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.