Take More Risks

I have been busy, busy, busy over the past week with to the E-Cards system I’ve been creating for work. It’s to be ready by Monday and I’m dearly hoping everything should be rounded off long before then I doubt that I’ll update that much until it’s complete – I really want to drive to ensure that the project is as functional as it can be.

I’m excited! I’m planning to spend a long weekend in Edinburgh for my birthday in late January. It should be great fun!
I still haven’t got around to creating that god damn business plan. Arghhh. I’ve got to look at it this way – in 6 months time I’ll have no income bar my internet earnings. If I don’t start taking this seriously I’ll be stuck on £15-20 a week which isn’t anywhere near what I need to survive!

Once the project’s finished I’ll start developing again properly. I feel as though I’m getting to grips with CakePHP now so I’ll concentrate on creating web applications as opposed to purely content based sites.

6 months and counting. I guess it’s time to stand up and be counted. Heh.

I’m not too fond of emailing webmasters, pleading for a link. I must be overly shy or something, even on the Internet! Up to now I’ve avoided this as much as possible – I instead opt to place a link on my websites to ones that are related by field, hoping that they will see my URL in their Referral logs and reciprocate.

This probably isn’t the best approach, especially nowadays – since so many splogs spoof referral urls to fool you into believing you have a backlink. It’s highly probable that the webmaster in question won’t even see your backlink.

So how can I overcome my shyness? I guess if I continued to build upon my site’s content, I wouldn’t feel ashamed asking for links off more established blogs. It’s best seeing it this way – a reciprocal link is for the future-good of both parties involved. You are providing someone else with an opportunity as much as they are paying you with a favour.

Most webmasters won’t bite your head off either! Heh.

A blog’s formative months are often fruitless. No-one seems to be visiting or leaving comments. Income is shockingly low and you can’t really see much of a future for your blog. Before self-pity takes hold – take action. Instead of complaining about why people aren’t visiting your blog ask yourself about the cause of the activity.
A brainstorming session can be effective in this situation. Try to come up with as many plausible solutions as you can. Here’s an example.

• Not enough content.
• Not catering to the target audience’s needs.
• No backlinks.

Take the first item in the list – content. There are many ways that you can increase productivity…..

• Pay someone to write posts for you.
• Research the topic more thoroughly.
• Set yourself weekly or hourly goals (for example in the next 2 hours I want to write 2 posts about subject x and 2 about subject y).

Be sure to keep your audience up to date on how effective each of the solutions were. You might want to consider why they worked and then make some recommendations for the future. You can then write a follow-up post on how you managed to fufill your criteria.

Unless you are targetting an extremely narrow niche – your potential to create posts is practically limitless. The greatest setback will always be the irrational doubting mind.

To succeed you sometimes need to put in 110% even when it seems pointless. As you increase your focus little by little you will gradually begin to see rewards within due time.

Don’t even give potential users a reason to skip your blog!

Here are a few of the things that I’ve learnt so far from selling websites over at Digitalpoint. I’ll add more as I become more experienced with this. Enjoy.

• Try to get into the mindset of the buyer. For example, pretend that you are viewing your own listing as a potential buyer. What information would you be looking for? This should include screenshots proving revenue and traffic as well as the reason why you are selling the site in the first place. You should also state whether the content/scripts are original or not.
• On the same topic I personally think it’s best to refrain from embedding images in your post. Rather link to the images of your traffic/revenue stats from the post. It’ll conserve a bit of bandwidth too.
• If you are unsure about how much your site is worth, don’t list a Buy It Now price until you’ve evaluated how the bidding is progressing. Make sure you mention that you’ll supply the BIN at a later date. If you specify a certain time, ensure that you keep to your word and publish the price.
• If no-one is currently showing interest in your site you might want to consider bumping the thread – but not in the crude ~bump :d~ way. Try to provide some additional information about your website that might attract more potential buyers.
• Don’t be too hasty in reducing your BIN. It can be very tempting to do this if no-one’s taking the bait and it can result in you receiving next to nothing for your website.
• Be sure to state how you want to be payed. This is important. The last thing you want is misunderstandings about payment after the auction has finished.
• And finally, never be afraid to put a reserve on your site!

Oh joy of joys, another night spent fighting to master CakePHP once and for all. I think I’m almost there. See the thing is I wasn’t aware of the bake script until just there now which meant that I had to create all of the models/views/controllers manually.

I’m in the midst of transferring goatboy.info over to Dreamhost since Hostgator does not offer SSH access, which is a pity because I haven’t had many problems with their service. Plus it runs off Cpanel. Ah well, at least this way I’ll be able to use bake. I was thinking of using the exec() function in php instead of the prompt but this would have been overly ackward. Besides I’d better get accustomed to using a shell interface – especially if I’m to transfer over to a VPS.
There is a cool feature in CakePHP called admin routing that allows you to build up backend interfaces seperately from the world viewable code. Heh, I was creating applications were the backend was viewable to anyone and didn’t even give it a second thought. God. I should be locked up.

My e-cards project in work isn’t going that great at the moment, having difficulties with model associations. Hopefully I can iron them out tomorrow. If I can get to work on goatboy.info for a few hours tonight it’ll be good practice.

I forgot all about Thanksgiving. For everyone who celebrates it, have a good one!

If you’ve been keeping up to date with the latest in Web Development you’ll know that tables are bad. The very mention of this tag is enough to make veteran CSS stylists launch into a manic episode resulting in you losing your front teeth. Or at the very least your dignity!

I’ve been wondering lately though – are there more uses for table than simply for scientific or mathematical tabular data? Take the example of a product grid on a site like Amazon. 15 products are displayed on each page, 3 columns by 5 rows. Would it be appropriate to use DIV’s over tables in this instance? If you implemented the solution with DIV’s you’d have to use three seperate tags – one corresponding to each column. Now let’s assume that you are using a screenreader. You are likely to interpret that the products grid consists of three independent divisions or parts. Is this correct semantically? I don’t think so. After all we’re displayed objects from the same entity – Products.

I’d be more inclined to use a table here, as at least it unifies all of the objects under one tag.

It’s all too easy to assume that DIV’s are the solution to every XHTML problem these days. I guess it takes you to stand back a bit and assess the situation properly from the perspective of the user.

Thanks to mason for pointing this out.

To stop the red links from appearing simply access the SEO for Firefox options menu in Firefox -> Tools -> Seo for FF -> and uncheck the highlight links in red.

This is something that I’ve been avoiding like the plague for months now. I realised on Sunday properly that I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life. I only seem to have a vague idea about where I’m going and I don’t know whether or not these conceptions are true.

It’s easy enough to specify that I want to earn $20,000 in the coming year. What use will that be to me though? What will it mean and how will I spend it? Will it make me happy or will I end up chasing the next $20k blindly?

All I know is that I want to be my own boss. I don’t really have the temperament to work under people for any length of time – especially when the egos are out

I want to continue creating websites for myself. I get a lot more satisfaction out of creating personal websites than commercial ones, simply because the customer has the creative licence to go ahead and botch up your work. And as well as this – you seem to have to go out of the way to impress other people which I find tiring after a while. I’m getting ahead of myself again. Heh.

If I continue to avoid writing up this plan, I will literally be passing up on success. It’s harder than I thought it would be as it requires a lot of soul-searching which is always fun.

Where the hell will I be in a year from now? Will I still be struggling to create successful websites and complaining about my lack of creativity on this journal. How will my family be? How will I be? Awww fuck I’ll take a leaf out of Eckhart Tolle’s Book ‘The Power of Now’ and quit with the fearing of the future and actually focus on where I am now. Hmmmmm.

Heh, it’s official! Take More Risks isn’t popular enough yet to be listed on Review Me. I received an e-mail about the site yesterday morning and I’m assuming it’s made by the people who were responsible for Text Link Ads. In case you aren’t familiar with it already, advertisers who would like their product or service reviewed select a website from the Reviewme.com pool. The targetted site can then accept or refuse the approach and if the former is true, they must write the review for a premium.

This depends entirely upon your pages popularity, with the least popular sites being offered $20 and the more established pages receiving up to $200.

It’s a great idea, but once again I must question why the base price for a review is so high. $40 is quite a lot, particularly when the review will appear on a site that’s not that popular. Although in saying that it’s a positive sign that they seem to be rejecting unestablished blogs. I wonder where exactly the cut off point is in terms of popularity. And more importantly how the hell do they measure the popularity in the first place?

It’s something I’d definitely be interested in trying in a few months down the line.

I’m almost embarrased to admit this but before Thursday of last week I had no idea that you could upload and manage images through the Wordpress interface. I’ve been using this program for well over 2 years now and I didn’t even know it had this capability!

Please excuse me in the meantime whilst I flood this blog with all sorts of screenshots!

Anyway, if you aren’t familar with the process of uploading an image on Wordpress, it really is quite simple. Lying directly beneath the post box is the upload section which is where all the magic happens. Click on the Browse button and select the file that you want to upload and once you are ready click on the Upload button you’ll then see a thumbnail of your image appear within the newly selected Browse tab.

Now simply click on the image and a popup menu will appear. Click on “Using Thumbnail” to toggle between using the thumbnail image and the normal version. Be aware that Wordpress does not perform any processing on the image so inserting the thumbnail of a 3mb picture will still mean that the thumbnail file is 3mb in size.

Once you are happy with your selection, click on the “Send To Editor” option to finish. Be aware that the image will appear at the place where the cursor currently appears in the text box. It’s worthwhile selecting the exact position you want beforehand to avoid any frustration.

Dear God I feel just a little bit silly. This certainly beats uploading the file and linking it in seperately any day!