There is a site that I have been nursing along for a very long time, however I have now decided that it is time to either get it bake to life, or kill it.

I am thinking that I am going to revive the site, and document everything that I do to make this happen here.

Currently the stats for the site include .25 registrations a day and 2 new threads a day.
So today we start back at zero. I am going to be doing a couple of things to make the site the place to be.

First I am going to make a minimum of 10 posts a day, with a minimum of 5 new threads.
Second, start working on automated post exchanges
Third, redesign the logo and get some online marketing materials made
And fourth, I am going to start working on contest ideas, something that will generate interest in the site.

I will report back in a week to let you know how it is going. Every month for the next year I will post the average number of posts, new threads and registrations per day.

If anyone has any advice, please post it here. I would be very interested in hearing what you have have done in the past to revive a currently dead forum.

One of the best things about getting started with cake is the scaffold variable. But once you get the associations, and the tables ready you can use bake to set up all of that boring stuff. Like the initial controllers, models and views.

To take full advantage of bake however you need to use the console, and to set up that you have to watch this.

I am trying to think of ways to minimize my bills and maximize my simplicity.  Basically I want to save money and live by my favorite (and probably every Engineer’s) principle KISS (Keep It Simple STUPID).

Right now I am running some of my sites on different hosting companies.  I have a couple of sites running on a reseller account from one company.  I think that I am going to move ALL of my sites to the reseller.  None of them are big in terms of resource hogs at the moment, and the way that my time scheduling is going and the weather is, I doubt that I am going to be spending a lot of time to build them up and MAKE them hogs.

Here is my headache however.  One of the sites that I have to move is this one.  I have had it on this account since time immortal, but it is a expense that I really don’t need.  My worry is that I am going to forget to set something up correctly in the move.  I have a lot of different scripts running on difference sub-domains.  Not that any of these are really making any money, I just hate seeing errors when I look at my stats.  Especially when the errors are my fault.

Anyway, that is enough rambling for now, I will be sure to let you faithful readers know when I am about to make the big move.  I am hoping to get it done by the end of August.

I am not sure if it is the weather or work, but I have just not been posting enough here.  Sure I mentioned back in June that I was going to be offline for a bit, but a month is way too long.  So here I am.

Not a whole to talk about, I noticed that there was a HUGE pickup of paid submissions to BluenoserLinks recently.  Must be a rumor of a TBPR update in the near future.  I must say that I like it.  I was getting worried that I would have to put some more work into the site, but I guess that people just want to get in there for the update.  I find it strange that they wait so long.  I usually do all of my link grabbing right after the update.  There are two good reasons for this (you should take this time to grab a piece of paper and pen)

1. The links get cheaper.  I am not talking about the links on the pages that just jumped in price, but the new sites.  The sites that people are talking about NOW, or just recently.  Google is fast but they are not that fast.  If you see a site that everyone is talking about, but didn’t get a good jump this time around, buy up some long term links.  They are going to be bigger in the next update.
2. I don’t think that there is much point trying to get links in the last couple of days.  I doubt that Google uses its most recent information for the update, probably a couple of weeks old.  And the older the links and the older the pages the better.  So go out there and buy some links now, and have them there months for the next update.

Well I guess those two points weren’t really earth shattering, but I think that there are a lot of people out there that browse the forums, find out that a PR update is on the way and then try to buy as many links as they can.  For a better idea, always try to get links.  Work on getting a link a day minimum for your site.  That coupled with really good content that people will WANT to link to will get you farther then buying up links at the last minute.

I know that one of the biggest problems when it comes to online websites and business in general is ideas.  More importantly good ideas.  Well the only way that you can come up with good ideas is to start with simply coming up with ideas.  From there you can go through them and filter out what you think are the good ones and then maybe talk to some people that you trust to come up with the really good ones.

But how do you come up with the ideas to start with?

One of the ways that I come up with them is when I am searching for something online and no matter how far back I go in the SERPs I can’t find what I am looking for.  There is an opportunity to fill a gap in the potential market. 

Another good way is evaluating a service that you are currently using.  Are there things in that service that is not serving all of your needs or simply don’t work very well, there may be a venue for you to improve on the service by making your own.  However, this is much harder to do in smaller niches since you are going to have to work in a market that already has a foothold, and sometimes if they see you taking away users they will adapt by improving.

And finally talk to your friends about what they look for online and especially ask them what they can’t find.  Probe them because sometimes you will find that once they can’t find something they completely forget about it.  This sometimes is a better source since markets that are not necessarily technical or web based are much more easily infiltrated since they tend not to be saturated.

Don’t forget to let me what you think by commenting, I look forward to hearing about the ways that you come up with ideas.