I’ve been quite busy with a few things lately. Being a dad (trying to be a good one!) is certainly one thing that tops my list and no matter what will remain my number 1 priority!

There’s also a couple of projects that have taken so so much of my time in January, February, March and April. But I have made quite a bit of progress developing an idea that I’ve always had for an online business that would mostly cater to a local market.

Time is always one of my biggest challenges!

Something that’s been eating at me alot is the  fact that I’d been sitting on this idea for this particular online business for a long time. For a few years actually. There was a couple of times that I just dove into putting it together, but I always seemed to get bogged down in certain aspects of it.

At one point, I remember getting bogged down in the technical aspect. What would I use? There was functionality that I wanted to included and figured that maybe building it all myself would be the way to go because I could then make everything work exactly as I wanted. But then the “time factor” would come into play and I’d realize that I just don’t have time to code it myself.

I’d ponder what CMS I should use? Wordpress? Drupal?

Then I’d get all bogged down in thinking about learning how the code is structured…. using PHP alot more (which I was not quite proficient with at the time) and figured it would lead to the same equation…

There was another time I’d jumped in to this project and got bogged down in just how to organize the information. How to properly categorize. How to market and promote…

Again, listening to my own thoughts, the door was shut and the possibility that this business could bring was shut out by discouragement.

A different approach!

In an effort to not repeat past mistakes and/or past mistakes I made some realizations and also some changes to my approach.

I’d been meeting with a local business person whom I had done some work for. Through some brain storming sessions we had come up with an online business idea. This particular idea we had at first was not for a local market but something we could possibly develop as a world wide resource. The idea was good but there were many challenges. One aspect that seemed a bit challenging was making sure we could come up with enough good content to make it work and give people value on the site.

But it was an area that I was not quite knowledgeable in and one problem or challenge that I  saw was that we may struggle finding enough content. We had thought about getting local experts in the field to write some material, but then the immediate problem was how to properly compensate them starting up.

After a couple of discussions, I thought maybe I would invite this person in on my idea. As a partnership. I’d known him for a while and he had been in business for many years.

Thinking about it more…. we also had a varied skill set. I was and am much more “techy” and he seemed much better at steering the ship with getting the word out, marketing…etc.

When we chatted about it, he accepted and understood the concept. We both started getting pumped about getting this thing going.

So I’ve been making time for this project over the last few weeks. Wordpress was chosen as the platform to develop on and it the timing seemed right as so far in 2010 I’ve been in PHP full time.

The idea to go into this project with 2 heads instead of 1 was definitely the way to go and when we’ve met the few times we have to get ideas it’s moved along quite well. We’ve chosen tasks, we’ve both had ideas when it comes to marketing

Creating a website that generates an income source…. well, you can read a whole lot of stuff online about buying content generators and all that crap. But really, if you can make any money, it’s a fly by night affair. Building something, building something useful, that people will come to over and over again requires alot of work. Alot of planning.

It’s not any different than building a business of any other type. You’ve got to plan. You’ve got to spend hours thinking about your idea, evaluating your idea and refining it. And how your going to promote your idea…. and how exactly it will function! What’s your business model????

There are really very few instances where you can cut corners and create an income stream. If it were the case anyone could half heartedly do something and create wealth.

I’m working hard. Hope you are too!

If you’ve got an idea for an online business eating at you, take the chance to work towards realizing it. Otherwise, something you’ll sitting somewhere thinking about that idea.. and all the “what ifs”. Time waits for no one.

Peace.

I just finished upgrading this blog to the latest Wordpress release (2.9.1).

I usually do a little research just to see if anyone has any problems with their upgrades and while I certainly appreciate the automatic upgrade options for the Wordpress core and plugins I tend to be a little too paranoid to click the upgrade button.

I have before for very small plugins but I generally like being a bit more cautious because I have read about the odd person’s tale of woe… loosing a database or getting an internal server error message….etc.

My approach is usually what is reckomended.

1. Backup all your site’s files!
2. Backup your database!
3. I sometimes upload the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in temp spaces… and rename them when ready..
4. I disable all plugins
5. I check the config.php file to see if there are changes to make (very rarely does it need anything)
6. I then upload all root files (index.php etc..)
7. I rename the wp-includes and wp-admin folders..
8. Login to the admin…
9. Click to upgrade the DB as required
10. enable each plugin…. upgrade if required…

Voila!

I’ve rarely had a problem.

But I have made mistakes… and a few times I forgot one of the steps, like disabling the plugins. So in my debugging I found some helpful ressources, like this blog article on how to manually disable WordPress plugins using SQL. It may not be something that you want to try if you don’t have any experience in web development, SQL..etc.

The article is called “Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database“

A couple of days ago I was writing an article for one of my blogs and wanted to put a picture in the article but wondered what was the best place to look. After looking in a couple of places I found a new site I’d never seen before.

At first I searched on Flickr’s Creative Commons website but couldn’t really find what I was looking for. Flickr’s Creative Commons site is a great place to look if you need some stock photo images.

Then I stumble across a site that I had never heard of. A website called PicApp.

What I was looking for was a couple of pictures, both of hockey players. Hadn’t found the guys I was looking for over at the other site but when I searched on PicApp a bunch of pictures were found.

Check out the PicApp website and take a look at PicApp’s advantages page.

They even have a WordPress plugin that you can find here on the PicApp blog.

So why did I choose Wordpress?

Well, Wordpress is one of the most used blogging tools out there and since it’s been around for a while it’s also quite polished.

Many bloggers use Wordpress and there are tons of plugins that you can get to provide various functionality.

A few plugins I’ve decided to use:
Contact Form 7 – http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/contact-form-7/
This plugin provides a contact form that allows people to send a message through the website to an email address.

WP-SpamFree – http://www.hybrid6.com/webgeek/plugins/wp-spamfree
This plugin provides some spam filtering for the blog comments.

You can also find many Wordpress plugins and Themes over at http://wordpress.org/extend/

Wordpress also has some great features that may come in handy when writting. In the editor there is a handy spell checker. The spell check is one that I will use quite often, it’s quite handy in finding nasty typos.

Another very handy feature is that Wordpress will automatically save draft copies while writing blog articles so if you happen to shutdown the browser a bit pre-maturely all may not be lost.

It’s also quite easy to change the website’s theme or layout at the click of a button… once you’ve uploaded the theme’s files of course.

So all in all I believe Wordpress is a very solid tool to work with. I’ll post about handy plugins, widgets and anything else that I find helps me in this process.

Here we are!

July 28th, 2009.

Today is the launch of my new blog and my new adventures in learning to make money online.

I’ve been doing a bit of researching and reading many blogs and websites to get a general feel for what people are saying about Internet marketing and different ways to generate income online.

So far I’ve already spent many hours reading, thinking… and searching for Wordpress themes.

At this writing, I’m many hours invested in my journey and the first fruits are this website that I will be adding to on a regular basis.

I’m really excited that the journey begins!