Phone (Call or Text): 559-871-1613|brandonchopkins@gmail.com

About Me

General stuff about me…there won’t be much in here…

Interview with WebProNews.com

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out my recent interview with WebProNews.com here.

Give me some feedback, agree? Disagree?

By |November 16th, 2007|About Me|0 Comments

Time For Halloween

My wife and I have been working on getting our Halloween costumes ready for Wednesday.  We’re going to be fishermen and our 6 month old daughter is going to be a fish.  Her costume is perfect and we just need a few finishing touches for our costumes.

One of the things that many people look for when putting together their halloween costume is contact lenses.  While our costumes don’t really need contacts, costumes like dracula and vampires would be perfectly suited for a set of cheap halloween contacts.  If you’re still deciding on a costume, you should be able to order online and get overnight shipping and have it by Wednesday.  While we were at the Sierra Vista mall yesterday, we noticed how expensive halloween costumes were.  When I checked online, they were much cheaper.

By |October 29th, 2007|About Me|0 Comments

eBay “Website for Sale” Scammers

Alright, I always see these sites that are “established” with “income” listed for sale. Normally they don’t sell, but I always see them.

You know, the text says stuff like, “Have you ever wanted to run your own online business from the comfort of your own home with the potential to make over $100k per year but did,nt know where to start.If so then you have come to the right place.This is your chance to bid on a popular proven real ecommerce website business and not an amateur maybe it might make you money website that is found on so many auction.”

Here is one such scammy, scummy, site for sale. What I don’t like about them can be found in the following picture:

eBay Scam

Now “scam” might be a strong word, but Merriam-Webster says scam is defined as, “a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation”.

So saying that the appriasal for this website is $22,400 is definintely deceptive. The website is worth $10 (domain) plus maybe $30 for an ugly template that has been used on at least 5 other identical websites.

So here is me, calling you scammers out. If your websites are really worth anything, lets have a contest. You vs. Me, Head to Head, One on One.

If your websites can make $100,000 per year like you say they can, I want to see a check!

By |June 1st, 2007|Reviews, SEO/SEM|6 Comments

Learn Something New This Month

If you were to learn 1 new thing per day, you would know 365 new things in one year. However, those would be shallow things that you would probably forget.

If you learn 1 new thing per month you would learn 12 new things per year. Those would be longer lasting things and could be beneficial.

If you learn 1 new thing per year you would know 1 new thing per year. That just isn’t enough.

For the sake of argument, learning 12 things per year is the ideal situation and since months are roughly 30 days, that gives you 30 days to learn (maybe even master) one new thing.

Are you up for a 30 day challenge?

So I’m going to take this challenge of learning one new in the next 30 days. I don’t know what I should learn. It could be computer related or not, but it should be something you don’t know much about.

Here are a few of my ideas for things to learn:

Japanese – I have some Japanese podcasts and I really like the language. I’ve learned a very little bit and don’t remember anything from the 10 podcasts I listened to a few months ago. I don’t know how Japanese could be useful to me, I don’t even know any Japanese people, but it’s kinda fun.

PHP – I have 2 PHP books that I started reading last year. I know how to use the include function, and read and understand a little PHP, but that’s about it. I know PHP would be useful in programming websites, but it would take a lot of dedication to learn something this intense. I’m not very well suited to learning on my own without others supporting me at the same time.

AJAX – Honestly I don’t know much about AJAX apart from the fact that it lets you reload a section of a page without having to refresh the entire browser. It is also very trendy and “Web 2.0ish”. I don’t know if my technical skills are up to snuff to learn something that combines an existing language (Javascript) that I know nothing about and XML which I know very little about.

CSS – I pay a developer to turn my .PSD files into CSS. It is pretty costly when I know this is something I could do myself. I’ve never had the desire, or taken the time to learn much CSS. This one would actually be beneficial to me.

Nothing – Then I could focus on my previous goal of working on one thing per month. Geez, it didn’t take me long to give up on one goal to go after another.

So what other things could I possibly learn? What about you? Interested in attempting to learn something for 30 days and compare notes?

By |May 31st, 2007|News|3 Comments