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.

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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It seems that lately I have been getting more and more ideas for some really cool tools, companies, websites, and contests.  This is great, I have been writing everyone down and have compiled a pretty good list.  However I have a huge problem.  I don’t have TIME.  My “real job” is starting to get nuts.  I have a shutdown at a pulp and paper plant that I am doing work at and that means a LOT of preparation so that I can be sure that the contractors are going to get all of their work down and there will not be any delay on start-up that was our cause.  This causes major headaches and a lot of finger pointing.

So what does a fellow do?  Do I try to squeeze some time in so that I get something out there?  Or do I just wait it out and hope no one else gets there first.  What do you do when you have a good/great idea, but just don’t have the time to implement it?

I have always had a problem with time-management.  I always work on things that I enjoy first, I check my email, adsense, affiliate earnings, and forums WAY too much, and then in no time I realize that I had nothing accomplished and it is time for bed, or to go to the day job.

So I started to track the time I spend on various tasks online on a task/website basis.  This is done in a simple Excel spreadsheet.  The problem that I am finding with this is that I am not always working on the same computer, so that sheet is not always with me and therefore it is not updated.

I am in the process now of finding a good online tracking script with a MySQL backend.  When I find one I am going to install it here and maybe even write a small widget so that you can see the time I have spent on various tasks on a weekly basis in the sidebar.  Then next time I try to figure out why I am not getting anything done, you guys can scream and say it was because I was spending 20hours a week browsing a forum for the last month

Maybe when I can SEE exactly where all of my time is being spent I will be able to tweak my schedules and get more done in the time that I allow myself, rather than spending more time and getting nothing done.

::EDIT::

Well I think that I have changed my mind.  The long weekend is coming up so I am going to make my own tracking script.  It is not going to be much but if I do make it into something I will release it to the world

I never knew that this blog was so popular.  In less than a week I have had over 800 spam comments blocked.  I knew that it was high but I never knew how high. 

Ever since installing Akismet I have noticed that only a very few of the spam are getting through.  Now I am actually getting, or should be getting, comments on my directory lists that are actual directories and not just links to porn blogs.

I recommend strongly if you have a blog to install Akismet as soon as you get the blog on the go.  It is not very hard and it will save you hours of frustration when it starts to catch all of that spam.

::PS::

This is not a paid or requested review, Akismet is just that damn good.

::EDIT::

Wow it was a busy weekend for spammers, I am now at ~2000 spam caught by the Mighty Akismet. I must be getting more popular, or is it because I did a couple posts on DP with this blog in the postbit? hmmm.