I have always had a hard time maintaining this blog. I have moved servers countless times and not bothered to retain the old archived posts. I just end up starting with a fresh install of wordpress and I’m off again. I think the reason why I haven’t kept the old posts (even though many of them were extremely informative), was because I never bothered monetizing this blog. I have never had ads on here. I think that if I could see a visible stream of money coming in (basically passive income), then I’d be motivated to continue posting useful things. Even if it’s only a few dollars a day, that’s all the proof I need that the time I spend is worth it. Unfortunately, when I am working online, I only see things in $. That’s more gas for my car, more food for my belly, and more money in the bank.

blogaboutyourblog.com has a post up about his blog making $1200 in 10 months of inactivity. This is more than four times the amount that he made in his five months of active blogging. I assume the income was all from adsense, and with his poor ad placement, and only 120 uniques/day, these numbers are very surprising.

I am going to implement adsense sometime soon.

Style Ignite has a great article on 8 tips to remember before designing your next site.

I feel that the most important thing before setting out to build/design a website is to know your niche. It’s very likely that someone else has thought of the same idea before you and has it published on the net already. In fact, it’s highly likely that your niche is polluted with competition. This does not mean that you cannot produce some sort of success. (Just take a look at how many web proxies are out there.) “Knowing your niche” means that you know who the big time players are, the audience they go after, and why they are doing so well.

My CTO mentioned that it seems like there are 75 “web 2.0″ templates out there and people just change the colors and text around for each new site. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t “designers” harbor their creativity and just make something nice. The rise of flamboyant colors, images, and white space is great for many sites that target the new generation. But how many 30+ people like it? 40+? Have you ever asked someone other than your 18 year old web design buddies? If you take a look at BaseCamp and CentralDesktop’s websites. It’s clear which is more of a simple web 2.0 application, and which is more of an enterprise level application. If you are building a website that targets grandmas who want to organize photos *ahem*, don’t use bright colors. You are just hurting their eyes. Their eyes are tired. They just want to lay down and drink tea and eat the scrumptious crumpets that they baked in the morning.

The next point, is noticing what your competition is doing. Look at their landing pages and product tours. They may not be the very best executions, but their success *might* be attributed to how well their campaigns are converting.

Search Google for some news, comments, reviews, etc on your competition. See what their users are saying. Learn from their mistakes. Find out why people aren’t using their services and figure out how you can capture those users.

Here is a good article titled, Stealing Business Away from your Competition.

Thanks to Jordan, I have a new theme! I think that the minimalist feel works best on blogs so that the focus is on the content or any images in the post.

Visit Sour Customs for any web design work. He does more than proxy themes too, just contact him.

So far I have only noticed one problem. On a post page, the logo image does not appear so you can’t get back to the home page.

Edit: I just remembered that tags aren’t displayed anywhere. Tags are vital for SEO on a blog.

Edit 2: Michael suggested that I add 1.5em line-height. Done.

I need a new blog theme. This one is too standard. Something extremely simply that puts heavy focus on content would be great. I wish upon a star, that I’ll one day be a great designer.

I’ve never been much of a partier but this holiday season was pretty daft. I didn’t really get into the “spirit” this year.

Anyways, I just figured I’d throw another useless, waste-of-time-to-read post out there because soon we will be updating our blog over at Central Desktop to wordpress. Rather than just overwrite the old installation of simplephpblog and lose all posts, links, and pagerank, I proposed installing it in a new directory (/blog).

The bosses liked it, and suggested that everyone who works here write a blog post at least once a week just about our jobs, the industry, and other interesting mojo that relates to running a successful software company. One thing that CD as a company has not done too well is build that huge web 2.0 reputation that 37 signals has done. This is one reason why BaseCamp seems so much more popular than us. The fact that 37 signals developed RoR can only help this. They also had a 22 month head start on us and focus more on the VSB’s, for example, a small team of 2-5 working on one web project. CD targets the SMB’s, maybe a team of 5-50, or more. As a platform, CD is very robust and flexible. It’s a lot more difficult to “outgrow” CD than BaseCamp. Anyone who has bothered to try out both softwares will know what I’m on about.

I will admit, when I went in for my interview, I thought CD was basically BaseCamp, just not as popular. You could say that working here has inflicted some sort of bias on me, but the truth is that no product really can be directly compared with us. It’s sort of like this. You could compare a Honda S2000 and a Mazda RX-8 directly - many have done so and it’s accepted that the RX-8 is simply a four door, four seat alternative to the S2000. You could also compare the RX-8 to a BMW 3 Series sedan, but you cannot compare the S2000 to the BMW 3 Series. I’m not entirely certain the importance of this post, but it’s some nonsense to get me back into blogging mode.

I’m not sure why I also delete my posts. I often regret this action immediately after I press the “delete” button in the wordpress control panel.

Regardless, I’m starting over again.

I just got a job at Central Desktop, Inc. It should keep me occupied for awhile. My goal was to just get a basic unpaid internship as just something to do this winter, while gaining valuable experience and contacts. My parents had been asking me to get a job so I’d have something productive to do, instead of wasting my life away on internet discussion forums and my car. I began searching for jobs on craigslist. One of the very first ads that I ran across was Central Desktop’s. The description was perfect. A paid internship. I immediately drafted up a cover letter and resume and sent it in as quickly as I could, hoping that nobody else had beaten me to it.

Luckily, they were impressed (or seemed so) and expressed interest in me. I was offered a decent hourly wage, and I accepted. I will be starting work on Monday, this being the last week of classes.

I’ve decided to pick up blogging again (for the 10th time or so). It seems so petty, and unimportant, but I’ve been mired in a cloud of procrastination and laziness. I feel that blogging helps get things off of my mind. Speaking of which, there have been a lot of things on my mind lately, and they eat away at the quality of my life until I resolve them. For example, Cal Poly Pomona seems to have misplaced my check for the orientation that I attended. Even though I am not a student there now, they have threatened to cancel my classes and prevented me from receiving university services as well as give out my information to commercial collection agencies and ruin my credit. Yes, all of this from a mistake on their end. I have been calling them everyday for the past two weeks, left messages to several departments, and wasted away my life while on hold. Not a single call has been returned. The original fee was $65 which was jacked up to $95 since they fucked up. I just paid it now and it’s been such a huge relief. If any Cal Poly Pomona official sees this, or I get a call returned during my holiday, I wish the plague on the entire university.

My car has also been a huge headache for myself, and my parents. It has just been sitting, covered, and dying for the past few weeks. I bought a replacement shortblock due to the spun bearing and it still isn’t in yet. I also bought a 2.5″ ES Tuning oval muffler and test pipe that are just waiting for the motor to be fixed before I can have them put on.

One thing that is sad is that my level of happiness currently relates to the level of my bank account. I’m also searching for credit cards. (That’s a hint out to credit card companies out there).