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The SAAQ Responds to My Letter Regarding Accompanied Rider Law in Quebec! Le SAAQ Repond a ma Lettre Concernant la Loi D’Accompagnement!

The SAAQ Responds to My Letter Regarding Accompanied Rider Law in Quebec! Le SAAQ Repond a ma Lettre Concernant la Loi D’Accompagnement!

I apologize for the delay in posting this, but I did receive a follow-up from the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec a couple of months ago, here is their response to my letter, which you can read by clicking HERE.

Je présente mes excuses pour le retard dans l’affichage, mais j’ai recu un suivi de la Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec il ya quelques mois.  Voici leur réponse à ma lettre , que vous pouvez lire en cliquant ICI.

Monsieur,

j’ai pris connaissance de votre correspondance du 5 janvier dernier, transmise simultanement a M. Robert Poeti, ministre des Transports, ainsi qu’a Mme Nathalie Tremblay, presidente et chef de la direction de la Societe d’assurance automobile du Quebec (Societe), concernant le retrait de l’accompagnement obligatoire durant la phase d’apprentissage des futurs motocyclistes.  En 2010, la societe a mis sur pied un comite d’experts charges d’analyser differentes pistes de solution pour ameliorer la securite routiere des motocyclistes. Au terme des travaux de ce comite, Le Rapport moto – Volet securite routiere, a ete rendu public en avril 2013. Ce dernier presente dix recommandations sur differents themes lies a la pratique de la motocyclette. Une de ces recommandations concerne le retrait de l’accompaqnement obligatoire.

Actuellement, plusieurs des recommandations du rapport sont deja appliquees ou en voie de l’etre puisqu’elles ne necessitent pas de modifications leqislatives. Les autres mesures, don’t le retrait de I’accompagnement obligatoire, pourront etre mises en ceuvre des qu’une opportunite d’effectuer des modifications legislatives au Code de la Securite routiere (CSR) se presenters. D’ici la, les titulaires d’un permis d’apprenti-conducteur de motocyclette doivent respecter la reqlementation en vigueur, telle que prescrite par le CSR. A cet effet, I’article 100 du CSR stipule qu’une personne titulaire d’un permis d’apprenti-conducteur conduisant une motocyclette doit etre accornpaqnee d’une personne, elle-msme titulaire, depuis au moins deux ans, d’un permis de conduire valide
autorisant la conduite d’une motocyclette.

Si vous eprouvez des difficultes a vous trouver un accompagnateur, sachez que vous pouvez consulter certains sites Internet, tel que le site de Motodirect (www.motodirect.netiaccompagnateurs) qui fournissent des listes de personnes interessees a accompagner des aspirants motocyclistes.

En terminant, je vous invite a consulter I’ensemble des recommandations proposes par le comite sur le site Internet de la Societe a I’adresse suivante:

http://www.saaq.gouv.qc.ca/documents/documents_pdf/prevention/rapport_comite_moto.php

Veuillez agreer, Monsieur, mes salutations distinquees.
La chef de service,
~
Helene Beaulieu
HB/AMUjl

So basically the letter is explaining that they do intend to do away with the accompanied rider law, however the neither the SAAQ nor the Transport Ministry can simply remove it as it is a legislative law.  So this means that the provincial government has to table the law reform and then vote on it, pass it, and apply the new law and the intention is to do so this fall.  So in other words, nothing is going to happen until next year.

I am somewhat amused by her telling me to go to Motodirect to search for available accompanying riders… how amusing!  At this time, there are 4 available riders listed on the site for my area of Montreal, and they are available on weekends on sunny days and some evenings.  Wow, that’s beyond useless seeing as I use my bike to commute, thanks a bunch for nothing.  This province never fails to amuse me with their ridiculous policies and attempts at placating the public with worthless solutions.

Francais: Donc, fondamentalement, la letter explique qu’ils ont l’intention d’en finir avec la loi d’accompagnement, mais ni la SAAQ, ni le ministère des Transports ne peuvent tout simplement supprimer la loi, comme il est une loi législative. Donc, cela signifie que le gouvernement provincial doit presenter la réforme de la loi et ensuite voter sur elle, passer, et d’appliquer la nouvelle loi et l’intention est de le faire cet automne. Donc, en d’autres termes, rien ne va se passer jusqu’à l’année prochaine.

Je suis un peu amusé par la partie de la lettre que me dis d’aller à Motodirect pour rechercher un accompagnateur … Tres amusant! A cette époque, il ya 4 accompagnateurs disponibles répertoriés sur le site pour ma région de Montréal, et ils sont disponibles le week-end, les jours ensoleillés et certains soirs. Wowfantastique pour quelqu’un comme moi qui utilize leur pour se render au travail, merci pour rien! Cette province ne manque jamais de me faire rigoler avec leurs politiques et leurs tentatives ridicules à apaiser le public avec des solutions sans valeur.

Well, at least they answered my letter…

Dan

P2LHosting is now closed, thank you everyone!

P2LHosting is now closed, thank you everyone!

I wanted to write a quick little blurb and thank you to all my clients and past-clients that entrusted me with their website assets by using P2LHosting for their webhosting needs.  As of today, the primary server was taken offline for good and hopefully everyone was able to switch over to a new hosting plan before the due date, which I communicated to all active clients twice via email earlier this month.

Unfortunately P2LHosting had been losing money for several years, but the amount was not that big of a deal as it proved extremely useful for me personally as well as for my clients.  But as the last few years have unfolded and I have been dedicating my work hours to my full-time career, the hosting business stagnated and eventually clients started to drop off.  Not many, but in a business where ever penny counts, even 2 or 3 clients lost per year hurts.  In addition, I was no longer able to respond to trouble tickets as quickly as I wanted, and I didn’t think that was fair to my loyal customers that were used to 1 hour response times over the years.  There is really no time to grow this business as all of my efforts are focused on serving the Playboy digital network that I currently manage.

For anyone that did not transfer in time (perhaps you never received any of the emails) I did keep a close eye on domains that were still pointed to the P2LHosting nameservers and I have downloaded complete cPanel backups for your accounts.

Didn’t transfer your account yet?

OK don’t panic, here’s what I have asked clients to do:

  1. Sign up for an account with a hosting company that uses cPanel.  I have personally moved to HostGator and I am referring people to use them as well.  You can choose a package and sign up HERE!
  2. During the sign up process, make sure you use the SAME cPanel username on your hosting sign up that you had with P2LHosting,  This is the username you would use when logging in to cPanel.  This is really important.
  3. Forward me your welcome email, which should contain your new cPanel information, including the login URL and login credentials as well as your site’s IP and nameservers, and your helpdesk login information.
  4. I will upload the cPanel backup to the home directory of your account.
  5. You will then be provided with specific verbiage for the restoration of your account.  You will need to create a helpdesk ticket and copy/paste the verbiage provided.
  6. You will need to update your nameservers on your domain via your registrar or you can send me your credentials and I can do it for you.
  7. Once the restore has been done, your site will be back up and running.

You can contact me directly via my contact page at https://www.danrichard.com/contact/ and I will get back to you ASAP.

Thanks again everyone for your loyal business over the years, it has been a pleasure serving you!

Dan

The Death of Tutorial Portals – A look at the Big 3 in 2013 and Suggested Counter-Measures for Webmasters.

The Death of Tutorial Portals – A look at the Big 3 in 2013 and Suggested Counter-Measures for Webmasters.

It was a matter of time I suppose, an inevitable evolution as web behavior continues to shift, morph and push technological boundaries at an alarming rate.  More precisely, the ADHD generation of web users combined with massive strides in search engine results accuracy and perhaps a dash of lack of interest has destroyed the tutorial search portal business model.  For my long-time readers, you don’t have to ask, but for those of you fairly new to the world of online tutorials you might of never heard of the tutorial giants – Good-Tutorials.com, Tutorialized.com and Pixel2life.com.  These 3 companies battled long and hard for top search engine placement, diehard fans, streamlined UIs and dominance of the tutorial aggregate site niche.  In the mid to late 2000s, these sites were huge and brought in tens of thousands of visitors every day and considered the gold standard of free tutorial listings.  But as 2010 rolled around, it appears the wheels started to break free from what appeared to be a rock-solid frame.

Today these sites have plummeted in traffic, rank and audience.  Tutorialized.com and Pixel2life.com were sold to new owners in 2010 – 2011 that converted one site in to an ad laden cesspool of affiliate offers and the other seemed to fall in to autopilot while the owners fell asleep at the helm.  For Good-Tutorials.com, they seemed to have turned off all development and just let it chug along like an old 1988 Dodge Aries that refuses to die but gets harder to drive up the hill every morning.  A quick look at Alexa paints a fairly nasty picture:

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You can see that all sites suffer from identical markers of a site dying a slow painful death.  It’s important to note that you can only see the Alexa ranks from 2012 to 2013 and there was already huge drops since 2010 to 2012 that you can’t see in the graph.  The other alarming number is the dominance of traffic from India rather than the USA, especially for GT and Tutorialized with GT at almost 30% traffic from India.  These sites were previously ALL 50% or higher USA traffic sources with Alexa US ranking way below 10k, but with the lack of social presence, development and user interest, the sites are now exposed to non-premium traffic, which destroys the ability of the site to run top paying advertisers and affiliate offers needed for the precious revenue to keep these sites worth running.  The bounce rates, time on site and page views are also unhealthy signs of sites that are on the way to a website graveyard.

The question at this point is what happened and how do you stop this from happening to YOUR website before it’s too late.  What you may find interesting is that while tutorial aggregate portals like the big 3 are petering off, original content tutorial sites catering to specific niches are still doing quite well, in fact probably better than ever.  It’s becoming easier for people to find these sites through long-tail keyword searches on search engines so they no longer have to even rely on these portals for traffic anymore.  With basic SEO and patience, it’s hard not to succeed at some small level.  With bigger investments (in terms of time and development) and smarter marketing, you can stand to make a nice little profit once you understand how the web works today.

So what happened to the big 3 exactly?  In the most basic terms, they were mismanaged at a time when Google started making huge strides in long-tail keyword search results making it MUCH easier to locate tutorials for exactly what you wanted right from Google instead of having to sift through results on an aggregate that suffered from ancient Boolean search logic with sometimes sketchy results and 404 links once you finally found what you needed.  It was the perfect storm and all 3 major sites sailed directly in to the teeth of the seething maw of web destruction.  Once the downpour ceased it’s pummeling drive, some seriously battered websites floated out of the haze and have been drifting ever since and even now the seams continue to widen and water is pouring in, dragging them under.  The sites also allowed clutter to build up and standards started to slip both in terms of tutorial quality and advertisers and the situation would only worsen as users continued to drop as they discovered much easier methods of finding tutorials for free.  The sites with forums were further mangled by out-of-control spam, rendering the forums virtually useless to any valid users looking to be part of the community.

The final straw that broke the e-camel’s back was the massive implosion of online ad pricing, which saw a massive drop virtually overnight on all major networks.  After several years of high CPC prices with AdSense and other small competitors and the absolute insane earnings from the short-lived Yahoo Ad Network beta phase (think nerds, hookers and blow) prices went from dollars per click to a penny per click or lower.  Many webmasters found themselves unable to pay basic living costs once the ad market crashed and some bailed for steady employment, others fought to get through it, and some simply moved in to their mother’s basement and continue to fight the good fight!  This was actually one of the major factors that led me to dump the tutorial portal side of P2L’s business (I still run the hosting) and focus on more productive revenue generation.  2008 was most definitely gone and would never be repeated.

Pixel2life daily traffic from better times – 30k visits a day!

I founded Pixel2life – it was my creation, my baby, my passion and my fulltime business for many years and when it changed so I could pursue new challenges, it was done so with the very best of intentions and was assured that my site was in good hands.  It pains me to see what has happened to my beloved P2L, the tutorial community and the sites I used to consider threats to my livelihood.  While I know there is nothing I can do for P2L at this point even if it handed back to me today on a silver platter, I will always value the MASSIVE amount of lessons learned in every aspect of web development and management that I carry with me today.

Another benefit from the demise of P2L is that I can impart some advise to you, my readers, to help you preserve your website and possibly your livelihood.  If you run or want to run a website and want it to thrive for years to come, here are 12 lessons from me to you:

  1.  Always try to gear your site to a particular focused niche and try to cater to a niche made up of a buying audience rather than an audience looking for something free.  P2L was geared towards people looking for free tutorials, so when it came to looking for ways of converting on that traffic, it was a nightmare.  Another site I ran that provided product reviews for a particular niche had 10 times LESS traffic than P2L, but actually generated about double the revenue. The people that used that website were looking to buy products and just wanted to find out of it was worth it… it’s not hard to convert on an audience that has one hand on the mouse and the other wrapped around their credit card.
  2. Know your niche like the back of your hand.  If you’re not an authority on your niche, your audience will know it and will look elsewhere.  Live and breath your niche and become the dominant name in that field – this was critical to both my tutorial company and my collectibles company.
  3. Write original content that has not been done to death.  Forget about aggregate sites in general – Facebook, Reddit and Google have killed most of those opportunities so focus on providing your own unique content that can’t be found anywhere else and you’ll find other likeminded people that want to digest it.
  4. Listen to your audience, they are telling you what your competitors are already working on simply by telling you what they want.  If you don’t do it, someone will – that’s actually why I started P2L to begin with.
  5. Learn everything you can about SEO, it’s really important.  There are simple factors in search engine optimization that can make a HUGE difference in how much traffic search engines send your way.  At the same time, there are fatal mistakes you can make on your site that can turn search engines away from you and could take months to recover even if you manage to fix them.
  6. Constantly question every aspect of your website to ensure you’re not instilling a sense of blind cruise control.  Don’t confuse this with indecision or questioning your business sense…  what you want to do is ensure that your site logically makes sense and your business model is relevant and effective.  Why does your site exist?  Does it make sense?  Why would users come here instead of a competitor?
  7. There’s no such thing as an auto-pilot site.  The second you take your foot off the gas and let the site run on auto-pilot is the second someone is taking advantage of your lack of interest to threaten your market share.
  8. Don’t be afraid of change and evolution of your site, the web and the audience.  As social media and user generated content continues to dominate the web, things like “I don’t need a twitter account” are emotion based statements founded on fear of change.  If you want to have a business online that thrives, you’d better know where people gather and then make yourself heard.
  9. Put yourself in the user’s shoes and pretend to search the web like a regular person who has never heard of your site before.  If you have a business called Joe’s Bowls in Sacramento with a niche site on decorative ceramic bowls, then no one is going to open up Google and type Joe’s Bowls if they’ve never heard of you.  Be realistic and search ‘ceramic bowl store Sacramento’.  Are you anywhere to be found in the search results?  Check out your social media channels and those of your competitor.  Who’s more engaging and why?  If you can afford it, hire some folks for a focus group and get honest opinions.  You would be shocked at what you find out.
  10. Manage your site like a project, with a clear charter, project scope, work breakdown structure with deadlines and milestones.  Have the capital required to hire a top notch developer if you want to do it right the first time and do not let ANYONE compromise your delivery dates.  The more your drag out and delay a project, the longer you delay building up your business and generating revenue.
  11. Easy or hard, your decisions should be based on numbers and logic, not emotions.  Don’t become so attached to something that you ignore the facts.  I have this as number 10, but it’s one of the most fatal mistakes a webmaster can make.  AB test everything, learn how to use Google Analytics and study conversion.  Your site is a business, and successful businesses have a proper business model, a P&L and management decisions are based of actual data.  If your site is on a downward trend, then you need to investigate and address it, not dig in and ride it out or stick your head in the sand.  Otherwise you could follow the big 3 in to obscurity.
  12. Love what you do.  If you’re going to run your own website and business for years to come, you had better love the subject matter.

Do you miss the good ol’ P2L days?  Have some thoughts on what I wrote?  Please share them by using the comment form below, I read everything you guys send me.

Thanks for reading!
Dan

Game of Thrones audio broken after intro or opening credits on PS3 Media Server PSM Fix!

Game of Thrones audio broken after intro or opening credits on PS3 Media Server PSM Fix!

If you’re like me, you’re probably enjoying Game of Thrones season 3 right now, and like me, you may be watching your episodes via your Playstation using PS3 Media Server and you’ve noticed lately that when watching the show, the audio craps out after the opening credits have played or maybe after the “Previously on Game of Thrones” segment.  This started happening for me, so I fuddled around with the PS3 Media Server Transcode settings and found a configuration that worked flawlessly.  Here’s the settings you should try out for your audio set up and your Game of Thrones sound should start to work again:

So the parts you need to pay attention to are the audio engines order and the audio engines settings on the transcoding settings tab.  On the left side under “Audio Files Engines” make sure you have the order set as:

  1. FFmpeg Audio
  2. MPlayer Audio
  3. Audio High Fidelity

Then, in the left middle area under “Audio settings, apply to following decoders:” make sure you check “Use LPCM” and “Keep AC-3” options and the rest are off.  Save and restart PS3 Media Server and you should be back in business!  You should also ensure you’re running the latest version of PSM or at the very least a fairly recent stable build.  PSM is updated on a fairly regular basis and the PSM team is always patching new bugs, adding tweaks etc.

Oh and yes I know I have video quality set pretty low… I stream via Wifi and anything higher just craps out.  One of these days I’ll hardwire it.

Please post a comment and let me know if it worked!
Dan

New goodies on Playboy.com – eShave video, Case of Bass with Moscot and Refreshed Girls Hub!

New goodies on Playboy.com – eShave video, Case of Bass with Moscot and Refreshed Girls Hub!

Hey all!  Hope you’ve all been well, Christmas shopping is done and you’re all set for the holidays.  I wanted to show you guys some cool new goodies the Playboy.com team has cooked up for our awesome fans.  As we continue to work with cool brands and products, we get to do some fun stuff on the site, and get some awesome giveaways going as well.  First up, check out this awesome sexy Shaving How-To video starring Lauren Elise and her scruffy looking buddy when we unleash them at the Bolt Barbers Shop with some sweet eShave shaving products.

The Playboy.com team did an amazing job putting this together, with probably one of favorite videos and of course a sweet gallery for your lovin’ eyes.  The best part is we gave away a $500 eShave prize pack including shaving mugs with the models on them to one lucky Twitter follower…  I personally use one of their Badger Brushes (This one in Smoked color with Silvertip hair) and I am in LOVE with it, amazing brush and worth every penny.

Next up, we worked with a company to bring to our readers a product that I am sure most people never realized even existed.  Imagine kick ass speaker systems self-contained in gorgeous vintage luggage… hard to picture?  No worries, Case of Bass has done all the thinking for you, and they made 3 custom Playboy.com Case of Bass speakers just for us! (Which by the way, we gave away)

Straight from Portland, Oregon, Case of Bass hand-builds portable sound systems within unique vintage suitcases that are individually tailored to your specific requirements.  We figured what better way to show these babies off than have the beautiful blue-eyed Elena Romanova don a pair of sweet Moscot glasses and strut her stuff Playboy.com style!  Check out the gallery (you won’t regret it) and the fun BTS video by clicking HERE.

And finally, Playboy.com has a brand new refreshed Girls Hub that’s been months in the planning and was finally deployed this past week.  You can now easily look up your favorite Playboy models, search by name, look at all the latest girl related content posted on Playboy.com and filter it by gallery, videos, profiles or articles.

You can also easily narrow down your content by model category (Playmate, Cybergirl etc) and a quick glance at the main carousel tells you who’s new to the site.  We’ve also made some tweaks to the search results page, helping you find content much easier now and we’ve got a few new surprises in our editorial articles section.  Additional back-end tweaks should also make your browsing even faster, so please go check out the site and hope you love the new changes! Please stay tuned for our upcoming ultimate gift guide this coming week… you guys out there still scrambling for the perfect gift for the ladies in your lives are about to be saved!

Back to work I go,
Dan