JoeBailey.ORG

Does this sound familiar? You are sitting at your desk working, you have an idea, you research it on the internet. Wow, you think, I found some great information, this gives me another idea. Since this is such a good idea, you think…. I’ll research this other idea and then, before you know it, 30 minutes have passed. Geez, in 30 minutes, I could have finished my work. Well, it happens to all of us. I call this Business ADD.

So, how do you solve business ADD, well the good thing is, you don’t need to see the doctor. An excellent solution to solve this is to do one thing, write it or type it. Since your idea is a great, you don’t want to forget it. So, track it. Personally, my solution involves using Franklin Covey’s time management quadrant and Outlook.

Here’s how it works. Open up Outlook Tasks. Every time you get a great idea or thought, type it into your task list, and get back to work. Set a time of day, let’s say before lunch or before you go home, take a look at the list. Next, go through the list one at a time, if you still think the task is worthwhile, keep it, otherwise delete it. By just doing that, you’ll save yourself at least 30 minutes a day.

Now, if you are getting advanced, there’s another trick. Using Outlook Tasks, create a category for eac of Covey’s 4 quadrants (Important|Urgent, Important|Not Urgent, Not Important|Urgent, Not Important, Not Urgent). Next time you go through your list of tasks, place the task into one of these categories. Now, sort your tasks on category and take a look. You will be amazed at what ideas/tasks are not important at all. Try this for a day, you’ll notice the difference in how much you can accomplish if you stick to the important items.

It’s been over a month now and I can’t find this blog on the search engines. Here’s one possible clue. This evening, I spent some time trying to find out why my site doesn’t have any meta tags. In doing so, I carefully walked through every setting in the options, and I may have found the answer to my search engine problem in the Privacy Options section. For some strange reason, my privacy options were set to block search engines.

So, if you’re curious as to why you can’t find yourself on the internet, you may want to check this out.

1. Log into your administrator account.
2. Click on the Options tab.
3. Click on the Privacy tab (sub navigation for Options)
4. Make sure the radio button labeled, “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” is checked.
5. If not, make sure the box is checked and click on the Update Options button.

In summary, this will change some of the settings in the hidden HTML code.

This is essentially the first month. Believe it or not, I’m actually making money already. It’s amazing.

Here are the results:
Google Adsense: $3.91 - $96.09 away from my first check from Google. Google requires you to reach $100 before they send you anything.
JoesWebShack Ads: $4.66

My dad is my biggest fan. Not too long ago, he sent me a link to the Randy Pausch lecture which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but watched it anyway. Since then, I have definitely reanalyzed my life and made it much easier. In fact, for about a week straight, every day, I would just let the lecture run in the background as I worked.

Here’s what I learned. Life is short, make it easy on yourself. But, of course this is more difficult than it seemed. But, I started following what he’s discussed and it’s made a lot of changes. Here are the steps that affected me the most:

1. Follow Covey’s 7 habits of highly successful people
2. Plan out my day, week, month, etc and stick to it. This was much harder than originally anticipated.
3. Analyze my day every evening and see how I can improve upon it.
4. Keep moving forward.
5. Analyze my time. Too much of my day was spent jumping around from task to task. Since then, I’ve been able to reduce the amount of time spent on each activity and eliminate those unnecessary ones.
6. Be proactive.
7. What would you do to help your family if you knew you were going to die soon? How come I’m not doing it now?
8. Ask why? I can accomplish anything or any task, why just tackle the simple ones with quick gratification. And, is this task, thing, really what I should do?
9. Focus. I found it much to easy to start on a tangent while working with the internet 2 milliseconds away.
10. Clean out my inbox every day. This is tricky. But, essentially, I’ll check my email 2-3 times per day. Answer or respond to any email, then categorize/file my emails into the respective areas. For example, I work on a lot of projects. I’ll file my emails in that project. Then, allocate time to each project. This allows me to clean my inbox, establish time for each project, and keep all of the information together.

Listen to it, think about it. You can’t lose anything, but a couple minutes of your time.

How did it go? Installation worked like a charm. Make sure to read the readme file that comes with the zip. Follow the instructions carefully. Also, once I ran the plugin to build the map for the first time, it took a while, and timed out. I had to hit the back button to reload the page to see possible solutions. The following link will take you directly there.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2006/04/07/google-sitemaps-faq-sitemap-issues-errors-and-problems/#P28_gen_memtime

Here’s what it states:
The last run didn’t finish or I just get a white screen
It could be that your server is not configured to run memory-heavy scripts like a sitemap generator.
-Try to increase the memory limit on the sitemap options page (start by “4M” and raise the value if it doesn’t help).
-Try to increase the time limit on the sitemap options page (start by “20″ and raise the value if it doesn’t help).
-If it’s still not working you may not have the permission to change these settings so you need to ask your hoster to raise the limit

I chose the first and easiest option which was to increase the memory on the sitemap options and it worked! To do this, go back to the Options page for the site generator for example: http://www.joebailey.org/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=sitemap.php
Once there, look in the section, Advanced Options and type in 4M (like the example text given) in the second option labeled “Try to increase the memory limit to. ” Then scroll all the way down to the bottom (CTRL+End can get you there quickly) and hit the update button. That’s it!

If anyone is looking for a good ftp program, I use filezilla which is free. You can find filezilla here: http://filezilla-project.org/
Installation Link: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

The internet and applications like this have come an extremely long way. It used to be that programmers like myself were the only ones that could edit web pages. Even though software like WordPress is easy, it still requires some technical prowess.

So, if you are in need of any help installing plugins for WordPress, I’d be more than happy to help. Feel free to contact me if you need help with the installation of anything. Keep in mind though, I’m a contractor for hire, so I’d have to charge you.

The optimal title installation allows you to change the order of the titles on your pages. To see your title, look at the very top of your browser window in the blue bar. If you’re using Internet Explorer 7, it will state something like JoeBailey.ORG > whatever page your on - Windows Internet Explorer.

This tool changes the title around to state whatever page your on > JoeBailey.ORG - Windows Internet Explorer.

So, why do this? SEO is the reason, essentially changing the title around will help search engines categorize your page. The idea is that the title of the page will state a summary of the page.

Findings. I happen to have an older version of WordPress, so I had to install it. But, the good news is that if you have a version of WordPress 2.5 or higher, you don’t need the plugin.

Experience. The installation was extremely easy.

Ok, I took a timeout. Of course, I’m not supposed to.

I found out that if you use free hosting with JoesWebShack or with GoDaddy, you can’t get RSS feeds to work. I read it in the blogs, but called to confirm just in case.

So, if you’re looking to get the full effect of RSS feeds, it won’t work.

I tried switching over to a server I have, only to find out I couldn’t install the latest wordpress because it requires some different server configurations. What to do? Well, I became caught up in domain name hell once I switched over and couldn’t figure out how to switch my domain name back to this site. Now, it’s resolved.

The problem was that I had to change my a record on the domain. I have no idea how to fix it. Here are the instructions given to me on how to change a domain record and synch the A records. Note, this occurred because I point my free hosting domain to another hosting site, then tried to change it back.

So, right now, my site is free. Hosting is only $4 a month, but I decided to make it a goal. If I can figure out how to make $4 a month from this blog, then I’ll switch. That’s my goal for now.

Thank you for contacting Online Support. It appears that the hosting account for joebailey.org is not resolving at this time because the A record is not resolving to the hosting IP address. To find the hosting IP address, please use the instructions are below.

To find the IP address for your hosting server, please use the following information:

1. Click on My Account.
2. Log into your account.
3. In the My Products section, click Hosting Account List.
4. Click on the applicable Shared Hosting account.
5. The IP address is listed on the right side of the screen.

Once you have this information, you can modify the A record for the domain name.

To change the IP address for your domain:

1. Select Manage Domains from the My Products menu.
2. Click on the domain for which you wish to change the IP.
3. Click Total DNS Control and MX Records.
4. Under the A (Host) section, click the pencil icon for the first entry.
5. Enter the new IP address into the Points To Ip Address: field.
6. Click OK.

Please allow up to 24 hours for this information to update with the Internet routing and DNS servers.