Mr Chow has a bunch of Entrecard credits, and wants to give them away. To do that he has started a contest where you link back to his site and you are entered into a draw for 10000 credits. That is quite a bit.
If you are not sure what Entrecard is all about check out John Chow’s post on the subject.
So my first step in “getting serious” has taken place. I have moved one of my more pet like projects to a separate host and installed a blog. The site has always been a forum, and for the last couple of years it has been a vbulletin forum, and of course I had to use Wordpress for the blog. I tried Vblogetinw when it was active, and I just can’t seem to justify the cash to go with VB Blog, and then on top of all of that I KNOW Wordpress.
So anyway, I had to find a way to integrate WP and VB nicely, and this is where the Bridge comes in. It is a plugin I found over at VB.org and it works great. I had a couple of problems getting it to work on my production site (I tested it with new installations first) but if I wasn’t so cocky after my tests I would have read the FAQ and realized the problems.
I am having one more problem with it, but I am not sure if it is going to be an issue. I had to manually give myself, my forum self, access to the dashboard. When I looked at the MySQL it seemed that there was something amiss with the way the plugin maps the roles. But it is only a small thing and I will be doing more of this backend stuff after I upgrade to vb3.7.
The next issue was to get a decent theme on there. I decided to go with Sandpress, it is a nice theme and I think it will work out great until I decide to start one from scratch using the Sandbox theme as a jumping point. I am still not that great at CSS so it took me a bit to get the right logo on there. I still have a bit of work to get everything looking right but I have to get more content on there and then traffic. THEN I will worry about the sidebars 
The only thing that I have done that is interesting is that I have added Gravatar support using the WP-Gravatar plugin. So far it is working great, I just need to add a “cooler” avatar for myself.
If you want to see for yourself what it looks like now, check out HoserNews
I think that I have reached the point in my life that I think it is time to get serious about becoming self-sufficient. There are aspects in my day job that I like, including the security, however there is not a lot of potential for movement both within the corporate ladder or around the world on work.
A couple of things that I want to do is move around. I want to have the ability to move around on work or move to one place to live for a year and just work there.
I have a few current websites that I am going to become VERY serious about in the coming months. There are exactly 4 including this one. A couple are sites that I have started worked on, let die, then worked on again. I am planning on getting them to the point where they are going strong and making me a steady income. The first target is my forum. I currently have a lot of members that are not active. My plan is to change the front page into a blog targeted on the theme of the forum and build traffic to that. From there I hope to build a readership base that I can then convert to the forum and have community traffic build content for the site.
The next site on my list is the same idea, but it has not been established at all and has very little traffic. It is in a completely different niche and is related to my day-job. My plan here is to build a professional position on the web and work on becoming an EXPERT in particular niches within my profession. From there I hope to be able to gain some consulting work on the side.
Then finially I have this site. I plan on doing more work on this site by the time that summer comes with better articles and status reports on how my experiments are going and give some fancy graphs using Analytics.
I will also be recommending some of the resources that I have used to get my ideas. This is something that is huge, I am going on a trip in a couple of weeks and will be taking a number of books with me that I hope to gain some inspiration from, I will point them your way when I get them
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