As many of you know, I launched Carbon Fiber Gear back in December of 2007.  For over a year it stood fairly stagnant, not really getting much attention or updates from me, and then I started to take it pretty seriously.  So how has it grown in that amount of time?

It’s not the biggest site in the world, but it has been growing pretty rapidly lately, and I haven’t had one month where the amount of search engine traffic hasn’t grown.  The site has been ranked on Google’s first page for the term “carbon fiber” which has definitely helped things move along.

With the site I’ve tried to have at minimum 2 new posts per week on the editorial schedule.  That way my readers know to expect new content.  This has surely helped drive traffic, and gain more SE visibibility.  Take a look at this chart which shows the amount of traffic from search engines on a monthly basis since the site started:

Lately, I’ve been seeing a good 15-20% growth per month.  When the numbers are starting to get this high (20,000 uniques/month), it’s really starting to make a huge difference on the bottom line.

To help capitalize on this newfounded traffic, I’ve recently redesigned the site to better promote older content (since the content mostly is not time sensitive), as well as promote other sections of the site (like our store).  In turn I’ve found that our pageviews per visitor has gone up, and our bounce rate has come down.  Huge wins!

My main point of this post is that while I’m nowhere near the amount of traffic I’d like to ultimately bring to the site, they are decent numbers…but look at how much time it took to get there.  Don’t give up if you don’t see results over night.  It takes time to build up a site and really generate a loyal userbase, if you keep pumping out good content, things will happen.

I recently bit the bullet and picked up an iPhone.  For the longest time I held back from doing it, not because I didn’t love the iPhone, but because I despised the AT&T network (I was on Verizon).  After some bad experiences with Verizon, I decided to give AT&T and the iPhone a try.  Now that I’ve had the phone for about a month, I absolutely love it!  I haven’t really had any problems with the AT&T network, but I also live in a pretty populated area.

One of the most powerful things I’ve managed to do with the phone is sync my personal Outlook, work Outlook (different computer), and iPhone calendar so that they are push updated automatically over the air.  This way if anything changes either at home, at work, or on the go, all of my calendars are synced up appropriately.  I’d like to share how I did this.

Just to clarify how I have everything setup before the sync, I have one computer at home running Outlook that has my personal calendar.  I also have another computer at the office running Outlook that has my work calendar.  I also have a Google Calendar (gcal) calendar that is blank, but has a personal and work calendar on it (not populated with anything).  Just recently, Google announced being able to push your Google Calendar to your iPhone.  Push essentially is an over the air update, so if something changes on one end, it will “push” that data to the synced device automatically, with no need for a manual sync.

Knowing this information, we know that we can get push updates from Google, so ultimately the goal is to obviously get our separate Outlook calendar data from Outlook to Google Calendar…but how do we do that?  This is done using two free tools, Funambol Outlook Sync Client and ScheduleWorld.  Funambol is a plug-in for Outlook which will sync your appropriate data to ScheduleWorld.  We’ll then use ScheduleWorld to connect to Google Calendar and push each calendar to the correct calendar.

First, sign up for an account on ScheduleWorld.  Then install the Funambol Outlook sync client to each Outlook machine and in your options, set it to only sync over the calendar information.  For the server information you’ll want to use http://sync.scheduleworld.com/funambol/ds as the location, and then your ScheduleWorld username and password.

You should now be able to sync each calendar into ScheduleWorld.  It’s not exactly that simple though, you’ll need to change some settings in ScheduleWorld, so go ahead and login. You’ll want to go to the calendar page, and create two calendars, one for personal, and another for work.  Then head to the settings page, under the Calendars section you should see both of your calendars.  Go in and change any settings to make it the way you want.  You’ll notice a “Google” tab.  Head over there, put in your Google username and password, and click find calendars.  It should find your personal and work calendar on gcal.  If you’re in the settings for your personal calendar, select personal as the Google Calendar…and of course do the same for work.  Then click sync, and make sure it works.  You’ll want to checkmark the AutoSync option, and go ahead and do two-way sync (this way if you change something on either place, it will update everywhere).  Save those settings, and then do the same for your other calendar.

In ScheduleWorld, you should see two devices under “SyncML Devices”.  I changed those names so I can better identify which is which.  This is where you’ll tell which Outlook calendar to sync to the appropriate calendar in ScheduleWorld…which will then update it over to Google Calendar.

Now on your iPhone, if you follow the steps from the Google Sync page, you should be all set.  If you update your calendar from anywhere, it should update Outlook/ScheduleWorld/Google Calendar/iPhone all over the air pushed to your phone.

Now that I think about it, if there’s a way to bypass ScheduleWorld, and just have Funambol update Google Calendar, that should also work…if anybody knows how to do this, post a comment.

I’ve got a new project site on my plate, and I’m proud to announce His1k!  The site is a blog for guys that highlights stuff we’d like that cost $1,000 and up.  Lets face it, there’s a ton of cool stuff out there, and much of it doesn’t come cheap.  His1k is the place to go to find the latest.  While we will cover things that cost wayyyy over $1,000, we’ll try to keep a majority of products in the $1,000-$2,000 range.

Why?

Part of the reason is it’s interesting stuff.  It’s a site that I would personally read, and if you ever want to be successful at blogging, you have to have a true passion for what you’re writing about.  The content is also considered to be very viral, it’s just like Carbon Fiber Gear…the right post will spread around the internet like the plague.  I turned Carbon Fiber Gear into a pretty valuable site fairly quickly, and I’m hoping to do the same with His1k.

How Will It Make Money?

There are going to be three stages of major revenue stream with the site, but will come in phases.

Affiliate Links

The first being affiliate links, which is also has the potential to make the most amount of money.  Since each post is covering a product, affiliate links will be used when possible.  By doing so, any person that purchases the product through an affiliate link, I will get a percentage of the sale.  This has the potential to really bring in the bucks because the products are all over $1,000…5% of a $1,000 product is a lot higher than 5% of a $20 product.

Advertising

Advertising can play an extremely powerful role in revenue stream down the line.  The target market is very valuable to advertisers, and can bring a high CPM with it.  You’ll notice though that there is zero advertising on the site right now.  Why is that?  Right now it’s time to build traffic, that is number one.  Bring the traffic, and then bring the money.  When starting a new site, you want to concentrate on building it, who cares about monetizing to make a few cents here and there…it’s just not worth it until you can command some real numbers.

Potential Store

Carbon Fiber Gear followed this same route, and has now opened a section where we actually sell products.  Margins are much higher, and we retain the visitor when we send them off to buy something since they don’t leave the site.  It also cross sells other products on the site.  The potential for His1k to launch a store is much lower in my opinion, but it’s something to think about.  As I mentioned before, build the site, get traffic, get a dedicated following, then worry about making money and expanding.  If you have traffic, you can make money.

Building His1k

As all my projects do, it starts as a concept in Photoshop, and then turns into a site.  I did a majority of the design in Photoshop, ported over it over XHTML, and then built a WordPress template for it.  I wanted to keep it extremely simple at first, you won’t even find a main menu on the page.  Using custom fields and a couple of important plugins, I was able to build the site to functionally do and look how I wanted.  We’ll see how everything works out as it builds traffic, and adjust accordingly.

Next Steps

I can’t reiterate enough times, right now it will be all about writing new content and posting it consistently.  I’ll be taking on a couple friends to write for the site, we’ll see how that works out.  I can’t say I’ve had the best of luck in the past with friends writing, but who knows   Make sure to check out the site and subscribe to the RSS feed!  Any feedback, ideas, suggestions, etc are always appreciated.

Hyundai has been on the right tracks of car design as of lately. Their new Genesis sedan is a great looking sedan. The upcoming RWD coupe version of the car is even better:

Back in August Hyundai leaked out a teaser picture of the new Equus sedan, and this is all we got:

Then earlier this month some sketches were released, and I have to say, they look amazing!  If the 2010 Hyundai Equus looks anything like these sketches, I will be very impressed:

The car looks super agressive, and I love me a mean looking car.  The rear looks like a mixture of a few cars to me.  I see a Honda Accord, Nissan Maxima, and Acura TL.  What do you think?

The Equus will be Hyundai’s big daddy Sedan, packing a 4.6 liter V8 and eight-speed transmission.  Speculation says there is a possibility of a 5.0 liter 420hp V8, and even talks of a 5.5 liter supercharged version are amok.  The car will be loaded with all sorts of technology, and is going after cars like the S-class Mercedes.

[Source: Autoblog]

All credit for this goes to hongkiat.com, I’m simply re-posting because I find this to be extremely useful, and like to note stuff like this on my own blog.

Although recognizable, the Feedburner chicklet that displays the number of subscribers is ehh.  I’d much rather be able to stylize the number itself and fit it into my own design.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you can pull the number out of the chicklet and do whatever you want?  You can, and it’s extremely easy!  You can see I just implemented this on the sidebar on Carbon Fiber Gear:

Of course that number can be styled however you want it using CSS.  So how do you get it?  Simply put this code somewhere in your WordPress template (Mine is in sidebar.php), and make sure to replace the “feedburnerid” with your ID in the $whaturl line:

1
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<?
	//get cool feedburner count
	$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburnerid";
 
	//Initialize the Curl session
	$ch = curl_init();
 
	//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 
	//Set the URL
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
 
	//Execute the fetch
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
 
	//Close the connection
	curl_close($ch);
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
	$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
	//end get cool feedburner count
 
	// Use $fb to print out the number of subscribers
	echo 'Join the <i>' . $fb . '</i> subscribers';
?>

You’ll need to make sure the feed count service is activated. To do that, login to your Feedburner account, hit the “Publicize” tab, and then go to to Feed Count. On this page you’ll need to activate the service. There you have it!

Recently, I jumped on the Flickr bandwagon, and signed up for a pro account.  $24.95 a year, and it offers you unlimited photo and video upload, plus all of the great community benefits of being a part of Flickr.  It’s a great service, with a great community, at a great price.  I was using my Flickr account for my personal/business use, I setup the name under dpitMedia (which is my parent company).  I created a few collections of sets that made sense for each site I had.

The collection for Carbon Fiber Gear had a bunch of stuff in it, including the pictures of products we sell that I had personally taken.  In the descriptions to each product I would just put that it was available on my site, and I linked to it.  I’ve seen this done a million times on Flickr, find any company that posts pictures of their products, and they’ll more than likely have a link to their site…or bloggers, that have a link to their blog.

So I probably had around 1,000 pictures in my account, and out of that, maybe 50 or less were pictures of the products that I took with a link in the description.  One day I login to my account, and it won’t work.  I try to access my photostream, and it just says “dpit Media is no longer active on Flickr”.  I had no idea, why, so I tried to contact Flickr to find out what happened.  I sent a message on the contact form to find out what happened (Flickr doesn’t have a phone number listed anywhere, so I was forced to e-mail).  This was the response I got:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.

Flickr account “dpit Media” was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

Flickr reserves the right to terminate your account without warning at any time.

Regards,
Do

That’s it.  There was nothing about what had actually been done, no information on if I was going to get refunded, etc.  I went through the Flickr guidelines link Do sent, and could only find one thing that could potentially be the reason why my account was terminated:

Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.

Some of the pictures I had could have been borderline selling a product, because I posted a link to where you can actually get the product…but I don’t know if that’s what they really mean by that term.  If I post a picture of a Nissan Maxima, and then put a link to Nissan’s product page, am I violating the terms?   I could easily find 10 examples without trying that would technically break that term…but is it enough, or even what they mean, to actually terminate an account?  I would think they are just protecting themselves against obvious spammers, not somebody who very obviously is not spamming.

So I sent an e-mail back:

Hi Do,

I’m assuming it was terminated due to using it for commercial purposes…as I had some sets in one of the collections that were linking to the product that it was a picture of.

I apologize, and must have overlooked that clause in the terms when signing up. I wish that Flickr had at least sent a warning (even though I understand you reserve the right to terminate the account at any time), I would have simply removed the link to the product in those pictures. Out of maybe the 1,000 or pictures I had, I would say that 50 of them were like that.

Is there anything I can do to have my account reinstated? Now that I understand this term, it will surely not be broken on my end again. I had just upgraded to a pro account, I really loved being a part of the Flickr community, and I’d hate to lose that over a small overlooking on my end. I had been promoting my pictures from my own personal blog, and had no intention of violating any terms.

Let me know if there is anything that can be done. At the very least, am I getting a prorated refund of what I paid? I would much prefer to be able to continue to be a part of the Flickr community, and will not violate any of the terms going forward, it was an honest mistake on my part.

Thanks,
Dave

It has now been 48 hours, and I have yet to get a response from “Do”.  At the very least I have a right to understand why my account was terminated right?  I never got a warning from Flickr saying “hey, you’re violating our terms on some of your pictures, you’ll need to fix this or we’ll have to delete your account”.  Nope, they just deleted the account.  That doesn’t seem like a very good way to retain customers, or provide good customer relations/service.  Last I heard in the market news, Yahoo wasn’t exactly in the position to just throw money away.

Last week, my credit card bill came in, and the charge for setting up Flickr had a toll free phone number next to it (866-562-7228 for those that want it).  I gave it a call, and it actually goes to what I guess is Yahoo paid services billing support.  I get somebody on the line and explain my situation.  The guy basically tells me that there is no notes on my account to show why it was deleted, but that once it’s deleted, it’s gone forever (makes sense from a privacy perspective…sucks for me though).  If I wanted to know why it was terminated, I’d have to e-mail back (which I did, and have yet to get a response).  He was also able to give me a refund (100%).  He recommended I find out why I got terminated, and setup a new account, and don’t do whatever I did wrong again.

So I setup a new account (find me here, and friend me!), and started to setup all the pictures again.  It’s not going to be as much as I had before, but it’s a work in progress.  Really sucks from my part because I spent a lot of time getting everything right, tagging hundreds of pictures, adding descriptions, etc.  Yahoo/Flickr, please make sure and tell me if I’m doing some sort of minor break of your terms, and give me an opportunity to resolve it before just going out and deleting it.  If Flickr wasn’t so awesome, you’d have lost me a customer…but because your service is so good, you have another chance.

Anybody else have similar stories?  Doesn’t necessarily have to be Flickr.

One of things has always been to have a killer garage…and that always starts off with cool floors in my opinion. I recently bought a new house (I’ll have some sort of tour post in the future sometime), and it’s now giving me an opportunity to build my dream garage. Stage 1 of course is flooring.

While I was at SEMA back in November, I stopped at one of the booths for RaceDeck, a company that manufacturers garage floor tiles.  They had a great show special, and the final cost would end up being a lot less than if I were to order it myself…so even though I wasn’t necessarily ready to buy, they lured me in.  I’m glad I did.  Installation was a breeze, and the floor looks amazing!  Once the garage is all painted and lighted up, it will look that much better.  Here’s a little picture timeline of the install:

Here’s all the tiles ready to be installed:

Move all your stuff to one side:

Here we can see I’m getting started:

Then I realized I should probably start from the corner:

It’s growing!

The most time consuming part was definitely the checkered area, but still not too bad:

Repeat on the other side, and then done!

Of course here’s a pic with my baby in it:

You can order the floor through RaceDeck, as well as design what you want…they have a pretty good designer on their website that will tell you exactly how many tiles of each color you’ll need to order to match your design.  By the way, if you’re thinking that RaceDeck paid me to write this, or I benefit in any way, I am not/don’t.  Just providing a good testimonial for an awesome product and a company that gave me good service.

If you think Apple successfully revolutionized music and the cell phone, you haven’t seen anything yet. Check out the new MacBook wheel:

For those that don’t know, the Onion News Network is fake news. Also, if you have yet to see the iRaq, this is worth seeing:

Hopefully some of you out there reading this are techies and can suggest a solution for me.  I’m putting a 37″ LCD in my office, and I’d like to optionally be able extend my desktop onto it.  The problem is that I am already running two monitors using both DVI ports on my Foxconn 512MB GeForce 7950GT video card.  So there are two solutions, one being better than the other that I’d like to figure out the best and most cost effective way to figure out.

1) This is the most optimal solution.  I’d like to add a third monitor and be able to extend my desktop onto it.

2) If I can’t do the above, or it’s not cost effective, I wouldn’t mind just having a copy of the 2nd monitor on the 3rd screen.  So whatever is showing up on my 2nd monitor, is also identically showing up on the 3rd.

I’m assuming the way to do this is to get another video card in order to obtain another output.  If so, does it have to be the same card (I can run them in SLI mode)?  Or can I pick something cheap up?  If it has to be the same card, I’m worried about power consumption and heat.  I have an Shuttle XPC case, which is a small-form factor case.  It’s extremely tiny, and not sure if it can handle the heat or power of a 2nd powerful video card.  Here’s my specs that you may need:

• Shuttle XPC SD37-P2-BK-V1 case/motherboard/power supply
• Foxconn FV-N79GM3D2-HP video card

Any thoughts?  Post your comments below.

With Ford no longer owning Jaguar, Range Rover, or Aston Martin, its only luxury brands to concentrate on are Volvo and Lincoln. They still make Lincolns? That’s what I thought, until I had the opportunity to get a few minutes with the 2009 MKS at Ford’s upcoming model event back in August.  I was impressed enough with the car there that I decided to get one into the garage for a full fledged review.

Ford sent over an essentially fully loaded all wheel drive model that had a sticker price around $47,000.  For reference, the AWD model starts at $39,590.  Optional equipment which was about $6,700 sticker price included the following:

• Technology package
• Navigation Package
• 19″ wheels
• Rain sensitive windshield wipers
• Dual panel moonroof
• Adaptive headlamps with auto high beam
• Forward sensing system
• Voice activated nav system
• Intelligent access key with push button start
• Rear view camera
• THX-II certified audio system with 5.1 surround sound
• Ultimate leather seating
• Adaptive cruise control

The 09 version of the MKS is built on the same platform as the Taurus/Sable/Taurus X and Flex, so you can kind of call it a pimped out Taurus.  Under the hood you’ll find a 3.7-liter V6 that provides a decent 270hp and 256 ft-lbs of torque.  The MKS is a bit of a fatty, weighing in at 4,127lbs, so it wouldn’t hurt to have slightly more power.  With the bigger V6 making all that weight move, I was averaging about 19mpg…one of my only bigger complaints about the car.  Then again, gas prices are down, and if you’re spending almost $50,000 on a luxury vehicle, how much do you care about spending a little more money on gas.  The MKS does allow you to use a lower-grade gas in the car if you don’t mind it not performing optimally.

One big thing to keep in mind is that Lincoln is working on an EcoBoost version of the MKS which will supposedly feature a twin-turbo V6 with some of the hp estimates coming in around 350.  While the car does move, enough to not really complain, it will really move with the additional ponies…and maybe even have better gas mileage.  Even a 4-cylinder EcoBoost motor that makes similar power to the current model, but increases the gas mileage would be a welcome option.

Now that we’ve looked under the hood, lets talk about how the car is dressed.  My personal opinion is that Lincoln did a fantastic job at designing this car.  The split grille, which is the new Lincoln “look” is elegant and along with the nicely shaped headlights, give the Lincoln a very classy yet sporty/aggressive look.  It screams luxury, but with a little muscle.

What I like best though is the rear of the car.  The new vertical LED taillights and generally shape remind me of the Maserati Quattroporte…but better looking.  While the overall design is not revolutionary, it does stand out as a handsome car in a sea of blandness.

The interior of the car is the best part of the MKS hands down.  I was pleasantly surprised how nice all of the materials were, how comfortable the car was, and how ridiculously great the technology was integrated.  One of the greatest steps that Ford has made with their lineup has been the integration of SYNC, a car operating system if you will, developed in conjunction with Microsoft.  The added Sirius satellite radio with Travel Link allows you to do some really cool things like auto re-route your destination based on traffic, find the lowest fuel prices in your area, check sports scores and movie listings, and more.  The voice activation feature to tie it all in works practically flawlessly, and is by far the best system I’ve ever used.

If you read the list of optional items that were included in the car, you need to know that everything other than the adaptive cruise control was part of the $5,715 “ultimate package”…and I wouldn’t buy the car without it.  There is just too much cool, convenient stuff to not shell out for it.  Take for example the 5.1 THX-II certified audio system.  For audio cds that support it, you will be extremely impressed by the quality of the sound.

In regards to handling, I was pleasantly surprised to how well the MKS stuck to the road.  While the car looks smaller than it is, it sits fairly high, especially at the rear.  I’ll be honest, I was expecting a good amount of body roll.  What I did find though was that I could take an exit ramp going 60 with no problems.  I was also a little surprised at how much of the road I could feel, I mean it is a Lincoln right?  I think this mostly had to do with the 19″ wheels that also provided a lower profile tire.  Note that there is also an option for a 20″ wheel.  While I did feel some of the road, the car was almost eerily quiet when driving.  It was so smooth accelerating and shifting through gears.  I had passengers in both the front and rear of the car, all complimenting the MKS on how incredibly smooth and comfortable the car was.

Speaking of comfortableness, the MKS definitely sticks to what you would imagine a Lincoln would be…notably comfortable.  My rear passengers were pleased and with no complaints, they were happy about their rear heat warmers in the 30 degree rainy weather we were in.

The Lincoln MKS puts itself into a class of heavy competition.  With cars like the BMW 5-Series, Jaguar XF, Cadillac CTS/STS, Acura RL, Lexus GS, etc…it’s tough to come out as number one.  What Lincoln does have going over the competition is the pricepoint.  A fully loaded MKS will come in lower than most of the competition, but I still think it’s priced a little high.  The initial reaction I was getting from most people was surprised when they found out how much it costs.  While it’s a nice car, they really need to undercut the competition.  I’d like to see a fully loaded AWD model come in at the lower $40,000 range if it’s possible.  In reality though, it is a great buy for what it is…which is why it was nominated for car of the year from Motor Trend.

For more pictures, as well as the high resolution versions, see the Flickr set.