Well even engineers need a vacation.  I am going to be going away for a week starting the 26th.  Unlike the last time I left I am going to leave someone in charge of my sites.

So this leads me into the TIP OF THE WEEK:

Always keep track of your sites.  I know that sometimes it can get overwhelming when you have too many, but be sure to at the very least visit them once a week.  There was a time not that long ago that I left for vacation and made sure that I had no contact with the outside world.  And guess what happened….a major crack was found in both phpBB and PHP-NUKE.  This led to 5 of my sites being defaced, nothing lost but defaced, which meant that any of the traffic that I was getting from SEs and returning guests were being welcomed with a front page that said something along the lines of, “this site has been owned by…”.

To make things worse this happened at the beginning of the vacation so there was a 10 day period that they were defaced in this manner.  My traffic took a HUGE hit, I lost a lot of great contributors at the time and a lot of cred.

I had to work double as hard to get the great contributors back, even resorting to bribing a couple with free stuff.  It was around this time that I felt it was time to limit the sites that I had running for the time being.  I also relaized that if I was going to leave civilization for any amount of time I am going to be sure that there is someone else around that I trust to look over things.

As some of you may know I work as an Engineer in the consulting field.  The way the consulting world works is that there is huge ups and downs.  When there are downs I am working like a crazy person on my sites since i have the time, however like now when I am working upwards to 60hours a week I simply don’t have the time to do any work on my sites.  Actually there are a couple that I don’t even have time to maintain. 

So that is where my time management comes in to play.  I am here sitting at work doing an Arc Flash study but while I am inputting all of the data, I am thinking about what I am going to do with some of my sites, how I am going to start up my new ideas and basically how I am going to set everything up into some form of passive income. 

To keep all of my ideas in line I have a small notebook that I have on me at all times.  I have this so that if I come up with an idea, no matter where I am at, I will be able to write it down (don’t forget the pen too).  I have the notebook not just for my personal business, but if someone on site tells me something I will be able to write it down so that I don’t forget. 

I am sure that a lot of you do something similar too, however this is what I try to do differently.  Every night before I hit the hay I have a binder that is divided into categories.  The categories include my current “sites”, new ideas, improvements, changes, etc.  Then on a seperate piece of paper I take 10 minutes to elaborate on the idea I jotted down earlier in the day.  This both gives me a second look to decide if it is worth proceeding and usually after thinking about it a second time I can come up with more to add to the idea.  Then when I have time again, and I am not sure where to go with my time I grab the binder and spend some time going through the ideas, I pick the ones that I think are the best and work on them, as they are “complete” I take them out of the binder.

This is how I ensure that even though I may not have the time at the moment to work on my personal business I still keep moving forward and improving my sites.

If you remember last week I started talking about a new site that I have started work on.  I have done some more research and realize that this may not be a very easy niche to make money in, however it will be a great niche for me to expand my knowledge in my career.  Research done for content on the site will be used directly in my every day work.

Now for the site itself I have decided to use Joomla.  I have used Drupal before but after some research I think that Joomla will be the better fit for the site as a whole.  I needed something robust that I can start small with and then scale up as teh site got both popular and more content.  I am also going to have a forum that will be on a seprate sub-domain.  I want to seperate it as much as possible for administration and management reasons.  For the forum I am going to start with phpbb, however when the site starts to make some revenue I will be purchasing Vbulletin right away.  There is no better software, in my opinion, for running a large forum than VB right “out of the box”.

For the forum I am going to do very little modding to the default style, however for the main site I am going to try to make it unique and useable as possible.  For that I am having issues trying to figure out how it works with Joomla.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of styles out there for free download, or even pay for that matter.

So if you know of any good sites that may have a Joomla theme for DL or a designer that is willing to put one together for me let me know either by email or comment.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I feel that it is time to change the name of one of my sites.  Well the URL has been picked and unfortunately it is a new one, which will probably hurt the SEO aspect of the site, however I do feel that it is a good domain name.

Now with out further ado, the name is Hoser News.  For anyone unsure what a “Hoser” is check out wikipedia.  If you are too lazy to read too much it is basically slang for a beer swilling working class Canadian, or in other words….Me

I am planning on some subtle design changes and will be working hard soon to get some good links to the site.  I will be VERY soon 301-ing the previous domain to lessen the impact in the SERPs.

So what do you think about the name?  Let me know

Jeff

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I have been thinking lately that I simply don’t have the time to spend on developing my online business to take it to the next level.  Therefore I have decided to work on my new idea.  Building a resource site for my industry.  I work in the Electrical Engineering/Design industry.  Most of the clients I work with are Commercial or Industrial.  Every once in a while I think of a tool that would be great for a consulting engineer to have, but can’t find it on an of the vendor websites.  So I am going to start the site myself.

Basically if I come across something that I think I would use on a weekly basis at the job I will build it for my site in my free time.  This will make me get more involved and learn more about the inner-workings of my industry.  If I find that people in my office think that the tool is useful then I will spread the word to other professionals.

Articles will be another thing, if I come across something that is especially useful I will write a quick “blog entry” with a link to the information.  This will be a good way to bookmark for myself since it will be searchable and other professionals as well.

I am thinking that at this point I will use drupal for the backend of the site but I am still not really sure if that is the best answer since I am going to be trying to program tools for the site and have never written a “module” for Drupal.

When the first tool is online I will be announcing it here and probably at a couple of other sites just to get some feedback.