Be More Productive!

I wanted to sit down for a few minutes and reflect on how I can be more productive and focus in on what will take my projects to the next level.

Remove distractions
When it’s time to work it’s time to work and distractions are a procrastinator’s best friend. Close your messaging platforms like AIM and MSN and only open them if you need a work related question answered. Have 2 web browsers open… one with only work related tabs up and the other with your procrastination tabs like your e-mail, forums, or whatever else floats your boat for fun. If you want to get work accomplished… remove everything that would prevent you from doing so.

Check your e-mail, messaging and forums in the morning once and then before you go to bed. During the day, only make those visits when you have worked for a set amount of time or accomplished a certain task. So for example I would sit down and tell myself, “I’m going to make 25 posts on my forum and then I’ll take a 10 minute break.” This could also make you work faster if you really want that break!

Change Your Mindset
One of the best blog posts I’ve ever read is the Do It Fucking Now! post on the SEOBlackHat.com blog. It may not be fun, it may be tedious and you may rather be doing something else. But there is no substitute for getting shit done. Your work doesn’t masterbate… it’s not going to do itself! And nothing beats the feeling of seeing the fruits of your labor. If you need to, post that line “Do It Fucking Now” or another slogan you find motivating. How about “Success Is The Best Revenge”? Or maybe there is something you really want… post a picture of it by your desk and whenever you feel like taking a break, look at that quote/picture and get back to being productive.

Make Lists
All of us have dozens of ideas and priorities running throughout our head in a given day that are directly related to our business. Things are bound to fall through the cracks if you don’t write them down. I keep a Microsoft Word Document open with the 4 or 5 main tasks I want to work on for that day listed at the top. As I think of other things that need to get done or ideas for new projects, I jot them down below this main priority list. Instead of taking a fun break, spend some of your down time checking out these other ideas… I always find that to be fun anyways. As you complete tasks, delete them from your list. Take ideas of larger proportions and put them into a different file at the end of the day… a running list of new ideas and/or new projects. Leave the small tasks on that list and make them one of the “top priorities” at the top of your list when the time is right. Your main list should be open ALL THE TIME and you should read through your filed lists at least once a week so you don’t let something important fall through.

Visit Your Own Sites Most Frequently
Make your OWN sites your favorite sites. If you’re not spending more time visiting/building your own sites than you spend visiting other websites than something is seriously wrong. For me… something was seriously wrong.

The site I probably visit more than any other site is the webmaster forum WickedFire. The owner, Jon, is making membership a paid subscription model and it has created a divide in the current membership. Pay $35 a month for access to the forum, to talk to the same exact people you already have been talking to but who may be a little more willing to share inside info. Thanks but no thanks… I’ll wait and see what others say. In fact, this paid membership could have an inversely positive affect on me. Jon insists that the $35 will be incredibly well worth it because it will help you make bank. Instead, I think it would mean I spend much more time on the forums and less time on my sites. Without the membership I think WF will become incredibly ineffective and I probably won’t be visiting too much. What will I do instead?

Instead I will spend time on my two favorite forums: ChefClub.net and PoliticalFury.com. I’ve made nearly 1,500 posts on WickedFire and spend more time there than I do COMBINED on my other forums. I think the main reason is because it is so active. Then why the hell wouldn’t I work extra hard to make my own forums incredibly active? They aren’t just going to liven up themselves! If the owner doesn’t even spend a ton of time there than why should they? I like my chances with this WF transition because I’m going to do what I should have been all along… making MY forums and MY community based sites the ones I visit and contribute to the most. If you’re not doing this now… you’re just helping someone else build their empire. Do yourself a favor.

My Action Plan
Right now I want to visit and post daily on my two forums… which isn’t a lofty goal but it’s a necessary one. Posting on these websites will be my “break time”. After all, they can have “Shooting the Shit” type areas too! Beyond this I have two other focuses: my local area directory and building my SEO Empire with the tools and databases in the Squirt Vault.

These two forums are ongoing projects and thus will never fall off the list. The local area directory will, at some point, will have more of a maintenance role at which point a new “Main Project” will take it’s place. And the SEO Empire will consist of making quick sites that might be ugly but will get a lot of pages indexed… so it’s quantity and not quality here.

In addition, I want to have PHP down to the point where I can do some useful things with it by the time 2008 comes around. I want next year to be a helluva lot bigger than this year. Next year is going to be a pivotal year for me.

My Blog
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been making sure to post daily on my blog - partly so I don’t have to pay the $20 for the contest I created! But here’s the thing… it’s been sooo much easier as of late. Why? Because I’ve been getting a TON of work done.

When I do a lot of work I run into problems, find resources, think of ideas, try techniques, have opinions on concepts/opportunities/tasks and find genuinely interesting information that I want to share. At the moment I decide I want to write about that, I hit up my blog and make a post with only the title and one sentence describing the post. I save it as a draft. When I log in to my admin cp I now have a list of blog posts waiting to be written… all of which I think are well worth their while.

Sometimes, these saved drafts are about things that I haven’t yet researched and it reminds me to research it, formulate an opinion and post the results. My blog is now a “to do list” in and of itself and I think this blogging model absolutely kicks butt for me. I’m going to be able to keep this daily blogging thing going for a long time.

Monetizing This Blog
I have never tried to monetize this blog at all but I may start. It will be subtle… I won’t completely whore it out like John Chow and Shoemoney. Those two boxes at the top will likely host some monetization features although to start I’ll simply have a “Popular Posts” area and monetize the other box.

We’ll see how that goes… it’s something that will come slowly and won’t be too invasive to the functionality or look of the blog.

Bed Time
It’s flippin 2:30 AM and I’m getting up at 8, heading to my parent’s house and working on my local area directory all morning. I’ll then have my laptop while I’m watching the Baltimore Ravens beat up on the Cleveland Browns, squeeze some more work in, and then it’s my sister’s birthday party. Did I mention I really want to get this directory done? It’s taking a lot of time but when it’s all finished it should really kick ass!

Goodnight!

PHP Here I Come

Feeling sorry for yourself accomplishes nothing. Unfortunately, I often feel that way when building websites and thinking of great ideas because I can’t implement them. What a crock of shit…

I’ve wasted so much time poking around the internet looking for free and paid tools that do what I want. Spent countless hours asking other people what they think about my idea, how I could get it done and what it would cost. I’ve had enough of it… I finally dug into reading some PHP tutorials.

All I’ve really done so far is go through all the tutorials on tizag which is an awesome resource. Tomorrow I will be writing myself an “action plan”. I waste too much time… spend too much time on forums… spend too much time asking questions… spend too much time that needs to be replaced with nitty gritty work.

I think it will take me at least until January 2008 before I can do anything very useful with PHP by myself. And by that I mean thinking of an idea and custom coding it myself. Anyways I don’t want to make this post too long… you’ll see my goals in my action plan!

But the bottom line is if you don’t know PHP I suggest you do what I’m doing: stop complaining, stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something smart - invest your time in learning PHP. I think it will be well worth the time.

Putting Space Between Wordpress Widgets

As you know from my last post, using padding, borders and margins to make my sidebar block elements appear properly caused a laundry list of problems because of the discrepancies between browsers. Do you want to format the basic look feel of the entire block element and the spacing between them? I’ve got an easy fix for you.

Just as Wordpress has a loop for displaying posts, I figured the same would be true with  the sidebars. Where is it located? Head into your wp-includes folder and you’ll see a little file called widgets.php. When we use dynamic sidebars within wordpress, this file is being called up to tell the browser how to display your widgets.

Scroll down a little bit and find the following code:

———————————————————

$defaults = array(
‘name’ => sprintf(__(’Sidebar %d’), $i ),
‘id’ => “sidebar-$i”,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => “</li>\n”,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => “</h2>\n”,

———————————————————

There it is! That’s telling our dynamic sidebar what comes before and after the actual widget and the widget titles! All we have to do is insert a little bit of HTML code in the proper place and we’re all done.

I wanted some white space before each widget, so I made the following changes to the before_widget line:

———————————————————
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div id=”widgetspace”><br></div><li id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’,
———————————————————

As you can see, I added a div called widgetspace and placed a line break in that div. I then headed over to my styles.css and changed the elements as I saw fit. This is what I did:

———————————————————
#widgetspace {
background: #FFFFFF;
line-height: 1em;
}
———————————————————

And that did the job. I was able to change my margins and paddings and borders to their original setting and the sidebars looked exactly as I wanted them too: with a bit of blank space between them, separating the various elements of the sidebar.

So if you’re experiencing the same problem, I hope I saved you some effort of trying to surf the net and find the answer yourself!

Internet Explorer, How I Hate Thee

Thou has cast a shadow of doubt on my blog redesign effort… damn thee!

Alright sorry, that was pretty lame. But in all honesty… are you kidding me? I got most of rough elements of my redesign looking good. Asked several people how it looked in their browser. Result = good.

Then I checked it on a different computer myself and both sidebars were out of wack. What was the difference? This computer was using Internet Explorer 6.0. It even looked a wee bit messed up on IE7 but the problem there is minor. IE6 users account for 13% of my blog’s readers according to Google Analytics. So, I figured I’d better please these people. (Psssst: download firefox!)

Googling a bit led me to a quick hack that should fix the problem nicely. Essentially, Firefox and IE handle CSS box elements differently. Whereas Firefox places padding, margins and borders on the OUTSIDE of the box dimensions, Internet Explorer includes them in the total dimensions. So for example, if you had a box element with width 100 and put a 5px padding on the left and right you would have:

And that’s the problem. I was using borders, padding and margins to create the white space between the various sidebar headings and Firefox and Internet Explorer are rendering these directions differently. So what’s the fix?

The backslash button \ is called an “escape”. When a line of CSS begins with the escape in Firefox and Opera, it can’t read it and simply skips over it. However, Internet Explorer can work with it just fine. So here’s what you do: in your stylesheet, create rules for both IE and FF.

Between the hashes are example code:

————————————–

#div {
width: 100px;
padding: 0 5 0 5
}

#div {
\width: 110px;
\padding: 0 5 0 5;
}
————————————–

Firefox will read the first div as 100 pixels wide and then choke on the second set of instructions because of the \ character, keeping the width at 100 pixels wide and adding the padding to the outside of the box. 110 total pixels.

Internet Explorer will read the first set of instructions but OVERWRITE THEM when it reads the second set of CSS instructions for the same div right below. So it will use the 110 pixel box and put 5 pixels of padding on the inside right and inside left of the box.

Voila! Both should render correctly.

I was excited to find out that the fix wouldn’t be as tedious as I first imagined and so I went to open up IE and start playing with code. Oh, wait… I have Internet Explorer version 7. No problem, I’ll just download IE6. Just kidding - YOU CAN’T! I couldn’t revert and downgrade to the previous IE, making my life a living hell.

There are a couple more complicated ways to run both IE6 and IE7 on your computer simultaneously, but this isn’t something I could do at the moment. I also found a few sites that will automatically take screen shots of your website using different browsers and print the results to your screen. Unfortunately, none of them seemed to function properly. Just to spite them, I hope my browser wasn’t compatible with their design… hehehe.

Another bump in the rode, but it was nice learning that little IE6 trick. Hopefully the idiots at Microsoft will learn that CSS is the wave of the future and create browsers that work with the latest versions. Hopefully the idiot writing this post will follow suit and learn how to flawlessly code his own CSS instead of digging through other people’s CSS crates.

So apologies for the “we’re moving” feel but you may have to deal with it for a little while longer. Keep checking back to see when it’s finally done. And for that, you can always subscribe to the RSS feed.

It’s 1AM again? Ugh… I’m hittin the sack… have a good one!

Pardon The Interruption

No, I’m not talking about the ESPN show with Tony Kornhieser and Michael Wilbon. This blog might look messed up a little bit over the next day because I’m going to test out a different theme and toy/play with it live. So if things look awry… now you know why!

FREE Website & Domain Ideas

I don’t have the time to take on any new projects, so I’m giving these ideas to you for free. If they help you and you earn money from them… I’d love to know:

At the time of this post, the following domains are available:

If you don’t know about the xo laptop, it’s the SUPER CHEAP laptop designed to provide children in developing countries with computers. They were for sale for only $188 and now they’re available in the United States. That’s right… but there is a catch. US consumers will have to pay $399 for 2 laptops - one for them and one for a child in a developing country.

It’s a non-profit project designed by M.I.T.’s Media Department Head - Nicholas Negroponte. It’s somewhat of a revolutionary idea and scientists and engineers have put in a ton of effort to make it work. Production of the laptops will start next month.

So how can you make money off of this? Well… the people surfing this site are probably interested in two things: purchasing a cheap laptop computer and learning more about this news article. Fill the site with several pages of info about the xo-laptop, splatter it around with some cheap laptop offers and move on. Or… how about an article saying, “How you can afford ANY computer” and write something about getting cash in advance loans. BOOM - that’s a $35 zip submit for you.

Two more domains that are currently available:

Steve Jobs and Ted Leonsis are launching this credit card business unit that will be called “Revolution Card” that will apparently undercut all the other major carriers when it comes to percentages and fees. The project just received $50 million in funding so you can be prety sure it’s going to go somewhere. Buy up a domain, make a comparison/info site and smack down some affiliate credit card offers (which are huge) and see what you can convert!

It might be noted that by purchasing these domains you are risking the parent company suing you for ownership of the domain. In such a case you would basically have to just cough it up and give them the domain. But, some companies (the smart ones, depending on the scenario) will see your little “mini-site” as free promotion.

Let’s see how long these domains last!

My Forum Favicons

Following up from yesterday’s post, I figured I would show you the Favicons I made for my 4 forums.

Chef Club
favicon chef club
I like this one a lot - it’s a fork and a knife.

Political Fury
fav pf
Took the earth from the logo and just resized it.

Turntable Talk
fav tt
I don’t love this one… it’s supposed to be a vinyl record but I feel like I could come up with something a bit more dynamic. Any ideas?

Bracketball.net
fav bb
You college basketball fans need to stop by… hoops aren’t too far away. I really like this favicon as it embodies the forum’s subject and really stands out. Might be my fave.

Football Source
fav fs
I’m still working on the design/template for this site and it’s currently just posting news from Yahoo Sports. But, to go along with the Bracketball favicon you’ll see that I just kept it simple and used the stitchings of a football. I like this one a lot too.

What do you think? I think I have an obsession with forums! Now if I could just sit on my computer all day and chat on my forums, which were packed with tons of active members, I think I would be in heaven.

Unfortunately, I’m not in heaven. I’m on planet poopy cause I have to go to work tomorrow. That means it’s bed time… wake up time is only 5 hours away… yay! Hope you had a great weekend and I’ll see you folks tomorrow!

Creating Favicons

Doing a lot of small things can make a big difference. And, one of those small things is a 16 by 16 box of pixels called a Favicon. You’ll notice the brand new Eureka Diary Favicon in the address bar and on your browsing tab. It looks like this:

favicon16

What is the purpose in a Favicon? It extends your brand. It builds your website’s personality. It adds another memorable point of contact with your visitor. And sure, it’s only a tiny picture, but like I said: doing a lot of small things creates the synergistic effect that builds empires. When a piece of clothing is emblazoned with the Nike Swoosh it gains instant credibility and value. When someone sees a yellow M they immediately think of McDonald’s “Golden Arches”. This is the pinnacle of branding and while our website probably won’t reach THAT level of noticability… it can still increase the perceived value and top of mind awareness for your visitors. It adds to the depth of your brand’s identity… so do you want to make a website or build a brand?

The Eureka Diary favicon is a light bulb. That’s the entrepreneurial feeling I get all too much… the “Aha” moment when the lightbulb goes off in my head. And, when I get around to giving this blog a new theme (soon hopefully) I will be integrating a lightbulb into the design.

So, let’s get started and give YOUR website a sweet looking Favicon!

First off, you need to download this photoshop plugin and place the file in your plug-ins/fileformats folder within photoshop. Go ahead and restart photoshop if you already have it running, so it will load our new file type.

As mentioned before, Favicons are 16 pixels by 16 pixels but that may be a little small for our liking when we’re designing it.

FILE > NEW… Name your file “favicon” and make it 64 pixels by 64 pixels:

File New

Now it’s time to make your Favicon and the best way to go is SIMPLE if you ask me. It’s going to be incredibly small so details and gradients are pretty much pointless. If you have an existing logo, try to embody that idea/concept with one simple item. Google and Yahoo simply use the first letter of their name, stylized with their “personality”. Basically, you need to boil down your website’s subject into one image.

Once you’ve made your image, you’ll want to save the .PSD before doing anything else. Once you convert it to a 16×16 it could be an unrecognizable blob or you might want to make some minor changes - give yourself that luxury.

Now that you have it backed up, convert it to the necessary 16×16 dimension by going to IMAGE > IMAGE size and changing simply plopping the new dimensions in. At the very bottom, make sure you have RESAMPLE IMAGE selected and the setting is BICUBIC SHARPER - this will give you the most clarity and best results:

resize to 16 pixels

Do you like what you see? If not, reopen the PSD you saved and play around with it meets your requirements. Once you’re ready to move on click FILE > SAVE AS and select the brand new .ICO file type we imported in the first step of this tutorial. Here is what it looks like:

save as ico

Use an FTP client to put the favicon.ico file you just created into the root directory of your website. Now we need to alert the browser that it exists.

In the header of your website, in between the <head> </head> tags, place the code that is between the hashes, replacing URL with the address of your site:

————————————————————
<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” href=”URL/FAVICON.ICO”>
————————————————————

Bingo, Bango. Grab a beer from the fridge, refresh your website in the browser and smile at the sexy new favicon you’ve created. Sure, it’s only a small change… but doing a lot of little things goes a long way!

Alexa Shmexa

Alexa and Google PR sitting in a tree.
Ask me if I give an S-H-I-T.

No… I don’t. Alexa is just as useless as Google PageRank. The numbers don’t mean much of anything considering:

Why would you want to? Well, for people buying and selling links and or full sites, Alexa has become one of the default indicators of a website’s success. Not rightfully so in my opinion, but whatever. In fact, I’m sure people have full business models built around buying a domain, artificially inflating stats such as Alexa, Google PR, unique visits, etc… and sell them to goofballs who evaluate the success of a site solely on these principles.

I was talking to Tyler Cruz yesterday and without request he offered up a link showing the Alexa stats for one of his websites. I replied something like, “Whoopdy Doo… Alexa is pointless.”

To this, he quipped back: “It’s only pointless for people who have pitiful Alexa rankings. Like anything above 100,000. Like you. LULZ, hax, pwnd, noob, eh?” Whoa, whoa, whoa there buddy. Alright I made up the last sentence in that quote. But seriously, I don’t even have the Alexa Toolbar installed. I don’t really care. I never really did. Until now.

So now I’m running a little test to show that yes, I can get some pretty good Alexa rankings by installing the toolbar and then using some additional measures to “game” the system. And after my alexa ratings improve, I still won’t give a flying fu… funny… I won’t care (keeping it PG-13).

So here is what I’m going to do and I invite you to run the same test yourselves. Either on your own sites or if you’re feeling motivated… on eurekadiary.com as well.

  1. Download and install the Alexa Toolbar for FireFox
  2. Download and install the ReloadEvery plugin for FireFox
  3. (mystery step that I’m researching now)
  4. Either in the background, or when I’m AFK, load up EurekaDiary.com and have the page auto-refresh every XX seconds. This should make Alexa think lots of people are looking at my site… yippy!

Now I’m not sure how big the impact will be but I’m sure it will have an impact. Time will tell. At of the time of this post here are my Alexa statistics:

Thanks Netherlanders… you all kick butt… all 12,000 of you who actually have an Alexa Toolbar installed!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be monitoring these Alexa stats for fun, just to see what happens with this little test. I’ll let you know how it goes but feel free to install the toolbar and follow along yourself!

Redirecting to WWW with .HTACCESS

The Google PageRank update is well overdue and that means the broken english bunch at Digital Point are clamoring about what in the heck could possibly be going on. Is there an update coming? Are they doing away with PageRank? I don’t know and I don’t REALLY care although it’s fun to give yourself a self-serving pat on the back (albeit pointless) when you gain some PR. Not to mention it helps when selling links and sites.

That being said, I know one thing that has HURT PageRank in the past is when your site allows users to visit pages in two different ways:

Why you ask? Because Google supposedly views these as two completely different pages. Why is this important? Because first of all, backlinks are an important ingredient to the search engine rankings of every website. Links could be pointing to your sites and pages using both the www and non-www variations of your web address. Why would you want to have 2 pages with the exact same content that have 50 links to each? Not to mention, does this bring up a duplicate content penalty issue? Why not redirect one page to the other and have 1 page with 100 backlinks? That’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Imagine how important this could be. What if you have pages ranking on the 2nd page of the SERPS in position 11 or 12 without redirecting. Then, after making the changes, your site is viewed as having those extra critical links that move you above several competitors onto the front page. That’s a silly simple way to increase traffic. And not only that… but PageRank as well. And probably a bunch of other benefits to boot.

The bottom line is… it’s such a simple fix… there’s no reason NOT to do it. Tonight, I implemented this redirect across every site I own. Here’s what you do:

  1. In each domain folder, create a file called .htaccess (that’s right… a period before and nothing afterwards.)
  2. Open the file in a text editor and copy/paste the following code between the hashes:

—————————————
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

—————————————

ALRIGHT BACK TO THE NARRATIVE:

Now if you already have an .htaccess file and it already has stuff in it, simply place the lines starting with RewriteCond and RewriteRule as the first line below “Rewrite Engine On” and you should be good to go.

This worked for me in not only Wordpress while still using permalinks but also with vBulletin and regular old HTML sites.

It will be interesting to try and track/note any beneficial results from creating this redirect and time shall tell. In actuality, time probably won’t tell. There are too many factors that cause fluctuating traffic and I’m hoping to get traffic to increase every day regardless of this little “trick”. So… it will be pretty much impossible to note how much positive push I get from this alteration alone. One thing is for sure - it won’t hurt.

I guess this inability to seclude this factor and weight it’s value is what has me curious about making this change and then witnessing changes in PR in the next update (if there is one). Ugh… a product of my own complaints.

I also might note that there are a couple wordpress plugins that complete these exact functions. Here is one that I found and here is another. In addition, because this is my first time attempting this, you may run into some problems/issues/variances. Heck… I might to. But in the long run it’s all for the better!

*20 minutes pass*
*runs back to keyboard*

I’ve just been informed that this .htaccess change has messed up the commenting feature on this very blog. Son of a gun and I thought it could be so easy! It’s a wordpress problem because my vBulletin sites are doing fine.

I just downloaded and installed the WP redirect plugin from fucoder (see above) and the redirects didn’t even work. I then tried the second plugin called yes-www and while the redirects worked… comments still don’t work. Is it just a problem with this theme? Maybe.

Regardless, I was able to add the redirection to a dozen other sites that don’t have any negative or unintended sign effects. And the Bible says so… So yeah… I’m right for sure.

Sorry it’s late and I’m tired. That last quote was a tribute to my absolute favorite person on all of YouTube - DaxFlame! This is the clip (one of my favorites) from where this quote originates.

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