s no hand-holding; you get full control of your box, so you need to know how to run a server. The upside compared to a dedicated host is that you’re not completely dependent on a single piece of hardware: there’s an abstraction layer that removes the single point of failure. If the machine your Linode is hosted on goes down, your virtual machine is instantly switched over to another machine. So… the reasons I decided to sign up for Linode were:

1. Speed – it’s waaaaaaay faster than a shared host
2. Reliability – it’s more dependable than a dedicated host
3. Cost – it’s far cheaper than a dedicated server

So, having made up my mind, I went looking for Linode promotional codes.

The hunt for a Linode promo code

I have a number of Google tactics I use to find promotional codes for anything I’m considering buying. The first and most obvious is just to pop open Google and search for “linode promo code.” That failed to yield any results from the normal first sources (retailmenot, couponcabin, etc.), so I switched to different tactics. The tools on the left side panel of Google are incredibly useful for finding information beyond the default search engine. My first resort is generally the ‘Discussions’ option, which I use to find all kinds of information — I’ll likely explore this in more detail in a future post. This limits the returned search results to forum posts. I have found that in general, the information discussed in forums is more useful than general websites, as there is far less SEO that goes on in forums and people tend to cut to the chase and discuss only the topic of interest.

So, did this yield any results for a Linode promotional code? Not really. I found one result that indicated that Linode had distributed promotion codes to a select number of people who attended a Ruby on Rails conference, but they weren’t shared and the result was a couple of years old. In a desperate attempt to find more recent (and thus more likely valid) information, I used the ‘Past year’ filter on the left Google toolbar. No luck.

So, unfortunately, the verdict is: Linode seems to be pretty stingy with promotional codes. That makes sense, as it’s already dirt cheap. The cost breakdown is like this:

1. $19.95/mo month-to-month
2. $17.96/mo one year prepaid
3. $16.96/mo two year prepaid

So, here’s the deal: there aren’t any obvious promotional codes, but if you found this post useful and decide to sign up for Linode, I would shamelessly welcome you entering the following referral code, which would buy me a beer (beer makes me happy). It doesn’t give you any extra discount, but it also doesn’t cost you anything and gives me beer (did I mention beer makes me happy?).

Tres’ Linode referral code:
5a484befc4dc20dc3b3302a1e922d335af6a0d19

Disclaimer: the various links to Linode in this post are referral links, which save you the work of copy-and-pasting the above referral code, and still buy me beer (beer makes me happy!) and cost you nothing.

Tutorial for Vim: Recording macros

I put together a video tutorial describing how to perform a simple code cleanup task using a Vim macro (this also works for vi macros):

The basics boil down to:

1. The q command is the record macro command. Press it then press another key to choose a vim register to record into.



2. Think about a repeatable sequence of actions that would accomplish your task. Generally this needs to be length-independent (i.e. use commands that will work no matter what the line length is), so commands like f, %, and the like are your friends.
3. Use the @ command to play back your macro. It expects the name of the register you chose in step 1.
4. Prefix the @ command with a number to repeat the chosen task that number of times.

The video covers an extremely simple use case for vim macros and goes into a bit more detail than this post. It’s a very powerful mechanism that can be extended far beyond what I’m illustrating here. If you have a better way to accomplish the code cleanup task I demonstrate in the video, please contribute!

Thanks for reading.

Google has a beautiful web font directory, and all of the fonts are provided under open source licenses, but they don’t provide any easy way to download the TTF files onto your computer. The content of the directory has grown from just a few fonts a year ago to (as of this posting) nearly 500 fonts. Follow these instructions if you want to multiply your locally-installed font collection on a Windows box to use them in programs like Photoshop and Word.

Here are both video and text tutorials on how to get over 450 free, high-quality fonts installed on your Windows box:

Download and install TortoiseHg

TortoiseHg is a Windows interface to the Mercurial version control system. Google stores the font files in a Mercurial repository and you need TortoiseHg (or another Mercurial client) in order to get the raw files.

Clone the font repository

Once you have downloaded and installed TortoiseHg, you’ll need to check out the repository. To do this, create a new folder somewhere with at least 1GB of space on your hard drive, open it, and right-click inside of it. Choose the TortoiseHG -> Clone option, and enter the following for the ‘Source’ field: https://googlefontdirectory.googlecode.com/hg/ and click ‘Clone.’ This will take several minutes. When it’s done, search the folder for “*.ttf” to find all of the True Type Fonts in the folder, right-click, select install, and you’re done!

If you still have questions, leave a comment or check out the video tutorial I put together. I’d also love it if someone would put together a version of this for Linux and Mac.

Finding a Market: Do your homework! Look for specific business niche ideas.

One of the early things I learned while getting started is that it’s important to find your niche and do your market research before diving into building a product. Rob Walling’s book Start Small, Stay Small was a big impetus for my shift in attention to finding business niche ideas. I’ll review his book in a later post. After initially starting to build a product I eventually determined that nobody would want (more on that later), I shifted my attention to first find a needy marketplace, and then to building out a product. This has several advantages:

1. It gives me focus. When I’m in the middle of hammering out fixes to some really tedious programming bugs in order to make my “fun project” production-worthy, it’s nice to have some kind of motivation. Knowing there’s a market and demand waiting for me at the other end of that gives me that motivation.
2. It saves me time. The biggest resource I’m bringing to my new business is my portfolio of software skills. If I waste a ton of time on a product that has no market, that’s my company’s value getting flushed down the toilet. The job I’m leaving right now billed clients a lot of money for my time, and I was consistently in demand. Of course, I didn’t bring home anywhere near as much as my clients got billed. Still, it does tell me that my time has to be worth at least that much to the clients, otherwise they’d go out of business. The reason it’s worth it to them? Because they already have buyers.
3. It’s the only way to make money. Let’s face it, personal programming tasks are fun, but I would really like to eventually turn this into my full-time income. You need customers in order to do that.

OK, but how do I find a market?

The Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is a great place to start. I start plugging in anything that pops into my head. Do a sort by ‘Global Monthly Searches’. I think that items in the 5000-15000 monthly search range are a good place to start. Any more than that, and it’s likely to be impossible to rank for the search term. Any lower, and you’re not getting volume. Don’t stress about “all the good ones being taken” — that’s irrelevant while the internet is still rapidly growing. As quickly as good niches are getting taken, new ones are appearing.

Market Samurai is another great option (disclaimer: the preceding link is an affiliate link, and if you click it and end up signing up, you’ll be buying me a beer, so if you don’t like what you read here, and you don’t want me to have beer, don’t click it). It offers a 40 day trial and I’ve been pretty impressed with what it’s able to do. I’ll go into more detail on my workflow with Market Samurai in a later post, but the basic idea is this:

• Think of keyword that’s a good balance between broad and specific (too broad: nutrition, too specific: electrolyte metabolism rate, just right: sports nutrition)
• Use a keyword generation tool to find related terms
• Filter based on various selection criteria (competition, search volume, relatedness)
• Rinse and repeat until you find something that looks like a product demand.

Business attitudes differ between marketers and developers

I’ve found two main business attitudes in preparing to launch my online business. I’m quitting my job on Thursday. My main goal is to travel for a while, but the thought of having some time off to work on something fun and start building my own assets and revenue streams is very appealing to me.

Although I was initially excited about the opportunity to just work on personal fun tech projects, the marketer in me is going to feel like a failure if I can’t bring in at least some money from this process. So I do exactly what I have done ever since I discovered computers: procrastinate, and learn a heck of a lot in the process.

This procrastination leads to research that wobbles between marketing and tech. For those trying to start their own online-based businesses, I’ve noticed two general business attitudes. Both are of course imprecise generalizations, but I do think they reflect a fundamental philosophical divide between online business owners.

Attitude 1:

“I built this cool thing. There’s gotta be a market for it.”

I started with this attitude. I was going to build a program to make flyers for a band easily. I remember having lots of fun making flyers when I was in a band as a teenager, and I thought that making a simple band flyer program would be a good starting point for business.

I started building it. I learned about every 2D graphics toolkit out there, tried to decide between vector and raster graphics, looked for images with suitable licensing terms, and so on. I implemented some basic scripts to do a few of the operations.

Mostly I was looking into the technical side of the product, with a little lip service paid to the marketing side of things. I thought if I made a good enough product, the buyers would come. Maybe that’s true, but I eventually lost motivation because I became increasingly convinced that it would be very hard to make enough money off of it to make it worth my time. I am not at all dismissing the product-first approach — I am more naturally inclined to it, and numerous very successful businesses have started this way (Balsamiq is a great example). The more I read, the more I came across the second attitude.

Attitude 2:

“I don’t care what the heck I’m selling, as long as it makes me money.”

Running into

this attitude was a byproduct of learning about how to get my cool band flyer project into the search engines. I ran across sites like warriorforum.com, wickedfire.com, and digitalpoint.com. The overriding concern on these forums is making money. The customer comes first, the product comes second. I learned about sales funnels, key

word research, and other marketing concepts.

It was through these channels that I found a new hobby: obsessively seeking out niches. I explore this concept in much greater detail in my next post, but the idea is to look for:

• Terms that have demonstrated demand
• Terms that are closely related to a product you know you can build
• Terms that don’t have a lot of competition.