Swollen Pickles

Time flies when you are doing stuff. It's hard to believe that it is Easter already. Seems like only yesterday that I was stuffing my face at Christmas. Now I'm stuffing my face with hot cross buns.

Which brings me to the Easter Bunny. WTF? A rabbit, laying eggs, made of chocolate. Is it the same rabbit each year or a different one? How does he get from house to house so quickly? Still, not as creepy as the idea of an old bearded man sneaking into my house at night leaving me 'gifts'.

The early to mid 90's was a golden period for basketball in Australia. National Basketball League (NBL) games were shown on free to air TV in prime time, the crowds were big, and kids were hitting the basketball court rather than the football oval. Andrew Gaze and Lanard Copeland were at their peak, and most kids could quote Michael Jordan's season stats off by heart.

Something happened in the late 90's/early 00's though. Basketball in Australia lost it's way.

Why? I'm not really sure, there were probably a number of factors that contributed. Channel Ten stopped covering NBL games in 1997, and around the same time the competition was shifted to its current summer season style format (running from October - April). Apparently the shift was to avoid direct competition from the variety of football codes played throughout the Australian winter.

Once prime time TV coverage disappeared, so to did the corporate support. When Mitsubishi Motors dropped out in the early 00's, the NBL really started to turn pear shaped, with a number of previously well supported teams folding including the Canberra Cannons and more recently the Brisbane Bullets and Sydney Kings.

For a guy that only has access to analogue free-to-air TV I could be forgiven for thinking that basketball has ceased to exist. In terms of basketball I'm still stuck in the 90's, with Andrew Gaze, Lanard Copeland, Shane Heal, Robert Rose, Scott Fisher, Andrew Vlahov and Derek Rucker. If it wasn't for NBA2K8 on the Xbox 360, I'd have no idea who was playing for who in the NBA. If it weren't for video games, I might still think that Shawn Kemp, Reggie Miller, Larry Johnson, Penny Hardaway, David Robinson, Chris Mullins and Latrell Sprewell were all still running around.

Where's this little nostalgia trip heading? Well the NBA are fresh off their All-Star weekend, and All-Star weekend means slam dunk competition. Here are some highlights, including the winning dunk from New York Knicks guard Nate Robinson. According to fountain of knowledge Wikipedia, Robinson is 5 foot 9 inches and has a vertical leap of 43.5 inches (110cm), which probably explains how he is able to literally dunk over the top of Dwight Howard who's listed as 6 feet 11 inches.

Robinson's dunk brings back memories of Vince Carter in the 2000 Sydney Olympics game against France, in which the Frence media later described Carter as delivering "le dunk de la mort" (or "the Dunk of Death" for the non-French speakers).

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This is the time of year that people usually pump out the "...and that was the year that was" kind of stuff. I'm a lemming. So here's my contribution.

2008 was an interesting year. I managed to keep this site up and running without breaking it. I started up a couple of other sites, with varying levels of success, and I managed to make a little extra coin. In terms of traffic, 2008 was the best year ever.

Here are some of the key statistics for SwollenPickles.com in 2008:

• there were 281,814 unique visitors
• April 19 was the highest traffic day, with 6,678 unique visitors in the 24 hour period
• 52.78% of traffic came from referring sites, 40.59% from search engines, with the remainder from 'other'
• The most visited page was 'Lindsay Lohan with massive camel toe', with 62,095 unique visits for the year
• A majority of visitors came from the United States, followed by the UK, Canada, Australia and Germany
• The least visited pages included Shock Docs Channel 9, A quick lesson in marketing and promotions, Project Deep Impact, the sadly under rated, Naomi Robson - her finest moments on YouTube, and the borderline inappropriate The latest product from Apple - the all new iPad
• SwollenPickles.com made a grand total of $270.59US from Adsense

With only a couple of days of December left, it's time that I sat down and think about what goals I want to set (and achieve!) for 2009!

* All the statistics span 1 January 2008 to 18 December 2008, so it's not technically the entire 2008, but it's close enough.

Basically everyone I know has at least one mobile phone. The things are every where. Being mobile is good, but it also raises some social conundrums. For me, the biggest of these is, what happens if you are in the lavatory and your mobile phone rings? Do you answer it or do you ignore it?

The reason I'm posing these tough questions is that recently I encountered a strange little piece of toilet etiquette. Whilst I was operating at the "fountain", two "cubicles" were occupied, with gentlemen apparently busy dropping some friends off at the pool. Everything was as it should be, until a phone in one of the cubicles started to ring. The gent that was occupying said cubicle, aka. cubicle guy number one, obviously felt comfortable enough in there to take the call, and proceeded to enter into conversation, not important conversation mind you, the general conversation usually reserved for when people have time to kill.

When it became apparent the conversation was not going to end any time soon, a gruff voice snarled from the other occupied cubicle, "for f***s sake, give it a f***ing rest would you". The phone chatter had obviously distracted cubicle guy number two from the task at hand. Cubicle guy number one promptly ended the call. I chuckled to myself and got the hell out of there.

It got me to thinking. Would I answer my phone while on the can? Or would I carry on a conversation with someone if I knew that they were seated in the house of ease? It's Friday. The day for the tough issues, so here's the poll. This could potentially tell me quite a bit about people that visit here.

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In another little piece of shameless self promotion, I'm proud to present my very first Flash animation. I had to do it as part of a course, so it's all work safe, clean and innocent. In other words, no camel toes in sight perverts!

This took me quite a while, and having finished it, I have huge respect for people that pump out Flash cartoons, like David Firth.

My animation has a suitably art house and deep title, Evolution of an Exploding Man. It's no Kung Fu Panda, but I'm happy with the fact that I finally finished my first animation! It runs for less than 2 minutes, so popcorn will not be necessary.

Hope you didn't fall asleep!

It's been a while since I last did this, so I feel a little bad for starting up something I haven't managed to maintain. Seeing as though this site wouldn't be half of what it is without visitors, I thought I send some love to the people that referred me the most traffic in June.

1. Comic guru, and guy with good movie taste, Lee, Quit Your Day Job. Check out his Top five signs that your DVD collecting is getting out of hand post. I'm pretty sure I exhibit all five signs.

2. Aussie Blogging Icon, Meg, Dipping into the Blogpond. Meg puts in a huge amount of work maintaining a list of the top 100 Australian blogs, which I'm currently lucky enough to be sitting in at 35.

3. Graphic and Logo Designer, David Airey, DavidAirey.com. His is a great blog, even if you only have a passing interest in design. He's been doing a logo of the month post for a while now, and are worth exploring.

4. Cyber legend, Me, DigitalBurn.org. My neglected music blog still manages to send people over here. Go read some of the artist interviews if you're into that sort of thing.

5. Fellow Aussie Blogger, Andrew Boyd, On Blogging Australia. He keeps on keeping on, so check out his post Injader: An Australian Open Source Blog Platform for all the techo geeks out there.

Honorable mention. Wormbrain, for continuing to entertain me, and send me a few peepz at the same time.

Shameless self promotion... if you're into guitar stuff check out Guitar FX Depot. I've posted a whole heap of guitar rigs, for the guitar geeks out there.

• John 5’s guitar rig
• Matt Bachand (Shadows Fall) guitar rig
• Pete Loeffler (Chevelle) guitar rig
• Stephen Carpenter (Deftones) guitar rig
• Mike McCready (Pearl Jam) guitar rig
• Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) guitar rig

Ahhh... self love...

As I sit watching paint dry, eagerly awaiting my seven day bidvertiser experiment to reach it's conclusion I've become reflective. In the past twelve months or so, I've joined a number of programs with the intention of making some cash from them. Some have been winners, some have been stinkers. But it's always nice to log into an affiliate program after a lengthy absence to find that you've made some 'surprise' money.

The first one, is Deal Dot Com. In it's start up stage there were a few high flyers that apparently did quite well with this program targeting the "Make Money Online" market. Unfortunately I wasn't one of them. To make decent money from Deal Dot Com, you need to be good at building referrals. The cool thing about Deal Dot Com is that you can have direct referrals (tier one) but also second level referrals (tier two).

"You get paid 35% of DealDotCom’s profit for every item that they buy. If someone you referred to DealDotCom refers someone else, you get paid 15% of DealDotCom’s profit every time they buy something for the rest of your life."

Unfortunately, I've never been good at building massive referral numbers, so I haven't made my Deal Dot Com fortune. Still, I was glad to see that my single digit referral brought me in $3.50 the other day! Thanks whoever you are, it paid for my coffee! The other beauty of Deal Dot Com was that it costs nothing to join, so there's nothing to lose. Easy.

Seriously though, if you've go a large network that's interested in making money online (and the associated products) you should give Deal Dot Com a look, they have a facebook plugin now as well, which makes it even easier for you.

The one that has really surprised me though is the phpBay Pro affiliate program. phpBay Pro is an awesome piece of programming, so I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it to anyone looking to integrate eBay auction into their site. I use phpBay Pro three sites, and it's the best $49 I've spent. To give you an idea, in this month alone, I've passed the $170 mark (see requisite screen shot below). That's $170 from very little effort. I'm guessing that's why phpBay Pro is an easy sell, and explains why I've made $90 from affiliate sales in the last 6 weeks.

The phpBay Pro affiliate program is a good one because it pays $14.70 for every $49 sale. That's a pretty decent cut if you ask me! What's been my strategy? Buying phpBay Pro, using it, proving it works, and then telling people how good it is. I should write a book!

Not an affiliate program as such, but I made a nice buck from picking the 2008 NBA Champions over at Predictify. I gazed into the crystal ball and picked the Boston Celtics a month or two back, and they got over the line, and helped me buy another coffee. I'm glad I couldn't disagree with Boston fan boy Blankshooting.