Month: April 2009

  • The Don’t Quit Poem

    When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
    When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
    When the funds are low and the debts are high,
    And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
    When care is pressing you down a bit,
    Rest, if you must, but don’t you quit.

    Life is queer with its twists and turns,
    As every one of us sometimes learns,
    And many a failure turns about,
    When he might have won had he stuck it out;
    Don’t give up though the pace seems slow–
    You may succeed with another blow.

    Often the goal is nearer than,
    It seems to a faint and faltering man,
    Often the struggler has given up,
    When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
    And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
    How close he was to the golden crown.

    Success is failure turned inside out–
    The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
    And you never can tell how close you are,
    It may be near when it seems so far,
    So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit–
    It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

    – Author unknown

  • Winning Streak History

    I can still remember
    the day I registered WinningStreak.com
    back in 1995, I was living in South Florida at the time and there was an
    article in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel about a new proposed gambling ship
    to be docked at the famous Bahia Mar, the article went on to say that the name
    of the boat was the “Winning Streak”. At that time I was involved in
    developing one of the first on-line Sportsbooks and we had just installed an
    on-line Casino on a server system in Curacao but late at night, about 2:30am in
    the morning, I awoke and wondered if the Domain name was available, sprang out
    of bed and logged on to the Internet to find out. Imagine that? Winning Streak
    was available, so I registered it. The gaming ship project sank.

    (more…)

  • Movable Type

    In 2004 I switched to Movable Type personal publishing software (also known as MT), since 2000 I’d been using a software called Radio from one of the original blog inventors, which I suspect is now near extinction, especially since WordPress has become so ubiquitous to blogging. At first I used the MT software just for Blogs as I tested and tried dozens of other content management systems (CMS). At that time there were dozens of PHP code repositories that offered individual components and/or modules, all in Open Source, so web geeks like me could just install theses onto the core and keep adding databases and then the various scripts we needed to achieve the desired applications. The idea was to install all the various scripts and tie it all together on the web.

    One of my favorite sites for open source downloads, back in the beginning of the hay-day of the PHP development was EvilWalrus.com, you could get just about any type of program for free and find support on a Forum from an active community of hackers trying to do the same things. Then the CMS “all-in-one” systems came, fast and furious, I tested one after another and settled on Mambo for awhile, then it changed names to Joomla but I became disenchanted with the CMS concept as I found them to be too buggy and never liked the user interface.

    Fast forward: Movable Type evolves it’s personal publishing platform to do more things and manage more tasks, the open source community grows and adds more components and modules, which they call plugins. The user interface is superb to anything else and the versatitlity of the software has grown to the point where you can do anything with MT that you could do with any of the 100 or so leading CMS software packages. I dig Movable Type

  • Back on a Winning Streak

    Finally feel a burst of new energy and have some encouragement recently from a few enquirers about hiring Winning Streak to do some Internet marketing for on-line gaming companies, or i-Gaming as it’s known. Online gaming has always been one of my favorite industries, so I couldn’t resist getting back to work on one of my oldest websites.

    Currently Winning Streak has an Alexa rank of 1,868,122 with about 40 unique visitors per day. At one time this site was very busy with 1,000 visitors on a low-traffic day and it generated significant affiliate revenue. Now begins the challenge to see how fast I can get the traffic back to where it once was, then go beyond that level to get back on a winning streak.

  • Renovation

    I decided to take up writing on this weblog again and for no other reason than to express myself in a way that is not about making money or promoting another web project. Just purely for the sake of having a place to publish my thoughts and ideas. Also, to make use of this Domain, which I’ve always been rather fond of and to use this publishing system for practice, as well as somewhat of a “sandbox” for testing various technologies developed for Movable Type by the “open source” developer community of which I am a member.

    This weblog is actually quite old, originally started with Radio software in 2001, which is why it was named “weblog” rather than “blog” since I started using this type of communication tool before it became fashionable and before the web community adopted the name “Blogging”  – for those that keep a “Blog”. In the beginning it was more about keeping track of site development.