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One of my favorite movies is called "Layer Cake" a 2004 film set in London that focuses on an unnamed successful cocaine dealer (played by Daniel Craig). At only 29, he has a respected place amongst England's Mafia, and is secretly planning to retire from the business. There's a couple of quotes in the film that I find particularly relevant to my career, first is the main advice of the entire plot, imparted upon the main character by the wealthy businessman near the end of the story:

The art of good business is being a good middleman.

This is a meaningful quote to me because for most of my career I've been working at being a good middleman, even if you consider the purpose of web publishing, more often than not, it's about providing information to readers related to places, people, products or knowledge in the hopes of bringing them together to consummate a deal. Web publishing is about being a good middleman, it's important not to forget that the surest way to become successful in this business, or any business, is to help other people get what they want.

Another favorite quote is from the same character, the successful businessman to the dealer:

You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.

My slant on that advice as it relates to web publishing is that, over time, if you consistently publish respectable web content and learn the tricks of the trade, sharpen your product-knowledge and focus in on reaching your target market, the day will come when the work get's easier, generates more revenue, and brings you closer to that point in time, when you own a valuable web publishing business and control your destiny.

Silicon Palms has continued to grow, the products have improved and more and more opportunities are introduced to me, whereas one upon a time I had to seek products to sell. Now the process has become easier and more lucrative. Perhaps the rarified atmosphere of having forgotten what shit even smells like has finally arrived?

Security Traders is a new social network for stock market investors. Please visit the new site I just launched using the Movable Type community software platform and feel free to sign-up, log in and post your own trade ideas, commentary, or global market observations. The Security Traders community is for sharing information and communicating with like-minded individuals who invest in global stock markets.

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.

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. 

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.

This post was created automatically when I finished the installation process of MT 4.0. This Blog is used for testing components, plugins and themes etc... all the good stuff that can be added and modified in Movable Type before I make similar changes on other sites that use the same software. So please be patient as I attempt to get caught up and then back to posting more real articles, photos, and ideas, on this and other Blogs that are designed, developed, and managed by Silicon Palms.

Strategic Profits Coaching Program

Rich Schefren was introduced to me by Mike Filsaime in an email just prior to the release of the Internet Business Manifesto. As a self professed information junky, with a penchant for self improvement, this document truly struck a chord with me. I keep a categorized folder just for eBooks and usually open new ones to make sure they're scanned for viruses and ready to read, then come back later in the day to check-out what I've downloaded to read.

Metrics refers to the standard of measurement and when relating to website visitor traffic there are 3 basic standards which include; hits, page views and user sessions. In the early day everyone used the "hit's" measurement since it will generally be the largest of the 3 and often sounds the best. However, a single user can create a dozen or more hits from a single page view, then banner and text link ads refer to "impressions", sound confusing?

Another Blog that I publish is called "Intellectual Security" and is information related to Intellectual Property (IP) topics such as copyright, trademark and patent law. Most of the content is Press releases but occasionally I come across interesting articles, so I write to the authors and ask for permission to republish. I met the attorney and IP expert John Farmer in 2004 in this way and now he's provided 2 excellent articles for that site.

I'm always on the lookout for digital download products to sell on Commodity Trader and my other sites, so recently I became an affiliate for Gecko Software, they offer the best solution for tracking, charting and back testing the Futures, Forex, and Stock Markets. Go ahead and click on the graphic to download your free 30 trail version of Track 'n Trade 4.0.