Monday, November 23, 2009

Earn $100 easy with Facebook and Paypal

Do you have a PayPal account?

Do you have a Facebook account?

If you answered yes to both of the questions above then you too can earn up to $100.00.

You don't have a PayPal account? Click here to sign-up for a PayPal account.

You don't have a Facebook account? Click here to sign-up for a Facebook Account.

The first step is to first login to Facebook. No need to do this if you've just signed-up for a Facebook Account.

To earn your first dollar, simply open the PayPal WishList Application and allow it access to your Facebook profile. Click on the link below if you missed the link above:

Open Paypal WishList Application

You should then create your wishlist by following the instructions on the application page.

Then use Facebook to tell your friends and invite them to use the PayPal WishList Application
You will earn an additional $1.00 (one dollar!) for every friend that accepts your invitation to use the PayPal WishList Application.

This offer started started on Nov 15, 2009 and will end on Dec 31, 2009.

If you have any questions or you need any help, please feel free to ask me or post them as comments.
You should also checkout the other posts on this blog which might help you earn some more money online.

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Sunday, November 22, 2009

Rise of Social Gaming

With my latest personal development project being a Facebook app, I couldn't help but notice that Facebook has become the largest social gaming platform on the internet.

So what is Social Gaming? Social Gaming is currently a huge phenomenon on the large online social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. These social networks offer their members/users FREE games. Most of these free games are casual games. They are targeted at or used by a mass audience and are typically distinguished by their simple rules and lack of commitment required. They usually require no long term time commitment or special skills to play.

What makes social gaming different from just plain old casual gaming is the network element. It adds a very addictive dimension by allowing their users to play with and against their friends, friends and acquaintances. It makes simple casual games much more enjoyable.

The games are written by Social game developers like Zynga and Playfish. Most of them monetize these games by selling virtual goods to their players as well as giving them offers.

Virtual goods allow players to have a better overall experience either by better customization of avatars or allowing them to level-up faster. For users unwilling or unable to pay for the virtual goods, a wide variety of offers are available which when completed will allow players to earn in-game currency. This in itself poses no outright danger but when you examine the offers, it will seem like a scam.

Some offers will ask you to take a quiz or a survey and ask for your mobile number. A code is then send to your phone via sms and the user is asked to enter the code on the site. This act will subscribe your mobile number to a monthly subscription for a pretty much useless service.

Another type of offer asks users to sign-up to receive a free CD or other product to try. The product is free except that the user needs to pay for shipping. What the fine print says though is that the user will be charged full price unless the user returns the product.

I have yet to hear about users here in the Philippines getting scammed by similar offers described above.

Please post what sort of offers you've done and did they have any detrimental effect?

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Friday, November 13, 2009

Revisiting Rails: Setting up on Windows

I've built my first Facebook application and now I'd like to take it a step further. Not being a fan of PHP, I took a look at what other people are using to build their Facebook  applications and I was delighted to find that some use Ruby on Rails.

I studied Ruby on Rails when it was first made public and the hype was at its peek. I just never got around to actually using it in a serious project. I'm just glad I can come back to Rails now.

Here is how I was able to set it up on my old Windows XP laptop:

I downloaded and installed the Ruby One-Click Installer

Using the command line, I updated the ruby gems using:

gem update --system
I had a feeling it will take some time so I proceeded to install a database for development. I went to http://www.sqlite.org/download.html and downloaded the command line program and the dll: sqlite-XXX.zip and sqlitedll-XXX.zip where XXX is the latest version which at this point in time is 3.6.20. I extracted the files to the ruby bin directory which by default is located at C:\ruby\bin

I'm also going to need a source code management tool and now seemed like a good time to learn about git. I went to http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list to download the latest version of the windows git installer. Afterwards, I ran the full installer to install git.

By this time, the gem update process has finished and I proceeded to install
rails and the sqlite3 ruby bindings using:

gem install rails sqlite3-ruby

For a lightweight text editor, I found Intype which is still in early alpha. It seems
like a small, fast, and flexible code editor for Microsoft Windows with an intuitive and easy to use interface.

With the setup finished, I'm going to proceed to study using the following free resources and non-free books:


























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Sunday, November 01, 2009

Facebook App#1: Election 2010 simulation

After 2 days of studying and coding, I came up with a fairly simple Facebook Application that simulates the Philippine 2010 Presidential Election.

I am a beginner at PHP and Facebook Application development so comments and suggestions are welcome.

Election 2010 Simulation

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