Joe and Jamie's Blog

Although the season is coming towards its end, I love this half of the fall season. Tymor Park out in Lagrangeville/Union Vale/Amenia (whichever it is) has wonderful scenery from the field. You can hear the sounds of people hunting in the forest in the near distance, bike riders come out of the trails in the woods and the trees are just a great site. If you don’t mind the occasional frost on the bleachers in the morning its a good day. The indoor season has started up, I need to get a camcorder so I can video one of the games in there, pictures through the netting are horrible.

I thought I would just share of the park’s surrounding area with everyone that may not have ever come here before. I need to explore this area some more. I like how its only fifteen minutes from my house now but you feel very far from the city life. Nothing but cows and horses out here.

Go Orange Team, Go!

I have made a decision to finally start using www.JoeandJamie.com as an actual site and not just a forwarder we tell everyone to visit to get to this blog. What I want to do is have a nice simple page come up with two choices, our photo gallery that I am developing, or this blog. Once I get that set and finish uploading all the pictures to the gallery and organizing them, then I can work more on what I want to do with the blog.

There is only one thing that bugs me about this blog, its the fact that the link is www.joeandjamie.com/blog. I don’t know what possessed me to keep that as the live one, it was only for testing, hence the “2″ part. I really want to make it so its www.joeandjamie.com/blog which matches the blogs title. I know all my hard SEO work will somewhat die off from losing links, but I’ll make sure the mod-rewrite in the .htaccess file works right to redirect it to the correct links. At this early stage I can afford to lose a few back-links, I don’t have too many.

Now that I got that out off my chest, I should talk about the photo gallery. I don’t want to give it away yet, I’ll post the specifics when it is complete. We have always wanted a place online to store and share photos so I decided to create a gallery for them all. I’m in the process of uploading thousands of pictures and organizing them all into albums and categories so the site is nice and navigable.

So stay tuned for more stuff to come, I should have something by the end of the week.

I decided to go with forums rather than blogs for the network administration help sites that I was designing. Forums are just easier for people to sign up and post their own topics, as well as making it easier to categorize everything.

For the last five days I have configured the phpBB forum that I have running now on NetworkAdmin.INFO. Please visit the site and feel free to ask any computer or technical question you may have. If I cannot answer it I surely have the resources to get the answer.

I hope this venture turns out well. I spent some pretty price money on old domain names to try and help this out and I would like to see it prosper. Over the weekend I will be posting as many help fixes as I can to try and fill the forum up a bit and make it look alive. I have some minor tweaking to do still and some SEO work, but nothing that will change or affect the forum.

VISIT NETWORKADMIN.INFO

I bought some more domain names this weekend. I was bored and stuck in front of a computer which never leads to anything good. I have had some idea of creating informative blog sites on basic computer and networking troubleshooting tips and guides. I started snooping around GoDaddy for some catchy names and found that they were all taken, like always. Some domain names were available for a premium price of two grand, but I don’t have that kind of cash to blow right now, especially when I don’t have time to make the site bring that much money in fast.

Here’s some of the names that I purchased that were surprisingly available for regular price:

• networksystem.us
• systemnetwork.us
• techadmin.us
• networktechnician.us
• systemtech.us

I picked up the same domains with different TLD’s (top level domains) along the way, whatever was available.

I wanted to get a few other domains, but they were too pricey. I searched around and found Sedo.com, a huge domain name aftermarket. Sedo.com allows you to actually bid on the site with the owner, rather than just pay the price posted on GoDaddy. After a few days of haggling with owners that wanted thousands for sites with absolutely no traffic at all out there, I obtained these two sites this morning:

• networkadministrator.org
• networkadmin.us
• systemadministrator.biz

What is great about networkadministrator.org is that it is seven years old and had a page available, it was not just owned without a site up. This means that it should be known to search engines and possibly already bookmarked by others and have links out there. You don’t make it in this business without links. I am in the process of getting the domain transferred to me now. There are a few more I am interested in, just have to keep beating the price down, hoping the owner doesn’t close the negotiations. [UPDATE] Just bought systemadministrator.biz while I was posting this for a fair price for a four year old domain, made for a fun night.

For these sites, I think I will start out using blogs to host the content. They are easy to set up and use, as well as free. The person who created this blog here as a whole slew of blogs, some free and some really nice premium templates. I really like a few of the templates at Blog Oh! Blog. You can check out the templates here.

I am out for now, going to start uploading the main templates now!

I had some free time really late last night while Jamie was studying. Rather than surfing the web or watching boring TV I decided to deploy five more sites.

I finished my series of what I call “everything” markets where you can search and buy everything and anything. Pretty soon I will start the more direct sites, like pets or sports, but that takes more time with filtering the categories correctly.

Check them out and support some good sites.

Hover over the links to see a site preview, courtesy of the Snapr Wordpress Plugin.

www.Bargain-Market.US

www.Overstock-Market.US

www.Sale-Market.US

www.Web-Market.US

www.Your-Market.US

and of course the first one, www.My-Market.US

The sites were just created, so any comments on things I should change at this point will help!

Over the past two days I have been tweaking the look of the blog. I have modified the template to show 4 posts on the main page, rather than the default 1 post and small boxes to display the older posts. I also removed the older post boxes, to me they were just ugly. I also encapsulated the posts in borders, I think it looks better than just post after post with nothing but a title header to separate them. I found a cool plugin to place related posts in each posts, hopefully driving some more page views and reading.

These are the obvious things that anyone that has been checking the site regularly (the whole 2 of you) would notice. The little things were playing around with the placement of advertisements to make sure they all looked the same on each page and weren’t put into boxes. I also moved around the widgets on the sidebar to allow me to show more recent comments and recent posts, especially since I removed the older post boxes from the blog.

Hope everyone likes it!

This week has been a little hectic with multiple tests and reports due, as well as new projects getting wrapped up at work. I haven’t had much time to spend on my websites or even posting here, so I figured I would sent out this little blurb.

Tonight there is another indoor soccer game at the Net. If I can remember for once I will bring my camera and take pictures. Jamie’s team is actually doing very well this season, so far their record is 1-2-1 and they aren’t in last!! They lost to some tough teams, but even then the scores were very close.

Saturday kicks off the outdoor East Hudson league. To me these are a lot more fun and exciting, probably due to the longer game time and normal size playing field, compared to the fast pace, small indoor turf. It will be good to see some faces that I haven’t seen since last fall. They are opening the league with a round-robin tournament, so all teams will be there. Once again, I hope to have my camera.

I’ll update everyone this weekend with some photos and news.

In the past month I have purchased over 100 domain names.

I now step back and take a look at the ever-growing list and think it’s time I needed to kick these sites into gear before I continue.

Let me put this in $$ terms. That’s $1,000 next Feb/March that I need to spend to keep these sites active, and right now I only made $20 off of them…..

Time is my biggest enemy right now. Between work and school I have no time to develop all the sites. Check out the Websites page for a list of all the sites I am hoping to get going. They are mainly Amazon store fronts. It is going to take several months to get traffic to all these sites so I can start making money. Maybe I will hire someone to help with advertising and getting me high up on search results, but thats another added cost with little to no money coming it. But hey, that’s the business I guess and I can’t cop-out now, this is something I have always wanted to do, and I have never gave up on any project before.

Once I get the first site (my-market.us) up and running, I will be able to easily create the other sites off that template, just customize each one with different colors, images and categories. My goal is that before school starts in August I have all these sites up and running.

So for now I will have to slow down on grabbing every name I can think of and stop buying the less used extensions like .info and .biz to keep costs down.

I swear it’s like a crack addiction. I searched GoDaddy for a name that popped into my head and if it was available, I purchased it 30 seconds later.