There are a lot of different ways to make rollover effects on menu items these days. Most of these involve two separate images with color changes between the two copies of the image. Most of them also involve using javascript to cause the images to swap when the reader hovers their mouse over the image.

Some designers, like myself, eschew this path because we like things light. An extra image and a bunch of extra javascript just don’t feel right. Many of us simply use CSS to style rollover effects on text elements like anchors or list items. That actually works pretty well, but has a serious limitation.

Sometimes you just don’t want the text on the page. For SEO reasosn, generally, you don’t want to use text in the anchors for the rollover links. In these cases, I’ve always reverted back to the two image, javascript rollover, but now I’ve stumbled on another way of doing this.

I really can’t believe I never thought of this before. I’m sure someone else has been doing it for ages, maybe you already know about it and I’m just behind the times here.

Basically the trick is to use a transparent .png image to create the “button” look for your rollover and then apply color changes to the container element when the user hovers over it.

Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s the html code

<div class="pngtest">
<ul>
<li><a href="#"><img src="home.png" alt="PNG Test Btn 1" /></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><img src="blog.png" alt="PNG Test Btn 2" /></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><img src="good.png" alt="PNG Test Btn 3" /></a></li>
</ul>
</div>

and the css

.pngtest {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

.pngtest ul{
list-style-type: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

.pngtest li {
margin:0;
padding:0;
width: 150px;
height: 25px;
display: inline;
float: left;
background: #660066;
overflow: hidden;
}

.pngtest li a:hover {
background: #fe6700;
}

Initially I used this code to highlight the list item behind the image, and that works in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer.

.pngtest li:hover {
background: #fe6700;
}

Highlighting the anchor as in this code still works in Firefox, and it also works in Internet Explorer, so this is the way to go.

.pngtest li a:hover {
background: #fe6700;
}

The overflow: hidden; is there on line 20 because for whatever reason Internet Explorer insisted on adding space to the list items beyond the image borders even with all of the boundaries specified for ‘0′. This resulted in a band of about 5px tall colored below the image row. adding the hidden overflow statement removed this color band.

Of course, if you don’t need the button look, and you are just doing this to hide the text from the search spiders, you can always just use an image with the text on a transparent background. Then it will llok and behave like a traditional CSS/XHTML menu class, but the text won’t be there. You would probably want to additioanlly name the images with numbers instead of the text you are hiding. I gave these names just to make it more apparent what is happening in the code.

If you have a lot of readers using Internet Explorer 5.5 or older browsers, the transparent .pngs will not be transparent, but will have an ugly gray background. You can look for a png fix for this, but they are not always 100% and i don’t understand why some work sometimes but not other times, so I can’t recommend any. Hardly anyone visits my site using an old browser, so i have decided i really just don’t care enough for the extra effort involved. Especially since i don’t have a copy of the old browsers to test with and have to rely on annoying procedures like using ThumbShots for each test and tweak.

She has her own style, this one. Here’s K’tala’s version of Rudolph

Rudolph

[Insert] This picture was taken by Devan on the kid’s camera. [/insert]

Automattic released WordPress 2.9 today with a lot of simply exciting new features. There are plenty of new goodies to go around in this release for end users and for developers alike. Some folks are calling this the final release for 2009, but this is WordPress, and I’d say that 2.9.1 has better than even odds of beating the new year out the gate.

A couple of features that are going to excite most users are a new image editor, offering the ability to edit images directly in the dashboard and an embed engine that will embed media objects from popular sites like YouTube, Flickr, Scribd and several more by simply adding a link to the resource on its own line.

As for me, the most exciting changes are the improved support for custom taxonomies, custom post types and extensible user profiles. I think that these elements are going to get a lot of play in the near future and are going to represent some of the coolest new developments in WordPress design.

A lot of what went into the new features for 2.9 seems, at least partly, an attempt to free bloggers from developers to some extent. Many of the new features will make it a lot easier for novice users to add some of the more difficult, or advanced, features many of them desire to their own blogs. Other features will make developers lives easier in the long haul, but there is a lot of code that’s going to need reworking and some that needs ripping out of many of the newer and more involved themes. Just one example is added built-in support for canonical URIs. I spent a good amount of time adding this to many of my themes; now I get to spend the time yanking it back out. But really, that’s a net good. I’m not bitter at all, really.

This post really isn’t about the Facebook privacy settings changes, though that debate has me thinking more about something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of months now. I really don’t care who reads my status updates @Dane on Facebook. Indeed, I’ve had my profile set for public display from the start. I don’t see any reason to close people off from the things i discuss with my friends and family.

If I have something really sensitive or private to say to someone I don’t say it in a status update on Facebook or anywhere else for that matter.

But, as I said, the debate raging about Facebook’s changes in privacy settings has given my thoughts about the nature of my Facebook use vs. other social spaces I use. Most of the people in my Facebook friends list are people I am related to, went to school with and or have known in person and closely. There is a growing set of Facebook friends that are different though.

Increasingly I’m being found on Facebook by people I know from professional circles and from the on-line blogging and internet Marketing communities. Some of these people are close to me as well, and even if we have never met face to face I consider them close personal friends. Some of us have sacrificed for each other, and that is a big part of what friendship is for a guy like me.

Now, the thing is, I sometimes publish things about my on-line business life to Facebook, which really, is a more personal space. I know that the reason for this is the friends from on-line who are into this sort of thing. But it causes a disjointed flow for my other friends.

I know that I am going to make a concerted effort to separate what I publish to my blogs and to places like twitter more rigorously. I am going to reserve Facebook as a purely personal space. I’m going to stop publishing things about blogging, social media, WordPress and Internet Marketing there. I have no problem with people reading whatever I do publish there, and for those interested in getting to know and understand me as a person, are welcome to view my wall anytime.

But what about who I add as a friend. Should I continue to add just anyone who requests, or should I limit my friends list to just those who I am personally close to? This is the big question. Part of the question has me leaning toward unfriending anyone I don’t have some personal connection to. Anyone I have never shared personal communications with.

They are all still welcome to read my wall, but it doesn’t entangle the two worlds so much and allows me to make Facebook a more personal space. My online business associates and I can connect in other places like LinkedIn and Twitter.

How do you separate your personal and public spaces on-line? Do you draw a distinction? Do you find the line getting blurred at times? What strategies do you have for dealing with it?

Sometime back, I’d say it was early or mid 2008 if you asked me to pin it down — though I must admit to being temporally challenged — many newsletter publishers discovered that it was more profitable to run advertising driven lists than it was to run content driven newsletters.

There were even a couple of e-books published about the fact that running content heavy newsletters were not the best use of a publisher’s time. And some marketers actually ran split tests to decide whether the dropout  rates outweighed the purchase rates after slashing the content. It seems that in many cases the content light, lists ran more profitably than the content heavy newsletters.

Now, I don’t begrudge these marketers their profits one bit. If that is what puts their kids through school, then I am all for it and I wish them well. On the other hand, as a reader, I must confess I get inordinately more pleasure from reading articles than I do from reading ads.

I ignore a lot of emails these days.

Noah Fleming, who runs the Rich Jerks Marketing Alliance, once suggested to his membership that they simply un-subscribe from their lists as a way of reducing the noise that so often gets in the way of productivity. Many of the members reported beneficial results from this exercise.

I never took that drastic a step, but I did move my email to Google Aps and take advantage of the excellent filtering features available there to filter these lists into separate folders. There are a number of folders that, quite honestly, I haven’t opened in months. Some of these have more than a thousand emails, not one of which have I so much as read the subject line.

The idea of just un-subscribing from lists en masse has made a few rounds through the various Internet marketing forums. One group will argue that it is the best thing people can do to decrease distraction and information overload, while another will argue that the lists offer the best free education in writing ads and offers available. Both sides have their merit, though I would tend to say there is more merit in reducing noise.

In truth, the high content newsletter publishers include ads in their newsletters and some, most really, even send out straight ads to their lists as well. So the opportunity to read ads is still there, and since most of the guys publishing these newsletters are aware of and promote many of the same things the list publishers promote, you aren’t really all that likely to miss out on the next big thing — though, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing for some if this weren’t the case.

What I am proposing to do here is start a list of High Content Value Newsletters. In order for a newsletter to make it to the list it should meet certain quality guidelines. It should;

• be published with some frequency, at least monthly;
• offer genuine information content consistently — the content is actionable;
• not be overrun with ads — content should make up 70 percent or more of a typical issue;
• be published by a qualified publisher;
• be written at least partly by the publisher — guest writers are fins, but the publisher’s writing should add continuity and authority to the newsletter.

There is no problem with making offers and publishing ads, but many people are doing nothing but that, and that’s where I am objecting. I want to reward those who put in the effort to build the value in their publication. I want to cast my vote for the best of the best with my continued readership.

Now, I’m not talking about after the sale lists. I’m talking about the lists that you sign up for at a landing page or from a form on another page before you buy anything. often, you need to stay on after the sale lists and pay attention to them for product updates and support, that’s a different thing.

I’m setting up a page to list these newsletters. I’ll list the first couple of them in this post, but I’ll be updating and maintaining a list on the Official High Content Value Newsletter page here.

I’m going start voting. I’ll be going through my archives. If it’s not an after sale support list, and it’s full of nothing but offers, I’ll be un-subscribing from the list. If it’s a high quality newsletter with real, actionable content, I’ll be sharing it with you.

Here are a couple, in no particular order, to get you started:

While Andy Williams no longer publishes the copy in the email, he still emails the alert when he puts up the newsletter, and it’s a great newsletter.

Duncan Carver publishes great information. I don’t think enough of you know about him at all.

EzineArticles has a core set of newsletters that really deliver. if you write articles (or blog posts) you really should consider a subscription to a couple of them. There are also feeds for each category that you can have sent announcing each new article posted to the category.

Clayton Makepeace’s The Total Package is about 50 percent offers and 50 percent news. Clayton writes about half of the articles, and the content is always great.

Chris Garrett publishes an info packed newsletter edition of his New Media blog. It gets delivered straight to your e-mail in-box. This is a valuable subscription, especially if you are a blogger.

That’s all for now. I’ll get a page up and start adding more shortly. In the mean time, be sure to let me know about any newsletters you think i should add to the list in the comment form below. Just remember, if you post more than two links in a comment, it’ll trigger the moderation queue and I’ll have to approve it before it gets published.

What do you think about rewarding the content publisher and un-subscribing the list publishers? Do you know of any high quality newsletter that I should add to my list? Let me know, the comments are open.

Angela Hoy of writersweekly.com recently posted an article, “Are Content Mills Lowering the Quality of “News” on the Internet?”, on the sorry state of quality writing ushered in by the “content mills”. She specifically cited allvoices.com, examiner.com, associatedcontent.com and ehow.com for transgressions of poor quality writing. Among the examples she shares is the use of loose where lose was what the author really meant. Wii for weightloss is one article she mentions by way of example. Throughout the article she hits several articles of questionable quality from these “content mills”. Her quality questions focus on the sole point of spelling and grammar, including typos.

Carson Brackney weighs in with his take on Angela’s article, pointing out that she never really reaches a conclusion to her question about content mills being responsible for a general decline in writing on the Internet. He points out too, that quality is a subjective thing, and her article makes no real statement about the measure she uses, save her mentions of grammatical errors. In short, the reader is left to make their own connections between her premise and her citations, using innuendo as the sole glue between the two. Carson’s main problems with the article center on Angela’s treatment of her agenda in the piece and her failure to complete her argument.

Deb Ng posted her take on both Angela’s and Carson’s articles and made a couple of points I liked. “There’s a difference between bad writing and bad proofreading.” and “The problem here is the content site’s purpose.” are two thoughts she puts out there, that I think could be expanded on further. While she admits that loose/lose is a peeve of her’s and she believes that poorly proofread articles should not be published, she takes the tack that the quality of the idea and the quality of the presentation are not necessarily joined at the hip. This is a position I have maintained for as long as I care to remember.

So to get to the point, I have a couple of thoughts on this topic I felt like sharing.

• Writers do bear a responsibility to correctly presenting their ideas. When poor grammar is employed, or misspellings are ignored, the meaning of your message can be altered or lost. I can’t come up with a sentence right off-hand, but I am sure there is something that could be said that would differentiate between loose and lose critical to understanding and context would not help the reader make their own correction. Also, when we use the wrong word, as in the weight loss article cited, even if the reader can correct the error on the fly, they have to come out of the thought to do so, which makes our message less accessible. The sole point of writing is communicating a message and that is more difficult when we make it hard for the reader to stay with the thought.
• Readers who judge quality based solely on things like grammar, typos and misspellings, miss much that is good. We can argue from now to eternity whether poor writing makes an article poor even if the content is good. But that argument misses the point if your goal is to learn. Not everyone is a gifted writer, but I believe everyone has a story to tell, from which I can benefit. if the person who’s story you need now has poor spelling and grammar skills, you’re going to have to get over it. If you just decided that an article was crap because of spelling and grammar, and failing to read it missed a key piece of information you need now, who lost more?
• Quality of message and quality of delivery are not so much divorced as they have never been married. There are garbage ideas that are expressed with great eloquence and there are brilliant ideas that are expressed with great dullness. It’s up to the reader, in a marketplace of free ideas to discern between the two.
• Thomas Jefferson said “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” In a similar fashion, were I to choose between widely available personal publishing with no grammatical quality and perfectly written articles without the freedom of personal publishing I would choose the former in a heartbeat. I would never look back or regret that decision.
• Finally, what about lean? The simple fact is that writer’s just like everyone else are living in a recession. In recessionary times sensible people practice lean. The core of lean is waste reduction and a core aspect of waste reduction is that any quality above what is necessary is waste. For the content mills, or indeed most other sites on-line, the level of writing quality they need to get the job done just isn’t all that high. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but it’s a simple business fact. Hiring $1.00 / word authors is not going to earn these companies a single dime more than hiring 1 or 5 cent / word writers will. So any quality they pay for beyond that is waste. There are plenty of outlets that do need higher quality levels and the quality needs of one outlet has no influence on those of another.

So are the “content mills” destroying the quality writing Internet? I doubt it. They aren’t the first thing down the pipe that was going to destroy the Internet, I doubt they’ll be the last. Both sides in the debate have their points, even if they sometimes fail to actually make them. Higher quality delivery will make content more accessible and ignoring content for poor delivery will cost opportunity.

One more point I have to make here is that sometimes, on the internet, things really are different. really.

We do things on-line that we wouldn’t do off-line, because on-line, they work out for us. “Loosing weight” now enjoys a full 14 percent of the search share for “losing weight”.

And if we switch to “lose” vs. “loose” the search share for the misspelling climbs to 17 percent.

Most “content mills” live and die on the strength of their search traffic, and “loosing” may be more of a business decision than an editorial one. It’s becoming an outmoded method, but there is a long tradition of keyword targeting misspellings to gain more search traffic. Right now Google will display the results for the correctly spelled “losing weight” when you search for “loosing weight”, but Google is Google and not all search engines play the game at that level, so there may still be value in this approach.

It is worth pointing out that the article in question also uses “weightloss” instead of the correct “weight loss”, and that there are similar search relationships between these spellings. Indeed, Google suggests the correct spelling on this search, but still displays search results for the term as it stands. There can be big money in grammar and spelling mistakes.

What do you think is the right approach here? Should all website strive for some artificial quality level? Is the search game changing in ways that will raise the quality requirements anyways? Should authors stick to their guns and demand a certain pay as a group? Or should free market forces reign supreme? Is there something in the middle?

I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the new Chrome beta so I could try out some extensions. First extension I chose to try is DotSpots. I made my first dot , on an article by Andy Beard about Dell and SEO just a couple of minutes later.

DotSpots has this to say about the project.

Dots are “distributed objects of thought,” highly portable mini-blog posts that are easy to connect into content, share and improve by each person who interacts with them.

When you create a dot, which is as simple as highlighting something on a page and waiting a second for the link to pop up, a reference is placed in line on the page linking to an AJAX box containing your comments on the article. other people with the dots extension loaded can see this “dot” and interact with it.

Dots are wiki like information. Any user can propose an edit to a dot, and then the originator can approve or disapprove the edit. Dotters can also suggest reference links for the dot, leading to news and blog sources relevant to the dotted work. As I understand from the site, the system also looks for connections in news sources automatically from among thousands of news and blog venues.

I’m not sure the world needs another social sharing site, but this one definitely has a certain “cool” fator that many others lack. I’ve been using a su.pr / stumbleupon combo for 95 percent of my bookmarking because of the traffic and tracking combination offered. It doesn’t generate the most traffic, or offer the best tracking, but it is an 80/20 solution that ties both up in a neat, easy package. In fact I rarely even visit stumbleupon any more, I just add a review from the su.pr AJAX page when I bookmark.

At this point DotSpots doesn’t seem to offer any tracking data at all, and its traffic driving potential is unknown, but I’ll still be using I think, along with my current system, just because i like the implementation. There are extensions available for Chrome (you’ll have to opt for the beta as of now to try it) or for FireFox. Internet Explorer, however, seemed incapable of even loading the style sheet at DotSpots so I can’t tell your for sure whether the extension is available for that browser.

I’m working on developing a portfolio for doing freelance writing. Now, by and large nearly all of my work centers around topics directly related to blogging. It’s just something I find fascinating.

I need to build a portfolio of articles that are about other things and rather than set up dozens of blogs with just a post or two on them I figure, why not write for you and let you post the article on your blog.

some conditions on this deal.

1. G-rated preferred, PG=13 possibly considered anything beyond that not considered.
2. Preferably you need something NOT in the blogging, social media, entrepreneurial fields.
3. I get a small picture of me with an about Dane blurb and a link back to my freelance portfolio page at the bottom of the article.
4.The article is 100% unique. I maintain copyright but neither of us is permitted to repost the article elsewhere.

Post the topic you want an article on and url of the blog you would like me to consider.

You can post the info here in the comments section, on my shout box at BlogCatalog or at Hey Dane! just submit a ticket in the “freelance” department.

I got a call earlier this evening from a tax preparation business. It’s one of the large regional chains and the shop is over in Sikeston.

I had mentioned to one of the employees there that I might be interested in doing work for them during the upcoming tax season, and they dropped my number on the boss.

So, on Monday evening I’m going to be starting tax school to learn how to help people do their taxes.

I know this isn’t like “really” freelancing, but in a way it is, because I’ll be temporary but not through a temporary agency, so I’m calling it freelance work.

I’m also going to be putting my bid in on a minimum of 10 writing and 5 design freelance assignments on oDesk this evening. I’m ramping up my efforts to land some paying freelance work. I’ll post more about that is a couple of hours.

I has occurred to me that a blog on the adventures of a guy in tax school might be mildly interesting, and with some of the keywords involved, potentially lucrative as well. So I’m thinking about setting up a blog to journal the whole experience and earning a double income from the process.

So what do you think? Would you read a blog about the adventures of a neophyte tax guy? How about if I passed on some tricks and tips for stiffing the tax man?

PS. See, I really can write a short post!

I was fortunate enough to have gotten in on beta testing a brand new niche market research tool that I think you will want to pay attention to.

Niche marketing is nothing new, and neither are keyword tools that allow researching niches to market in. Most of us have a few keyword research tools, and even a couple of subscriptions to niche research sites. There are a lot of different approaches to the problem of finding the right words to target to dominate a niche market.

So do we really need another keyword tool?

Most likely another new keyword tool hitting the market isn’t going to excite you too much. But every now and then something does come along that deserves closer attention.

Jonathan Leger believes he has just such a tool.

This tool is rooted in a system for finding niche markets to dominate that Jonathan first described in a post about having achieved forty-six page one rankings on Google in just seven days.

After talking about this method with several people and being asked repeatedly to share the exact method he used to dominate these small but profitable niches, Jonathan decided to go one better. He actually created a niche keyword research tool called Niche Horde that automatically finds these niches for you.

And find them it does. The Niche Horde database has added over a million (That’s million with an m) new niches in the last couple of days. It’s amazing to just watch that number grow.

What’s New about this tool?

There are two things that primarily interest me in this new niche research tool.

The first really interesting thing is that it is driven by an organic growth model. Members (it is a low cost membership based tool) run a small software application in the background that gathers data about keywords from Google.

Each client only accesses Google once each sixty seconds, and even on my dial up connection it is barely noticeable. But the cumulative results of each of these individual clients mining and reverse engineering niches on Google is staggering.

The number of niche groups available in the database grows constantly. every time you refresh the “latest Niches” page you have a whole new view of potentially explosive niche markets to explore.

The second thing that excites me is the “Strength Of Competition” measurement that Jonathan uses.

Most keyword research tools and systems use an “exact match” or allintitle: search to determine the competition for a given phrase. Jonathan builds the case that this is not true. In order to determine the actual competition for a given niche phrase you need to use the allinanchor: operator.

This returns a listing of pages that are linked to with a link containing the niche phrase as the anchor text. If someone uses the phrase on their site, or even if they use it in their title, this does not really indicate that they are competing for that phrase. If they use it in a link anchor pointing back to their site, that is a whole other story.

That’s an intentional action designed to tell Google that they are providing that information. That’s competition.

So, looking at the numbers involved can suddenly give you a completely different impression of the landscape in any given niche market. Some things may have thousands and thousands of pages with the target phrase somewhere on the page, but none of those pages might actually be competing for the phrase, while other phrases might have just a few hundred pages, but they are all competing fiercely for the term.

Using this method you will know this up front, and can make a decision based on this whether or not you want to dive in. Or you can even just change your campaign slightly to maximize your opportunities to get pages to the top of Google using less competitive, but still highly relevant words.

Bloggers with Social Conscience

Others, who know me more closely aren’t nearly as surprised. I reject such notions as Gay Rights, Women’s Rights, Men’s Rights… Well, lets cut that list short and just say that I believe that a right is a human dight or it is not a right at all.

If marriage is a right, then it is a right that belongs to all people everywhere, notwithstanding their personal hormone soup or that of their partner’s hormone soup. If speech and expression are rights, then they belong as much to the nazi as to the preacher, as much to the hater as the lover (unpopular expression is the only reason to regard such a right).

Now, I fully understand that this category is going to dilute this blog to some extent. This is not a political blog, or a policy blog. It isn’t a charitable blog or and activist blog. This blog, ultimately is intended to become a for profit venture. Yes, Virginia, I just said I want your money; Remember I did say I was a Laissez-faire Capitalist.

But the fact remains, whatever the impression some may have of me, that I do have this social conscience.

To that end, I have registered with Bloggers Unite, a site that provides bloggers with events to blog about on specific days for social change. The goal is to have all of these bloggers posting about a specific subject on a specific day to help raise awareness of the issue.

Now I probably won’t do every issue that comes along, there are just a lot of issues out there. But I will be joining at least one event each month and posting about it in the Social Conscience category on this blog.

Up front, I am partial to issues that deal with children, and to those that deal with veterans. So I’ll be looking for events that involve those, but there are other things I care about as well, and I will remain open to many things.

I’ve published my first facebook app. Yay me!

Well, to be completely honest, I cheated a little.

I used John Eckman’s WPBook plugin which guides you through the whole process of creating an application to share your WordPress Blog directly on fans profile pages.

One glitch that took me a bit of figuring was that I had a framebreaker script installed when I started out. That simply doesn’t work for getting your blog on facebook. I disabled the framebreaker and things went well. Later I’ll look into the code and see about selectively unincluding the script for just facebook frames.

This process creates both the facebook application and a facebook page. Here’s the Experimental Blogger App Page. Or you can go straight to the Experimental Blogger Facebook App.

This is the first step of many that I will be taking to expand my reach through social networking sites. I’ll be adding more stuff on facebook as well, including more apps to do different things for bloggers, writers and freelancers.

And I’ll be doing some special facebook only promotions, so make sure you click through and click the fan link to stay up dated. While you’re there you can go ahead and add Experimental Blogger to your facebook profile and help spread the word.

Well, as you can see I did it.

If you don’t know what I did, that’s okay, I’ll explain in just a minute.

For the handful who do know what I’m talking about, I decided not to wait for a consensus. One of the new rules is not waiting. No pondering. Any action, even the wrong action, is better than inaction.

Andy Beard and Mike Paetzold both saw the last post on the old blog and commented. I’m not really sure if they had the chance to see my replies to their comments or not, but as is always the case with these two, they were very useful comments and I really want to express my gratitude to both of them for years of great ideas and inspiration.

I consider myself a pretty fair blogger and WordPress guy, but these are a couple of the guys I look for to learn something new in this field.

So, lets start with some back story, shall we?

I had a WordPress blog here for a long, long time. and one day i had the brilliant idea of expanding it into something more than a blog. I determined to turn it into a full fledged CMS with all kinds of features, departments, bells and whistles. I tested a bunch of things and settled on drupal. I installed it on the site and backed up the posts I had already amassed into a “legacy” section of the site.

But it never really worked out for me. The CMS approach just never fit for what I really wanted to do here. This site just should be a blog in my mind, and I never put my whole heat into the community concept.

I continued to blog, using drupal as a battleship in a bathtub solution for about a year, but I just wasn’t happy with the results.

Don’t get me wrong. I love drupal. I just don’t love drupal as a blog. Eventually I decided to experiment with this blog. I just quit posting altogether. I only very very rarely responded to comments.

The Blog Would Not Die!

And yet it would not die. I mean, there was nothing earth shaking going on, but I was still getting between 50 and 80 visitors a day (with an 84% unique visitor and a 75% bounce rate).

And they were commenting! Sure a lot of the comments were just attempts to get a link and some were outright abusive spam, but many of them were genuine comments. Probably 4 or 5 a week on average.

And Google was the chief pusher of the traffic; Followed by StumbleUpon and then a group of about 14 blogs that had linked to me in old posts (sorry about breaking those links guys, I’ll be fixing any links you have out there with 301s shortly).

And came the anniversary.

So the plan had been to let the blog sit fallow for a year until it was good and dead, then kill it off and start fresh.

The tabula rasa effect, right?

Nope.

I checked in last month after a year of neglect and realized that the simple fact was that in order to start fresh I would have to actually delete what was already there.

A month of agonized consideration ensued.

And then, Last week I did something rash. I quit my day job. Not like all of the other marketers you are so familiar with. Not because I was making enough money to do so. But because I simply could not endure another day working at that job.

Guts? Stupidity? I’ll report and let you decide.

But you know what. Action is what makes things happen. I know I can earn a good living online.

I’ve made money on line. I know why I haven’t made consistent money online so far.

I’m correcting that starting now. By the by, a nod to The Success Addict, Robert Plank is in order here. I’ve been absorbing a number of his products lately, and I’m deploying a lot of what I’m learning from him here on this blog.

One thing from the start is New Rule No. One. TAKE ACTION. This theme aint ready for prime time. Stuff I want here aint ready to go. But I ain’t waiting. I’m getting content up now. I’ll continue making things more like what I want, but forward momentum is the order of the day.

For instance. In the past I’ve made my own themes. Not this one. I downloaded something close, hacked it just enough to get it looking a little different and I’m publishing. I’ll continue to work on it. But it’s going to take some time. The content comes first. Starting when I push that publish button in just a couple of minutes.

I’m living the 8020 rule I’m doing the 20 and getting the 80 from here on in. No more working for 100% and getting nothing because 100% is never reached.

I’d love to read your thoughts on this post. Please take just a minute to leave me a comment. Am I nuts? Completely starkers? Shrewd? Gutsy? Let me know what you think!