I am thinking about starting a poker blog. I play a lot of poker and read a lot about poker so it seems like a great idea. On the surface….

I am not sure if I want to start a brand new site using an existing domain, or new domain, or just starting posting about poker on one of the sites that I currently run. I am thinking that the third option is the one that I am going to go with. Not sure what site, or what is the best way to do this, but I am going to start thinking about it for the next little while.

Maybe I will spend some time and start writing articles about poker and see how long it takes for me to get bored of it. Not sure if I would want to write 100 articles and then get VERY bored with it all.

Not really much going on in the webmaster world with me. I am currently developing one of my sites themes. I have a bunch of content written, the first few pages are indexed and getting minimal traffic from Google, but I think that the look of the site is not quite ready yet. This is something that I am going to work on for the next month or so, while adding content.

When this site is rolling, I have an application that I am working on that needs to be developed. This is the app that I am going to use CakePHP with. Not sure if I am going to build the entire thing myself, or have someone else do it for me.

Not too much to report on these days. Been spending most of my time at work and my leasure time going to public lectures. So not a lot of work in the online world. I have been thinking about what I am going to be working on in the New Year, and CakePHP is going to be something that I am going to be putting a lot of time in. I have a couple of projects that I would like to develop and if Cake can do this faster I should learn it.

So one of the things that I found was this podcast. Not sure if it is going to be useful yet, but time will surely tell.

So you think that it would be cool to make some money as a “blogger”. Why not, seems easy enough….Right?

Before you quit that day job read, How to Become A Semi-Successful Blogger

The part of the process that I am not very good at is the “Shameless Self Promotion”

Don’t be afraid of shameless self-promotion

I just knew this post, if distributed through the right channels, would be a huge hit. I knew that even the top-tier bloggers in my niche would appreciate the post, because my slant on the topic (humor) was totally unique and well-crafted. Perhaps against my better judgment, I emailed a bunch of the aforementioned top-tier bloggers shamelessly self-promoting my post. The email said something like “Hey [name], I’ve been reading your blog for quite some time now and I thought you’d appreciate a post I just wrote entitled [ultra-witty and attention-grabbing post name]. Let me know what you think!”

To my surprise, many of these people not only viewed the post, but commented on and linked to the post, and the most important blog in my niche dedicated an entire post to describing and linking to my original post - all within two hours of publishing the article. So I found more avenues to shamelessly-self promote my article, including posting a link in a Facebook group dedicated to my niche.

This is something that is not in my nature which if I ever want to move from the hobby blogger, to the business blogger I am going to have to overcome.

John has a good take on the process, but I would recommend going over to Chris Garrett’s site to since he is on of the authorities in the Blogging world.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to subscribe to my feed to stay up-to-date on everything Bluenoser.

I was stumbling along today and found this great blog post on “Things You Must Know About CakePHP”

There is a lot of great information in here, I especially liked the part on creating simple Admin Sections

Creating a simple admin center

If you need to create an administrative back-end for your CakePHP site and would like all the actions with administrative capabilities to exist under a specific folder, open up config/core.php and uncomment:
define(’CAKE_ADMIN’, ‘admin’);
This will then make all actions that are prefixed with “admin_” to be accessible via:
/admin/yourcontroller/youraction. For instance, if I created an action in my posts controller called “admin_add,” I would access this via: www.example.com/admin/posts/add
From there I could simply password the admin folder to prohibit unwanted users from adding posts.

This is something that I am going to have to use in the current project that I am working on.

And knowing how to make custom 404 pages is really nice to know

Creating a custom 404 error page

If you need to change the page that users see when a document is not found, create:
/app/views/errors/error404.thtml

I have a inferiority issue. I don’t like to give away link juice. I always feel like I am hurting if I see something and want to link to it. Why didn’t I write something like that, maybe I should.

Anyway, I think that my thoughts and feelings towards this issue is really hurting no one but me. So starting now I am going to be sure to post about cool things that I see online, while I am wasting time at the day job or researching something. I am evening thinking about making a weekly “Link post”, this is something that I see a lot of other blogs that I read do, sometimes I will read them sometimes I won’t but I have found some really interesting articles that way.

So if you think that you have a post/service/etc that you want me to write about send me a note to coolstuff {a} bluenoser.net, if you are selling something that you want me to review however you are going to have to pay for that service So check me out over at ReviewMe