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I started working full time on computers back in 1994. That means I’ve been sitting for like 12 years straight and as a result put on some extra weight. A few years ago I started on the job of getting back in to shape and either hit the treadmill or bike 6-7 days a week and eating right. It works too, I lost 40 pounds so far and have another 25-30 to go before I’m happy and healthy. But I don’t think that’s enough. I’ve been reading up being healthy more and more and many articles are suggesting a link between sitting for long periods and disease. Working out daily isn’t enough to combat the effects of being an office potato.

One of the trends I’m seeing is sit / stand desks. Man I love that idea. At one of my old jobs I was a PC tech and we had work benches that were perfect for sanding up and working. We had taller chairs, more like stools with backs, that you could use to lean on or even sti for a bit if you liked but mostly we stood. Standing just seems more alive, more alert. So I’m looking into getting a new desk in a few months that’s got a motorized sit / stand setup. Ikea used to have a model that ran about $500 bucks but they no longer carry it. The cheapest ones I can find these days are around $1200-$2000 bucks. While that’s a big chunk of change it’s a small price to pay to be healthier. The advantage of the sit / stand desk means I can sit when I need to. Sometimes it’s just better to sit and we all need a break.

Technorati Tags: Ergonomics, Sit / Stand Desk, Office Health

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I love productivity. So much so that I’ll work hours at improving my productivity and never get a lick of work done! I’m sure I’m not the only one either. So in taking steps towards getting more done each day and constantly moving towards my goals here are some changes I’ve made in my life to help me get more out of the day.

• Deleted all games off my computer. While I don’t play games much I do like to jump in now and then and blow off some steam. I’m done with that for now. Time is money.
• Limit IM/Chat. Again, I’m not big on the chat. It’s great for making connections and friends so I hop on now and then to stay “visible”, but I don’t linger.
• Email is my bitch, not the other way around. I check my emails at regular times during the day and don’t let it distract me from getting my work done.
• The phone is from the devil. I know a lot of people think the phone is the best way to get things done and sometimes that’s true. But largely phone calls are counter productive. Verbal communication is open to interpration, memory and just generally easy to get wires crossed. Email is much better and creates a trail of what’s been said and decided. It also allows both parties to fire off a batch of emails and then get back to work instead of spending who knows how long trying to hash something out on the phone.
• Limiting time on time wasting web sites. It’s easy to get lost in Facebook or Twitter or any number of social / media sharing sites. I check most of these only once or twice a week and just do Twitter a few times a day. Social networking is a big part of getting your name out there so it has to be part of your process but don’t let it get in the way of getting things done.
• No more TV unless I’m on the Treadmill. Killing two birds with one stone I save myself several hours per week! The only shows I watch off the Treadmill is Heroes and Dexter because I have friends & family come over for those.
• I love forums. They are one of the best places to meet people, network and learn valuable information. But they can also be a time sink if you don’t manage them properly. Like email and chat schedule times to do your forum rounds.

That’s just some quick things I’ve done to take back my day. I’ve always been pretty good about most of those things but now that I’m trying to do even more it’s time to kick it up a notch. I find working on projects is as fun, if not more, than most of the things that distract me anyway. Granted, I deliberately take breaks for short bursts of time to avoid burn out. You’ve got to. I just go off and read or just leave the house for a bit, nice dinner with Aeryn or anything that give my mind a break.

Anyone got any other good tips for getting more done? I’m sure I’ve left off several.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Getting Things Done

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The hardest part of diving back into my own projects is where to start and where to go next. With only so many hours in the date how do I decide what I should be working on. I want to do things that’ll bring me closer to my goals but also be a lot of fun. I don’t want to create a ton of sites that never get updated. I want to work on a small group of projects and make them great.

I do want to try my hand at some affiliate sites. While any site can sell a product, I’m talking about building a site around a product. I know people out there doing it but most people don’t post examples. If you’ve every done any amount of research into affiliate marketing you’ll no doubt end up at Clickbank. I know a lot of people swear by it but if I see one more “make money at insert keyword here” ebook I may be sick. The worst part about affiliate marketing is all the people trying to fleece new people by selling affiliate marketing itself! If you can sell them, more power to you. I’ll tell you what you need to know about affiliate marking right now. Find a great product that people want and sell it. It’s not magical, it’s not mystical and it’s not hard. The hard part is the same thing that’s hard about any site - getting visitors to it and getting them to take the desired action. I’m not sure I’ve found the right product to start my first real affiliate site, but I accidentally sold a big screen TV through amazon for a $49 commission and so LCD/HDTV’s are sounding pretty good! I know it’s way to late to think about affiliate marketing for this holiday season, but I’m already thinking about next year.

Aside from affiliate marketing, I’ve got ideas for sites like TV Forums and a re-launch of Readers Unbound. Both would be forum/community driven sites and RU would eventually have some cool features like your own book collections, reviews, etc. When deciding what to do I have to ask myself: “Is what I’m doing adding moving me towards my goal?” The answer is often no. I love doing cool little projects, helping just about anyone who asks and doing any number of things that don’t really move me towards my goal. While some of these ideas could help in some ways (link strategy, raising my visibility, etc.) the bottom line is building traffic and monetizing that traffic. So, with that in mind it’s time to decide what project is next up on my list. I’m leaning towards two product/deal type sites. One for gadgets, tech etc. and the other for women which my wife Aeryn would be writing. There is a ton of potential even if these markets are competitive. I just want to see if they work at all and learn from them and apply the concept to tighter, less saturated niches.

Within the next week or two I should be ready to launch one or both of these and I’ll make sure to point them out. During the downtime today I need to go through Azoogle and check out some of their offers. I’ve been seeing really good stuff from them.

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Sara Smith Interviewd Matt Mullenweg who you might know from Wordpress. When I was working for 451 Press we were getting so much traffic that the servers couldn’t handle the load. Wordpress, like any database driven site, can put quite a strain on a server. The majority of that being from mysql queries. The bad part of these kinds of site is that the pages rarely update. Pages like the front page update a few times a day, as do the category pages, but they don’t change that often. Actual posts and pages only update whenever an author edits them, which is not that often. Part of the http header response is whether or not a page can or should be cached. Wordpress specifically tells the browser NOT to cache any pages generated by WP. Squid, setup as a revers proxy or caching server can let you cache a tremendous amount of pages with very little overhead relieving the load on your web server.

The problem is Squid obeys Wordpress’ request to “not cache” those pages. The end result is that Squid will cache images, css, etc. but not the pages themselves. While this is a still a big improvement as static files get served from cache freeing up your web server to churn out more Wordpress pages it could still be better.

One thing we did to help reduce the amount of mysql queries was use WP-Cache. Matt mentions in the interview that Wordpress 2.4, which is due out pretty soon, will have the new version of WP-Cache built into the core. It’ll be disabled by default but you’ll be able to turn it on if you like. This is a big step forward in making WP more cache friendly. Add this to Squid with a dash of memcached and opcode caching and you could serve many, many, many times more pages than you were able to previously. This is the magic formula to surviving a Digg or slashdot or just a very popular site that gets lots of traffic. You might first be inclined to setup several web servers and do some load balancing or something like that but caching is cheaper and pretty easy to setup. If your site is still getting more traffic than your cache can handle then you can load balance your cache servers!

I’m just happy to see Wordpress addressing something like this. As more sites use WP and become popular they are going to need this. It’s no longer just a need of large blog networks.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, 2.4, Cache, WP-Cache, Squid

John Chow says “there is no secret formula” and it’s something I believe to the very core of my being. I used to think there was some “magic” out there for just about everything. You go around reading up on anything looking for the key to it and you’ll find people trying to sell you their secret sauce. While there are certainly specific tips to doing anything worth doing the formula is always the same. John mentions diet as an example and I can testify to that. I’ve done a lot of research on losing weight and getting healthy, mainly so I knew what I was doing. I was never under the delusion that there was a magic formula to help me lose weight I was just looking for great exercise, healthy food choices and just educating myself on nutrition and health. Almost all the resources I went to were trying to sell “weight loss secrets”. There aren’t any.

The secret to succeeding at anything is putting in the hours and dedicating yourself to the process. For web sites that means create a good site, work at getting traffic and maximizing your ad space. That’s where the specifics do come in and you can learn from other people or experiment on your own. But the basic formula never changes. Of course you’ll hear people selling the get rich schemes and 99% of the time they’ll sell you an ebook on how to sell ebooks to people. If your not prepared to work for it then don’t bother trying.

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