The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 98)

Went to open houses and watched movies all day.

Monday (Day 99)

Did the food shopping, blogged, and roasted a chicken in an attempt to become #1BF! Got pretty discouraged about blogging. Sure, I love to do it, but a day laborer would laugh at my internet earnings. I think my content is good, but I currently lack the ability to get it in front of more of the people that will enjoy it. I need to find more people who are like you and me.

Tuesday (Day 100)

Read Blogging, Advertising, and SEO articles for half the day and took on another advertiser. Ate leftovers, watched a movie, and laid awake trying to figure out how to fit in movie reviews in a way that’s both useful and searchable. I have hundreds piled up, and I want them to be presented in the easiest, most useful way to people who read them.

This was an 11 hour workday.

Wednesday (Day 101)

Came to the realization that #1GF! might think that I screw off all day because a portion of my day is spent reading feeds and surfing the web. Because I treat my blogging as my job now, I read a ton of articles on how to make money on the web, as well as trying to find interesting things out there to present. I am at the computer from 8:30 AM to at least 6:30 PM working on this site, and it ain’t easy. It’s what I love to do, so it doesn’t seem like work, but I work harder at it than I have at any job. And I worked hard on my last job.

Went through my archives and started reformatting posts that haven’t seen the light of day in years. Came across a post on the death of a family friend and 75 Clues You Might Be A Metalhead.

Got my Kubb set post featured on the Make Magazine blog which wiped out any discouragement left over from the beginning of the week. The link brought in more visitors in a day than I typically get in a month.

I showed #1GF! my FineTune Friday artwork and she said something like “Wow. It’s too bad that no one will appreciate it. They don’t care. It’s good. You are wasting your talent.” I love to impress her. I felt very proud of even if she says a lot of things just to get in my pants.

Thursday (Day 102)

Tried to figure out an alternate solution for getting TV schedules for GBPVR since Zap2It Labs closed their free guide. Yapi2xml seemed promising, but the Yahoo programming database is so flaky that I haven’t gotten a TV guide downloaded in a week. #1GF! was feeling the pain because she is the queen of the DVR.

My blogroll was huge, and no one gave a click about it, so I thought I’d try to make it more manageable and useful. When I couldn’t find a solution that fit my needs, I spent most of the day and night writing a WordPress Widget called Better Blogroll. It required me to dust off some SQL gears that haven’t been turned in a while, but it will hopefully drive more traffic to some of the good people who are featured on my blogroll.

One of my long time blogroll members, Michelle got added to my Netflix friends list. She is the first person added that I consider a friend who I’ve never met or even spoken to in person. The internet is weird with creating friendships like that. A post over at Snoskred confirms that I’m not alone in building these strange types of friendships.

When #1GF! got home, the guys from my old job (Pete, Preston, Greg, and Pierre as far as I know) sent some cha siu bao home with #1GF!. Even though it had been sitting in a refrigerator all day and #1GF! had just brought home pizza, I was overjoyed to scarf that bun down. I really believe that cha siu bao is the world’s most perfect food. It is my desert island food. Xie xie, guys.

Thanks to Tony, I found out that FineTune is pretty happy about our FineTune Fridays. That’s good to hear considering the number of stations everyone has put together.

This was a 16 hour workday.

Friday (Day 103)

I finished off the Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress and I was a happy, happy man. I finally found the two letters that were screwing up the code. Feeling a little cocky, I started adding more options to it and ended up ctrl-z’ing ([CTRL]-Z is undo for most applications) my way back to a stable release. After it was done, I had to put together the documentation for it, and submit it to Wordpress for approval.

Afterward, I went on to learn how to register a second Wordpress sidebar and widgetize all of my plugins. The only one left is the Show Top Commentator Plugin which I’ll probably have to widgetize on my own. I was skeptical about the widgets at first, but they really make things easy when you want to shuffle around your sidebar.

Got a little help from Brian (a t-shirt king and long time member of my blogroll) on certain issues that I had overlooked in my site design. He offers really good things to think about on the subject.

I started looking into other affiliate programs to see if I can make all the little bits of cash turn into big amounts of cash. I also got my first site sponsor from Text-Link-Ads (see my sidebar). And I couldn’t believe that it was The Family Guy. How kick ass is that? I want to get my 70’s radio announcer to do a spot that says “Dyers.org is brought to you by… The Family Guy.” Booyah.

In my spare minutes, I offered my expertise to a fellow blogger who was in a bind thanks to a bit of spyware and to another who is looking to build some servers. By 7PM, #1GF! still wasn’t home, which left me sitting alone in the dark in front of the PC after another 11 hours.

Saturday (Day 104)

This is normally a “no boogging day”, but #1GF! went out, so I spent the day working on affiliate marketing. There was a lot to look at and the day flew by. I looked into setting up an LLC, but gave up after finding out that they cost $500 per year to maintain. I looked into getting a federal tax ID and into more affiliate programs. I didn’t write a word and worked all day. This meant it was a six day workweek.

What I Learned

• I can work on my site for 14 hours and it doesn’t seem like work.
• I still have the need to help people with their virus issues.
• Friendships are strange things that are difficult to define.
• You mean more to people than you might think. Yes, all of you.
• Incorporating as an LLC doesn’t seem hard, but it will need to be justified by income matching the $500/year cost.
• Advertising has become as fun and addictive as video games and it pays slightly more. Although just slightly.
• I’m still a problem solver at heart.
• I still love pouring over PHP and MySQL queries. Code is fun and poetic.
• I invariably spend more time debugging than writing code.
• Notepad++ (free and open source) is still indispensable for cutting down stupid code mistakes.
• If left alone, I will continue working until I fall asleep at the PC.
• I learned how to make a Wordpress widget.
• I learned how to register multiple sidebars in Wordpress.
• Some affiliates have much better clients than others.
• You can get a Federal Employer ID Number (EIN) for your business in about two seconds.
• The Family Guy finally likes me as much as I like them. It’s no longer a one way street.
• Some readers do appreciate my artwork.
• In Facebook, people can introduce other people to you. Every day I’m more impressed with it as a networking tool.
• Unexpected gifts at unexpected times can make a great day fantastic. Thanks again, guys.
• Trying to be something you’re not will eventually surround you with a bunch of people you don’t fit in with. If you be yourself, you attract people who are like you. Birds of a feather really do flock together. I guess that means that if you’re reading this, you are probably at least part weirdo.

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