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 guess it is about time that I did an About for this page.  It is one of those things that is very important.

To start my name is Jeff, and I usually go by the moniker of capebretoner or bluenoser on the various forums, blogs, etc that I frequent.

I got interested in being a webmaster back in 1999 when I first started to learn HTML, and started to work on a website for the local cemetary.

Then in about 2002 I met a friend in University who bought a large portfolio of domains and was selling them at a profit.  That is when I first found out that there was money to be made online.  However I was more interested in learning how to program and build sites then.  So I bought my first couple of domains and played with making sites.  My first was a personal site and then one that was used for the IEEE at Dalhousie.  I learned my first PHP/MySQL then, and even put up some adsense to see if I could make anything with it.

It really wasn’t until 2004 that I “saw the light”, I was bored at my day job.  Times were slow so I started reading some forums online.  It was then that I found DP and NamePros, I spent a lot of time on them and started to make some more sites, buy and sell, dabble in just about everything.  All of that dabbling cost me a lot of money, I was doing this as a hobby so it didn’t bother me too much.  These days I have decided to make my hobby profitable, so I have sold the majority of my sites and only kept the profitable ones.

This blog is really my record of everything that I have done online, I started it about the same time as I started getting serious about my hobby.

I hope that you enjoy reading my posts and most of learn from them.  It is better that you learn from my mistakes rather than make them yourself.

I have finally broken down and installed Akismet.

I have been dealing with about 200 spam a day and in the process have been deleting just about all of them. I figure I have deleted more than one legit comment in the last little while.

So Akismet should take care of everything. I hope

First off I sold one of my babies, www.superfreeforums.com The money has changed hands and the transfer shall be complete by end of January. This is a huge lift off of me since I was spending more and more time on this site and not really seeing any results. I guess I was not cut out for the Hosted Forums market.

On the other hand I have been making money with my directory. The directory that I was planning on letting die is simply doing the best out of all of my sites. Not bad for 0 work over the last few months. I didn’t even mention it in any forums. That said I am going to be transferring it to a new script, while archiving the current site. This is simply because the admin features of the one that I am currently using leave a lot to be desired. So I am going to make the jump. I think that the archiving part is going to be the biggest challenge, I don’t want to leave a lot of links just hanging there and then loose rank with the masterful G. But I think that with alittle work I can make it work.

This new script will allow me to use featured sites and have the integration of the paid link directory work MUCH better. I may even try to automate it to the point where I sign in daily, check the queue and that it is it. And for the first few months use ALL of the money that I make for marketing. My other sites can carry the costs so everything I make from the directory is gravy anyway.

I will let you know how it goes.

I just checked out the Google index for Webmaster Books, and it is over 40 pages.  Not bad for a site that I have done nothing with since I installed the script.  All I did for links was place one in the footer of this page and the header of the forum.

I think that it is time that I modified the default layout, it is not that nice and doesn’t “mesh” nicely with the rest of the sites.  Maybe I will use that as the starting point for my entire Bluenoser network of sites. hmmm I think that is the best idea that I have had in a long time

Well I will just have to add that to the list of things to do, right after everything else, unless something on my list is less fun

 

PS I really have to get to the re-design, I am finding that the blog is really loading slow since I moved the sidebar over.  Not sure why that would make a huge difference, but anyway.  New CSS style is a coming, I think that I will start off with the default WordPress style for everything and go from there.  That would be easier than doing all of the CSS from start.