It is now possible to hit the publish button on your latest blog post and see the result within 30 seconds on Google. I am not exaggerating, I’ve just done it. I hit the publish button, copied the headline, fired up Google and pasted in the query. Hit search (yes, I know you can type enter to save time) and there’s my blog post in the number one spot (and number two indented which means they actually indexed one page and updated another). In 30 seconds flat, probably faster because I wasn’t rushing. Now how the hell do they do that and just how fast is Google?

The fact I took the headline and first two paragraphs from a news site and the original was ranked at number three is a bit embarrassing (for them), but of course I gave them a read more link to funnel the traffic their way.

I’ve been noticing the speed pick-up all month but now it’s just crazy fast. Think about it, an obscure little web site in the arsehole of nowhere coughs up a post and somewhere out there ravenous Google beasts instantly detect movement and pounce. They race the prey at light speed back to the Google hive, stash it in just the right spot and then bolt away to find the next catch. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days per year, for millions of web sites all over the planet.

You can’t help being impressed (or make that depressed if you are Yahoo or Bing).

Of course you can’t achieve this turnaround with just any web site. You need to work to prime the Google beasts so they notice when you twitch. If you hardly ever move then you eventually get ignored even if you resort to jumping up and down and waving your arms around.

Yes I know Google has been indexing pages faster and faster for a while now but something has definitely changed, something has picked up a gear. I’m aware I could run over to the face-slappingly smug blog run by that famous Google guy and get all the details but, as it happens, I’m not a fan boy by nature.

The “activity” thing must be for real then, because why else would they go to such lengths to provide performance this impressive? If you don’t know what the “activity” thing is, SEO bods and rebel (i.e. new product launch imminent) marketers are saying that Google is about to pay a whole lot more attention to freshness and social “buzz” at the expense of traditional on page SEO and link building.

Put another way, pull SENuke back to second gear and get yourself a blog and a Twitter account. Plus get yourself a cat, you’ll need something inane to talk about in the land of social media. Love it or not that’s where we’re going because that’s where Google is taking us – fast!

Okay… I’m hitting the publish button… NOW!

You see the fact is, I have a killer secret I want to share with you. Something that will allow you to hoover up free money while you sleep. Really, this is so easy anyone can do it. You don’t need a list (not of your own anyway), you don’t need any traffic and you can set the whole thing up in a couple of hours and make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I’m going to give you all the details right here in this article, nothing will be held back.

Let’s get to it. First you’ll need to to find an existing marketing product, it really doesn’t matter which one, whether it works or not, or if has been around for donkey’s years and is common knowledge. Don’t worry, we’ll fix all that.

Now take the key concept from that product. Let’s say it’s a training course on affiliate marketing, you know the usual stuff. How to set up a WordPress blog, how to install a few plugins, how to scrape a bunch of content from other peoples’ web sites and claim it as your own, just the standard stuff.

Now think up a great name. Something like, “Super Atomising Ballistic Profits Wonga Vomiter”, is perfect.

Rehash the key parts of the tired old product you have selected and use a fancy-pants graphics tool to create an image of hundreds of CD and eBook covers. In the past 5 or 10 covers would have been enough but the industry has “matured” so now we need hundreds.

Now go through the course and take a screencast of you setting up a WordPress blog and installing plugins and scraping content and submitting backlinks. Each screencast should be about 2-3 minutes long, this will help you use up those hundred covers you created.

Make sure you create a unique name for each of the processes. So the WordPress install could be referred to as your, “Crystal-Meth Crazed Blog Bazooka”, method. You can’t over-do it, be as ludicrous as your mind will allow.

Now create a bonus product. A PDF jammed with screenshots from your screencasts will do. Add in a couple of sentences here and there to create “value”.

While you are at it, go and get a couple of PLR MP3s of people being interviewed in 1997 – or something equally useful. This will be your, “Insider bonus”, for fast action takers (aka. desperate people).

Now produce an official looking graphical seal and type, “30 Day No Fuss Guarantee”, across it. Buy a domain, create a support address, install a free support software package and ring your mate in the Philippines and tell him you’ll pay him a couple of bucks to deal with customer enquiries (ouch!).

Now go to Powerpoint and create a bunch of slides explaining why yours is the ONLY product that works and why everything else is dog shit.

Go to any half decent parking garage in a London or New York banking district, find a Porsche or a Ferrari and take a few pictures of it.

Now here comes the biggest secret of all, the “killer” touch that will ensure you “crush it” and end up “golden”.

“If you only take away one thing from this article” (C)The Gurus, then this is it so get a notepad and pen and make notes!

Spam all the gurus out there, tell them you have a great new product and ask if they’ll do a webinar with you to market it. Tell them you’ll do all the talking and their role will be simply gasping and shouting, “Wow!”, from time to time. Tell them you’ll pay at least 75% of the sales to them.

Next, set up a cheap and buggy membership site with a barely functional payment system. Make sure your login page is thoroughly broken and, if you can, get a server that collapses when more than 10 people ping it, that’s ideal.

Upload your product to Amazon (without protection so it can be ripped by non-payers later), set up your sales page – don’t fret on this because nobody will read it and all your sales will come from the webinar, but DO NOT test it all works properly! I know there will be a temptation to run a test but stick with what works for the big ticket marketers.

On the night of the webinar and provided the guru has warmed the crowd up with a stream of, “Amazing, Jaw-Dropping, Revolutionary, SEO is deader than Lennon”, pre-sales hype, you should have an eager (desperate) audience of several hundred people to pitch.

Let the guru go first so you can surf on his reputation. Let him tell the audience how you are revolutionising the marketplace, even more so than the revolutionary guy he had on another call last week.

Remember those photos of the Ferrari or Porsche? Yeah?… Yeah? Are you getting it now?

Do your Powerpoint pitch. You know the order, massive proof (use your best Clickbank screen shot even if it has nothing to do with the product), why nothing else but your product works, why you are sharing your secret method (because you love everyone and want to give something back), a painfully slow and repetitive run-down of each and every video and PDF in your product pack (don’t forget to add, “Real World Value – $997″, next to each item), repeat last step but go slower, put a figure of $196,997 on the screen then cross it out – because the buyer won’t be paying that much tonight…

… He won’t even be paying $96,997, so cross it out, you’re not even going to charge $96,996, or $96,995, not even $95,997, or (for brevity I’m going to skip the next 30 steps), $997… oh no…

Tonight and just for the people on the webinar, you’re giving the product away for a ridiculous (must use that word) $497 (or 4 instalments of $297 for the plebs who can’t count).

Clinch it by stating there are only 100 copies available, because you don’t want this secret getting out!

Now you need to do the product list thing again, maybe a couple more times.

Let the guru end the call. Go to bed, wake up, the cash is in your account. ‘kay?

And the bloke the Philippines can handle all the shit while you get on with your next great (even better than this one) product release.

Do this enough times and you could be a guru too!

PS. I’m kidding, this would never happen in the Internet marketing industry!

TwentyTen is a very clean and practical theme and, unlike the previous default, is perfectly acceptable as a production theme. I’ve created a child theme 95% based on TwentyTen as a rapid deployment template and it works really well apart from one niggle with the page titles.

TwentyTen tries to pick up some of the title rewriting capability found in plugins like All in One SEO pack but I prefer the latter and would rather WordPress leave my titles alone. There’s also an error whereby the site name is jammed up against the page name without any spacing and this looks ugly and could have implications for SEO.

WordPress does the rewriting using the function twentyten_filter_wp_title() found in the theme’s functions.php file. It hooks wp_title to achieve the end result. An easy way to undo the rewrite would be to disable the filter in the parent theme but on the next upgrade the filter would be restored.

So I’ve applied remove_filter in my child theme’s header.php file and that should do the trick no matter how many times TwentyTen is upgraded.

Getting to the point, here’s the relevant section in my child header.php, the code you need to add is in red:


<title><?php

?></title>


Obviously this only applies if you are using a child theme based on TwentyTen. If you are hacking the parent directly then comment out the following in the main theme functions.php file to achieve the same result:


// add_filter( 'wp_title', 'twentyten_filter_wp_title', 10, 2 );


I’m not subscribed to more than a handful of these lists any more (in an effort to combat information overload and outrageous bullshit) and I keep up to date with what’s going on in the marketplace via the excellent JVNotify which is all you need.

Even so, the physical product push is becoming almost as bad as the last great thing – anyone else remember the death of Internet marketing and the rise of mobile marketing? Or the death of Google and the supremacy of Facebook? Sheesh!

So what’s it to be? Physical products or information products? The answer, obviously, is both! Why on earth would you ditch one multi-billion dollar market in favour of another? Exploit both, for heavens sake, and don’t believe for a second method X is better than method Y because it just ain’t so.

Why would you ditch Clickbank and Paydot.com where you can pull in 50% – 75% commissions per sale? Where’s the logic? Yeah sure, there’s a lot of competition but do these physical product marketers seriously think selling flat screen TVs or Kindles is a walk in the park?

Come on! The same rules hold true no matter what type of product you are trying to move. Find the products with big demand and low competition and you’re going to make money. It doesn’t matter if the product arrives by post or is downloaded immediately. If people want it and you can get ranked on the search engines then you’ll be able to shift it.

On all my affiliate sites I make sure I have a good mix of the informational and physical. Freebie ebooks are still a great way to build a list. PLR information products can quickly be turned into revenue streams that complement physical products. An example, promote WII accessories on the physical side and game tips and tricks or other information as a downloadable product. Use your list to double up the revenue.

Also consider, how many times will somebody buy a physical product? The answer is once, until it wears out. Yes you can promote accessories and add-ons and you should. But don’t underestimate the power of the information product in supplementing those physical items.

Have you ever bought a top of the line home cinema system, had an expert set it up for you and then thrown the operating manual against the wall in frustration the first time you needed to configure or troubleshoot the thing? Enter the information product. Whenever you have a problem with anything at all note it down and create a product, then stick it online. It’s guaranteed if you’ve experienced the problem then somebody else has too. Probably many people in fact.

How many times have you trawled the Internet looking for solutions to obscure problems? You can’t even figure out what search you should enter, right? You’re not alone. Hours later you might have an answer but maybe not. Would you pay $7 or $9 or $12 to save yourself the bother? I would and I do. Regularly. So do other people, I’m betting. That’s supposed to be a big part of this game, helping people. Well how are you helping people by throwing away the information product in favour of physical products?

You get my point. Physical products or information products? A good mix of both will serve you well and give you an advantage and don’t be swayed by $2K online promises and misdirections.

A guru is similar to a drug pusher in many ways, and just about as ethical as I have discovered. Obviously not ALL gurus, but most of them. I know that’s an outrageous thing to say but consider the reality, a reality I’m confident has been gnawing at your own thoughts as you shell out your cash, follow the program and wonder why the traffic and money isn’t appearing as promised.

These gurus will even blame YOU for not taking action when their products don’t live up to the sales hype. Honestly, I’ve just concluded a lengthy argument with a very unscrupulous chap (well known in our industry) who was skilful enough to sell me a pile of crap (my fault) but didn’t have a moment to spare for his customer when I tried to apply his crap and, surprise, found it was just a bunch of crap (his fault).

Do you want to make money in 2010? Really? Are you prepared to put the effort in and absolutely stop relying on gurus whose whole business model revolves around keeping you just ignorant enough to come back and spend more of your money?

Think about it. If even a handful of these gurus were the real deal the whole guru business would quickly fade away because everyone would be using their methods to thrive and wouldn’t need a guru ever again. Right or wrong?

I’ve bought myself wisdom. It has cost me a lot of money. I had to be a victim of the scam before I realised it was a scam. Some people are a lot smarter than me and can spot a con from a mile off. But trust isn’t a shameful attribute. The real shame arrives when that trust is abused. Lessons learned and mistakes that will never be repeated.

If all goes according to plan (and for the first time since I got into online marketing I believe it will) I will have entirely replaced my regular income by the mid point of this year. I will have done it by relying on the one person that will never let me down. ME!

I’ve applied the skills I already had. Leveraged my experience. Shut my mind to the gurus and started using my own brain. Luck hasn’t entered into it. It has all been the result of hard work, realistic planning, application and common sense. I’ve stopped begging like a dog for a free meal and started taking charge of my own affairs and making my own decisions. Now I’m seeing the rewards.

You can do it too. But only if you have a skill or service to offer that’s in demand. Economics 101. There is no magic formula. I repeat, there is no magic formula. For as long as you continue to believe a magic formula exists you will continue to be easy meat for the gurus. Sad but true.

Maybe some people will protest and claim the gurus have lead them by the nose to prosperity. Stop and think though. Was it REALLY them that built your success, rather than you? What did they teach you? That you need a product to sell? That you need to market the product? That your product must be in demand?

Well hell, that’s hardly genius is it? So go to Clickbank, find a product that sells, create a web site for a few bucks, go and check out the web sites of the top ten sellers for that product. Copy what they are doing. Put your back into building back-links. Give something of value away for free and build a list. Market quality to your list. Tell the truth to your subscribers, build trust. Obvious! Do you want to pay me $27 or $47 or $197 or $1997 for the common sense I just revealed in the last couple of paragraphs? I doubt it.

What if I pad those paragraphs with a lot of fluff you can get for free on places like the Warrior forum? What if I stick up a flashy sales video full of lightening strikes and spinning dollar symbols, will you pay me double?

And that’s why I don’t spend much time posting here any more. Because I’m busy making a nice living online. It’s a time consuming process that demands most of my attention. Yeah, I tried those “do it for you” automated products. That’s right, they didn’t work.

I’ve cut out all the bullshit, un-subscribed for all the lists, cancelled all my memberships except those I really need. And focused on what I already knew worked but was distracted from by gurus who introduced complexity where none was necessary.

However, I will be using this web site again in the future. Once I get to where I want to be I’ll reveal, in great detail, precisely how I did it. And I’ll give it away for free. The gurus are being cynical when they claim they want to give something back. You know this to be true because they won’t hand anything over unless you get your wallet out. What if your best friend charged you ever time you wanted advice or a helping hand? Some friend, eh?

Well, I really will give something back and at the right price. Completely free. Check in every now and again. You won’t hear from me much in the interim, but when I’m ready I’m going to join the very small band of Internet marketers who genuinely are prepared to share (rather than exploit).

Is this a rant against gurus? Yes. But it’s also a plea to anyone who reads this. Have confidence in your own abilities and your own ideas. Try stuff, even if the gurus tell you it won’t work. Do what feels right for you. If you fail, figure out why and change things. Try again. Keep your money in your pocket. Make sure you are applying the basic rules. Good product, demand, awareness, profits.

Honestly, there is nothing more to it. And if you don’t understand or demand I tell you how or, worse yet, want me to do it for you – well then you aren’t cut out for this business anyway. Go and get a job in McDonalds.

All the best in YOUR business in 2010.

Time to do a spring clean.

Seriously, how many membership programs have you signed up for as you try to make your way in Internet marketing? I ran a check today and discovered I’m subscribed to at least five services I hardly ever use and provide very little or no value to my business.

These repeat payments come in several flavours and some can be very hard to track down and cancel once you have signed up. Whilst the better vendors provide a clear route to cancelling agreements the less professional sellers make it deliberately difficult.

I’ll give you an example. In January I signed up to a WordPress plugin system that claimed it would automate my affiliate marketing and sales process. Yes, I know, I was a gullible fool back then. Anyway, today a notification of a Paypal charge popped into my email inbox informing me I’d just paid $47. That’s $47 in January, same again in February, March and now April. $188 for a system that doesn’t even work – my fault, no complaints, I’m an idiot. But it’s only by taking action immediately when you see these charges appear that you’ll put an end to the waste.

That’s what I decided to do, take action and cancel this subscription. So I scanned my old emails and eventually found the login details for my account. Once logged in I looked for an easy way to cancel my membership. Guess what, no chance, not a single mention of how I could cancel my agreement. Oh there’s plenty of highly visible ways to spend even more money, but nothing on how I could stop haemorrhaging cash on something I no longer want.

Try the support desk, I thought. So I clicked on the support link and it asked me to create a ticket. But first I had to login. I entered my account details, hit submit and was promptly told I needed to register a new account on the support system. Because, of course, the support was being handled by a third party who didn’t know who the hell I was.

So I registered and was told a confirmation email had been sent. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes later no email. Added to that, the “support” policy indicated even if I did manage to register, a response to any ticket I created might take up to 7 days! Seven days! What sort of support is that? It’s more of an afterthought, a “when we can be bothered” approach to after sales assistance. And fairly typical of our industry I’m afraid.

But wait! Hadn’t I signed up to this thing using Paypal? Thank heavens because Paypal lets you cancel an agreement without having to refer back to vendors who make themselves rather scarce after they take your money.

I logged in to Paypal and had a look at all my subscriptions and agreements. Several horrific minutes later I realised I was shelling out a small fortune every month on membership programs I could scarcely remember, never mind use on a regular basis. I went through each one and with a single mouse click cancelled each agreement.

End result? A saving of just over $3,000 per year. I kid you not!

But there are times when Paypal can’t help, such as when you’ve given your credit card details to the vendor and they re-apply for payment each month. Unfortunately you have to go through all the hoops to kill these ones off. So that’s my next job, going through my bank statements to discover who, when, why and how much and putting a stop to anything I find that isn’t absolutely essential to my business.

I urge you to do the same yourself. Make a list, check your Paypal notifications, reconcile your bank statements. Prune ruthlessly. If you’re like myself or any number of other Internet marketers I’ve spoken to you’ll end up amazed at how much garbage you are paying good money for month after month and how much loss you have potentially exposed yourself to.

Go on, do yourself a favour this spring. Clean out the old, save yourself a pile of cash and set yourself up for a profitable 2010.

Start applying all the things you have learned. Stop buying new products, stop signing up for monthly subscriptions. Reverse the cash flow and start putting money in YOUR bank account for a change.

But eventually, when everything you do online becomes tightly regulated and subject to the overbearing authority of every Tom, Dick or Harry that can weedle a position of authority, you’ll be forced to take notice. But by then it will be too late.

As ever, when these bureaucratic goose-steppers decide on a course of action it is undertaken without consultation and in the form of a demand. My answer is the same as always. Two words and shouted like I mean it. One day, if we ever collectively develop a set, it may dawn on the pen-pushers that they need us a lot more then we need them.

Here’s the love letter in question:

Hello D,

In order to serve our customers with the highest quality control,
Ymultimedia now requires that you
submit a form of photo identification (Drivers License, Passport,
Government ID.. etc.) in order to
promote Ymultimedia offers and receive commissions earned.

Moving forward, you will not receive payment until we have an ID on file
for your account.

Additionally, if an ID is not received by EOD March 31, 2010, your account
will be suspended until
one has been received and verified.

Please send via email to this email address (id@ymultimedia.com). Photo
identification names must
match what is stated in your account.

Please contact you AM if you have any questions or concerns.

Best regards,
Ymultimedia

In fact just pay a visit so you can re-live the experience of what the web used to be. No pop-ups, pop-unders, exit splashes, little men walking onto the screen – just calm, static, quality, content. Oh boy, those were the good old days.

It promises to build niche and product targeted WordPress blogs that you can set up in under an hour. Custom plugins are then used to auto-generate content so you never have to visit the blog again, you just leave it to build itself while you get on with building another auto-blog and then another and another until you have hundreds or thousands or millions or billions…

…because what we really need is a whole bunch more spam sites on the web. We can never get enough of these things, especially when it comes to actually trying to find useful information on the search engines.

I ran a search on Google just yesterday, I was looking for a tool to transcribe my mp3 recordings. I can’t recall the range of keyword searches I used but no matter what I tried all I could come up with was a whole bunch of spam sites offering the same tool I already knew was out of date garbage. I gave up in the end, I just didn’t have the patience to wade through hundreds of results only to find each one I clicked lead to a mini-blog stuffed with adsense, download links and the same, utterly uninformative article re-spun to death.

What I was seeing was the wreckage of a previous affiliate marketing effort for a product long since expired. Whilst Google isn’t my “bestest” friend in the whole wide world, I do have sympathy for the guys who try to figure the algorithms so genuine searchers stand a chance of finding what they are looking for.

I guess you can gather by now I’m pretty damn disappointed by Auto Content Cash. Maybe it’s the cleverest tool on the block, maybe it does exactly what it claims, maybe the price is a whole lot better than the alternatives out there. But whatever happened to the concept of building a real, sustainable online business? Why are we seeing more and more of these lazy and brainless methods for generating cash with zero regard for the effect on our community and the Internet in general?

The Internet is the most valuable tool we have today. All the other media outlets have long since been captured by the corporations. Television, radio, the mainstream press – these are all tightly controlled and heavily filtered. Only on the Internet can a little guy compete with the big dogs. So along comes Auto Content Cash and a whole load of other methods designed to vandalise our most precious asset so a few shirkers can stuff their pockets at the expense of the rest of us.

I am massively disappointed to see a genuinely good guy like Brian Johnson involved in this sort of thing. This is the same Brian Johnson who pushed the merits of unique content in his excellent course Commission Ritual. Listening to Brian last night on a webinar arranged by James Jones, I got the impression he has the best intentions as he tries to help people who can’t make the break and start earning online. But doesn’t he see that many of these people can’t earn because they aren’t prepared to do the hard things necessary to build a decent business? They are lazy and perhaps they shouldn’t be helped at all – harsh? Maybe they should just be told to go and get a menial job that requires zero ambition and will be more suited to their perspective on work – unreasonable?

Some of us are trying to build business that will be around in five and ten years from now. Some of us aren’t quick-in, quick-buck, rapid exit and leave the mess merchants and some of us are realistic about the game we are in and know we’ll have to graft to succeed. And what’s wrong with that?

The creators of Auto Content Cash justify their new product by claiming Google loves duplicate content and that, in fact, Google itself is built on duplicate content! Oh please… how thin is that? It’s like saying it’s okay to plagiarise an entire book because you saw its title listed in the index of another publication.

What they mean to say is there are methods available to fool Google into treating the content as unique, such as mixing it up a bit, adding a few links, re-spinning, modifying the title. Google is a robot in the end and a robot is programmed to follow rules and react based on those rules. Once the rules can be deduced the system can be gamed. This doesn’t for a second imply Google loves the outcome.

At best the philosophy behind this product is aimed at people who want some spare pocket money and don’t really care how they get it. The sort of people who have no regard for their reputation online because they know they’ll never be around in one spot long enough to be called out for producing junk and muddying the water for the rest of us.

Don’t get me wrong, automation has its place. There are sites and directories out there that are based on collating the content of the Internet into various formats that can provide a value to the end user. Places such as Digg where social buzz is quantified, article directories where I’ll look if I want content inspiration, Twitter which is a sea of noise like everyday life. Automating submission to these places is in line with the nature of the sites. Some might argue otherwise but let’s not pretend Twitter is a valuable index of knowledge, it’s a disorganised jumble by design so auto-tweeting your unique content blog posts is about flagging value, not killing the model.

But these are not the places I go to if I want to find the most relevant and authoritative resource for quality information. For this I rely on the search engines. If these search engines end up filled with micro spam sites (which is exactly what these adsense sites are) then I have been robbed of the value a tool like Google once provided. So whilst Auto Content Cash is great value for lazy Internet marketers it comes at a cost that is being extracted from you and I and all the other serious marketers who are producing the very content that is stolen and then used against us.

Auto Content Cash itself sounds like a re-hash of WordPress plugin content thieving tools such as Caffeinated Content and WPRobot. To be fair it also comes with a lot of quality content that will be useful for non-spammers, such as SEO tutorials and information on outsourcing and site flipping. And the price is super low, cheaper than buying either of the previously mentioned WordPress tools.

Brian also makes mention of a plugin that quickly allows a WordPress configuration to be cloned and this alone is probably worth the asking price. I’d be interested in seeing it as I’m half-way through writing something similar.

But it’s the automation, spam and forget nature of this product that is its primary selling point. The road to hell is lined with good intentions. I’ve dealt with Alex and Brian in the past and believe they genuinely care about their customers and want to see their students succeed. I just think they’ve got it very wrong this time and are setting people up with a method that, eventually, Google will defeat. At least I hope so because that will open up the way for those who apply a bit more care and consideration in their business and are building for the long haul rather than the fast dollar.

Auto Content Cash then? A massive thumbs down. This isn’t the way you’ll be successful long term.

But if you don’t give a damn about your industry and have zero standards then go ahead, the price is right and the tools on offer will certainly allow you to keep your fat ass on the couch whilst you watch TV, stuff doughnuts and skim profit off the back of others. You could say it’s a steal all round. Certainly a no-brainer!

Too honest?

Auto Content Cash

In the near future web developers (fingers crossed) will finally be able to design once in the knowledge their code will be compatible with all the browser choices out there. Of course we have the mobile market to consider which is a whole different ball game. But let’s just hope the painful lessons of the past have been learned and this new medium is rolled neatly into place. Utopia beckons. Well it will seem like utopia by comparison to what has gone before.

The main trouble developers face now is the number of legacy IE installations out there, especially in the corporate world. IE6 still has a frighteningly high user base, dwindling fast but still significant because it was so dominant.

Add in the folks who managed to make it to IE7 but, inexplicably, have missed out on IE8 and you are left with three distinct versions of non-standards compliant browsers to account for. What makes it even worse, these version of IE aren’t even compatible with each other and you can’t reliably install them on the same computer so you can test your web site.

Despite the surge in competition, Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser so ensuring your sites are compatible with it (and all its active versions) is a necessary task and a major headache.

You could install three machines running the different IE versions and test locally, I guess. Or there are a few online services available that will load your site and return a screen shot. This is okay for testing visual output but tells you nothing about interactivity.

Paid services exist that allow you to remotely connect to servers running installations of most of the active browser brands and versions. I’ve never used these myself because having to pay for Microsoft’s mistakes is something I won’t do.

Which is why I was delighted when I stumbled upon a free resource that is simply superb. Have a look at this: Spoon.net Browser Sandbox

This is a free virtual service that allows you to fire up a remote copy of any of the major browsers and run it just as if it were installed on your local machine. All you have to do is download the Spoon Plugin and you’re good to go.

It actually works and works very well. I downloaded the plugin, it downloaded fine but didn’t give any confirmation message when complete which prompted me to think, of course, “There is no Spoon!” But it runs silently in the background and then all you do is visit their site, click on the application you want to run and within a few seconds you have the app running on your desktop. This is not some hobbled version, it’s the real deal so go ahead and test as if you’d just installed from CD.

Great stuff, browser cross compatibility testing SOLVED! This changes the game.

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff you can load up also, including the GIMP, a version of Navicat (try it if you are bored with MySQLAdmin), games, utilities, tons of stuff.

I’ve no idea how long this service has been running but I just found it and I’m chuffed to bits. Check it out for yourself, you’ll be impressed.