Johnathan Ward

Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

By John Ward / March 20, 2015 / 65 Comments

This is the history of my experience trying to make money online over the past 10 years or so. This is by far the longest post I've ever personally written and it's more of an autobiography than a blog post....

I Made an Automated Pancakeswap Prediction Bot

By John Ward / October 14, 2022 / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago I got the idea to try to automatically bid on Pancakeswap's Prediction game. So I decided to try to build a Pancakeswap Prediction bot to take on the task. I did this just to learn about...

IBM Watson Explorer

By John Ward / April 6, 2015 / 1 Comment

I'm going to talk a little bit about IBM Watson Explorer (WEX). A few people have contacted me about what I do at my day job as a Watson Explorer Consultant. Since this is my personal site I don't usually...

What is IBM Watson

By John Ward / July 24, 2020 / 0 Comments

There is a lot of confusion about what exactly IBM Watson is? I'm going to try to clear that up a little bit in this blog post. I'll go into the history of IBM Watson and what IBM is doing...

My 2022 Recap and 2023 Plans

By John Ward / January 13, 2023 / 0 Comments

I haven't been posting to my blog that often, but I wanted to recap 2022 and lay out some of my plans for 2023. Overall, 2022 was a pretty good year for me, and I made some progress on business...

Watson Explorer vs Elasticsearch for Enterprise Search

By John Ward / May 12, 2020 / 0 Comments

Are you interested in IBM Watson Explorer vs Elasticsearch? Recently, I had to do some comparisons between IBM Watson Explorer and Elasticsearch for a project. I spent some time going through the features of both platforms and found some interesting...

One AdSense Change Dramatically Increased My Earnings…

By John Ward / March 9, 2015 / 12 Comments

... and I have no idea what it is. I used to blog actively on my tutorial site, TeamTutorials. In it's prime the site would see over 100k page views per month. Even in the prime the site barely met...

Are Products the Road to Prosperity?

By John Ward / May 13, 2015 / 1 Comment

Regular Expression Converter for Watson Explorer Engine

By John Ward / August 23, 2019 / 0 Comments

Sometimes it's useful to extract data from a Watson Explorer content node using regular expressions. In this post, I'll show you how to extract data using a regular expression and create a new content node for that specific data. To...

IBM Watson Discovery Fundamentals Training

By John Ward / October 28, 2020 / 0 Comments

I'm excited to announce that I've released my first course on Udemy titled IBM Watson Discovery Fundamentals. This course is designed to give business and technical users a good high-level overview of the IBM Watson Discovery service. What is IBM...

Regular Expression Converter for Watson Explorer Engine

Sometimes it’s useful to extract data from a Watson Explorer content node using regular expressions. In this post, I’ll show you how to extract data using a regular expression and create a new content node for that specific data. To start off we will use the default example-metadata collection. We will attempt to extract any … Continue reading Regular Expression Converter for Watson Explorer Engine

Using crawl-url nodes to enqueue data along with a url in Watson Explorer

viv:crawl-enqueue-url is documented as having 1 argument – the url to enqueue. However, it has an optional second form with two arguments which allows much more flexibility. If the first argument is set to the url and the second is a variable containing a crawl-url, that also works. (note the use of entities to create … Continue reading Using crawl-url nodes to enqueue data along with a url in Watson Explorer

Watson Explorer XSL Tips and Tricks

Using the Chico Application to Test XSLT Here’s an example use of Chico! I was testing something to do with evaluating XSLT and wanted to run it quickly: <vce> <process-xsl><![CDATA[ <xsl:template match=”/”> <xsl:variable name=”params”> <param name=”jean” value=”bar” /> </xsl:variable> <foo2> … Continue reading Watson Explorer XSL Tips and Tricks

Copy and Modified Documents with a Watson Explorer Converter

A common task when crawling and indexing a document in Watson Explorer Engine (WEX) is making changes to a document during the conversion process. The most common occurrence is needing to copy all the contents in the application-vxml document while making some changes to one or a few of those contents. To do this, there is … Continue reading Copy and Modified Documents with a Watson Explorer Converter

The Cognitive Call Center on IBM Watson

One of the major use cases I see for Watson Explorer (WEX) is in call centers. No matter the specific industry the major goal for call centers are decreasing call time and increasing customer satisfaction rates. The way to do this is to get the correct information in front of the Customer Service Representative (CSR) as fast … Continue reading The Cognitive Call Center on IBM Watson

Building a Business Around a 3rd Party API

Today I read an interesting post on HackerNews about a price comparison site, PriceZombie, being kicked out of the Amazon Associates program. The Amazon Associates program is Amazon’s affiliate network. Amazon pays a commision for any sales you bring in through affiliate links. Since I have a pretty extensive background with affiliate marketing I have a few thoughts … Continue reading Building a Business Around a 3rd Party API

Tracking Ad Blockers Using Google Analytics

If you’ve read any of my older posts you probably know that I’ve been involved in internet advertising, in some form, for a long time now. Lately I’ve been seeing more and more posts about how ad blocking is growing at a tremendous rate. I still have some sites that make money from display advertising … Continue reading Tracking Ad Blockers Using Google Analytics

The Best WordPress Email Plugin

Thinking about adding a WordPress email plugin to your site? One of the most power marketing tools that anyone publishing online can take advantage of is email marketing. According to the Direct Marketing Association email advertising has an average return on investment of %4,300 in the United States. Email is consistently the best performing media in … Continue reading The Best WordPress Email Plugin

Are Products the Road to Prosperity?

A few weeks ago a wrote a somewhat popular post about my past experiences trying to make money online. I went through the ups and downs of working as an affiliate promoting other people’s products. At the conclusion of the post I said that I wanted to focus on building some type of product. So … Continue reading Are Products the Road to Prosperity?

Setup A Life You Don’t Need to Escape From

I waste too much time online, especially on social networks like Facebook. I saw a quote the other day from Seth Godin: Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from. -Seth Godin This really hits home with me. I often find myself … Continue reading Setup A Life You Don’t Need to Escape From

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