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

If you remember last week I started talking about a new site that I have started work on.  I have done some more research and realize that this may not be a very easy niche to make money in, however it will be a great niche for me to expand my knowledge in my career.  Research done for content on the site will be used directly in my every day work.

Now for the site itself I have decided to use Joomla.  I have used Drupal before but after some research I think that Joomla will be the better fit for the site as a whole.  I needed something robust that I can start small with and then scale up as teh site got both popular and more content.  I am also going to have a forum that will be on a seprate sub-domain.  I want to seperate it as much as possible for administration and management reasons.  For the forum I am going to start with phpbb, however when the site starts to make some revenue I will be purchasing Vbulletin right away.  There is no better software, in my opinion, for running a large forum than VB right “out of the box”.

For the forum I am going to do very little modding to the default style, however for the main site I am going to try to make it unique and useable as possible.  For that I am having issues trying to figure out how it works with Joomla.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of styles out there for free download, or even pay for that matter.

So if you know of any good sites that may have a Joomla theme for DL or a designer that is willing to put one together for me let me know either by email or comment.

I have been thinking lately that I simply don’t have the time to spend on developing my online business to take it to the next level.  Therefore I have decided to work on my new idea.  Building a resource site for my industry.  I work in the Electrical Engineering/Design industry.  Most of the clients I work with are Commercial or Industrial.  Every once in a while I think of a tool that would be great for a consulting engineer to have, but can’t find it on an of the vendor websites.  So I am going to start the site myself.

Basically if I come across something that I think I would use on a weekly basis at the job I will build it for my site in my free time.  This will make me get more involved and learn more about the inner-workings of my industry.  If I find that people in my office think that the tool is useful then I will spread the word to other professionals.

Articles will be another thing, if I come across something that is especially useful I will write a quick “blog entry” with a link to the information.  This will be a good way to bookmark for myself since it will be searchable and other professionals as well.

I am thinking that at this point I will use drupal for the backend of the site but I am still not really sure if that is the best answer since I am going to be trying to program tools for the site and have never written a “module” for Drupal.

When the first tool is online I will be announcing it here and probably at a couple of other sites just to get some feedback.

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