My favorite aspect of the MySpace phenomenon is the swarm of creepy copy cat sites offering the same basic layout editing services. The purpose of these sites is to catch a viewer’s attention long enough to con them into clicking on a Google Ad for another competing MySpace site that is most likely using the exact same technique. It’s a vicious and apparently money making circle.

As a brief aside, this weird game of circular ad clicking has become the backbone of Google’s business. How does that make you feel?

In the last few weeks, the folks at MySpace have been taking steps to cut out these layout middlemen. First, they bought out Photobucket which gives them great leverage over the third-party image hosting sites that have been leeching the attention of MySpace users. After the Photobucket news, came rumors of MySpace acquiring Flektor which offers more profile enhancing services. After that rumor began gaining steam, MySpace released their very own layout editor that will most likely be the final nail in the coffin for these cheap “layout sites in a box” everyone has been using.

So why would MySpace go on this binge? I’d imagine they’ve become sick and tired of losing eyeballs to these other sites. People already spend a mind numbing amount of time on their site plus even more time on the profile editing sites as well. If you can combine the two under one house, which is what these acquisitions will help do, your going to see some nice growth on a site already seeing huge levels of traffic. MySpace would probably be foolish not to take these steps.

If you own and operate a site with a PageRank of 4 or higher you owe it to yourself to at least look into selling text ads on your site. The basic idea behind text ads, without getting too technical, is that you’re selling a small piece of real estate on your site to give an equally small boost to your advertiser’s site when it comes to search engine rankings.

I’ve been using Text Link Ads to sell links on three of my sites since December of 2006 with varying degrees of success. The process is simple: you insert their code on your site, they begin selling links for a set price based on your PageRank and traffic and then you split all income 50/50. I approve all ads before they go live and between the Ohio Sports Report, the Michigan Sports Report and i am jack’s design I average about $15/month of income per link (after Text Link Ads takes their cut).

It’s now reached the point that if I simply maintain my current monthly income from TLA I’ll have covered all of the bandwidth and hosting costs for i am jack’s design three times over by the end of 2007. I know that sounds like chump change but for the amount of time and effort it takes it’s more than worth it.

I’ve been on a pretty steady diet of TextMate and Transmit for my web development needs since I switched to the Mac about two years ago. As most people in the Mac developer community are probably aware, Panic recently released their new tool for web developers called Coda. Coda eliminates the need for constant switching between applications by trying to bring everything under one roof. That means you can FTP files, write code/markup/CSS and work in a terminal window all inside of Coda. I’ll save you all the gory details of the program and simply suggest you check out the Coda website to learn more.

In the short while I’ve been using Coda I have nothing but good things to say. I’m at a stage in my freelance career right now where I am not taking on new projects and am more than happy to continue to provide support for my existing client base. Coda allows me to quickly make updates and fulfill client requests with an almost disgusting level of ease that my previous workflow just didn’t provide. I can be in-and-out of a site in a matter of moments.

Right now it’s looking very, very likely that I’ll be dropping the usual Textmate/Transmit setup I’ve come to rely on in favor of using Coda full-time.