LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals. You won't go on there and find all the teenage themes, music, and video. Rather, you're able to add a single picture of yourself, and your profile focuses much more on your job experience, awards, and interests.

Colin invited me to join LinkedIn a few months ago, and I think it's been worth it. Mind you, it is free. I've established a network with several of the contacts I work with on obtaining review samples, as well as a few "corporate folk" from Buffalo Wild Wings. Not to say it'll grab me a new job in the near future, but anything helps.

I added a LinkedIn button to the staff profiles at BIOSLEVEL. It shows up on the "About Us" page right next to the person's name. Of course, not all the staff have it, as much as I'd like them to.

I wonder what Linux developers are on LinkedIn.

I've been publishing a few articles a week at BIOSLEVEL.com. The increases in traffic have definitely been noticeable. We just need to take better advantage of this for monetizing the traffic so the site is atleast able to completely pay for its own hosting and advertising.

Two articles were published this week, the first of which wasn't actually a review, but rather a short tutorial on how to use chroot to recover root passwords. It's nothing new, but I guarantee there's plenty of Linux users out there that don't know how to do this.

The first article was of Noctua's NF-P12 120mm case fan. Normally I wouldn't consider a case fan a very exciting review, but Noctua included some very innovative features with the unit, as well as a silencing kit. You'll have to read the review to get all the juicy details.

Before the week's over, I'm hoping to have two more reviews published, one on a hard drive, and one of a video card. The parents are going to be out of town for the weekend, so maybe I'll have some time with no interruptions.

I made a few small changes to BIOSLEVEL tonight. This is after trying to complete a new review or two this morning, but found myself unable to complete because my camera has decided to go haywire. More on the camera later. Let's look at what I've changed with BIOSLEVEL.

Changes to BIOSLEVEL

The changes aren't too numerous, nor are they complete yet. First off, I've altered how the <title></title> tags are done, so article names are now displayed rather than just "Article & Reviews". Hopefully this improves the site's overall SEO. The second part of the update comes in the form of some buttons for our article & review pages: Digg It, E-Mail Page, and Stumble Upon.

E-mail Page will either open a new window (smaller) or within the same window a page that allows them to e-mail the article's introduction, title, image, and link to someone's e-mail. I obviously won't track e-mail addresses, but should I keep track of how many times the feature is used per article? Obviously, I haven't implemented this feature just yet.

Digg It submits the story to digg. Obviously. Stumble Upon submits the story to Stumble Upon, but I haven't added the link for this just yet. I'd also like to add some icons for Reddit and a few similar services as well. Anything to build up more traffic.

Camera Woes

My aunt bought me a Cannon PowerShot S1 IS a few years ago for Christmas. At $400 at the time, the S1 IS was only a 3.2MP camera, which is really more than I need. I spent some time debating this morning while looking through cameras on NewEgg.com

I almost bought the latest version of my camera, which boasted a whopping 8.1MP and a 12x optical zoom, whereas my camera only has a 10x zoom. I ended up purchasing the Nikon D40, a DSLR camera. It'll be my first DSLR, and I'm really hoping that my older SLR lenses will still work with it.

There's more functionality in this camera than I'll probably ever use, but I'm also up for experimenting with it. The important part, however, is that I'll be able to take shots of products to complete my reviews.

Take a peek at BIOSLEVEL for the said updates, and watch for a new review in a day or so. Also expect another entry here in the near future.

I've been very busy the past week, mostly just for the fact that I worked eight days straight. It might have been good money, but tomorrow is a well-earned break. In these past eight days, I fell behind in some of the reviews I've been writing.

I meant to post a review of the OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2 RAM I used in my reviews of the 780G motherboard and Radeon HD3870 Toxic, but fell behind because of all the extra hours spent at work. There're several more reviews to follow the review of this RAM, but my main concern right now is the RAM.

BIOSLEVEL has several fantastic reviews coming up, but what I'm really excited about is a home theater series of articles I'm trying to plan out utilizing MythTV. We have one machine that's able to act as a MythTV box itself, as well as a MythTV server so other units can connect to it. This'll be a great option for some units such as the Asus barebones I recently reviewed for BIOSLEVEL

On the bright side of my time issues, I did manage to get a little done on a new design for this site, as well as business cards for BIOSLEVEL. Once both are completed, I'll post the final designs. Or, that is, change the design of the side and post an entry about the business cards.

BIOSLEVEL is picking up steam just in time for the end of the school semester. After Colin's OLPC XO Laptop review, BIOSLEVEL's traffic has been kicking. Sufficient to say, we're trying to retain this traffic with more reviews.

What traffic?

On a three-day average, BIOSLEVEL saw a 80-90% increase in traffic from the OLPC XO review. We came very close to hitting the front page of Digg, but never quite made it. Colin and myself both need to reach out to more people to join Digg, but we also need to focus some effort on Stumbleupon, Reddit, and del.icio.ous. One of these days, we're going to hit the front page of Digg and more.

Retention?

Realistically speaking, I'm not expecting to see a higher amount of traffic after the week that we published the OLPC XO review. I'm sure traffic will return to normal levels.

That is, unless we manage to keep up with fresh content. I have enough stuff sitting my room right now to take care of perhaps a month. Provided we get some links from other sites to these reviews, I think we'll be able to build up even more traffic. For the most part, however, I doubt we'll see much traffic returning from Digg and whatnot.

Taking advantage of it...

One of my goals for winter break is to redesign ad placement on BIOSLEVEL. Most of the ads there a week ago were merely placements to test the design or ad code. Before the XO Laptop review went live, I tweaked some of the ads and added one new one. From the increased traffic, I did notice a percentage of clicks per visits than before. However, for the amount of traffic we received, the amount of money we made was ridiculous. There's still yet more tweaking to do.

And the rest...

Aside from more reviews, I'm working on removing the timestamp from the URLs to articles both here and on BIOSLEVEL. In the end, it's the most practical and beneficial method to add the article title to the url instead. This is not only more user friendly, but it also greatly benefits our search engine optimization. Hopefully with these changes, we'll start to notice some real improvements with BIOSLEVEL.