Getting out of a Funk

What I may look like if I am in a funk

Last week saw me gradually get stuck in a funk.  I think that it got started when I was working some crazy hours at the beginning of the week, only to find out that what I was working on was not as important as I was lead to believe.  The funk really hit its peak Sunday evening when I was really not that fun to be around.

Monday morning it was the same thing.  I was snappy and was able to get motivated at all when I sat down at my desk.  I tried to take an early lunch and that break worked a little, but the thing that worked the best was getting my ass kicked at the gym at the end of the day. I am working on a Nike+ coach program so I figured that something like hitting the gym would work out well.

As I sat down to write this I checked out what some of the how-to sites had to say about getting yourself out of a bad mood.  None of them really gave me any good info, to me it sounded too generic and I am not sure how it helps anyone.  When I am in a funk, a mood, or generally down, I find it best to talk to someone and get it out there.  Sometimes though I am not even really sure why the funk is there in the first place.  It is at those times that I can sometimes just take some me time.  Get away from everyone and spend some time by myself, doing nothing.

This time that didn’t work either.

That is why I hit the gym, sweating it out, pushing for that extra 1/4 mile was huge in me getting out of the funk.  Sometimes you may feel that it really doesn’t matter if you are in a bad mood, but it really affects everything and everyone around you.  On my way to work Monday morning I knew that I had to do something to snap out of it before I went home, and the gym was the perfect thing to work this time.

When I got home, made supper and went to bed I was all ready to make up for the lack of productivity that struck me on Monday.

Blog Updates February 2010

One of the things that I am going to be doing on this site is monthly updates on the backend of the blog.  It is in these posts that I will be talking about the plugins that I have installed, explain why I have each installed, any tweaks to the site that I may make.

I have a rather selfish reason to be doing this.  I have a habit of continously tweaking a site and not really keeping track.  By documenting everything that I do it will both slow me down, and teach you on what works and what doesn’t and more importantly why.

Since I just completed a major overhaul of the site and have moved hosts this post will not cover everything.  In subsequent Blog Updates I will do reviews of the plugins and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of them.

I am also thinking about a permanent blog brand that I will be developing over the next 6 months.  At the end of this time I will have a new theme designed that will work on top of the framework theme that I have installed now.

The Host:

Well I moved the site from my old host to ThisWebHost. I yelled out to Twitter and a couple of my followers suggested them. I have read as much as I could online about them and they seem to be an up and comer that is either going to grow huge or get bought up by one of the current big players.

I bought the smallest account that they have for this blog for now.  It is just a tester and if I like what I see then I will be buying larger accounts from them and moving my other sites.  This is not an insignifcant task, so I want to be sure that it is the right move so that I won’t have to do it again for a long while.

The Plugins:

  • Akismet
  • Google Sitemaps
  • WordPress Mobile Edition
  • WP Super Cache
  • OIOpublisher Direct 2.0
  • Pretty Link
  • Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
  • Feedburner Feed Replacement
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
  • Twitter Widget Pro

So these are the plugins that I have installed and activated right now, a lot of them are self-explanatory for anyone that has been around Wordpress for a while, but they are all very basic and with the exception of OIOPublisher and WP Super Cache.  However not all of them need to be installed on every blog, in fact the only plugins that I install on all of my sites are the first 4.  These I will give a little more explanation.

Akismet:

Akismet is a comment spam plugin that comes right from the makers of Wordpress.  When it is installed it takes a look at every comment that someone makes on your site, compares it to a hug DB of comments, IPs, emails, etc and decides whether or not that comment is worthy on your site.

This plugin will save you hours of maintainence on your blog when you are approving comments.

Google Sitemaps:

This plugin is relatively self explanatory, what it does is create a Google friendly sitemap of your site that you can submit to Google using their webmaster tools.  It helps Google with finding the relevant information on your site and indexing what you want.

WordPress Mobile Edition:

This is a newish one to me that I have been using a lot more.  It takes your site and if it notices that your visitor is on a mobile phone it will output a page that is very light and vry easy to use on a mobile.

The importance that I see in it is that it allows the use of social networks to link your site that people may be using on their mobile.  All the major social networks have mobile programs and this allows your friends, follows, etc to click through to your site and not feel sorry about it.

WP Super Cache

This one may not seem that important to the small blog, but you never know when you are going to “go viral” and you want to make sure that your site can handle the load for as long as possible.  There was a couple of times over the years that I either got Stumbled hard or was linked to on Fark that my site died after a couple of hours.  Who knows how large of a lost opportunity that was now.  But I do know you don’t want that to happen to you.

I will review/explain the other plugins in future posts.  Keep reading here, add the site to your RSS reader, or follow me on Twitter to stay current on everything Bluenoser.

Cheers,

Jeff M

Time for change and a Clean Beginning

Wordpress LogoWell if you are one of my readers you may have noticed that the site has been acting up lately.  Well I really can’t figure it out, and my host doesn’t seem to know why every once in a while this blog will go off-line and not be viewable.

The Move

I have decided to make a change and try a new host with this blog and take the time to start completely anew. In the last few days I have been moving the entire site to a new host, and will be starting to be more active in my posting on here to reach some of the goals.

The move turned out to be a more painful experience that I was expecting, my site has gotten very bloated with plugins and various other stuff that I couldn’t do it on my own.  I had to use the service provided by my new host to make the move for me.  I must say, even if you are proficient with these technical details, I recommend using the free service if it is available to you.  They did an amazing job and it was very pain free.

The Goals

One of my goals for 2010 is to cut my debt in half.  So I am going to hit making money online again. I will be basically starting from scratch as I all of my old compaigns have now been dead for a bit, as I have been busy with other things in my life and haven’t had the time to work on them.

Get my write onWhat I will be doing on this site is publishing the time that I spend on these tasks, how much money I have spent and how much I have earned, I will be trying to do this on a monthly basis.  I will also be pointing out the services that I use and ways that I make the moola. I won’t be publishing the specific niches or campaigns that I will be working in, but I will tell you the networks I am using. Follow along with me and join the ride.  Ask questions and I will either give you my answer or find someone who has the answer.