Down On Our Luck

Posted on Thursday, 21st August 2008 by Bcarter

So, thanks to and idea from Josh at Unconventional Marketing, I’ve made Wednesdays the day that I answer questions from my readers, but no one has sent me any and of course I’m a day late I can forgive everyone if you can forgive me.

Feel free to leave a question about gambling addiction or Big Crumbs you’d like answered in the comments section of this or any other post and I’ll answer it on Wednesdays in the following weeks. Please keep in mind that I’m not a professional therapist, just a person working through a problem. I hope to have more than one question to answer every week, but we’ll see how things go. I’ll get a “contact” page up real soon in case a question is too personal to publish. For now, if you have a question that is too personal to post, please feel free to email me at questions @ downonourluck.com. Don’t worry, I’ll get the contact page set up soon, hopefully this weekend.

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Tags: gambling addiction questions, questions
Posted in Q&A | Comments (2)

Posted on Tuesday, 19th August 2008 by Bcarter

In my daily routine of things, Tuesdays I’ll be posting about Big Crumbs which is one of my favorite ways to earn money online. Of course, once a month will be my update on earnings from this great website, but I will also post my ideas, tips and tricks that have worked for me along the way.

This month’s update is a little overdue, but I did lose my way a little during August. July was an another good month for earning Big Crumbs referrals as I added another 10 people to my downline. Thank you to all that signed up under my username.

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Tags: Big Crumbs, cash back shopping, free online income, make money shopping
Posted in Big Crumbs | Comments (2)

Posted on Monday, 18th August 2008 by Bcarter

Yesterday I made a commitment to get my blog on track and post everyday. My biggest problem is coming up with ideas on what to write about in order to set myself apart from the rest of the same old boring blogs. To keep things on track, I’ve decided that I almost need to set a theme for everyday in order for ideas to start flowing for me. Sundays will be contest posts and Mondays will be motivation ideas to keep myself on track.

Monday is a great day for me to post about motivation, it’s the day that I hate to see come out of all of them in the week. Monday is also countdown day to Friday, not a good way to spend my life and I have found over the last six months to a year that the biggest roadblock towards working for myself is myself. Please don’t come here looking for “you-rah-rah” posts because I’m not that type of person. These are motivation and time management ideas that work for myself and hopefully you can find something here that may work for you. Who knows, it could give you a reason to stop and just say “that girl’s a nut job”.

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Tags: motivation
Posted in Motivatioin | Comments (0)

Posted on Sunday, 17th August 2008 by Bcarter

I’m trying to set up a weekly schedule for myself and get posts written ahead of time so I don’t have to write so much on the weekends and stress about content getting written in a timely manner. I’ll be starting out with my weekly contest post on Sundays. I do not want to turn my blog into just a plain old blog with a bunch of contest posts; but every week there is usually one contest I’d like to enter. If there’s more than one, I’ll post twice, no biggy. At least this way, I’ll have something that won’t take me a lot of time to post or get ready for Sundays. So, without further ado, I present the Adspace Contest – Win Banner Space on 10 Blogs.

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Tags: ads, advertising, contest
Posted in Contests | Comments (0)

Posted on Saturday, 2nd August 2008 by Bcarter

I don’t think of myself as superstitious, but there must be a touch of this trait in myself somewhere because I haven’t posted anything about Q’s gambling problem in a long time. I don’t know what it is, but everytime I give Q praise either in conversation or on this blog, it comes back to bite me in the butt with a trip to the casino by Q. Many times he doesn’t know I’ve said something good about him, but it almost always seems the same day I say “Q’s been doing real well and avoiding the casino” in a real upbeat tone, is the same day I come home to disappointment and heartbreak. The whole cycle of building up some faith and trust in him is then beat down and must start over.

I can’t resist taking a risk here and stating that Q has been doing really well (as far as I’m aware of) with staying out of the casino. I’ve become pretty good at reading the signs that he gives off when he’s lying so I have to say that I do believe him when I ask and he says “no”.

Q had a real breakthrough last time he went to the casino and lost his paycheck. He had been going to a branch where he didn’t sign the contract to be banned and had not been thrown out yet, so security did not know him that well. Last time he lost his check, he went up to the security desk and asked them to take a picture of him (with the hat on this time); the security officer then told him that he could be thrown out and into jail right then and there, but because he was asking for help he’d give him a break. He also brought home the business card of the security officer and gave it to me.

He has not been to the casino since and I am extremely proud of him. Now I’m going to go and place my Karma Cap upon my head and hope this doesn’t bite me in the butt.

Tags: Casino Banning, My Story
Posted in Helpful Tips, My Story | Comments (1)

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 (5)