Weekly Plans & Goals, June 1st 2009

// June 1st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Personal Goals

Accomplished last week…

The contest on DigitalPoint for a site design was completed. It was an interesting project. In the end I had to blatently spelt-out what I liked from all the entries received and hoped someone would pinch the ideas from the other submissions and make it. I didn’t feel it was completely fair to the contestants however I needed to get a design done – they should have put it together themselves.

The next step is to code the design in xHTML/CSS. Initially it was something we were going to do however will probably pay someone else – I found someone who will code it for $30, our time is far more valuable than that so it makes sense to outsource it.

We need to clean up the design a little and then we’ll get it coded.

The script project also wrapped up. It was posted on two sites, hireservices.com.au and getafreelancer.com. On hireservices.com.au due to the strange way they run their bid process the job automatically closed and I am unable to contact people who submitted prices which is a pain. On getafreelancer.com the bids were a lot more than what we had previously received (ie. on elance.com and hireservices.com.au). On getafreelancer.com the available “budget ranges” were higher and even though our budget was on the lower end of the range, most bids were for the upper end. At the stage we’ve extended the bidding stage for a few more weeks until we decide whether we can stretch the budget.

This week…

I actually have a bit happening this week unrelated to my online projects so it will be quiet.

This week I want to finalise the design we had done on DigitalPoint and send it off for coding.

Other than that I will spend a bit more time on australianwebmaster.com and start preparing the monthly newsletter which I normally send out on the 7th of each month. It’s going to be a difficult one because I have honestly no idea what to include!

I will also run through some more figures, analysing income potential of projects and doing more planning of projects.

Finally, unlike last week, I do have a couple of other post ideas for this site so I will continue to post here. I must also alter the CSS for this theme, the Heading 1 tag is bigger than the post title!

Plans for this week

// May 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

Firstly, how did I go last week?

Pretty good for me! I think putting pressure on myself through my post last week has worked.

freecssgallery.com – tick! I have posts scheduled on freecssgallery.com until 25th June – I decided to only do 5/week so I was able to stretch out the templates a bit longer!

diyweb.com.au - tick (kinda)! I did give it some more thought however not 100% sure on what I will do yet. See my post on Friday on Mid-term goals.

Other things...
australianwebmaster.com still gave me a couple of distractions initially – seems I have to keep involved to some degree, I wish I could get a couple of mods to commit to it.
I did keep up posting here at jono.me although Friday was a bit of a stretch.
web design brief – tick! Posted on DigitalPoint.
outsourced project – tick! Posted on getafreelancer.com and hireservices.com.au.

What else happened? I got a really good ad sale for one of my sites – was pressured in to a 12-month link but it gives me some money to play around with. Not too sure how I’ll spend it yet. I do have a number of bills coming in – e.g. a lot of my domains are due for renewal around this time of year as well as my vBulletin licence is due for renewal however I feel that this is a bit of a bonus and therefore I can do something special with it (ie. invest it in something).

Plans for this week?

Well I’ve managed to hurt my back yesterday so I’m not going too good at the moment, however this is what I need to achieve this week:

Mid-term Goals

// May 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, diyweb.com.au

I intended doing more of a opinion piece today however have something on my mind…

One of my self-assigned tasks for this week was to plan diyweb.com.au.

I have given it some thought however I’m stuck. The way I see it, I have two options.

Option 1 is to do what I said, turn it in to a site with resources on how to set up your own web site. So cover domain names, hostings, CMS (e.g. WordPress) and how to maintain the site. I could use some video (screen casting) showing all this stuff.

This option could provide revenue by selling hosting (either via my own reseller account or affiliate), template affiliates, etc. I could also offer to do all the messy stuff for a fee (but it would only be a small fee I’d say).

Option 2 is to sell preconfigured custom WordPress blogs which people can then self maintain and extend. This was another idea I had for offering locally, initially under a different site. Costs would need to be kept as low as possible as the market would be small businesses starting out online.

Both options have their pluses and minuses.

I feel the main deciding factor is which one will help me meet my goals, and this is where I’ve realised that I don’t have my goals really planned.

I know my long term goal, but what’s my mid-term goals?

Long term I know I want to be able to replace my offline salary with an online income but I now need to work out how best to get there.

In the case of diyweb.com.au I have the opportunity to setup a simple site which can give me an experience of launching a site and provide some income, or it might be an opportunity to start developing that income which has the potential to replace my offline salary.

The third option is to do both – go option 1 initially and develop it in to option 2 (maybe using a different domain?).

Hmmm…. back to the drawing board!

Server Issues

// May 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

On Saturday evening I received a DOWN alert from my server monitoring tool, Pingdom.

It was strange because I could still see the sites. I then worked out the sites I hadn’t visited for a while I couldn’t see, but those I had been to recently I could. We then received e-mails from people who we run sites for saying they couldn’t access their sites.

I’ve had my current VPS for coming up to 12 months now and probably 3 times now the sites become unavailable. Typically though after about 5 minutes things come back up. I sent off an urgent support ticket to my hosting providers and to cut a long story short apparently the server started using too much RAM so it decided to kill some processes.

A reboot of the VPS fixed the issue and everything is normal again. The hosting company had everything back up and running within probably 30 minutes.

The sites we run aren’t all that big so a little surprised to see that RAM was an issue, we have just over 512mb of RAM which is pretty decent. We tend to hover around the 50% mark normally. To see if we can find an explanation my hosting provider has installed a cPanel add-on called Munin Service Monitor. This tool shows the usage of all your different resources – looks very comprehensive.

Plans for this week

// May 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, australianwebmaster.com, diyweb.com.au, freecssgallery.com

I need to put some commitment in to getting some things done. This week I am planning to work on the following:

freecssgallery.com

I have left this site for quite some time, in fact the last template added was 7 March. I was expecting a whole lot more traffic to the site than what I am getting, having said that, the site traffic seems to be picking up but it’s still pretty pathetic.

I have a number of CSS template lists bookmarked so it’s just a matter of going through and picking out the ones I think look the best. As I’m using WordPress I can then schedule them to have a new template to appear once a day.

My plan is to do around 30 templates then I can then I forget about it for a month. After that I can the reassess what do with the site.

diyweb.com.au

Not something I do very often but I was looking at the Whirlpool forums over the weekend and noticed a couple of people asking questions about setting up a basic web site. They were getting some pretty unhelpful advice – like go and learn HTML. Valid advice but I don’t think people NEED to know HTML to build a basic web site.

A while back I had an idea for a web site which catered for this type of person, I registered the domain diyweb.com.au but other than setting up the default WordPress install I hadn’t got much further.

The idea is to teach people how to start their own web site on the cheap.

This week I would like to put a bit more thought in to this site. I could easily get carried away with building the site so I want to work out what I MUST have to do to get it up and running. I’m not 100% sure where the income would come from (it might be a community service project? ) so I want to control how much time I spend on it.

australianwebmaster.com

Planning on trying to hang back a bit on this one for this week and work on some other sites. Will probably do some posting today (as it always goes dead over the weekend) and then see if I can leave it until the weekend.

Other stuff

• I have to put together a web design brief for a web site – planning on holding a competition on DigitalPoint for a design. Mainly done however have to come up with some example sites showing the type of stuff I like.
• I have to re-post a development project on a freelance site after the person we had doing it failed to deliver.
• I also want to keep up the posts on here, jono.me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to keep committed to this site like I’ve intended to several times. Over the past week you can probably see a mixture of posts from personal blogs (like this one) to more hints & tips – a little  unsure what I should be posting at this stage. Thinking that the “hints & tips” probably deserve a better location than here but at this stage, just posting something is my goal.

Avoiding forum spam

// May 16th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Webmaster tips

I hate forum spam. It’s very demoralizing to wake up in the morning to see that someone has posted all this rubbish all over your forum. Not to mention the damage it can do to your site’s reputation when new visitors are greeted with it.

I compare spam with graphiti.

What can you do? Well more importantly, want don’t you do? Definately don’t implement a “solution” that is going to hurt your users – that’s just making this worse. If your willing to hurt your users just to beat the spammers then you may as well pull the plug.

Think about the real issue – what the motivation for the spammer? Work out what can you do to address that issue without effecting your users.

For me the real issue was that it looks bad.

My forum was using vBulletin so a search through the vBulletin mods turned up a great solution. Called Prevent Spam this mod will place any post containing certain keywords in to moderation for approval. I defined the the keyword “[URL]” as a spam word, which just so happens to be the keyword vBulletin uses to designate a link – therefore any time someone posts a link, the post is placed in moderation. The mod allows you to define how many posts that users need to have to avoid this, for me I chose 10.

It’s not fool proof however it addresses 99.9% of my spam. It means I have more moderation work to do but I’m on my forum several times a day so it doesn’t wait too long before it’s approve. Obviously having moderators would lighten the load too.

I did also turn of signature links for new members. This is breaking my own rule however I considered this acceptable. Even if a legitmate user’s only intention is to post so their signature is displayed, then I don’t think they are going to be a great contributor to the forum. I purposedly set this limitation to users with less than 5 posts so for the legitimate users it’s a minor inconvenience.

Note: If you do make these types of limitations I recommend you alert members in their welcome message. Cuts down on a lot of confusion.

Another thing I implemented was a random question on registration. I chose a vBulletin mod called NoSpam!. This in addition CAPCHA and validation e-mails gives another level of protection against spammers.

So remember, be creative in addressing the issue but whatever you do, don’t hurt your legitimate users. Unfortunately it seems spam is here to stay, but still make sure you put up a good fight!

Success doing business online…

// May 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

I’ve posted about a couple of instances (here and here) where getting work done online has not worked out, however this isn’t always the case.

Recently we needed a logo done for our business so we turned to Digital Point to run a logo design contest. We paid on the high side (compared to other contests) but we ended up getting a number of great entries which we were really happy – it was hard picking a winner!

Note: “high side” for Digital Point was only US$40, compare this with the hundreds we would pay offline or at sites like 99designs.com.

So getting stuff done can work sometimes!

You would think we had a bigger chance of getting burnt on Digital Point compared to Elance, however so far, we’ve only had good experiences on Digital Point, but there are some pretty bad stories so you do need to be careful.

Don’t hurt your users

// May 12th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Webmaster tips

If you have a problem with spam on your site, don’t fix it effecting all your normal users.

I run a number of blogs and forums and I see spam every day – I hate it.

Spam is like graffiti. But if you have a problem with someone painting graphiti on the wall of your house, do you put an 8ft barbed wire fence around your house so no-one can get in? If you own a retail store and you have a shop-lifting issue, do you put a fence around your shop so no-one can get in? No you don’t (well I hope you don’t!).

Another issue faced by people running blogs is the republishing of RSS feeds – people effectively copying your content and putting it on their site. It’s a breach of copyright and is plain and simple content-theft. Don’t effect your real users in addressing the problem.

How NOT to prevent forum spam

Don’t turn off linking!

When I visit forums I hate it when I can’t post a link to something I want to share. I am a legitimate user wanting to post a link to something that I feel is really beneficial to the members of their community (it’s not a link to my own content), but the owner of the forum hasn’t decided new users can’t post links. Argh!

What do I do? I leave and unlikely come back.

The solution, I will keep that for another post! Stay tuned…

How NOT to prevent RSS feed republishing

Don’t change your feed to summary posts. I saw a site do this recently, in fact it actually prompted me to make this post – see I am sick of splogs Copying our Content! @ Web Tools Collection.

I completely sympathize with them but just look at the feedback – and this feedback is from fellow blog owners who are more likely to sympathize than other user types. It’s a bad move!

The solution, well I am going to keep that for another post too!

Other dumb ways of fixing problems

I don’t know the full details of this one so perhaps I’m been harsh, but here’s another over the top response to fixing a problem. Go to this site and tell me what you think – http://developers.phpjunkyard.com/.

A novel way of solving a problem but what about the loss of search engines? How is Google suppose to index your content if it is behind a logon?

Perhaps they have set it up so Google can still access the site but I think the confusion this would cause is still harmful to legitimate users.

Burnt again!

// May 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

Earlier this year I posted about how Doing Business online = Getting ripped off, well guess what, it’s happened again, however no loss of money this time.

My wife has an idea for a web site and we used Elance to find a programmer.

We had done the same thing about 12 months ago however the programmer we found just didn’t understand the project so we all agreed to cancel it. As money was still in the Elance escrow system all the money was refunded.

This time we thought we found a great programmer – seemed to understand the project and communicated well through the tendering process. Again we used the Elance escrow system so our money was safe.

Things started well and we even saw proof that the system was coming along, however half way through the 2 week project he stopped communicating with us.

We’ve attempted to contact him several times via Elance’s messaging system however he never responds, this is despite us seeing that he was logging on to Elance and even successfully getting more projects!

We asked if he needed more time, but still no response. It’s been more than a week since we last heard from him and the project should have been delivered by now.

The whole ignoring us is just weird. If he can’t complete the job, just tell us. We’re not going to pay him until the project is delivered and since he has delivered nothing I can’t see how he can claim any of the money in escrow. I have no idea what he hopes to achieve by ignoring us.

We’ve cancelled the project again but need his approval before the money will be refunded from escrow – if he doesn’t approve it with 7 days we then have to get Elance to decide what to do.

So another waste of time which is really dissappointing. We’re going to try Get-a-freelancer next time and hopefully have some better luck!

Australian Webmaster update

// May 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

I spend an awful amount of time on australianwebmaster.com because you have to check on a forum a few times a day to make some posts and to moderate posts. As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s one of those sites where I’ve put so much effort in to it I can’t just drop it.

It’s coming up to 12 months since I took over the site – boy time flies!

The traffic is building though. Each month the traffic grows which is really good. Last month there wasn’t such a big growth but the site had a 30% increase the month before which I thought was really good. Hopefully things aren’t starting to slow down!

A few months ago I sent an e-mail out to a section of the members, basically those who had posted but not returned to the site for a while. I asked what they wanted from the forum. Didn’t get a massive response however I did get some suggestions.

The main thing I am doing now is putting out a monthly newsletter – it give members a reminder about the site. I am just about to send out my third one so hopefully it will get things humming along again.

The other thing is holding a live chat on the site for members to get together. The first one went really well, however the second didn’t. The first one was held on a Thursday night however I decided to run the second one on a Sunday night – I think that was my mistake. I have since gone to the community to ask their preference, which seems to be mid-week oo the next one will be held on a Wednesday. Hopefully a lot more people come this time!

Some other suggestions included highlighting more posts on the forum home page, just not the last post in each section. I was able to put a vBulletin add-on to do this.

Someone mentioned converting the site to a blog, which I thought would be a waste.

Still unsure what the future holds for australianwebmaster.com, it takes up a lot of time which I would like to be spending on other projects…