It’s Good To Be Busy

Last 14 days I haven’t wrote even one single post at this blog. One might say I’ve finally made a common mistake all bloggers do –raring their articles over the time. Well, I sure owe you an apology but since you’re not here in order to listen lousy excuses let me explain what actually had happen. 

Thing is I was quite busy (and still am) with my regular job, but beside that I have started brand new, you could say money making, blog and I’m proud to say it’s performing pretty well. It’s been live for two weeks already (as you see, parallel with the idle period of this blog) and already have 5 RSS subscribers, around 30 unique visitors daily and I even made $0.30 already (hehe). It’s a free blog running on Blogger platform. I won’t tell you its URL because I think it’s too early to brag with it. 

Anyhow, I’ve managed to organize my time with this new blog and now I am going to continue to write on this personal blog of mine. So, come back soon. 

Thank you for your patience and until my next post, have a great life.

Golden Rule Of IT – Backup Your Data

Last night, when I came home and sat down to check the situation with my blog, I’ve pressed power button of my laptop to turn it on, but to my surprise, nothing happened. Huh. $2000 worth equipment had failed down on me. First thing that fall to my mind was: When did I back up my work last time? Hell, I didn’t do it since August. Cold sweat. Let’s give it another try. Nothing. Ok, these things tend to happen with notebooks so I’ve decided to try to reconnect the battery. Power button again and there it works. It was just my pure lack that this wasn’t real malfunction. I could end up loosing all my work for last two months. Trust me when I say, it’s a lot of work. 

No mater if you are an IT professional or not, backing up of your data is a must, unless you don’t care about consequences. All those files are results of time spent at your keyboard and it would be real shame to loose them without the possibility of restoring it in case of any trouble.  

Depending on the type of your work and how often you change your information, you should consider doing backup every few months, once in a month, once per week, every day or even more often but that would be some extreme situation. When prepared, backup could be stored at another PC, network storage disk, CD or DVD.  

Situation is same with blogs. You should backup all your articles and comments too, because they contain valuable information. 

If you are running your blog with your own [paid] hosting service, then they provide you with the way to download and backup complete content of your website. 

But, if you are running your blog with one of those free platforms, situation is little bit different. I’ve been checking WordPress and Blogger in order to find out if they offer any backup options with their free service.  

Guys at WordPress are claiming that they backup data hourly but if you want to back it up on your own there is Export section under the Manage link on your blog’s Dashboard. Exported blog is in XML format and they don’t recommend you to use it often because it requires a lot of resources to create that backup file. Here is the complete article about it.  

Blogger on the other hand don’t have an export or download function than its providing these instructions for creating single file with all your posts. 

But, simplest thing to do would be to crate a copy for every article you would wrote on your PC and then, every once a while burn new articles on CD or DVD. It requires some time to backup existing articles if your blog is already running for some time and if you haven’t do it before. But, once you do it, all work comes down to backup of one single article immediately after it’s published. And it’s saved in friendly format rather then in XML or something else for what you’d need proper software to use it later.

I hope this article gives you usable information. If you would have any additional questions or comments please leave them below.  

Thank you for dropping by and until my next post, have a great life.  

222000 Dollars Fine For Sharing 24 Songs

“… NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) – The recording industry has won a major fight in its effort to stop illegal music downloading with a U.S. jury decision to impose $222,000 damages against a Minnesota woman who used a Web service to share music…”. 

Ridiculous! 

It’s a fact that recording industry is suffering from large losses because of illegal downloading of music, but instead of solving this on global level they hit small people which, per my opinion, don’t deserve to be treated as criminals.

How many of you have already downloaded or shared music files over the internet? Better said, is there anybody out there, who uses Internet, which had not downloaded or shared one single music file illegally (Illegally means that you are not a legal distributor of that music, what you can’t do without starting a company first, even if you have paid for that one single copy.)? I bet there isn’t.  

I really do feel sorry for that woman. Besides being a common employee, but not an entrepreneur, she’s also supposed to be a single mom. A single mom!!! How the heck she could pay this fine and continue to raise her child? Did anybody from recording industry involved in this case have thoughts about that? And, does really 222000 makes significant different to someone who make more then that in one single day? I’m disgusted.  

And I find this case insulting. What worries the most is the fact that now we are all endangered. On the other side, I don’t believe that public will allow this to continue in same manner. Recording industry will probably be forced to find better solution for illegal downloading of music, instead of making impingement on ordinary people. 

So, in the future, be careful what you upload or download, because you might end up paying fines way over your abilities. There is bunch of articles about this case spread over the Internet and here is link to one of them. 

Thank you all for dropping by and please leave your comments because they are much appreciated. 

Until my next post, have a great life.  

What Is Wrong With Those Managers

If you have read my About page, you’ve noticed that I am in IT business for last 10 years. Currently I am working as project manager and developers team leader. Our company is not so big and we don’t have place for all those titles, so my job, among few other things,  is to manage projects, clients, potential partners and on the other side to work with developers all the way down to the final solutions.  

As some of you probably know, worst thing to deal with would be a client. Why? Well, in most cases they are people who don’t have a clue about IT industry, but they want to take benefit of it. And when time comes to find the best solution for their needs, work can easily become a real nightmare. But, if you take this in consider at the start of every project, there is no problem any more. You know that your job is to read their minds and as soon as you understand that it becomes a real routine. 

On the other hand, your potential partners are people who are already working in IT industry. It happens that you have fond mutual interest with them and you need to take the benefit of that. You assume that since they are in IT industry, it will be easy to communicate since they are already in the business and they should know the job. Sometimes, you send simple tech requirements and then you wait for their confirmation in order to continue with your work. Since it’s quite simple you expect to have an immediate answer from developer on the other side so you could wrap things up. But heck, instead of developer, you got letter from their manager which doesn’t write anything specific then is trying to translate what their developers have said to him about those requirements. And here is where real nightmare begins. You are talking to middle man, who is maybe little bit above of your clients with its knowledge about development. What happens? You end up exchanging waste of emails trying to find same language with their developers. And while days are passing by, project is on hold. What’s wrong with those managers? Why they want to make things difficult for everyone while trying to justify existence of their title?

This is exact situation that is happening to me with an ongoing project and I have already lost more then a week while determining specific requirements with our potential partner. It pissed me of this morning when I saw email from their manager which actually, doesn’t say anything specific again. Why the heck he don’t have one of developers manage this. I can’t give you real facts about this project, but I assure you it’s stupid to waste a week on it. Like you build a whole website, but you must wait now to get client’s contact info before you can release it online. We have prepared everything for less then 24 hours and we just need their confirmation in order to let it go live.

Anyhow, this is not the only case like this, but this one made me write this article.  I’ve decided that from now on, I will treat our potential partners same way I treat our clients – as average people who probably don’t know much about the business. This way I will avoid unnecessary tensions because somebody didn’t done what it’s supposed to do. And you know what? I am already calming down while bringing this article to the end.

Anybody else having similar experience?

Again, thanks for dropping by and please leave your comments because they are much appreciated.

Until next post, have a great life.

September Summary or Blogging From Newbie’s Point Of View

Since most of other bloggers are doing it, I’ve also decided to do a monthly check point on my blog’s progression. Thus, my blog is only 2 weeks old, I’ve decided to do this now, at the end of month, because everybody else is doing it at this time and I wanted to go alongside with them. This way I can always compare my blog’s performance with them and see if I am really making any progress. So, here are some figures about my blog’s performance for last month (September ‘07). 

Income 

0 (zero). But don’t be afraid. This blog isn’t yet supposed to bring any money and it doesn’t use any source of income. I didn’t want to waste precious time on implementing ads and similar stuff because at this point, it wouldn’t bring any significant income and I still need to work on my blog’s content. My main occupation is to write articles, what is pretty hard and time consuming at the start. Hopefully, over the time this blog will get significant amount of readers and then I will work on implementation of money making tools. 

Visitors 

Last couple of days I have about a dozen of regular readers, with jumps at around 50 visitors when submitting articles to digg and del.icio.us (I didn’t submit every article). I am also going to check StumbleUpon today and probably sign up with them at the same time. Hopefully, it will make these jumps in number of visitors go higher. I believe that most of my regular readers are guys from my Blogroll section, which I love and respect and very much appreciate their support. So, comparing to other blogs performance for the first month, this looks pretty solid to me. 

RSS Subscribers 

Since I have just yesterday subscribed with FeedBurner I don’t have a clue if I had any RSS subscribers far now, because I weren’t able to track them down. But I am sure I got one since today (me) and I hope this number will grow in the next month. I wonder what it will look like at the 1st November. 

Goals For Next Month 

When setting their goals for upcoming month, bloggers are giving clear figures about income, readers, subscribers and everything else they might mention. Frankly, I don’t have a clue what I could expect in the next month so I won’t set any goals in form of size of income or number of visitors. I am going to concentrate mainly on improvement of my self, my writing and further content of this blog, and results should come eventually. So, compiled list of my goals for next month looks as follows:

- write at least one article per day

- submitting articles to digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon

- expand my blogroll section, make more friends

- search for new blogs and concentrate on commenting

- customize the template of this blog (redesign it)

- involve my wife into articles writing (spice up the content of this blog) 

Conclusion 

Things are starting to roll for this blog, I am pretty sure, and as already said I am starting to feel as a part of this (blogging) community. Great feeling and it gives me the strength to continue with more intensity. I am just a newbie and I learn as I go. I know there is large number of tools and techniques for getting more traffic but I want to go slowly and don’t want to skip any important lessons along this path. Hopefully, results should come eventually and further improve performance of this blog. 

Thank you all for visiting and please leave your comments because they are much appreciated. 

Until my next post, have a great life. 

You Are Not Alone

Majority of topics about blogging are indicating that most important thing for blog’s success is to keep writing and posting at nearly constant frequency. If you would decrease this frequency or even completely stop to write for longer period of time, you could say goodbye to your blog. I’m sure that you could always get your blog back up and running, but all your previous efforts invested in your blog are going to become wasted.

Now, if you are startup blogger, like I am, and especially if you haven’t spend some time in detailed planning of your blog deployment, like I didn’t, then most likely you will come in situation asking your self “Who do heck is ever going to visit my blog and read this?”. Or “Will I ever get some regular readers?”. Or “Is this worth of doing it?”.

After I wrote my first article, I was looking at its preview and wondering “Now what!? My blog have one article only. I don’t know one single blogger out there whom I could tell about it. I am alone in this Internet space …”. But I didn’t give up. I’ve wrote one more article; then another. Still nothing. I was getting few page views, probably from del.icio.us and digg but that’s all. No comments yet. After fifth article I’ve received first comment. Wow. I got first comment after few days only. Some of you could laugh but I was feeling quite excited. Considering that I didn’t want to use all those available blog submission techniques until I see how my blog would perform without it (except del.icio.us and digg) I’ve found this pretty cool. After all, people have started to notice my blog.

I’ve decided to start with comments. So, I’ve started to visit other blogs and read their posts. If I would find interesting post I would leave a comment. And what started to happen is that people actually were responding to my comments. Not only that, but they have visited my blog and commented on my articles. Wow. More excitement. Things are starting to roll for me. Comparing the situation now and when I have just started my blog, there is a huuuuge difference. Nothing significant you might say. But only 14 days after I’ve started this blog, I have constant number of around 10 visits per day for last 4 days. Comparing to 0 (zero) views at the start this is really something. Beside that, I am starting to feel like a true member of blog community and it’s great.

So, basically, what I am trying to say here, primarily to startup bloggers, is that you are not alone out there. Keep writing. Visit other blogs and leave your comments. Make relationships with other bloggers and nourish those relationships. Add them to your Blogrol section (like I did). Review their blogs.

Results will come eventually. As somebody have said “You need to give if you want to receive”.

It’s time to finish this article. Again, I would like to thank to all of you reading my blog, leaving comments on it or in any other way providing appreciated support to my efforts. If you have any comments please leave them below because they are much appreciated.

Until my next post, have a great life.

Another Experiment

Last few days I’m kind of drained out with ideas and I am spending most of the time checking what other bloggers are writing. On the other hand, I’m in the very good mood and have feeling of quiet rush, like lull before the storm, so don’t be surprised if this blog would spit out some pretty cool articles in the near future. Yes, I don’t think that existing posts are cool. It’s probably because I’ve started this blog without any planning, than simply, sat down and started to write. Now I’m not sure in which direction to go, but don’t be worried, as always in my life, I will find that direction soon.

Anyhow, tonight I was checking del.icio.us as usual and it drove me to Ben Cook’s Blogging Experiment. I am new to blogging and this is just a second website like this I’ve had run into it. But I’m pretty sure there is a whole bunch of these so called experiments, when people are trying to make money from blogging by telling others they want to do it and then expecting their participation.

Don’t get me wrong, I support their efforts and I will support every other similar experiment I would spot in the future. Probably as most of you, I am also curious if these experiments actually are going to bring some money. I am even thinking to start one on my own, alongside with this blog. If comparing them with common bloggers, like me, I would say that they are much more sincere, because they are frank with their intentions. They want to make money from blogging and that’s it. And they even admit that we shouldn’t expect some high quality content in their blogs. I don’t dare to write something like that in my blog, because honestly, deep down inside, I hope that someone, someday, will say great things about it.

Opposite to what Ben Cook says in About page, that we shouldn’t really listen to him, his Blogging Experiment contains some cool articles about blogging and newbie like I am will find useful guidelines over there. So don’t be afraid to pay him a visit. Don’t forget to leave a comment and to click some ads. After all, his main goal is to make money with that blog.

And for Ben, keep up the good work. I’m sure you’ll succeed.

That would be all for tonight. Please leave your comments because they are much appreciated.

Until my next post, have a great life.  

BlogRush – [Don't] Give It A Try

UPDATE NOTE: WordPress won’t let you use this or any other widget containing JavaScript in your blog because of security reasons. Full article here. Somebody at BlogRush should mention that somewhere on their website so people wouldn’t waste their time. Very bad practice.

Hi there everybody.

Today I was quite busy with development so I haven’t had much time to work on a new post. I am already exhausted and meant to go to sleep, but then I’ve found this article about BlogRush and decided to stay awake for one more hour (at least).

BlogRush or Blog Syndication Network as they like to call it, based on same principals as many times seen link exchange programs, among few other features is offering additional exposure of your blog’s RSS feed in exchange for displaying their RSS widget on your blog. Plus, you’ll get additional traffic in exchange for exposure of their RSS widget made by referrals you’d forward to their website. More detailed video about their service is available at their website’s main page. Since I have just started my blog I am not refusing any possible way of getting more traffic, so I decided to give it a shot.

First thing to approve is simple and straight forward registration procedure. After few steps, you are ready to roll.

Installation of their service is also quite simple, but I still haven’t managed to activate their widget on this blog. Not sure what’s the reason for that and I am still waiting for response from their customer support. Anyhow, everything on this website is quite simple and easy to understand so I don’t think this should be a big issue. A step-by-step video tutorial for installing a BlogRush with your WordPress blog and few others, is available here.

Their reporting is available only 24-48 hours after installation of their service. Since I’ve just registered with them I can’t tell much more about it.

FAQ section is being prepared (coming soon or even there already at the time you’d be reading this).

All together looks like a prospective thing and I suggest you to give it a try.

That’s it for today. I can’t keep my eyes opened any longer. Thank you for visiting and I hope you’ll be coming back in the future.

Please leave your comments because they are much appreciated.

Until next post, have a great life. 

Thank You John Chow!

Hi there everybody and welcome to my blog.  

First thing I’d like to point out is that I probably wouldn’t have started this blog yet for another couple of months, or even years, or maybe never, if I wouldn’t be lucky to bump into John Chow’s website (John Chow dot Com). This happened earlier today while I was browsing through del.icio.us articles. Few posts read and I’m hooked up. Few hours later and I am sitting here, at my desk, writting my first post ever.  

John Chow dot Com is great website, but it’s not first blog about blogging I’ve visited and I was already been thinking about my own blog for a long period of time. What made a difference was one article from his e-book Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com. By the way it’s a great book and if you haven’t read it already please do so. It’s free and it’s real and it gives you bunch of helpful info (if you are, or want to become a blogger). The article which I want to mention here is called Giving Yourself An Out. Here is a paragraph from that article:

“… You know why a person with a loser’s mentality always uses words like “someday”, “I hope” or “I wish”? He does it because it gives him an out and allows himself to not be accountable for his word. If he was to place a time limit on the goal and doesn’t do it, he fails, and a loser hates failing. Winners have no fear of failing because they know success is made from a string of failures …”

Suddenly, I woke up. What the heck I was waiting for, all this time. Right moment. Great idea. Something else … I’ve realized it really isn’t about the money it’s about blogging. So, I came home from work, powered my laptop and started to work on it. Per John Chow’s suggestion, I’ve made my blog with WordPress. Registered, changed theme from default and here I am.

Sure this post is not a work of art but it’s a huge step for me in the world of blogging. Sure my writing skills are poor, but I will try to improve them over the time. Most important thing is that I’ve started this and I am feeling really excited. Once again, I would like to say one big THANK YOU to John Chow and his blog, which I recommend to all of you interested in blogging.

Thank you all for visiting and I hope you’ll be coming back.

Please leave your comments cause they are much appreciated.

Until my next post, have a great life.