Archive for the 'Web Entrepreneur' Category

13
May

Time to get back to work.

It’s coming time to do a blog/site shuffle and for me to get back to working on my websites again. I have been on parental leave now since my son was born on September 29th and my leave thru EI is soon coming to an end - I have this week left.

This domain has always been slated for a business website and I will be slowly but surely turning this domain into that over the next couple of months. I will be touching up posts from here and re-posting them onto my purpleorange.ca website where I plan to talk about business and technology, and phpark.com where I plan to talk about programming and PHP. It is my intention to split the two sites into technical and non-technical.

It has been nice being able to clear my head about what it is I want to do with my career. I have come to realize over the last few months while meeting other Internet and open-source enthusiasts, that I do enjoy what I’m doing - just not in the environments I have been exposed to. It has helped me come to terms with the fact that I’m an entrepreneur that just does NOT have the capacity to deal with the “enterprise” and culture of the corporate world. I am about win/win situations, helping others solve their problems, being supportive rather then oppressive and view “competitors” and co-workers as resources rather then the enemy.

I am mostly interested in working on my own projects while tending to my son during my partners school hours at UBC Okanagan. I have enough money to get me through to the Fall and if I can’t make a living with my projects, I will have to get a part-time job. The heat is being turned up on me to start cranking out these ideas I have to see which of them will fail, which will be successful and learning from both cases.

The time is fastly approaching for our upcoming relocation to Kelowna on May 29th. We have been crammed in our one-bedroom apartment here in East Vancouver since our son was born which leaves me with little to no productivity. I have always been one that at the end of the work day, would clean up my desk before leaving for home and rarely had anything other then a notepad and pen on my desk. My creativity cannot flow when I am working in clutter.

I am really looking forward to getting moved and settled into my new office so that I can get some long overdue work completed.

By jake 0 Commentson Time to get back to work.
Categories: Web Entrepreneur Tags: No Tags.
23
Dec

Finding Clarity Thru Routine

Lately I have been keeping track of the amount of hours I have been working and what I have been doing within those hours. I do this for two reasons: One) I can see how much work I am putting into my projects and where I am spending that time and Two) so I can see that I am truly getting work done which helps me move forward by keeping motivated. I have one of those “Fat Lil’Notebooks” where I keep track of my working hours and it never gets removed from my desk:

Fat Lil’ Notebook

I spend anywhere from a half hour to six hours a day working, with the average day working out to 3 hours. I am finding that if I work less then three hours a day, I tend to keep it up more and not get burned out. Where I see I have stopped as of December 9th, was after 5 days of working 4-6 hours or more.

On the days that I spend more then three hours working, it is time spent on either doing research or development. This is leading me furthur into the mentality that the weekends should be spent on research and development (long and mind numbing) while the rest of the week is spent on content creation in the form of blogging or writing articles (short and more succinct).

Moving forward, I am going to do research and development (late) on Thursdays and Fridays so that I can leave my weekend days for what I enjoy most - socializing, brunch and watching hockey - while spending my weekdays working part-time on my websites - unchaining myself from my desk in hopes of finding that “sweet spot” of work/life balance.

I have to give credit where credit is due and mention that part of why I have started tracking my hours the way I have, has been from watching Tyler Cruz’s work challenges that he posts on his blog: TylerCruz.com

Being someone who has for the last decade been buying into the entrepreneurship mindset, I know just how challenging it can be being a one-person shop working from home with the only motivation being that if you don’t work, you could be starving and out in the cold if you don’t start making money soon.

What do you do to keep yourself honest, motivated, and working when you don’t have a boss cracking the whip at you?

By jake 0 Commentson Finding Clarity Thru Routine
Categories: Motivational/Spiritual and Web Entrepreneur Tags: , , , , , .
08
Nov

Now back to our regularly scheduled programmer

Wow. Time to get back to blogging!

I’ve taken the past couple months to deal with the unfortunate passing of a few people while adjusting to becoming a new daddy! It’s not that I haven’t been working on my online ventures because believe me, I have been putting hours in during sleepless nights because I either can’t sleep or the baby keeps me up.

Tasks I’ve completed as of late:

  • Setup, installed, and configured installation of WordPress MU with sub-domain support
  • Templating OSWD templates for use with WordPress
  • Organized project files into folders - both electronic and paper based (have approximately 35 domains)
  • Designing a process/plan for flipping web estate (domains, websites)
  • Reading PHP 5 Advanced Visual QuickPro Guide
  • Reading WordPress 2 Visual QuickStart Guide
  • Reading thru stacks of magazines (Inc., Revenue, Business 2.0, php architect, Linux Journal)
  • Reading thru stacks of articles printed from Intraweb (sense a trend here?)
  • Cleaned up my portfolio management application that I’ve written in PHP
  • Setup, installed, configured, and in some instances upgraded WordPress on several domains
  • Planned for splicing sipofwater.com blog to start new PHP blog
  • Worked with VMWare, SVN VMWare appliance and OAMP VMWare appliance for local DEV and UAT servers
  • Touched up design for sports-cards.ca (not yet launched)
  • Plans for touching up ffvii.org website

I am happy to have seen a steady increase in traffic to my Final Fantasy 7 website from really only exchanging one link. When I purchased this website near the end of July, it was averaging around 200 uniques per month. The website is now averaging 1,000 uniques per month. Now I need to figure out how to monetize it! I put up TLA about a week ago now and with the Google crackdown and no sales, I am about to pull it off. At least I know what TLA seems to think I can make selling text link advertising. Although with what it estimated prior to sign-up ($6/month) and what the ad is going for ($15/month), I wonder if it has gone up with the Google crackdown and people jumping the TLA ship? The site has also gone from a PR1 to PR2 which I don’t want to muck up by using TLA.

My upcoming dance card:

  • Content creation at warp speed! Dammit Scotty, I’m a programmer, not a writer!
  • Work on building traffic to all websites
  • Creating a proper development platform locally using VMWare, SVN, and OAMP VMWare appliances
  • Purchase NAS storage devices and configure backups for all network nodes
  • Cleanup files on both laptops and re-install 15″ laptop (possibly 17″ too)
  • Skin more OSWD designs for WordPress blogs
  • Finish requirements for sports-cards.ca web application (then start coding)
  • Register and pay for images used from StockXpert for sports-cards.ca design updates and go live
  • Banner(s) creation for sports-cards.ca (contest or hire someone, I’m not a graphic designer either)
  • Attempt forum upgrade to phpbb 3 from 2.0.2 (for the umpteenth time!)
  • Work on first trial of selling a domain and/or a website (whichever sells first)
  • Dig into social networking to promote blog and other sites (notice I said dig and not Digg)

That sums up the past couple of months and my upcoming months pretty well. Hopefully now that life has settled down a bit, I will be posting more and have more inspiration to blog about my ventures. Some of the tasks I`ve mentioned above I will be blogging about in the future either here or on the upcoming PHP blog. On another note, I appreciate that the spell-check in a blogging application doesn’t even recognize the word blog.

By jake 2 Commentson Now back to our regularly scheduled programmer
Categories: Web Entrepreneur and Websites Tags: , , , , , , .
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