Joe and Jamie's Blog

Hello world! Still here.

It has been a very long time since I last posted. Not really that long but too long for my liking. In an ideal world I would post every three days or so, maybe even everyday if I did more exciting things to write about.

Jamie and I have just been very busy lately with school and work, barely finding time to do anything. Besides the boring yard work and soccer that I already wrote about too much, there isn’t anything that I really can write about that anyone (including myself) would want to read. Oh yeah big highlight, cleaned the fish tank the other day; fun, fun. See what I mean, not quite a compelling story. I have been able to accomplish a few more websites and I am in the works to sell some domain names at serious prices. One domain can literally erase half my debt which would be awesome.

Thanksgiving is coming up and I believe we are traveling out to Long Island to our relatives on our father’s side. We haven’t seem them in awhile so it will be nice. Can’t wait for the food! This nice long weekend gives me some time to catch up on things and get squared away before I am bombarded with end of the semester tests over the following two weeks.

I will try and video the next indoor soccer game and see how it comes out, would be fun to watch it online. Now I just need some kind reader to send me a camcorder for Christmas so I can really video tape stuff and play it on the blog.

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 decided to come up with a name to place all the sites under. If I ever start to make some profit off of these websites I will actually register the company, but for now it’s fun to just pretend I am one. I’ll eventually get my butt down to the proper place to officially make it a registered business.

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

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!

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.

It’s been a very busy week for me, haven’t had much time to post and further develop any of the other sites. I did notice I finally got my first comment, so at least 1 person is reading this every so often!

I just got a 40″ plasma TV for free…with one hitch; I have to repair it first. I was given all the necessary parts, but these things are like computers now. I have a box full of new circuit cards and chips that need replacing. I hope this isn’t too difficult, would be nice to have a 40″ TV for free.

Over the weekend I will be configuring a few more sites and getting them up and running. Hoping to have overstock-market.us and electronics-market.us at least configured and maybe even formatted correctly.

I added a few blog pages today. I am going to post a lot of computer/network troubleshooting tips to the Network Admin page. I will be useful for people searching google to maybe hit my blog and find the answer to some common problems I have come across in my line of work. I also have a websites page that lists all the sites I own and operate. Maybe I will get some hits off of that, and if not, at least its one place on the web that contains links to my sites.

Went a little crazy with more domain names, but it’s a hobby of mine. I bought out the rest of the personal ones that I own under the .info, .us, .org domains. Bought toy-market.us, beauty-market.us, and networkadmin.info. I am planning on turning networkadmin.info into a help forum with answers to error codes and tech questions I have dealt with in the past. Hopefully that will bring some people to the site, pretty easy name that explains it all…info for network admins…ain’t I just clever!?!? If I don’t wind up doing a forum I will look into pooling other tech help sites and just displaying their information. We’ll see how it goes, have to find some forum templates first.