I uploaded almost 2,000 photos tonight so please go check them out. www.joeandjamie.com/gallery or the link up top.

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I buckled down this weekend and most of the night tonight and started coding the pool. It was really tough in the beginning for me because I don’t know any how to write to MySQL databases using CGI or PHP, I really only know ASP which I can’t use since I’m on a Linux server. Sorry for all the techno-jargon, it’s almost over. So I spent many hours learning and testing writing with PHP and MySQL to get this thing to work. I eventually got it to work and then of course figured out easier ways to code it, after it was all done. Let’s just say I took the brute force method in the beginning instead of being logical and doing loops. I guess my programming classes did me well after all to notice such silly mistakes and correct them.

The point of this post? Just to let you know that I learned how to do something and the end result came out pretty great. Check out the pool here. I’m thinking over the summer I can clean up the code even more and get it working so you can click on the square you want and just enter in the information instead of using the form. This will let me create some good super bowl pools.

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

So the picture gallery is there for you to look at, along with the simple main page to the site with a choice to the blog or the gallery. Go to www.joeandjamie.com and choose either site to enjoy.

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

So here’s the change:

http://www.josephhannigan.com/blog2

is now

http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog

Update your links – www.joeandjamie.com

This is something that always has bugged me since day one. I don’t know what took me so long to do this, would have been much faster if I had done it when I had three posts and a small database.

Over the next week you may experience different looks of the blog. I will be testing some new themes. Quite frankly I have grown board with this one. I did put a lot of work into making it what it is though, I remember all the long nights tweaking the page code.

Since this was a bit of a daunting task (more me worrying about screwing it up more than anything), I want to share the articles I found that were very helpful.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress -This article is hands down the most important. It is narrowed down to each specific type of move you could be doing. Whether you are changing subdirectories or servers, this is the document for you.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL – This article goes deeper with the database changes to be made. I found it just as easy to backup the database, edit it in a good text editor (not notepad) to update the links, then restore it.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database

http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup
The trickiest part was figuring out how not to lose the old links. I am sure most will drop from the search engines, but I do have a handful of direct links which I didn’t want to lose. I found documents on .htaccess redirect rules which did the trick. The following site from Apache has all the mod aliases you can use. The RedirectMatch worked best for me.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html

This is the code that I have in my old blog’s folder .htaccess file.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog2/(.*)$ http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog/$1

This keeps everything after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ and puts it after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ essentially pointing all old links to the new URLs, which is exactly what I wanted! I couldn’t be any happier.

Another important step was getting the image URLs updated. This wasn’t done during any other step because they are part of the content in the post. I very luckily stumbled across a wonderful plugin to take care of this for me.

http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/wordpress-plugin-update-urls/ – This plugin allows you to enter the old URL and the new one and presto-magico its done…I wish everything were that simple…

I learned a bunch of neat stuff tonight. Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll try my best to help.

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I apologize to all my readers out there, this was beyond my control.

So after all this, as soon as my plan comes up for renewal say bu-bye to this host. This was the last straw.

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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!

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I started to create a simple site to just put links to all my other sites on as well as explain a bit about the company and why I started all this, as well as some contact info. I need a good logo made, but I don’t want to ask Jay because he will probably charge me $100 a pixel, and that’s the friend price! =P

www.hanniganwebcompany.com

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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!

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Check it out!!! Now I have a complete working site that I can use as the template for the rest. Thanks to the helpful hits of Paul at the Homeowner’s blog.

VISIT www.my-market.us

©2010 Joe and Jamie's Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

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