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My Recommendations for a Happy Life
18 Mar 2023
An essay by Jim WestergrenMy personal thoughts on the matter and what has worked for me.Not a scientific article This essay is advice for myself (follow this Jim!) but also for others to benefit. Most of my advice is so obvious it almost sounds stupid but don't let that fool you - most often the [...]
Budget 100 - an old school magic format
29 Dec 2022
Old school Magic is a wonderful way to play the Magic the Gathering card game by using only the cards created in 1993 and 1994 (the first 2 years of Magic). Lots of nostalgia and excitement. Back when cards had beautiful fantasy related paintings and were not overly complicated. Are you an old school magic [...]
My Favorite Board Games and How I Play Them
18 Dec 2021
Board games is one of my passions. Both as a player and now also as an aspiring game designer. And I can sometimes get obsessed in trying to improve rules of games to better suit the tastes of me and those I play with (usually my wife, son and brother-in-law). I normally play as a [...]
Switching from Windows PC to Mac and why I switched back
6 Jun 2021
I am a SEO and web developer that has been using Windows since more than two decades. In may 2021 the fan of my current lap top started to make a lot of noise and I bought a MacBook Pro M1 which was highly recommended to me by coworkers - I was told that I [...]
Creating The Space War - The Card Game of My Dreams
29 Apr 2021
I love card games. I have played various card games more or less regular the last 25 years. I started to play Magic: the Gathering (MtG) around 25 years ago and have played it on and off since then. Other card games that I have especially enjoyed to play is Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, [...]
24 Characteristics That Geniuses Have in Common
27 Aug 2020
I am republishing here an excellent article that I first read back in 2002 and that I have read many times since then. I feel I just need to share it, it has worked well for me and might work well for you as well. The worlds greatest geniuses have all had 24 personality characteristics [...]
Setting up and Managing a MySQL Server
18 Mar 2020
Disclaimer: I am not a professionally trained sysadmin. What I have learned is by trial and error and study from Google searches. This is more notes for myself rather than a guide or article. I will regularly update it. Intro I am using a dedicated MySQL server for Domainstats.com and I have been doing that since [...]
Canasta - The Great Card Game
11 Mar 2020
Canasta is a card game that was created by two bridge players in 1939 and was extremely popular at the end of the 1940s, "In the peak year of the game one hundred million packs of cards were sold" - When Canasta Was the Craze, article from 1952. It is one of my absolute favorite [...]
Annual report number 13 + 14: My Success
28 Feb 2019
Back in December of 2004 I started a new life from zero. I was 22 years old without any money, education or connections. I borrowed my mothers computer and started to learn HTML and internet marketing. Each year I publish an annual report. Earlier reports are linked from the history section in my about page. Personal [...]
Selling my SEO business TodaysWeb
19 Apr 2018
Since I came back to Sweden in beginning of 2016 I have mostly been working on Domainstats which I also secured an investment for. The project is now almost ready for an official launch which is very exciting. My SEO and web development business TodaysWeb stayed in Bolivia as an independent company and has been [...]
PDO vs MySQLi speed comparison
31 Oct 2017
My conclusion Based on my testing and the advantages of PDO (info) I recommend the following: Use PDO with PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES set to TRUE and use the charset=utf8mb4 in the dsn (to be equally safe as if emulation was turned off). The speed increase is around 80% and this is not the default with for example [...]
Installing Apache Cassandra with PHP 7 on Ubuntu 16.04
15 May 2017
I spent a lot of time and paid for some help (thanks David Donari!) to figure out how to install Apache Cassandra with PHP 7 and the Datastax PHP Driver. I needed additional Cassandra servers with PHP and had to find a solution to this. Following the official installation instructions ... will not work. It [...]
Annual report number 11 + 12: My Success
20 Jan 2017
Back in December of 2004 I started a new life from zero. I was 22 years old without any money, education or connections. I borrowed my mothers computer and started to learn HTML and internet marketing. Each year I publish an annual report. Earlier reports are linked from the history section in my about page. [...]
Git with GitHub the Simple Way
30 Apr 2015
This is what is working for me and may not be the best for you. This is very beginner level. I am using the Git Bash from here. Starting a new repo Create the repo in GitHub, include readme. Create a team in Github and make sure you have access to the repo. Create a [...]
Annual report number 9 + 10: My Success
3 Mar 2015
Back in December of 2004 I started a new life from zero. I was 22 years old without any money, education or connections. I borrowed my mothers computer and started to learn HTML and internet marketing. That is now little more than 10 years ago and each year I publish an annual report. Earlier reports [...]
Annual report number 8: My Success
16 Feb 2013
Back in December of 2004 I started a new life from zero. I was 22 years old without any money, education or connections. I borrowed my mothers computer and started to learn HTML and internet marketing. That is now 8 years ago and each year I publish an annual report. Earlier reports are linked from [...]
Guide: WordPress with Maximum Performance and Speed
25 Oct 2012
This is a step by step guide in which I will show you how to setup WordPress with maximum speed and performance for just $15 per month utilizing Nginx + PHP-FPM + APC + Cloudflare + Redis. It is the same that this blog is using and I will show you how. No need for [...]
How to load WordPress in a few milliseconds using Redis
25 Oct 2012
Redis is an advanced key-value store. Like memcached on steroids. Everything is in the RAM and you can theoretically reach 100 000 GET per second with Redis. My solution below will cache all the HTML output in Redis and display it without the need to load WordPress. A big thanks to Jeedo Aquino who have [...]
Maximize the Link Juice of your Infographic with the use of the Canonical HTTP Header
20 Jun 2012
Since June 2011 Google is supporting to set the rel canonical via the Canonical HTTP Header. This is great for PDF files, but nobody seems to have mentioned images? Does it even work? Link building with your infographic A popular method nowadays, post penguin, is to use an infographic to attract links. But how do [...]
Why I recommend CloudFlare and why you should try it too
17 May 2012
CloudFlare is a both a proxy and a CDN (content delivery network). It was recommended to me by Magnus Bråth. Quoted from them: On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast uses 60% less bandwidth has 65% fewer requests is way more secure All for free! Never heard of them? According this recent [...]
Annual report number 7: My Success
9 Jan 2012
Back in december of 2004 I started a new life from zero. I was 22 years old without any money, education or connections. I borrowed my mothers computer and started to learn HTML and internet marketing. That is now 7 years ago and each year I publish an annual report. Main highlights from 2011 My [...]
Sixth Annual Report: My Success
13 Feb 2011
I know that I publish this late, but better late than never. On the 5th of December 2004 when I was 22 years old I changed my life 180 degrees. I quit my earlier very special life and moved back to Sweden to change my life totally and start a new life. I can now [...]
Common CSS mistakes and their solutions
31 Jan 2011
While adding new templates to my website system N.nu (see all templates here) I always have to correct mistakes in the CSS. I normally add templates from Wordpress.org or popular CSS templates sites so I assume that the creators are experienced professionals. This article is based on the experience after correcting over 100 popular CSS [...]
How to use a WordPress theme or CSS template for your N.nu website
23 Nov 2010
There are thousands of WordPress themes, CSS templates and other website templates available for free to download and use. Just make sure that you abide by the license which normally is to just keep the credit links in the footer. The existing templates already converted and ready to choose with a click can be seen [...]
SEO Features of N.nu
11 Aug 2010
I learned PHP and built the online website creator N.nu from scratch myself (examples). From the start one of the principal focuses has been to make sure that the system has optimal SEO and it is my intention that N.nu is the online website creator with the best SEO. This blog is of course hosted [...]
A new approach to block web spam
22 Apr 2010
This article updated on the august 11, 2010. Around half a year ago or so I had a unique idea (at least I had never heard or read about it before) on how to block web spam. It is very simple, yet very powerful. Normally comment spam, false registrations and other such spam are being [...]
Fifth Annual Report: My Success
11 Jan 2010
On the 5th of December 2004 when I was 22 years old I changed my life 180 degrees. I quit my earlier very special life and moved back to Sweden to change my life totally. I had no money, education, experience or connections and some people highly doubted that I could get successful – personally [...]
Challenge In Building a CMS: Different Hosting Setups
11 Nov 2009
This is the first article in a serie about the Clesto CMS - my first PHP project (I am still a kind of noob, feedback appreciated). There is a huge difference in building something for yourself and something that you release for a lot of people to download. The Clesto CMS has now been tested [...]
Fire Sale! 80+ Web Sites And Domains Must Go
12 Oct 2009
Over the years I have bought a lot of domain names and web sites. I especially bought a lot of web sites in 2006 and 2007 to use for link building to clients but as I sold my link building services and 40 web sites in October 2007 I have had almost no use of [...]
Version 2 of my CMS, The Clesto CMS
18 Sep 2009
After a lot of hard work and learning I have now finished making a complete new version of my Clesto CMS. It is still flat file based without a database and now it has both visual editor and HTML editor for making the pages - similar to that of Wordpress. Focus has been to make [...]