Progress Progress Progress

Life has been crazy busy for the last couple months. Following two months of unemployment and collecting a nice regular check from the UE department, two of the companies I applied to asked me in for interviews.

Although it goes against the goal of supporting myself with my web related work, it met my personal requirement of being a job where I will grow and learn. (and I am still pursuing my goal of being free from the rat race...)

Part of collecting unemployment benefits is that you must actively seek work and accept any offers that you receive. I personally am not willing to intentionally blow an interview as well. As such, I received offers from both companies and am now working as a Lead .NET Developer for a small company who is making waves in their industry.

I am quite excited about this position and have been enjoying it tremendously as I have really grown as a programmer. My first week resulted in answers for about two years worth of questions. In the months since, my programming style and understanding of the advanced subjects have really developed.

The sweet thing about that is that my personal development is benefiting... I am actually able to build my application better and faster now that I have the opportunity to study and learn from others. My learning is still mostly on my own, but I am subjected to different aspects of programming which answer a lot of questions before I get stuck on them in my own work.

My personal work has primarily three areas of focus.

• Publishing web content for my sites - Right now that primarily includes www.theviewfromhome.com and www.weddingsineugene.com. This is a source of new traffic and adsense growth. I try to add a new page or new content to theviewfromhome.fom ever so often and occasionally sell a page to a third party.
  
  
• Honing my design skills - I have a few sites for other folks I am working on. They are turning out quite nicely and has given me the chance to exercise my artistic side. www.daretodreamsporthorses.com is an example of one of these sites.
  
  
• Developing my long term project. This is where most of my effort goes as it has the promise of the strongest returns. I am building an application to manage several niche directories and am probably 20% there. The data structure has been put together, as well as the management sections to build a listing and view an initial list of existing listings. I am almost done with region management which will let me assign cities, counties, and postal codes to a listing.

The last of the three shows a lot of promise and will be an extension of TheViewFromHome.com and will really increase my portfolio of products that have the potential to produce income. My content and adsense pages are also starting to build up and I am seeing this reflected within my adsense reports. Its not much but growth is very reassuring.

well... off to work for now. Today promises to be a long day of coding.

A General Update and Some Forward Looking...

The last few months have been interesting. Mid December I moved on from the job I held for the last year and a half. I have spent the last two months completing several involved projects and catching up with a growing to do list concerning my websites and TheViewFromHome.com

The visual layout has been tide together further including a common page design for official pages. I have a considerable amount of tuning to do still and have a million ideas floating around.

Aside from catching up with much of the house keeping, I have completed the initial release of the commenting and messaging systems. What this means is that my page owners will have the option for other users to make comments on their pages and if a member wishes to communicate with another member they may simply shoot a message off. The messaging system is internal so as to protect my member's privacy and to reduce spam.

When a member receives a message or a comment, they are notified through the email address they have on file so that they know activity has occurred regarding their account

This week is exciting for me for several reasons. First off, I start a new job. I am officially a "Junior .NET Developer" and will have three senior programmers around to learn from. I officially start on Tuesday and have picked up 5 more books on niche topics to add to my collection to help prepare me for the job. I am not totally sure what I will be doing, but I am sure (and hoping) that it will be challenging. This will be the first time that I have actually been employed as a developer/programmer outside of my consulting/freelance/contract gigs.

Now, of course, this raises many questions. Will I continue with my 'projects'? Yes. The projects I take on are part of how I learn and are a keystone of the foundation I am building... Will I slack on any of my sites? No. The speed of development may not be there, but I will certainly be bringing some exciting new developments to my sites... more on that later. I will still be doing occasional site development. In fact, www.daretodreamsporthorses.com is getting some attention and generating some referrals... However my contract work is dependent on if I have free time to commit to that.

I am currently in the process of developing a directory system so that I can publish niche directories with a financial model revolving around paid listings. I am very excited about this as it is helping me tune several of the coding techniques I have learned over the last few years and I am finally getting to use some of the APIs I have been wanting to play with.

:-) so the future will bring some good change that will help solidify my coding, which will in turn benefit my business developments. I will write another post here soon about why I am developing a directory system. It is very promising in terms of financial benefit and takes advantage of my strengths.

With that I am out. I am enjoying a nice glass of wine and with the passing of time my ability to write is deteriorating ;-)

WeddingsinEugene.com is Now Live

I have added another website to my portfolio. I am running an experiment in a localized niche.

Through this site, I plan to use AdSense, various affiliate programs, as well as local paid advertising and paid directory listings as the means of monetizing the site.

For content, I have combined several local directories that I found and am going to provide content and how-to articles for getting married in and around Eugene, Oregon.

Weddings In Eugene

A Gear in the Supply Chain

One of my common past times is pondering potential business ideas and secretly consulting my friends and encouraging them to try their hand at entrepreneurship.

Recently one particular business model has been emerging among my friends. A really short uncut description of that model deals with taking something that already exists, improving it and selling the better product with a mark-up.

My wife is getting into horse training. That is, taking a horse from auction. Taking a few months to give the horse quality training and then reselling the horse to those who want a horse that works and functions right out of the box with no directions or assembly required. She will be partnering with someone who already does this successfully and she has already begun taking steps to make the effort into a business. (I couldn't be more excited!)

My best friend has been setting up a shop over the last several months and has been brainstorming on various ways that he can make a living with it. He has the skill and equipment to do all sorts of things such as prototyping and custom parts replacement. He just picked up a lathe last week and he was telling me about the potential of buying old equipment, fixing and replacing the broken parts, and then selling the refurbished product.

Both ventures have considerable markups and would provide them a full time income.

I am curios if there is something like this in any of the industries I work with.

One requirement seems to be the availability of a barrier to enter. In my wife's case, that barrier is the knowledge of how to ride and train as well as having access to a market place (which she has in part due to her partner/trainer). For my friend, the barrier is the availability of expensive equipment and the knowledge of how to use that equipment.

My specialty tends to deal with business planning/consulting and web and application design involving ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, some PHP and some graphics design.

The amount of free time that I have to invest in my ventures may be increasing soon, and if I can find a combination of work that will sustain my self-employment, once it begins, life will be good.

Sold 3 more t-shirts at CafePress.com

Sold three shirts last week of my newest t-shirt design.

I am absolutely ecstatic that the effort to create the design paid off and that multiple people like the design enough to spend their money on it.

I really hope to eventually look back (once I achieve my goals) and look over the years of crawling and know that they made a difference.

I need to create another tshirt design now!

Commenting at TheViewFromHome.com is now possible

Today marks a good step in the right direction. The ability to leave comments on pages at TheViewFromHome.com who have opted to allow commenting has been enabled.

Beer Inside is the first page to have this tool enabled. Coming soon... The Beer Guide.

Mission of the Week: Create Interactive Content - The Beer Guide

Yesterday was a big day for me and is one that I consider to have been very successful.

I had another meeting with a member of the investing community. We will call him John. John has been there and done that. He survived the dot bomb era and successfully sold his business for millions. He is now a leader in the angel investing arena. I have met with him several times over the last several years and solidified our relations yesterday. I officially have a mentor.

This means that I will have the guidance I need should I pursue the financing route of business development. He has a lot to offer in terms of experience. He also has active investments in similar fields, which means that our interactions are mutually beneficial. I am thoroughly looking forward to our future meetings.

I have some fun projects under development. Specifically I am working on a tasting guide that will, over time, become a comprehensive list of beer and wine with commentary on what people think of each. I hope to build guides for Beer, Wine, Coffee, Chocolate, and even Cheese. The list will also include home brewing so as to encourage growth and interaction in that field.