The World of Joel

If you have been checking in with us here at WorldofJoel over the past few days you may have noticed a lot of downtime, some wierd advertisement websites, and some design changes. Well most of this was not planned, and in fact none of it really was what I was expecting out of the weekend. The original plan was to announce my current and future projects, but that will be on hold for a day or two more. First off for those wondering about the downtime. Our old server host (more on that in a minute) Telnap had some serious hard drive failures and were working hard to get it back up. Two days later we were finally back up, however when we were we had some extremely odd advertisement websites up which led me to believe that there was some sort of hacking. Well with some help from my good friend Matt Propst (fellow blogger), we worked hard to try and get to the bottom of the website demise. Anyways to make a long story short we got the site back up earlier this morning and I transfered it to the new host, HostMonster which hosts a lot of my new projects which will be announced soon.

You may also notice a design change, I am not one that likes change, but something about this blogs design that makes me want to continually update and tweak. This current design is one of my favorites and I have worked a bit on customizing it more for the blog. I do need to work on integrating my YPN ads into this design, however they have been doing awful as of late so I am not sure I am in a rush to do that. Anyways sometime this week I hope to be able to officially announce the newest project and lineup for the future of this blog and my web endeavors.

Ok well I am now two days away from my last day of school for the spring quarter and then comes the sumer classes. However I will have a week to get my projects up and running and so I am just letting everyone know to stay tuned because some of my new projects will be revealed which I have been heavy at work for the past month or so getting ready for a new idea I have had that will hopefully take my web development to the next level. So stay tuned I would imagine by this weekend we should have some big updates! Stay tuned for that and of course more updates here on the World of Joel!

My biggest problem in developing websites is that I start with an idea, and that idea multiplies in so many different ways that the final product isn’t usually what I had intended, or it is and its to complex. Thus is the problem I am having with Movie-Stop.net right now. The site itself is doing well, but I fear that the site is to complex and to many ideas and not enough follow through. My fear is that what wanted to be a “movie site” has become far to much and thus the initial idea was to broad. I am working on cutting back a bit, focusing on what I enjoy which is more the news and reviews aspect. So I am thinking of switching the site to a more “blog” style format which would leave more room for personalization and reviews. This would take out the need for movie pages for each movie and such which takes up the majority of my time working on the site.

Moving forward that is my concept and idea that I am wrestling with and one that I will be working on in the coming weeks/months. As for new projects, this should come as no secret, I love TV, and thus I have some fan site ideas that are going to be for some of the big TV shows on already and new to this fall. More information will come on that later, but I think these are the type of projects that I will start to undertake, rather then putting in the crazy man hours of more complex websites.

So I don’t do this very often, mainly because I don’t check World of Joel’s visitor totals all that frequently. I make around 15 to 25 cents a day on my blog which isn’t much but as you can see my Google Ad’s are not there for optimization. However I have to say I am a bit surprised with my stats both in a positive and negative way. I had days in the month of April with 100-150 unique visitors on the blog. I also had days where there were 20-30 unique visitors. Looking at my posting last month I managed to be extremely consistent (for my standards) and yet my readership seems to be all over the board with very little rhyme or reason.

So I ask you. What do you like to read about on this blog? Would you rather me take more a tech approach? Would you rather I stick to my personal life and the life of Joel? Or do you like the way the blog is going? Give me some feedback. I have noticed that we have a lot of readers but not a lot of comments. So I am asking you readers of World of Joel what would you like to see from this blog?

Well I really thought I picked a good bracket this year. For the first round or two I was in the top of the rankings, but after that it just fell apart. Thanks a lot Texas for just totally letting me down, I can’t believe I laid my faith in you. But as part of the agreement for going into the tournament we have to give a link back to the winner of the tournament who was Bryan Le.

Congrats Bryan you did pick a good tournament, I would have never guessed Florida was going to repeat, but hey they were the best team! I am a big fantasy guy, and really enjoyed doing this, got to love college basketball.

I have been talking to a lot of “bloggers” lately, mainly because I want to hear others input on what you can do to make a blog a successful one. I have been “blogging” for well over four years here on WorldofJoel, I just didn’t always call my site a blog. One thing that I have always noticed when looking at my traffic, and my success on the internet, can be directly linked to how well I schedule my time. Now sure you can be saying that hey there is nothing I can do about my limited time, but let me tell you, anytime that you have, whether it is ten minutes, or even a half an hour you can easily be successful on your blogging.

Here are some pretty good tips to keep yourself on track:

- Be consistent on your times. If you feel more alert in the morning then blog in the morning. If you feel like writing at night then you can probably guess when your going to blog. Pretty self explanatory.
- Don’t be afraid to expiriment with different topics. I have found that if I stay on one topic to frequently then it feels like more of a chore then an enjoyable experience, and thus a lack of consistent posting.
- Stop looking at your stats. To elaborate for a second, if your looking at how many hits your getting each day that’s much to frequent. It’s like watching the clock turn on the last day of school, it just makes everything go slower. Plus the more time your bothering yourself with those numbers the less time your spending on your blog.
- Make friends in the blogging community. I have a few that I have made through past jobs I have worked online with, and other’s that I just enjoyed there blogs and let them know so. However you do it, if you have a few minutes make a few acquaintances. It never hurts to have a few friends who can also help keep your blog in line.
- Have fun with your blog. I am sure you have heard the saying “let the money come to you”. Now that doesn’t mean to not educate yourself on how to best monetize your blog, but what it does mean is enjoy what you do and if you bring that to a blog people will see that and respond accordingly.

If you think I am missing anything let me know I would be more then happy to add or subtract anything on the list. I hope that helps anyone who is trying to get in blogging, or who just want a fresh perspective on keeping a consistent blog.