On Tuesday, i have to register for college and that always signals the ‘end of summer’ for me. For some reason i always seem to end up with loads of work starting back to college. This year is no different…

I remember saying this last year but college will actually act as a ‘break’ for me. During the week, for the past couple of weeks, i’ve been working about 10 hours a day and probably a combined 10 hours at the weekends. So 60 hours / week in total. Exaggerating? Not at all. Tomorrow i’ll be rolling out another site on theleavingcert.com network which will help to ‘prove’ that.

These sites don’t build and run themselves. I spent 7 hours on Thursday trying to make a wordpress plugin play ball. Out of the box, it almost did what i wanted, but it was missing one key feature… so i spent about 5 hours diving in to files and studying how the plugin was put together, line by line. Eventually i was able to build up a mental picture of what line of code did what. Now i knew how to solve the problem in plain english, but not in php.

So i spent another 2 hours or so messing about until i came up with a solution in php… i can’t even write php, but i can hack. I know enough to get by and make things work. And of course i’m learning all the time and only getting better. For those curious, the plugin / my solution is here.

The second problem took the same length of time and it was much easier but still time consuming. A custom bbpress theme design. To match our existing theme design on students.theleavingcert.com. You’ll see it tomorrow

So there’s a common theme running through my life right now… education. However, i’m beginning to use my own education to create things and solve problems, which is exactly what education should do. But education is useless without work rate and quite often the smarter we become, the lazier we become.

Could i have paid people to solve those problems for me? Yes. Could i just give up or switch off after so many hours? Yes. But in doing that i’d learn nothing. I wouldn’t move forward… the easy option is just to walk out when the going gets tough or get somebody else to solve the problem.

Instead, i worked and worked and then worked some more until eventually at around 3am on Friday morning, i cracked a problem i’d spent most of the day working on. Ok, it may be a trivial problem to some but that’s not the point. The point is that i not only possessed the ability to solve problems i’d previously regarded as ‘impossible’, but i also possessed the self-belief and work ethic to make things happen and didn’t stop until they did happen. The best thing of all, is that i had nobody pressuring me or no financial reward at the end of it.

That’s the kind of work ethic which i love and the kind i’m hoping to maintain…

In my quest to create the best possible home office environment for myself, i’ve checked two more things off the to-do list today…

White board Mounted

The white board i got a couple of weeks ago has been mounted on a wall at last. I’ve deliberately kept the ‘path’ to it clear. So i can now swivel over to it and start to write or stick stuff on it. I just have to get in to the habit of using it now but i’m already in the habit of writing down notes on post-its so really all i have to do is keep doing that and stick them on the whiteboard.

I probably won’t use the marker much, but it’s nice to have it there..

Leather Bin

Bins aren’t important in the grand scheme of things… or are they simply having a bin within reach encourages you to get rid of that paper, so they are important to keep clutter to a minimum. A stylish, good looking bin can only, surely, encourage you to use it more…

I liked the look of this brown leather bin, so i got it today. For the first time ever, i now have a bin beside my desk. It’s the small things that matter…

Or in this case, quality content always rises to the top of google Just a few days after we unshackled students.theleavingcert.com, here it is, flying high in google already…

I said previously we were doing risky things in terms of SEO with our leaving cert revamp… unchartered waters for me and i wasn’t (and i’m still not) sure how exactly google will react. But the early signs are good.

Our main site, ‘theleavingcert.com’ is still holding on to it’s crown as top dog for the terms ‘leaving cert’ in google.ie which i was expecting it to, seen as we haven’t touched it yet… but right up it’s backside in no.2 spot is students.theleavingcert.com… despite the fact we’ve barely taken the plastic wrapping off it.

It will probably chop and change because we’ll have to make more changes to that site, but so far the early indications are good. The risky move is looking like a smart one People are often fascinated by SEO but without content, SEO is nothing.

• The cup is your website.
• The coffee is your content.
• The cream is your SEO.

Combine the three and search engines lap it up.

Anyway, moving away from SEO and on to content on students.theleavingcert.com. We never said how many bloggers we were going to have this year but myself & Enda agreed a cap of 10 first of all. When it became clear there was far more interest than we had predicted, we raised it to 15…

Now, all 15 places have been filled. 15 bloggers will keep students.theleavingcert.com ticking over for a year. But the applications kept coming in… more and more…

photo credit: MrMio

So we’ve decided to accept an unlimited amount of ‘guest’ bloggers. Basically we control when posts from our guest bloggers are published. With our regular bloggers, they’re free to publish whenever they want.

The reason we set a limit of 15 bloggers originally was because stats showed us previous bloggers posted twice per month on average. So 15 bloggers x 2 posts = 30 posts per month. 1 post per day on average. That was our thinking. Ok, it was never going to run that way, but we figured it was a ‘safe’ number. Not too busy, not too quiet….

The danger in accepting an unlimited amount of bloggers is that content gets buried and i wanted to ‘protect’ our bloggers from that as much as possible. It’s important they get their fair share of time on the homepage.

So we’ve decided to accept ‘guest’ bloggers and because we control when their posts get published, we can help prevent content from getting buried quickly. We could of course just let anyone sign up and submit posts and approve them as we see fit but that’s not really how the site has worked for the past few years. It would be too drastic to make changes like that now. Maybe next year

But the bottom line is that we have a minimum of 15 approved bloggers contributing this year and we could end up with many more ‘guest’ bloggers. They’re churning out posts for fun at the minute and no doubt the novelty will ware off quickly but it’s our job to ensure it doesn’t

Starting Monday, we roll out another sub site. Part #2 in our overall revamp plans for theleavingcert.com. More about what we’re doing here.

My new speakers arrived yesterday but they’re not the only new addition to my home office…

More Storage Space

Earlier today my wordrobe was turned in to a camouflaged shelving unit… here it is on the outside, just a regular old wardrobe. Nothing fancy.

Open the doors however and it’s now a full fledged storage unit.

The perfect solution to help me organize everything and keep my desk clear from clutter. On the top shelf we have a variety of stationery… pens, markers, staplers, post it notes, tip ex, paper clips, sellotape, envelopes, elastic bands, scissors… stuff that’s just handy to have.

The second shelf is holding all of my binding equipment. Third shelf is holding few baskets of random stuff that i haven’t managed to properly organize yet. Fourth shelf is the folder shelf. All important documents, college stuff and paperwork go here.

At the bottom we have a few books, reams of paper and i’ll keep a few hard drives and stuff there too.

New Speakers

On Sunday i ordered new speakers from amazon and they arrived yesterday. Great service from amazon. Lightening quick delivery. Why pay for next day delivery when you can wait two days and save €10+? In fact, any time i’ve dealt with amazon, delivery has been rapid and their service top notch.

The logitech x540 speakers i got arrived in a surprisingly small box. The subwoofer is a good bit smaller than my last subwoofer but the satellite speakers are much nicer. Fancy ‘swivel’ stands, nice classy appearance… they look more pleasing on the eye than my last set.

In terms of sound, not much difference between my last set of Creative speakers and these Logitech ones. Not that i was expecting much – they’re both pretty similar on paper. It’s just nice to be able to walk out of the room without having to worry about the volume magically increasing which is of course the reason why i got them… my last set were on their last legs. I did get 5 years of daily work out of them though.

The only criticism i’d have of the logitech x540′s is that the cable length of the wired remote is very short. Likewise with the power lead. So short i couldn’t keep the subwoofer on the floor. I had to put it behind my monitors but i had a bit of wasted space back there anyway so it’s no big deal.

So all i need now is a bin, some more extension leads and i still have to get my white board up on the wall.

I thought this revamp on theleavingcert.com would be a smart move, but just a few days in and we’ve been amazed by the response. Part one of the revamp aka students.theleavingcert.com is creating a rather large headache for us…

Accept or Reject?

Content overload. User overload. Limit. Exceed. We’ve had an incredible amount of applications for our blogging team of 2010/2011. It’s getting to the stage now where we can’t really accept more no matter how incredibly gifted they are with words. Which is a shame. So we must think on our feet and make quick decisions. This is a time to be creative and turn problems in to solutions. Make things work for everyone.

The ‘problem’ we face is accepting too many bloggers. Too many bloggers is of course great for us, it means more content. But we must also protect our existing bloggers and give them the opportunity to be heard. They can’t be heard if there’s floods posts coming in day by day. And that’s what will happen if we don’t have limits and caps on the number bloggers.

But this is a very nice, unexpected problem to have… don’t feel sorry for me. It just gives forces me to think on my feet and revamp the revamp.

No. Just no.

Whatever it is, i’m not doing it. With immediate effect, i’m stopping all work on any other projects. I have a few client sites to take care of but after that, i’m refusing all work / partnerships / anything that takes up time. The reason for that is theleavingcert.com. theleavingcert.com is growing too rapidly and showing too much promise to just ignore.

It’s eating up so much of my time now that i may as well commit to it full time, officially. I also start back in college in a couple of weeks time so i really won’t have the time for anything else.

Whatever the question is, no is the answer until further notice