As the readers here know, I was planning on having a contest on ThePartyLive, however that has changed, I have more work to do before I do that. 

When I was sitting around with a few friends on Thursday I asked them about my site and why they don’t post.  I told them that there were lots of topics and I am sure that they would enjoy at least one.  Well it turns out that the reason they didn’t click the link in my sig or MSN was because they couldn’t get a feel about what the site was about from the URL.  www.thepartylive.com doesn’t really describe Canadian discussion. 

So following that I feel that the reason I can’t get refferals into members may be that they either don’t know what the site is, or get a different impression from the link, and then when they find the site they decide to turn away.  That is why I am going to get a new URL (done) and start a change over.  I am going to do it slowly, over a couple of months and 301 everything from thepartylive.com to the new site.

When the new site is running and everything is active again I will start the contest, maybe get it rolling in August and then have the draw end of Sept.  By then I hope to have 6 VERY active members and some more people using TPLNews

I will annouce the new Name when I have the domain parked and new logo up.

I have been thinking that I am going to re-start TPL-Canada.  It has been a VERY long while since I have done anything on this site, so I am going to give it 8 months of time to see if I can get it to critical mass and then have it running for itself.

One of my ideas is contests.  The first contest is going to be blogging reviews.  I am going to offer a decent prize, maybe a Ipod Nano, or video to the winner.  The winner would be a simple draw, and an individual registered member can enter as many times as they want depending on the number of blogs they have.  There will be stipulations including, must be registered on The Party Live and must have 5 posts.  The blog posts must also include a link to a list of pages (one link).

The reason I haven’t started the contest is that I am not sure how to market it.  I am thinking of just starting a post and then post in a number of different forums, blogs, etc and then Adsense.  I do have a budget for this so that is going to be important.

If this goes well I will have a posting contest directly afterward and then a maybe mini monthly-posting contests for advertising space, if the winner doesn’t have something that they want to advertise then I will offer a list of charities that they can use instead.

If anyone has any ideas on other ways that I can drive this site to the Canadian public let me know.

Jeff

It seems that lately I have been getting more and more ideas for some really cool tools, companies, websites, and contests.  This is great, I have been writing everyone down and have compiled a pretty good list.  However I have a huge problem.  I don’t have TIME.  My “real job” is starting to get nuts.  I have a shutdown at a pulp and paper plant that I am doing work at and that means a LOT of preparation so that I can be sure that the contractors are going to get all of their work down and there will not be any delay on start-up that was our cause.  This causes major headaches and a lot of finger pointing.

So what does a fellow do?  Do I try to squeeze some time in so that I get something out there?  Or do I just wait it out and hope no one else gets there first.  What do you do when you have a good/great idea, but just don’t have the time to implement it?

My time management is getting a lot better regarding maintaining my sites, however I am not sure if that is because I have less time to work or not.

My day job is in the process of ramping up, so I am finding I have less and less time to do my own projects.  Right now I am going to be in the office only 2 days this week and one next.  The rest I am going to be on the road.  I also have to fit in Volunteer time for IEEE and all of the general household stuff.

That said I did have time to work on a time tracking program.  I searched the internet for what I was looking for but couldn’t find anything to my liking.  They were either for pay or the one promising OpenSource was way too complex for what I need (Thanks for the pointer Rami).  Right now only the bones are done so I can’t show anyone.  The design looks something like this site, and it has a very simple user interface.  I still have the user management, control panel, admin side and graphs stats etc programing to be done, but that will have to wait.  When it is in the BETA stage I will open it up.  I am also thinking that it is going to be targeted to webmasters and programmers.  I have been talking to a local company who are looking for something like this, so I will build the interface to their criteria and maybe they will donate some programming time

Oh yeah, it is my plan to have a FF extension so that you don’t have to actually go to the site to input your stuff, something like the ScribeFire Extension that I am using to write this post

I have always had a problem with time-management.  I always work on things that I enjoy first, I check my email, adsense, affiliate earnings, and forums WAY too much, and then in no time I realize that I had nothing accomplished and it is time for bed, or to go to the day job.

So I started to track the time I spend on various tasks online on a task/website basis.  This is done in a simple Excel spreadsheet.  The problem that I am finding with this is that I am not always working on the same computer, so that sheet is not always with me and therefore it is not updated.

I am in the process now of finding a good online tracking script with a MySQL backend.  When I find one I am going to install it here and maybe even write a small widget so that you can see the time I have spent on various tasks on a weekly basis in the sidebar.  Then next time I try to figure out why I am not getting anything done, you guys can scream and say it was because I was spending 20hours a week browsing a forum for the last month

Maybe when I can SEE exactly where all of my time is being spent I will be able to tweak my schedules and get more done in the time that I allow myself, rather than spending more time and getting nothing done.

::EDIT::

Well I think that I have changed my mind.  The long weekend is coming up so I am going to make my own tracking script.  It is not going to be much but if I do make it into something I will release it to the world