July 25th, 2010
Blerz
I made the transition from an office working code monkey to a self-sufficient work for myself at home small business 2 months ago. Here’s how I did it.
- Confidence – I have 2 kids and a wife who is also an independent business person. It didn’t occur to me to worry if I could support the family without that steady paycheck. I had so many good ideas but no time to implements them. I was sure that I would start making enough money to pay the mortgage (2 of them, as a matter of fact), because I was able to find a good job and pay the bills that way. There is essentially no difference between working for someone or working for yourself, functionally. Either way you have a path to success – you know your success point. Its only the trip from where you are now to where you want to be that is different. Inspired by that sometimes rocky path…
- I saved the money to do this. Yes, I was confident, but stuff happens. I could have been hit by a bus the day I resigned. So i saved up a generous cushion fund to make sure a) I had enough to feed the family, just in case and b) I wouldn’t feel panicked or overwhelmed by being on my own suddenly. The pressure I would put on myself, I figured, would be enough stress, without the gnawing worry of how to pay a month’s mortgage. We stripped absolutely every last bit from our budget, went without dining out or anything like that for 2 years. Remember, this is my make or break moment – the difference between working for myself for the rest of my life, or a working holiday and then back into someone else’s rat race. 2 years of hone made dinners is a pretty small price to pay.
This ends part one. Part 2 will be up this week.
July 7th, 2010
Blerz
This tutorial is meant for those who have used WordPress before, though it isn’t essential. Let me know in the comments if you think any parts need further explanation.
- Download and install WordPress 3.0. The latest version finally gets rid of that annoying admin password auto-generation, and instead allows you to set an Admin username and password during installation.
- Yes, WordPress installation is that easy.
- Set remote rpc under settings>writing – I do this because I update multiple blogs simultaneously and it requires remote XML-RPC
- Set permalink structure for SEO. Click Settings>Permalinks, I usually use /%category%/%postname%.html/ or /%category%/%postname%/ (I’ve seen some people claiming this doesn’t work, or is wrong/bad/stupid, but meh – it’s always worked well enough for me, and I’m in the middle of testing alternate permalink structures to see if there really an effect)
- Delete default ‘Hello World’ post
- delete defaultcomment
- Set user first and last name for posting display purposes Users>your profile
- Update the ‘Uncategorized’ category to something juicy, so if you’re like me and forget to set categories when doing batch wordpress updates, then at least your permalink will show the right subject. No idea if this is good bad or indifferent for SEO purposes, but it hasn;t failed me yet.
- delete about page
- install theme
- Install plugins – akismet, all in one SEO all in one, feedwordpress, google xml sitemap, twitter tools. These are the base plugins I put on every blog – but I generally add them from within the new wordpress installation, to make sure I get the latest versions.
- Add the new site to your Google Analytics account.
- Add the new site to your Google Webmaster Tools account.
- Create a new ad and channel for this site in Google Adsense, and then get your new ads and put them on the site.
- Add other affiliate marketing ads/networks etc, whatever your deal is
now to create content
- import whatever blog you want (generally I create multiple blogs on the same subject to test the waters and see which design/voice/style works the best – I import another blog to flesh out the new blog – I don’t believe in the hypothetical Google penalty for duplicate content, but I could be wrong )
- Using the feedwordpress plugin, funnel some posts from your other sites to this new one – be sure not to just randomly grab other bloggers’ RSS feeds – even if you think its ok, you dont want someone sending you a nice friendly letter from their lawyer a few months down the road. That is a hassle no one needs.
- write one original posts, with keywords
- Use the Google Sitemap plugin to generate a sitemap, and add that to Google Webmaster tools
- Now the real work begins!
Notes:
With WordPress 3.0, installing plugins is the easiest its ever been. Click ‘Add New’ under plugins, do a search for the plugin names as I’ve given them, then it’s a one click install. Some of the plugins do require activation and/or settings changes, but the ones I’ve listed here all all self-explanatory.
July 6th, 2010
Blerz
Recently I was setting up a CodeIgniter installation for a new project on my GoDaddy shared hosting account. I ran into a slight problem: I was getting the CodeIgniter 404 error doc while trying to just get to the default home/index page! Here’s how I fixed it:
In System > Application > Config > config.php
Change:
$config['index_page'] = "index.php";
to this:
$config['index_page'] = "index.php?";
and further down in that same file:
change:
$config['uri_protocol'] = "AUTO";
to:
$config['uri_protocol'] = "REQUEST_URI";
June 29th, 2010
Blerz
The tools you use to do web development can really make the difference between success and failure – the better your tools, the more efficient your development, which means quicker time to market, which means more time to spend on making tweaks and bugfixes to the apps/sites you release out into the wild.
- The Internet: OK, it seems a little silly to list this as the number 1 tool to use every day, but it’s true – using the Internet is the most important part of successful web dev. Knowing where to search, how to search, and how to use what you find – these are all vitally important to success in developing web sites, web applications, or really any kind of software development.
- Development Server: I myself use WAMP, which is a super simple easy toi install and use ‘full stack’ (server, database, web dev language (PHP)) solution. It’s free, stable, and after using it for a couple weeks it will feel like home. If you’re coming from the Windows world, it’s invaluable – if your a Linux user, you most likely have a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, perl/PHP) baked into your Linux distribution, or you can get it easily via apt-get, rpms, or other ways, like the Ubuntu SoftwareCenter. You can download WAMP from here
- Graphics Software – I use Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended
, which is very expensive, but totally worth it – I used Macromedia Fireworks before they were bought out by Adobe, and found it to be almost as good, at least for rapid visual prototyping, with the use of layered PNG images.
- Free Web Resources: SmashingMagazine regularly has freebies they offer for download that are most likely as nice or nicer that anything you can design yourself, at least for WordPress themes. and Icons. Make sure you locate and read the terms and license, if you are planning to use any of the resources in public facing projects. Generally they offer stuff that you can use for personal sites/projects, and sometimes for commercial use as well.
- Development tool – A programming IDE. I do most of my freelance programming in PHP, and
Dreamweaver CS5
– but it is very expensive. I’ve used Komposer, Komodo, vim, emacs, Notepad++ and so on, and I keep coming back to Dreamweaver, since I’ve been using it since version 3. This is 100% personal preference, but my advice is to find a good IDE, and really stick with it – really get to know every aspect of it to improve your workflow – the faster you develop good code, the more money you’re going to make in the long run.
