I was preparing another reason not to blog for my reasons not to blog series. It was going to be entitled “My Blog has an Identity Crisis”. But I actually caught myself freewriting about what I wanted to do with this blog. Which triggered a memory of why I started this blog in the first place.

It was a place to empty my mind of things I wanted to get done. By freewriting, I could put things straight in my head. After a while, I polished these pieces up and added them here. Sometimes, if there were a process or a procedure I did not want to forget, I wrote about it and posted it here. If I found pages too important to be lost in my Delicious account forever, that was when I did link posts. And my lists of links were lists I used. I just thought I would add them here so they could be more useful to others.

But after a while, I forgot this and got caught up in trying to add quantity. And I read too many blogs on picking a narrow niche and keeping your posts focused. And now I have come to the conclusion that this is totally stupid. This site make hardly any money. I have other sites for that. There is no need to front anything here. And if anyone doesn’t like what I write then they have found the wrong blog. I have not written the wrong post.

And all this took to realize was to switch the focus of the post from a blogs identity crisis to who really has the authority to define a blog’s identity when there is no outside influence. By no outside influence, I mean taking the necessity of making money from this blog off the table although I will still pursue it here. I do have advertising available on my blog but will not let that influence what I write. I am no longer looking for clients gear posts locally or to certain topics.

Then the definition is mine to make and totally up to me. It is not a sink or swim situation. This is only for my own enjoyment and sanity.

I am not one to let life go on as it is without analyzing whatever I can. So I try to look for an explanation of how this happened. I guess I just have a weird mental makeup that let’s me fall back in the same ruts and have the same epiphanies every few years. It’s not as bad as it sounds or as cyclical but sometimes it seems that way.

For some reason, I fluctuate wildly between being fiercely independent to being a pushover in a social situation. I tend to take on the personality of people I am around. This affected me in my freelancing and in blogging here at this blog. Things I would be opposed at the beginning and rules I set for myself fly out the window eventually. I get really confused about the difference between what people want and what they really want.

And I have come to the conclusion that I need to stay away from idea people who have no idea of the mechanics of the field they are having ideas about. Because they know no scope, they know no priorities. And because they are idea people, they never stop with them. It is your job to be secretary and filter before you even work on their site. But you are never quite sure of their priorities and they never tell you so it is almost impossible to get a job finished. Because they say all they want is a finished product, but their definition changes as time goes on.

It is amazing how by segregating “my own thing” totally from “stuff people pay me to do” and minimizing the “stuff people pay me to do” allows me to make leaps and bounds in “my own thing”. I know it’s route and I spent the last 5 years or so learning the mechanics. And after last year, I have learned a little of my own limitations. I was that same idea person but I have some battle scars now and know what the land mines look like. When there are no big fires to put out, it’s just one foot in front of the other whether I get an hour or 20 hours to do my own thing each week and I can always see the progress.

For a while before this, I thought I was going crazy or slowly getting stupid. I used to finish things. I used like what I was doing. I used to see my goals. But I had gotten way to caught up in other people’s goals that mine got put way back in the back, back burner. And you know what, I made less money for it. There was no advantages to it. Except maybe to learn I do not do well freelancing.

I do well with “build a site and get traffic“. If you want a look, get a designer first. I may be able to develop, but if you want custom, hire someone else first. I like developing my own stuff. Only the pure reward of creating something you need is worth the bitch that it is. Creating someone else’s idea is a fate worse than death. I build fast and go live ASAP and then starting cleaning up, tweaking and adding things. My only method of developing. Gives you a chance to cut your lost time earlier if your calculations are off. Gives you a chance to start making any money to be made sooner.

Some people know just enough about the internet to be dangerous. They have ideas. But they have no idea of the process. Some things internet professionals do seem magic and a lot gets done in minutes. But some things like necessary, hardly seen details may take a week of work to finish. And it seems I attract these types of clients. Some do have a plan of action. But those that don’t or second guess themselves a lot will have you going crazy, running back and forth changing things but never really finishing anything. There is no perfect website, but they are going to build the first one the first time ala Duke Nukem.

My own sites follow an evolutional flow. When they are on my mind, I know what needs to be done and when. They just follow an order and time is not an issue because one foot will still be put in front of the other. I may never see farther the next two steps ahead, but the plan and goals are written down.I may think I can post three posts a week on a blog that is not and may never be correctly monetize but a few weeks later, the reality may be that that may have to fluctuate and one hell or high water post a week may have to be the goal. But those are the breaks. And this blog was just supposed to be a side product of that work.

When I posted here, I was excited to be working with ideas. When I stopped, that joy was gone.

Yes, while I was looking for freelance jobs, I bumped my rank up for local SEO and development terms to get jobs and it worked. But now I have let myself drop back out with a little restructuring. I do like the process of thinking on paper. I does tend to be vague and general but that is how I see things. The details tend to fall into place. If you read or learned about them somewhere, they find their places. I don’t work well with people at times. Never had the skill. But ideas and information, I am at home there.

So moving forward, I have some plans. Some old ones and some new ones. Nothing too drastic. But I think I broke another spell.

Who cares if the supernatural world is real or not? The real world can turn you into a zombie just as effectively

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Strange, but I figured might as well. The links I find follow no rhyme or reason anyway. They are just the byproducts of the work I do and the blogs I read and every now and then a random coincidence, which is why I still like StumbleUpon. And I will not be held down to the tyranny of a specific link day because some weeks I just collect more than others. Plus I have a new list of sites I am posting to my affiliate marketing blog, which will be my first link:

• An Analysis of 71 LinkWheel Sites – I don’t know if you have heard of them, but I think I here too much about them. Web 2.0 brought with it a lot of free content sites. No need to pay for hosting or install software. Instead build your network on freely available, authoritative content sites and point even site to your money blog or website. It is a bit more complex than that but you get the idea. I took a list of 71 of these fully featured free hosts, added PageRank and Alexa Data, found out which have revenue sharing (6), and added notes where I could.
• 15 methods to boost your PHP based website’s performance – I was looking for a way to cache parts of a page for different lengths of time. I ended up using gCache. It might end of playing a part in other software I am developing.
• 10 Writing Rules You Can’t Break…And How to Break Them – Sometimes the rules just don’t apply. How to throw out that Strunk & White at least momentarily.
• Creative Writing Tips for LinkBait Production – How to come up with ideas for linkbait or how to create a story so hot that you don’t have to build any links to it, everyone else will for you.
• ProgrammableWeb: How to Make Your Own Web Mashup – A lot of links to various API’s available on the internet. A great way to bring more content and data in for your visitors.
• Nesox Link Checker Free Edition Download – Software to check Pagerank and Alexa Rank and it’s free. And, yes, it is what I used to get the rank for my LinkWheel site list
• Wiktionary:Frequency lists – Wiktionary – I have been playing around with content classification and contextual matching for a few years now, trying to hit it from different angles. One angle I thought of was taking a sample of the most infrequently occurring keywords from the content. At some point over one word, a definite theme could be locked. So rather than trimming stop words and then indexing, go directly for the meat and build upward until a match is made. Think of it like Wheel of Fortune. You go for the easy letters to fill the board fast, but really if there was a z in that word you were trying to guess and it were visible, you would know the word right away. I find myself half the time searching Google this way. Not typing phrases, but trying to triangulate between three words I know have to be on the page, words that would never occur together except in the context I am looking for. This link is just a list of how often an English word occurs in various contexts from the Gutenburg Project, Movie Scripts, etc.
• Writing for Attention: Ammunition for Personalised Search – A great post on making your site stand out in Google’s new search results.
• DreamPie – I already warned you, I said random links. A few weeks ago I posted a link to Sikuli a visual programming tool. Well, you scripted that software in Python. After realizing Python was like the Volkswagon of programming languages, very forgiving to errors and simple, I found DreamPie, which is a Python shell.
• Most Beautiful Free Wordpress Themes for E-commerce – Nice themes to turn Wordpress into a shopping cart.

Let me guess. You’re an in-house ecommerce developer. About a year or so ago you heard about this slick ecommerce software called Magento. You’re skeptical but you see a large community and free extensions. So you think you can make it work.

Yeah, you can start with that default Magento theme. It’s better than that crappy table driven one you are currently using with osCommerce anyway. So you start with the default theme. And all is well until you try to get that stupid dog picture off of the sidebar. Some of you might have just stopped there and I can’t say that wasn’t a wise choice. But for those of you who stuck with it, this is probably only the first WTF moments in a long line with Magento.

I have developed in Wordpress, Drupal, phpBB, ZenCart and on and on. And it didn’t take me long to learn any one of these when I was a newbie. Enter Magento. Magento is a different creature all together. I am at a point now where I understand how Magento does what it does, but up to this point I have bypassed using modules to change things. If I couldn’t find an extension that suited my purpose, I would go to the theme files and create a custom theme to do what I want.

If only I had the Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide before I started on my long trek across the continent that is Magento. I already have learned a lot through Magento’s forums but this book added a few missing pieces to the puzzle, modules. Some of the chapters I skimmed, because I had already been through a few Magento installations:

• Installation – This part of the book will take you step by step through multiple ways of installing Magento. Magento has a massive amount of files and the quickest install process is through SSH. I learned this after uploading all the files manually once through FTP.
• Core API – I have used this a lot. Some things are just quicker through the API. In fact, there are some things that you can do through the API that you can’t even do through the backend. The book provides a complete reference to the Magento API and all the functions available.
• Import and Export – This was actually what I became an expert on first and one of the reasons I chose Magento was it’s flexible import and export process

But since I jumped into Magento with both feet with a site that was taking sales I didn’t quite learn enough about Zend and the book was good enough to give me a brief overview on the role that Zend plays in Magento. It is good to know the core structure so you know how everything else fits and works.

And despite all the theme hacking I have done with Magento, I still have yet to write a module and this book covered that topic in depth with a step by step tutorial. I now think I have everything I need to write modules for some ideas I have.

• Shipping Module – This chapter walks you through creating a module that gives customers custom shipping prices for orders over a certain amount touching on everything you need to know to create your own custom Magento shipping module.
• Payment Module – The payment module has to be one of the most important links in the chain. Something I have never tackled in any platform, because I would rather not make a mistake when it comes to money handling. But I think I have enough information now to write my own if I ever have to and I have been thinking of an affiliate module that would do things a little differently.
• Fully Featured Module – This chapter takes you through every step of creating a module that has a frontend pages with their own urls, a backend menu item and a backend form to edit the data.
• Third Party CMS Integration – Luckily there are extensions available to integrate Magento with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Typo3. The Wordpress integration extensions is one of the free ones, but it is not necessarily click a button and done like many Magento extensions. This chapter steps you through installing this extension and touches on the other CMS integration extensions available.

I will be referencing this book a lot in the future. Magento can be a monster but it can be worth the trouble. There are features in Magento you can’t find in any other shopping cart software. And this book will help you as a developer push Magento to it’s potential even if you have a PHD in Magento forum searching by now.

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Reason Not to Blog: Feeling Boxed In

This blog has subscribers. I have followers on Twitter. At one point, I realized these could be real people and I freaked out.

I used to spur of the moment posts about anything I happened to be doing during the day that might be useful to someone else. Then more people began reading and commenting on my blog and I wasn’t sure what to post next. At some point stage fright hits and there is so much you can’t write or at least you may tell yourself that.

Yes, I had just done something pretty cool with Filemaker and it had taken me a while. Should be useful information for someone and I have a good chance to rank in the search engines for specific Filemaker keyword. …But not everyone uses Filemaker. In fact, it costs money and I would not be using it had not the company I worked for bought it for the business. Will it cause subscribers to go away? Am I stretching my blog too thin?

And what if I write the posts I used to, the ones that totally take off on a tangent, that have nothing to do with anything online? What would happen then?

Really, who cares. If you are blogging about something you like, then do so and you will find subscribers. I am trying.

And  the $4000 notebook. It’s analogy. Don’t ever pay $4000 for a leather bound parchment paper notebook. Because you will start weighing your ideas and nothing will make it to paper. And if you end up with one, use it. Just imagine that it is a college rule spiral bound pad from the grocery store.

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• Bloggers: This Is How Long Your Posts Should Be

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• Top 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using LinkedIn

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• WordWeb: Free English thesaurus dictionary download

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• 9 Quick Tips for Catalog Quick Order | Get Elastic

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

First, let me tell you that I will soon be receiving the Magento 1.3 PHP Developer’s Guide to review. Magento has an architecture link no other software. Hopefully this  book sheds some light on developing with Magento and beats hunting a pecking through the forums. The last book I bought for a CMS was one for Drupal. With Wordpress, I picked up everything I know online.

Up to a few weeks ago, I was about done with Magento. I have a post I was working in in my drafts on suggested shopping carts. Magento is not in the list. Because anywhere attributes are loaded, Magento is slow.  Anywhere configurable products are loaded, Magento is slow. Anywhere products are listed in a collection, Magento is slow. You go to checkout and Magento is slow. This did not happen up to a certain amount of products and a certain amount of attributes, but at some point, the sites seem to hit a wall. But I have found a few solutions like html block caching in the meantime and think I can make this work for our sites using Magento. Not so sure I want to tackle another site using Magento yet though, at least not with the product complexity of Magento sites I have built.

And so yesterday I go and update our Magento installations to 1.4. Those who know Magento, know how well that went. But it’s working now and here is how I Upgraded to Magento 1.4, if you need that info.

The 1.4 version of Magento has custom variables, widgets and new cache and index system from what I can see so far.

I started writing this post a few weeks ago on a Sunday. I was just getting to a weekly rhythm and something broke, so that Sunday was different as most Sundays are. A schedule is always the best case scenario.

Before I started freelancing, I did have a rhythm but I forgot it and found it again and that’s what this post is about. For over a year now I only go into the day job 4 days a week at my day job and when I thought I was going to make a killing freelancing, I was only going in three days a week.

So back when I started the 4 day schedule, I was blogging and social networking in the morning before work and then on the weekend I spent the time writing and finishing drafts and building new projects. It was a nice schedule because it allowed me to get things done.

My projects tend to mess with my writing and blogging. If I think I can finish something in one day, nothing with stop me from believing that until the clock strikes midnight. Nothing else I have in my plan or schedule matters. I like having something done. I know myself well. I know that if I don’t keep myself on task, who knows what project I will start working on when the time comes to work again. So, basically, I don’t trust myself to pick the project up again after beating my head against the wall for a day.

After a weekend of crashing on projects, randomly writing and editing and doing much-needed reading, on Sunday I look over things and make sure I have the week ahead covered. I have been writing three posts a week here. I could write more than that but I would rather work on quality and patience. I have been very impatient in the past and couldn’t wait to hit the publish button.

So on Sunday, I look over my drafts, now which number about 100 in various states of finished and I pick two to publish because Friday’s post is just a list of links I have found during the week. I have tried to publish one Reason Not to Blog until that series is over. It was that series of random thoughts that turned into posts that got me blogging again and I figured it could help some others out.

Another thing that prevents me from running off chasing random ideas is carrying around a notebook. The notebook I use has changed a lot. I used to use a Moleskin. The thing about using one is that a Moleskin is nice and you can’t rip the pages out. I would find myself weighing my ideas before writing in the Moleskin and having a hard time separating those things that were done from those that were not, because I couldn’t rip pages out. Now I use a standard top spring 3×5 notebook that costs about a buck and sometimes I go through one in a week. A moleskin would last me a year, because it was an idea high rent district.

What this notebook does for me is free up my mind. Once an idea is in there, whether for a post, a site or a marketing technique, I don’t have to think of it any more. That is big freedom because I will try to keep every idea in my mind, number them to make sure one is not lost and then rotate through them during the day. Also, the ideas get time to sit. Until Sunday that is, when I start ripping pages out and putting ideas where they belong on project lists or in my drafts folder.

Since I write throughout the week and only post a few days out of the week, I will consistently have more drafts that posts and that means, if I really buckled down I could schedule posts out for a month if I had to, without actually being around. And in some ways, I am hoping this schedule works and as time goes on, there will be less projects and more writing and then I can post more.

So, do you do anything special to prepare for your week of online activities whether it be blogging or some other online work? Leave a comment and let me know how you do it.

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

And here are some similar phrases that I put in the same basket:

• “We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round.  The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round.  He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.”- George Bernard Shaw
• “If you build, they will come” – Random Ghost in W. P. Kinsellas “Shoeless Joe” (yes, there was a book before the movie “Field of Dreams” and the author they were traveling to see was J. D. Salinger.)
• “If men were meant to fly, God would have given him wings” – A lot of people with a close connection to God who seems to have changed his mind. He does that a lot. He’s an old god and has a touch of Alzheimers.
• “Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.” – Jimmy Swaggert
• “Fascism combats . . . not intelligence, but intellectualism . . . which is . . . a sickness of the intellect . . . not a consequence of its abuse, because the intellect cannot be used too much . . . it derives from the false belief that one can segregate oneself from life. . .” – Giovanni Gentile, addressing a Congress of Fascist Culture, Bologna, 30 March 1925
• “Ignorance is better than knowledge” – Tao Te Ching

This is an answer to this post: sachin.posterous.com/will-seo-experts-ruin-search-results-or-will

And no, that is not a link because that would be SEO too, just to let you know.