Now I’m just wondering how much it will cost to cash it out!

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Let me do a quick follow up on the last post and then write a bit about what is going to happen now…

Extra work

In March I wrote that I would not be taking any extra work on; well, that’s was true until now :-) I’ll get back to this in an upcoming blog entry. (I’m rather excited about this). It involves iPhone & Unity 3D ;-)

Poker

I have not had much success with poker the last few months; sure I got some payouts but not enough. It also happens that I leave a game been unhappy about how I played. So I sure have enough to work on there. Other Poker opened at a new location, so now both in Basel and Kaiseraugst and I will surely continue to play there when I have the change (and the time). During the last few months I also did a good few games online but again, not with enough positive results but I will continue to play of course. I will be playing less than before, both due to bankroll and the extra work I will be doing.

Fitness

I paid for continuing the training at the fitness studio but never got around to go again. So I finally cancelled my membership. Nothing wrong with the place or the people there but I’m just able to find the time to go there. Hope this will change one day…

So… what comes next?

This kick start is NOT about goals, aims and so forth. Had enough of that :-)

• I will be approving all comments in the queue that is not spam (of course) and do some comments on them; some of the comments are rather old :-(
• Then check if some small tweaks are needed for the blog, updates of plugins and so forth.
• Cleanup in links

Thereafter it will be time to start blogging again, it is SO simple.

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What makes it worse is that I at the very start of the year wrote about my goals for this year (No Real New Year Resolution but goals for 2008) which included a few blogging goals, then later in February I wrote about starting up again with the blog (February 16th: Starting up again) and since that post I only wrote 6 new posts.

No excuses and nothing to blame it on (except myself) so time to move on and get started again with my hobby.

Also no promises about what I will be blogging about or how often it will happen but the plan is surely to get it kick started again.

So let’s see when the next post will arrive and if I can continue to write more regular.

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Due to changes in my work I have put aside all time for that (more info about that might follow) but enough is enough, there must be time for blogging also.

So I will be starting up slowly again and I have following planned for the next few days:

• Movie: Cloverfield
• Books: His Darkest Materials
• Games: Super Mario Galaxy, Super Paper Mario
• Games: PC game, will first be mentioned when released
• Consoles: PS3 (yes, I have one now)
• Gadgets: iPod touch (yes, I also got one of them)
• Blogging: EntreCard (and what I think about it)
• Blogging: One special ‘photo blog’
• Blogging: I will from time to time mention some of the other blogs that I enjoy reading

The order above might not be the order that I will be blogging about the different subjects.

So what can I say except: I’m back

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Happy New Year

Guess it is a bit late but since this is the first post in 2008 I would like to take the chance and wish the readers of my blog a Happy New Year.

I hope the people who set New Year resolutions and goals for 2008 didn’t give up yet. I’m still sticking with mine but the year just started.

Changes

Let me go over the small changes that I did recently. People who come here regular (you do, right?) might have noticed the changes already; but let me sum it all up:

ScratchBack

In case you are not familiar with ScratchBack then I just sum it up quickly what it is:

Look over to the right and you will see the ‘Are you In My TOPSPOTS’. This is the widget used for ScratchBack. It allows readers of the blog to give me a tip (I promise; I will not drink up all the money I get from tips…). So if someone thinks I deserve a tip then they just click the “Show some love, buy one!”

So what makes this tipping system special is that people can leave a name, message and a URL. If you move the cursor over the first entries you will see what I’m talking about. Each message and URL has to be approved by me and in case I don’t like it then I will just not approve it (and it will not be shown) but I do keep the tip. It is after all about giving a tip. I have approved all tips so far.

New tips appear at the top of the list and bumps the other down; so there are no time limit on them but I can say that ‘macewan.org’ has been on the list for a long time.

I did two changes to ScratchBack:

1. Increase number of top spot.
   I used to have 5 top spots on the list but today the 5th was bought so I increased the list to 10. This might be changed to 15 or 20 if the 10 spots get bought.
2. Increase price.
   A tip used to be $2 but I increased this to $3 today. I will continue to increase it by $1 each month until it reaches $5. So the quicker people get on the list the cheaper (hint hint).

The earnings from this is nothing special (yet) but I like the idea about tipping and this way (message and URL) is perfect in my eyes.

NeverblueAds

I recently signed up with NeverblueAds. NeverblueAds is an affiliate system where I can select the products/services that I want to promote on my site. (You will see some new banners various places on the site). Their system is very straight forward to use and didn’t cause me any problems.

I’m not able to give any feedback about how well NeverblueAds perform as I only had them on the site for a few days but I have a good feeling about it.

Their service/support impressed me from the very start; they need to talk (voice) with all people who sign up for their affiliate system; so they gave me a call one afternoon this was to verify the information I gave them and to quickly have a chat about how I was planning to use the affiliate system. I later emailed them with a few questions/issues I had and they responded very quickly.

WidgetBucks

I removed the widget for WidgetBucks for now; I liked the design and the idea behind WidgetBucks and how it was possible to promote products (such as games). But the performance was pretty bad, since October I had a few clicks earning me a total of $0.22.

As I said, it has been removed for now but it might return at a later stage or in specific posts; just like I did with the post: Yet another broken XBox 360.

I will keep an eye on possible changes from WidgetBucks side.

BlogRush

BlogRush was yet again an interesting widget that had some promising ideas but failed to perform. Out of all the MANY thousand times my post headlines was shown to other users I got around 20 clicks; so only 20 persons ended up reading the posts this way.

Comments

One thing that has changed over the last few months is that I get more and more comments to my blog entries. This motivates me a lot to continue blogging (Nope, I didn’t consider to stop anyway). Getting feedback and getting the communication working just ROCKS. So keep doing it.

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Seems Beth liked my blog, so why don’t you head over to her ‘review’ of it and read it yourself. She got some great comments that made me simile ;-) oh, and she subscribed to my RSS feed, thanks to Beth. Guess this puts some pressure on me for writing more good posts.

She claims that she is good in poker and can win it any day; who knows, I might challenge her and of course keep her in mind if the system from the 30K per month book works. Then I can always sponsor the book for her :-)

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She wrote what I consider a rather positive review, which can be found on one of her many blogs, just go over to her Cats and Coupons blog to have a look at the review.

One thing she got right was that the right sidebar are cut off but it all depends on the resolution and probably also the browser, only one of the items are cut here when running 1024×768 (Which I just happen to know that she is using), but if the resolution is lower or if the browser is not full-screen then yes, she is correct. Oh, I just checked with Internet explore 6 and more was cut off, time for me to fix that.

Another thing she noticed was my About page, that it gives a good few details. So I just had to double check her own About pages and I was not able to find her real name on any of them, so she will continue to be known as: valmg

Anyway, thanks to valmg for taking the time for the review, appreciated.

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What is HubPages?

The very short version: HubPages is a CRAZY big blog with around 40.000 articles, written by a lot of different people (Their best list got 6999 listed). A Hub can be seen as a single post/blog entry.

The Hubbers (writers/bloggers) can write a Hub about what ever they like and it is not connected directly to their own ’space’. The Hubbers do have their own profiles where the latest Hubs are mentioned, but it does not work as a blog for each member. Just have a look at my profile.

Around 3 million people are visiting HubPages each month, often are people coming from the search engines, so a big audience.

Hubbers are not paid directly by HubPages for blogging but if they sign up with Google’s AdSense and Amazon (eBay also possible) then the impressions (impression = when an ad is shown) is split so that Hubbers gets 60% of ads impressions (Meaning, 60% of the impressions will have the AdSense/Amazon code from the Hubber in them). It is also possible to get more and get impressions on other hubs by linking. You also get some % if you refer people to sign up to HubPages. But even if 60% of all the ads shown have your code in them, then this does not mean that they will be clicked.

Why not use my own blog for all?
So there are great possibilities but you might ask ‘why write there when you have your own blog’. When I signed up at HubPages I liked the idea about that you can write about whatever you like and whenever you like, not as other blog networks that might require that the author selects a category and then are require to write X number of posts pr week. But back to ‘why’; on HubPages I can write about subjects that might not match my own blog. I’m also able to go in and have a look at the ‘requests’ from other people; these are suggestions from other people.

My first Hub was an answer to such a request (See the Hub). I plan to use the requests a lot, find a request that I find interesting, do some research and write about it. So it is as a practice for me: quick research and then blog about it, even if it was about a subject I never had to deal with before. If I write about things that I would find suitable for the blog then I will of course mention it here on blog; together with a link. You can of course also subscribe directly to the RSS from my profile.

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Hosting

The site is been hosted by DreamHost. This means I got close to infinite storage and bandwidth (at least it feels like it). They are also hosting at a great price with possibility for some great discounts (See my $97 discount). They have a great list of supported packages, such as WordPress.

Blog software

I’m using WordPress 2.3, which was a one-click install from the control panel from DreamHost. I have not used any other blogging systems so I’m not in a position to compare them other solutions but I have been pretty happy with it from the first day. It is also very flexible, as you can change theme and there are LOTS of plugins to add any extra functionality you might want. If you know your way around PHP then you can also add your own of course.

With just hosting and WordPress 2.3 it is possible to get started with blogging…

Theme

After lots of searching and testing I finally came to the xMark theme by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. This theme was close to what I wanted, widget support, 3 columns, nice layout, easy to change if needed by editing a style sheet, directly support for the plug in for archives page and Share This and very easy to setup for SiteMap. I have done some small modifications myself but if you compare my site with the xMark one then you will notice some changes but not a lot. Lisa has been a great help with some of the questions I had. Thumbs up for good support.

I will probably come back from time to time to do small changes to the theme and surely also to the layout of the columns.

Plugins

I use a good few plugins and also here I would expect things to change over time. These are the ones I use at the moment:

• Akismet, version 2.0.2
  This plug in works as a Anti-spam system for comments. Probably 90% of all WordPress users are using this plug in (just my guesstimate). Maybe there are alternatives but I never investigated it. It has caught around 2000 spam comments so far, so saved me a good bit of time.
• Adsense-Deluxe, version 0.8
  This plug in makes it easy to define AdSense codes that can be inserted into posts, so I can decide while writing the post if I want any AdSense ads in it or not. To add a AdSense I just have to type <–AdSense–> (example) and the Google AdSense ad will appear. Also makes it possible to disable a group of them. Also gives one places to change the look of them all if needed. So no more adding AdSense code into the php files directly.
• DiggClick, version 1.3
  This is not the latest version of DiggClick (1.4 is the latest one) but I’m no longer able to find it. The old web site that hosted the plugin is no longer working and the email address I had to the author is also no longer working.
  At the start of all my posts I have the DiggClick icon, letting people submit the post to Digg or allow them to Digg my post.
• Google Analyticator, version 1.54
  Plug in that handles any java script code needed for Google’s Analytics. Too just a few minutes with this plug in to get the analytics up and running
• Google XML Sitemaps, version 3.0
  Plugin for creating sitemaps xml files that Google can use directly.
• Share This, version 1.4
  The xMark theme got direct support for this great plugin, see the green icon at the end of this post, try to click on it and you will know what Share This is about.
• SRG Clean Archives, version 4.2
  The xMark theme also got direct support for creating archives but requires this plugin. Do check the archive pages and see how nice they are :)
• WordPress Database Backup,version 2.1.3
  Backup and backup again. I’m always paranoid about loosing data, especially after a hard disc crash that cost us a good few thousand to get restored. So automatic and manual backup is something that may NOT be skipped. This plugin makes it all so easy, creates backup of all databases used by the blog.
• wp-cache, version 2.1.2
  Always let the cache speed things up when possible, specially when it can all be adjusted by a nice plugin.
  
• WP-ContactForm, version 2.0.7
  See my contact page for what this form can do. Replace your email address with a contact form.

I’m always looking for new plug ins and widgets that can improve the site, both for myself (need a new text editor plug in) and for the viewers/readers.

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The new theme that SamuelNova.com is using is the xMark 2.0 created by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. The funny thing was that I decided for this theme a week ago but just before I did the upgrade I did a double check on the web site for it; and to my surprise I saw that Lisa updated it, so it works better with WordPress 2.3, perfect timing.

The upgrade went very smooth, so let me go over the steps I took in the change. I’m sure that other people will be able to upgrade the same steps but I do not make any guarantee that it will work for all.

Backup phase

Call me paranoid but I really like to have backups before I do changes, especially when it is massive changes as this one. I do backups on a regular basis, not only the web sites but also of all local data.

• Did a full backup of the WordPress folder on the web server
• Backup of SQL database

Plugins status

Next step was to get an overview of the plugins and other settings.

• Wrote several text files with
  • What plugins was used, including version number
  • Content of each Widget
  • Special tags used on the page
  • AdSense codes
  • Any options that I thought would be useful to keep in a text file
• Checked the list with plugins to see what the status are of them all, if the author had released new versions or if there were reported issues with WordPress 2.3

Upgrade time

• Disabled all plugins
• Upgraded to WordPress 2.3 using the One-Click-Installs (which also does upgrades) (from DreamHost … 97$ discount page)
• Finished the 2.3 upgrade directly from WordPress

At this time the site still worked, just with a few errors due to the old theme.

Change of theme

• Upload xMark the theme to WordPress and selected it inside WordPress admin area.

Surprise… It just worked :-)

• Did some modifications to the theme, such as the upper/left graphics :-) and some movement of text.
• Worked on the widgets in the two side bars on the right. What had to be included and in what order (this is an ongoing task)
• Installed few new plugins, also removed a few old ones that was no longer needed.
• More small modifications to the theme and the style sheet used by it.

I didn’t run into any problems with the upgrade or the theme or any plugins, so all in all a very smooth upgrade. This does not mean that I’m done yet, I still got some plugins and widgets that I want to check. Then again, new plugins and widgets appear all the time.

Do note: I’m not using tags but still the good old categories. I might add tags at a later stage, but that will be when I have some hours free as I will need to go back to all old posts and add tags to them.

I will one of the next days do a post about what plugins I’m using and where they can be found.

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