It’s apparently “Guest Post Thursday” for me as two more articles I’ve written were published this afternoon.

The first is another post over at Blog About Your Blog. This one is about getting search engine traffic to your blog by writing about tech support issues.

My other post is a synopsis of internationalized domains over at the Xavier Media Blog. The ability to register a domain name with international characters is an interesting new addition to the TLD game. It opens up some security/phishing concerns for me though.

I’m not sure how many more of these I’ll be doing but I’ve done a few through the Entrecard shop so far. Other than those that were “paid for,” if I have a post idea that I don’t think fits in with the slightly ambiguous theme of this blog I’ll send it somewhere else to be posted.

UPDATE: My post at Blog About Your Blog was just mentioned on Search Engine Journal but they incorrectly credit this site as belonging to Matt from BAYB which isn’t the case. No big deal but I wanted to clear that up in case there was confusion.

The second annual MacHeist event is coming to a close today in four hours. At the time of this writing, nearly $1,960,000 has been made (over $450,000 of which will be going to charity) through over 40,000 sales of this year’s software bundle. For only $49, everyone who got in on the offer had the chance to buy 14 great Mac applications that had a combined retail value of $499.

A mega-deal like that is just too sick nasty ill for anyone to turn down.

During last year’s MacHeist I managed to stand firm and resist the temptation to financially take advantage of the Mac developers involved. Afterall, I know in my heart what their products are worth and it certainly wasn’t what their split of my small fee would have amounted to. It felt like I had won the battle against economic tyranny.

But this year I lost the war…

I completely caved this year and bought the bundle. It’s not that I’m a cheapskate. If anything I’m the antithesis of a cheapskate. It was just impossible to resist some of the applications MacHeist had this year.

This whole MacHeist thing is practically criminal. I still feel dirty and it’s been over 24 hours since I bought the bundle. Let’s look at the top four applications really quick. Just selling a combination of any two of these applications for $49 would have made MacHeist the steal of the year.

Vector Designer (Retail: $69.95) is a lightweight vector graphics program. It’s kind of like a cost-effective Adobe Illustrator. It also just won a “Best of Show” Award at Macworld.

Snapz Pro X (Retail: $69.00) would have come in handy this summer when we were tossing around the idea of making screencasts for Fore Score.

Pixelmator (Retail: $59.00) is another product that kind of competes with an Adobe program. This time it’s Photoshop. Pixelmator was the one program on the list that I was actually anticipating buying at full price very soon. I’m tired of Photoshop running like hot garbage on my Macbook.

CSSEdit (Retail: $29.95) probably needs no introduction for any web developers out there. I’m actually embarrassed to admit that I didn’t own this already.

That’s just the first four programs on the list. There are ten more Mac applications that you get to go along with those. For instance, TaskPaper is something I can’t wait to try and integrate into my daily work routine. Again, all 14 of these programs only cost me $49.

What’s the big problem?

I have a hunch that the 14 developers aren’t getting an even cut of the nearly $1,500,000 made by this promotion. I know that last year’s developer share was not pretty but maybe this time around things are different. One can only hope.

The problem is that in the long run each of these developers will probably see negative results from their involvement in MacHeist. In the short term they’re gaining new customers, excellent exposure and they’re helping raise money for charity. I understand that. That’s great.

But what happens when these new MacHeist customers come calling for tech support? Each of these applications just received over 40,000 new potential support emails. Could you imagine that? How do you justify thoroughly handling any and all requests from MacHeist customers when, in the back of your head, you know they only each paid a few dollars for your product? Wouldn’t you feel ripped off and abused a bit?

I have a value I put on my time. And I’m sure these developers do as well. I just hope they didn’t miscalculate the price they’ll have to pay for being involved in this promotion.

Would You Take a Tumblr With This Man? at The New York Observer

The Observer wrote a nice piece recently about David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. David’s story is pretty interesting. He began his career as a teenage CTO for a dot-com startup in New York before moving on to form his own company called Davidville. He now works on Tumblr full-time. Oh yeah, and he’s only 21.

How to Buy Good Domains Names – Guide for Beginners at Digital Point

I’ll be the first to admit that I love browsing Digital Point but for the most part it’s a pretty dirty place. The true colors of the Internet come out in some of the forums over there. Thankfully, every now and again someone makes a brilliant post like this one full of tips for people new to the domain name game. It’s a must read for anyone interested in getting into domains.

Get Google Adsense statistics by using PHP at the DotSauce Domain Forums

Here’s another forum thread you should check out over at the DotSauce Domain Forums. The starter of this thread has given an entire PHP code example to scrape AdSense stats. PHP fans should stop by and check this out.

How NOT To Get a Backlink From Me at Slightly Shady SEO

Since I can’t seem to go a day without mentioning something about WordPress I offer you this great article at Slightly Shady SEO about encoded footers in themes. As I mentioned above, the Internet is a dirty place and that’s never been more apparent than with this popular tactic of encoding sponsored links in WordPress themes. Someone should make a site that lets you upload footer files and get them decoded and scrubbed clean.

I have a post on Blog About Your Blog today about the benefits of doing interviews on your site. A lot of what I talk about is based on my recent experience interviewing WordPress designers about premium themes.

I’ve released a new free WordPress theme today. It’s called Green Piece and there’s a preview available for those of you interested in checking it out before downloading. Green Piece is widget ready and uses a fixed width (that’s probably wider than most) and uses some of the excellent Silk icons from famfamfam.

I’ve submitted the theme to a handful of the more popular WordPress theme sites but that process was proving to be so frustrating that I had to stop. I’ll definitely be writing about that later on this week.

This was a project that was, quite literally, months in the making for me. It was my first serious foray into outsourcing a design project from start to finish although that wasn’t the intention from the start. I’ll be writing more about the whole process later as well. It should prove to be interesting for anyone looking to outsource their extra work.

Anyway, hop on over to WordPressings and check out the new theme and, if you haven’t seen it yet, my first release Bruise.