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You are an influencer.

When you blog, people listen. When you don’t like a product, share prices drop. You might speak at conferences and write books. You reach people. You are your own brand.

You have spent years building your reputation but reputation alone does not pay the rent. Now, you are looking for a way to monetize your blog or web site that enhances rather than tarnishes that reputation.

The last thing you want to do is fill your site with ads that annoy your loyal visitors and cheapen your image. And who has time to spend finding advertisers and negotiating rates?

You need a solution that just runs itself so you can concentrate on what you do best: writing, speaking, creating…

Welcome to Pistach.io: an exclusive ad network for people just like you.

Pistach.io has topical packs of web sites and blogs belonging to the top influencers in our industry so you will be in very good company. Each pack accepts a limited number of highly vetted advertisers and each site displays just one ad, by itself. The ads themselves are elegant and understated.

Pistach.io ads don’t shout their message; they whisper it.

Pistach.io is about to enter Beta with the Flash Pack, a group of top influencers from the Flash Platform.

To be alerted when Pistach.io launches, sign up at http://pistach.io.

If you feel that you belong in the Flash Pack, are interested in advertising on the Flash Pack, or have an idea for a new pack, email aral@pistach.io.

Xpay is a product from SecureTrading, I’ve used it a number of times on a number of different projects. So far I’ve been very impressed with the API, however there’s a few things about the Java application that I’d change:

• Logging - yes, I like to know what goes on with my servers
• Debugging - yes, strace and grep let me find what I needed to but I shouldn’t have to and don’t want to
• Process ID files
• The ability to start, stop, and restart a daemon like every other service I use on my server

I enabled three out of four requests (even if logging isn’t as verbose as I’d like, it’s a start) with some bash scripts a few months ago. There’s one for Ubuntu servers, and another for RedHat. Now they’re online and open source, if you use Xpay I hope this makes it a little easier.

Over the past few days I’ve soft-launched Joard. It’s aim is to help website owners make money using job boards. I’m very excited about this product, and so-far there’s been good feedback.

I’ll be blogging Joard related topics over on the Joard blog, so if your interested you can follow progress over there (I’m sure I’ll still mention it time to time here mind you!)

We launched a job board for OSFlash, so if your looking for Flash jobs, or Flex jobs, pay them a visit! If your looking to monetize your website, get in contact - sales@joard.com.

Today, Dexmo went live. We actually deployed last week just before The Future Of Web Apps, but today was the official launch.

Dexmo is a project I’ve been working on for Patrick & Rita, with Denis from 38one doing the design (more about the team). I describe it as a Myspace/Digg mix. Why not pop over and have a look? dexmo.com.

Wow, I just don’t get it!

Me: I’d like a merchant account to make me money, and you the bank will take a percentage.
Bank: No, try one of our competitors, besides, whats wrong with Paypal?

Seriously, that was HSBC’s advice to me - use PayPal - I then explained to them how selling online works, who the different parties are etc., I explained to them! - it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that something is wrong. Oh, and, this was after having to ring them and go to my local branch every day for 4 days in a row.

Halifax bank of Scotland (HBOS) I heard were good but they want a full business plan, then it needs to be authorized, checked, and… at this point I was bored and didn’t care. I will be making you money, what else do you need to know!? Mind you, HBOS didn’t say “PayPal”, and they were nice people to speak to.

Anyway, long story short, if your looking for a merchant account in the UK, Barclaycard. Within 4 hours or asking them I was told “yes, and it’ll be running 14 days after we get the signed papers back from you” (I’m waiting for the papers to arrive now). Seriously, after HSBC and HBOS I want to hug someone at Barclaycard.

For those that recommended me to Barclaycard, thank you.

After the successful launch of Amigo, the next Webapp I’m working on is dexmo with Denis (even if half way through he moved to the States), but, hopefully, we’ll be going live next month. If your interested in whats going on head over to dexmo.com and sign up - we’ll tell you when it launches!

That, as well as a number of my own ideas at the moment - one I’ll let you think about is kapoddo.

For those of you following the process over at Bare Naked App, we’re running “pre-flight checks”. Watch this space.

While this isn’t new code from me, I got round to cleaning it up and making it suitable for "open sourcing". This javascript allows the developer of a website to assign optional css styles to any element(s), which the user can then choose.

Jakob Nielsen said back in 2002 in his Alertbox Let Users Control Font Size

"Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site’s visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size. However, because every extra feature takes away from the rest of the page, I don’t recommend such a button for mainstream websites."

While not an ‘alternate style sheet’, it is an ‘alternate style’ and one of the examples I’ve included does exactly this. Head over to the alternateStyles.js page for examples, and source code.

I said a few posts ago that I keep meaning to release some open sourced code. Well, I stumbled upon a script I was using to build my xul-based Firefox extensions, and after a little bit of editing I decided it was just about suitable to be released. It’s very simple, but if you build extensions for Firefox often you’ll know it can take a lot more time for every build then should be necessary. This short bash script solves this.

This has only been tested on my machine at the moment, which runs Ubuntu Linux. I’m confident that most Linux system will be fine as long as you have ‘zip’ installed. If anyone tests this on a Mac please let me know.

If it’s your cup of tea, download buildxulextension.sh.