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RSSLife of Riley Week 17
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 112): Fascination
Drove my sister to the airport and went for a long walk with #1GF! where we contemplated one of the bank owned crap holes that is on the market in town. We could probably make it into something nice, but it looks like it would be a fair amount of work.
On the way home, we stopped into Fascination, a sort of golden era gambling hall that’s always filled with old ladies. #1GF! walked in first, so I was obligated to follow. I walked up to the guy on an elevated platform and said that we’d like to play and if he could explain the rules.
You roll two rubber balls into a wooden 5×5 square, and when the ball goes through a hole, it lights up the corresponding spot on the board in front of you. The first person to light all 25 lights wins. It was sort of like bingo mixed with ski ball, but you’re sitting down. It was only a quarter per game, and I ended up winning a buck once. It took $3 to win one, but it was pretty fun.
Afterward, I begged #1GF! not to make me cook and ducked into a local restaurant to blow whatever cash we had left on dinner.
Monday (Day 113): Free Stuff and SEO
I created my e-mail icon pack for people who are looking for an RSS style e-mail subscription icon, but don’t want to steal anyone else’s artwork. It didn’t take very long to complete because it’s all vector graphics, which makes scaling icons lossless.
After that, I read a lot. One of the better things that I came across was a free e-book from Yaro Starak called the Blog Profits Blueprint. In spite of all the “how to make money” posts I read on a daily basis, I still took a few good tips from it. It’s solid information for anyone looking to make some money from their sites.
From there, I worked on some site mods and sought out 66 of the finest Halloween fonts I could find. I only stopped because #1GF! got home. She is like my quitting whistle.
Tuesday (Day 114): PHP and MySQL
#1GF! liked my Halloween font post, but suggested that I needed an image to go with it. Of course I couldn’t disappoint her, so I spent a couple of hours putting one together.
After that, I made some security fixes to WordPress, upgraded to WordPress 2.3, caught up on my reading, and upgraded my Better Blogroll Widget for WordPress to work with WordPress 2.3. Because WordPress changed a lot of tables to include tagging natively, they broke a lot of tag based plugins. It took a good few hours to upgrade my plugin’s double SQL join to a triple SQL join. If you’ve ever done multiple joins in SQL, you won’t be surprised that I went to bed after logging 16 hours of work on the PC.
Wednesday (Day 115): SEO and Security
Read a bunch of SEO stuff. Wrote a post on surviving a WordPress upgrade, which reminded me to lock down my robots.txt and .htaccess files, create a google sitemap, change my page title to something that made more sense than the title I had been dragging around for the last five years, and introduce a META description that is missing from the default WordPress installation.
You don’t need an SEO plugin to make your Wordpress titles better. You can add some simple code to your header file that will do it for you. I’ll have to put together a post on it one day. This was an eleven hour day.
Thursday (Day 116): Social Networks
Woke up and started the day with a little movie called D.O.A. It was lame but awesome at the same time. I finished up my posts for the week by noon and breezed through some reading. Did some free tech support for my sister and her non-profit. Updated my template to include a wider search bar and added a new feature called “The Smokin’ Poll”. We’ll see if it lasts. Read about openads and put off setting it up because I wasn’t sure if expending more effort to manage my relatively unsuccessful advertising efforts is warranted right now.
Started combing my social networks and updated my contact page with a number of the networks you can find me in. I also started bundling up my del.icio.us tags to make them easier to sift through. I ate a sandwich for dinner and worked for 15 hours plus or minus an hour for a flash game or two.
Friday (Day 117): Graphic Design and Goal Destruction
#1GF! had taken a vacation day and expected it to rain, so she started on the 18 hour process of making pasta sauce. I was supposed to write, but I ended up trying to write a more complex WordPress plugin than I have the skills for right now. When that started tearing up my brain, I screwed around with Inkscape to create the graphics for Monday’s post. All in all, it felt like a major waste of a day on my part.
I checked my stats for the month, and some of my pages getting picked up by other sites has pushed my traffic from 4k unique users per month to nearly 15k unique users. My goal for the last few months has been to break 10k, so this was a big win for me.
Saturday (Day 118): Mr. Bitchy Fix-it
Put in a new headlight for #1GF!. I expected the process to be a clean 5 minute job, so I was wearing regular clothes to do it. Within 10 minutes I was sweating, covered in grease and working in a space that was made for the hands of a tiny, left-handed geisha. And I was trying to go on feel because the bright sun was hampering my efforts to see in the dark engine compartment. It was then that I turned into a little bitch and started getting on #1GF!’s case.
She offered to pack it up and have a mechanic do it, which triggered the flannel fix-it man in my head to step forward. I thought, “You’re a man. Men sweat, they get grease on them, they don’t care about keeping their clothes clean, they respect their women, and they fix things without bitching.” After that, I was a little ashamed, so I apologized and got the job done. It’s nice to have the opportunity to recognize when you’re being an asshole before anyone has to tell you.
From there, we went to #1GF!’s mom’s house to simply crimp a connector on a cable so that she could have cable TV in another room. Because I had all the right tools from wiring my old house, the task took about 10 minutes. Unfortunately, it took us a little longer to trace the cable back to where someone had cut it in her basement. Because they had cut it three inches shy of the closest available connection, we had to pull out all the staples and readjust the line to reach. Once we got it all adjusted, trimmed and crimped, we couldn’t find a splitter to actually hook it up, so we had to go out and buy one. All told, the 5 minute project took a half hour, but it was still written into the win column.
Afterward, we went to the craft store to see if we could get any creative ideas, and the toy store to find some games. I’m a huge fan of board and card games, but ironically, toy stores never have any of the games I want, and I always end up having to order $5 games online.
From there, we went out to dinner with my parents, and then back to their house to play some games. I nixed Set
What I Learned
- Social Bookmarking brings traffic.
- Big links from big sites bring big traffic.
- According to my sister, I should start using whatever looks I have before they fade. I’m not really sure how or why I would possibly do this.
- I understand why old people play bingo.
- I feel better about giving stuff away for free than charging people for what things are worth.
- Everyone needs a freebie now and again.
- I now am better with Inkscape.
- I learned more about Wordpress MySQL internals
- I refreshed my knowledge of web security, and realized that even if you tell people about security problems with their site, some of them won’t implement fixes. My next step is to learn to let it go rather than think it is somehow my problem.
- Linking to people’s sites will not necessarily engage them in discussion even if you know from your stats that they saw their link on your page.
- I still haven’t learned how to effectively engage people in discussion on the web.
- I work for myself, but I still sometimes think like a wage slave.
- I learned some hacks to improve SEO in Wordpress without plugins.
- Jobs are easier if you have the right tools.
- Whining is no way to go through life.
- Ironically, toy stores never have good games.
- People don’t care about free tech support.