Down On Our Luck

Posted on Saturday, 26th July 2008 by Bcarter

Bloggers know the importance of social networking to get the word out about their blogs and websites, but knowing when to stop and get some work done is very important. I have seen signs of this in myself lately and have come to realize it’s time to get back to business. I won’t say which of these signs I have exhibited, but if you’re trying to run a business online going down this path can be very non-productive.

1. Your friends on Facebook know more about you than your spouse.
2. You have found 7,000 people to follow on Twitter, but haven’t called your mother in over 2 weeks.
3. You haven’t seen the light of day besides going to work in over a week.
4. You have dropped 600 Entrecards every day for the last month; the old fashioned way.
5. You’re best material is left in comments.
6. You check Twitter every 5 minutes because you’re afraid of missing something.
7. You can’t remember the PIN for your debit card, but you know the passwords for all 200 sites that you belong to by heart. FYI, I do not belong to 200 Social Networking Sites. Only 100; JK I really only use about 10 or less regularly. I’m not sure where I’d find time for more than that.
8. Joe Schmo from New Mexico giving your Stumble home page a “thumbs down” throws you into a deep depression for over a month.
9. Sex, what’s that? I might miss a Tweet.
10. I have a blog? What’s the URL again?

This post is not really meant to be serious, but it could be a heads up to those of you trying to make money blogging or running any other type of online business.

What are some other good signs of social networking addiction that you can think of?

Tags: addiction, Blogging, social networking
Posted in Blogging | Comments (8)

Posted on Saturday, 19th July 2008 by Bcarter

Last weekend I decided that I needed to transfer all of the blogs that I’m paying for over to my new reseller’s account at Real Web Host to save money and keep everything all in one place. The process for transferring this blog took almost 10 hours because I thought I knew what I was doing and I didn’t research anything in advance.

At my old webhost (GoDaddy) I was still running my blog on Wordpress 2.3 and I wanted to upgrade to 2.5 when I transferred the blog. So I started with installing WP 2.5 on the new server and thought that I could just import the PHP tables. Boy was I wrong, I ran into errors all over the place, I think because the tables were set up a little differently in the two versions. I also ran into a problem with the permalinks not working correctly which I fixed with the .htaccess file, but by then it was too late. About 8 hours into the process I found this Moving Wordpress tutorial in the Wordpress Codex. Due to my frustration with dinking around for 8 hours, this really irritated me; why didn’t I look for this sooner?

So, it was back to square one. First of all, I deleted everything I installed originally except for the database, which I emptied the entire contents of. Then I FTP’ed everything from the GoDaddy server onto my own computer in the same file structure that existed. Once that was done and the nameservers were changed over, I was able to FTP all of the same existing files onto the new webhost. This took care of two problems, installing wordpress and keeping the same custom settings.

So, with the file transfer complete I was then able to go to the PHPMyAdmin at GoDaddy and export the entire contents of my database. A simple copy and paste into Notepad with a SaveAs .sql file and the export was done. Then I logged into PHPMyAdmin of the new server and imported the database. Down On Our Luck and One Million Pet Pics were still running on SQL 4.0 or 4.1 so upon importing, I made sure to choose the SQL40 format. I don’t know if this was necessary, but I did it anyways. Everything imported great and here we are. I did need to update the database the first time I tried to access the admin section, but with a click of the mouse, this step was complete.

Even though this took longer than I wanted it to, it was a great learning experience. PHP tables have kind of been mysterious to me up until going through this process, but I am now starting to understand them which will come in real handy for future projects. I also learned that when in doubt with Wordpress (or not), check the Codex and I should save myself quite a bit of time.

Since I got a little long winded here, next time I’ll tell you about the upgrade to 2.5 and how my future upgrades will be a lot easier with a plug-in that I found for upgrading Wordpress.

Tags: webhosting, Wordpress
Posted in Wordpress | Comments (4)

Posted on Tuesday, 15th July 2008 by Bcarter

I’m going to admit that I’m still young enough to reveal my age, which is 33. Yes, 33 years ago my wonderful mother finally went into labor with me; I say finally because I was two weeks late and I’ve been late ever since.

I usually take my birthday as a time to reflect on where I am in life and to possibly start a new good habit for myself. My mom sent me a check for a decent amount of money which I received on Saturday. I was tempted to go out and buy some new clothes with this money, but I really need to do something to get myself in shape instead. If I could drop 30 pounds, I have at least 3 pairs of jeans in my closet that would fit me. Why should I waste the money on new clothes when I have perfectly good ones waiting to be worn once more. I know this is easier said than done, but starting tomorrow, I’m going to commit myself to reserving 10 minutes every morning to working out. To help me out with this, I’m going to be ordering the Beachbody 10 minute workout. Q thinks I’m crazy and I’m not going to commit to this, but I think spending the money will keep me committed.

It takes 20 days to build a habit and I’ll be committing to my 10 minutes every morning right when I wake up. If I don’t do this right away, I’ll make excuses not to work out at all and then Q will be right. I think this will give more more energy during the day as well so I can either get something done at home in the evening.

Tags: personal tips, working out
Posted in My Story | Comments (5)

Posted on Friday, 11th July 2008 by Bcarter

I finally made the plunge and decided to go with a reseller account for all of my websites. When I added up the costs, it just made sense. So far, I’m saving almost $12 a month and I have quite a bit of room for growth. I have been with Real Web Host for a long time since I had The Software Castle redone with an OSCommerce shopping cart. This was in a round about way, but that’s where I landed up.

So, it dawned on me that I want to get my blogs transferred as soon as possible; to make for an extremely busy weekend. However, I need to keep true to the conscious decisions I made this week to keep myself sane.
more cat pictures

1. Even though my dream is to be working for myself (soon I hope) I cannot sacrifice relationships and quiet time; this doesn’t help myself or Q in his recovery process. Coming home and just crashing on the couch is not the way I want to spend my life; besides, it’s not productive. I think Josh stated it best in his post: How to Make the Switch to Working Online - Part 1, “Start small and allow yourself to have a life outside of the Internet and your work.” Allowing a life outside of the Internet is my biggest battle. Tomorrow Q is going to help some friends out, I’m going to make sure to make some “me” time, do some rummaging, take a dip in the hot tub, and rest outside in the shade. There’s only about 4 months in Wisconsin that can really be spent outdoors and I need to start taking advantage of them. While resting, I’ll be writing ideas and blog posts down so I can take advantage of the quiet time and fresh air.
2. On the other hand, the weekends are my productive times where I get the most done. I read a post the other day (I can’t remember where) that pretty much stated, “You’re not going to make any money just sitting on your butt doing nothing, so get to work”.

Finding a middle road between relaxation and working to the point of exhaustion is a difficult position to find. Once I find it, I’m sure it will be my happy place.

Which end of the spectrum are you on?

Posted in Blogging, My Story | Comments (0)

Posted on Monday, 7th July 2008 by Bcarter

I realized the other day that I didn’t post an update for my Big Crumbs earnings for May. They weren’t bad, not great, but not bad at $11.41 for the month. June turned out to be much better as you can see below:

On top of this I also earned $26.13 in cash back for myself; $22.50 of this came from Let’s Talk when I renewed my contract. Not bad for something I was going to do anyways.

My tip for the month is to remember that Big Crumbs offers cash back for purchases from GoDaddy.com. If you purchase your domains from them, then you may want to check into this great site to earn some rebates on your domain purchases.

After all of my cleaning, I am finally ready to start the spreadsheet needed for my contest. There will be two parts to this and one of them will take a little manual tracking on my part. Stay tuned for more details.

Posted in Big Crumbs | Comments (1)