One quarter down, 3 to go: How many goals have I accomplished so far?

The best way to accomplish goals is to review them several times - and monitor your progress - before its too late to make any changes.  By taking a step back every once in a while, you’ll be able to see what you need to be spending more of your time on.  Also, it’s just good practice to review what you’ve completed so you know what’s left on your list.  Lets get into it.

The first quarter of the year is over - so lets take a look at what I’ve accomplished so far.

• Read a book - Yep, I already read a book!  What book did I read?  It’s called Seeing Systems, by Barry Oshry - and no, by “Systems”, it is not referring to computers; It is referring to organizations.  The book was actually the recommended reading for a week-long workshop I attended for work, and it was amazing.  I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about how organizations operate, and why people react as they do to certain situations.
• Take on more public speaking opportunities - No, I haven’t joined Toastmasters yet, but I did get an opportunity to speak at a local high school about what I do at my job.  I think it went very well, and I’ll be looking to volunteer for things like that in the future.
• Make a Dabbledoo work schedule so my life is more structured. - This is becoming increasingly harder and harder to do as more and more tasks / projects / todos surface.  I have been trying to make goals to get certain things done each day, but sometimes that doesn’t leave much time left in the day.

Doesn’t seem like much right now, but hopefully I’ll get a bunch more done in the months to come.  Here’s what I plan to accomplish by next quarter:

• Get married smile
• Start a new job
• Take the GMAT
• Buy a beginners DSLR - I think I’ll be getting a Nikon D60

Apr 11, 2008

ExpressionEngine subcategories: Showing child categories on Gadgetell

A few months ago, we decided it was time for a redesign for Gadgetell.  Ever since the redesign, I’ve been craving a good solution to show the child categories (second-level categories), but hadn’t found a good way to do so in ExpressionEngine - and haven’t really had time either.  Well, over the past two nights, I’ve finally implemented child categories on Gadgetell, and am absolutely loving how they look and work.  Take a look below - and on the site - and let me know if you have any suggestions. 

I love being able to go from concept to production testing to production within a few hours.  If you are trying to do a similar thing and need some help, let me know and I’ll send you the code.

Feb 21, 2008

Thoughts on Twitter’s growing pains

It amazes me that Twitter is having so many server issues lately.  I know the company has had to scale to an insane amount of users in a short period of time, but all of this downtime is really turning me off to the service. 

I joined Twitter way back when, and only started using it within the past month or so.  All of the downtime is just painful.  I’m talking the kind of pain that you get when your cell phone dies… you don’t know what to do with yourself!  I’d say I’ve checked the service twice today, and both times it’s been down.  Not only that, but think of the amount of third party applications out there that are bricks right now because the grand daddy is down!  I would imagine services like Twitter Vision that rely solely on the feed from Twitter are caching information just in case the service goes down.

At the beginning of February, Twitter decided to ditch its old web host and go with an Enterprise Hosting Solution at Verio, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT America.  Apparently that’s not helping the situation as much as we had hoped.

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Feb 12, 2008

Switching Content Management Systems - what a nightmare.

Back when I started Gadgetell, I made the relatively simple decision to use WordPress as the site’s Content Management System.  At that point, I only cared about two things: 1) it’s free, and 2) it has a huge development community.  I needed all the support I could get since this was my first hosted blog. 

Once Adam came on board and we grew Gadgetell to a decent size (about a year later - October 2006), we decided to branch out and create sites for Apple news, and gaming news; meet Appletell and Gamertell (which both finally launched in May 2007).  We figured it would be best for the growth stage of our business if we moved to a CMS that was made to handle multiple blogs in the same control panel.  The ideal solution would allow us to have multiple member groups, multiple blogs, and a whole slew of other options.  We did our research, and it appeared that ExpressionEngine was the way to go.  They had a fair-sized loyal development community, and had pretty much all the settings / options you would ever need.  Also at this time, we thought it would be a simple export / import moving the Gadgetell data from WordPress to ExpressionEngine.  Boy were we wrong.

We were already working with a design firm at this time, and they said they would move the Gadgetell data into ExpressionEngine.  When they realized they didn’t have the means to do the work (after months of fumbling around), they hired outside help.  Little did we know, the outside help was going to run into problems as well.  It seemed that none of the WordPress export tools were able to handle our data for some reason.  The bizarre thing was that we didn’t make any crazy customizations - it was pretty much out-of-the-box.  The only feature we counted on that was not included in WordPress itself was Ultimate Tag Warrior - a fantastic plugin by Christine Davis.  We also had one custom field in WP that we relied on to auto-generate the thumbnails.  All of that beside - we knew what needed to be done: export the WordPress data in MovableType format (pretty much a standard for blog migrations), and import the MovableType data into ExpressionEngine.  Sounds easy, right?  Apparently not.

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Feb 11, 2008

My Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals for 2008

On our car ride back from Chicago today, Michelle (my fiance) and I talked about what we want to accomplish in 2008.  I’m going to try and keep this as a “working document” to make sure I capture everything we discussed - and more as I think of them.

• Get married
• Start a new job
• Purchase real estate (probably a condo)
• Furnish our condo
• Become an expert in something - Brian Clark (of CopyBlogger and Teaching Sells) wrote a article over at Teaching Sells entitled Secrets to Becoming an Expert in Any Subject about how all you need to do to become an expert in any subject is read 3-5 books.  Interesting enough… I’m going to try it this year.  I’ll report back with what it is I want to become a so-called expert in.  Michelle wants it to be in personal finances, but we’ll see.
• Read a book - it’s been way too long.  This one’s a given if I’m going to follow through on the previous goal.
• Take the GMAT.
• Buy a beginners DSLR - possibly a Canon XTi?  Any suggestions on this one?
• Buy a MacBook Pro.
• Start a new project with Adam.
• Build my personal website up to 1,000 visitors a day.
• Take on more public speaking opportunities.
• Join Toastmasters to strengthen my public speaking / presentation skills.
• Make a Dabbledoo work schedule so my life is more structured. It drives Michelle crazy that I don’t know what I’m doing each night until the night actually comes.
• Learn to play the guitar. This is a very audacious goal if I do say so myself.  I’ve always wanted to be able to play the guitar - so I think the time has come.  I can’t guarantee that I’ll be strumming like John Mayer by the end of the year, but I hope to be able to play a few songs.

Remember - these are meant to be goals difficult to attain, hence the Big, Hairy, and Audacious headline.  More to come as I think of more items to add to the list.  If you can think of anything I should add, feel free to post it in the comments and I’ll update my list.  And if you can help me accomplish any of the items above, I’m all ears!  Wish me luck!

Feb 10, 2008