Wiredniko's Journal - Adventures of the Newbie

Took Thursday and Friday off. Still worked in my day job of course.

Created 9 more pages for backend control and one master page for quick linking to everything I need to update. Its simple as hell, no CSS or anything, I will update it when I am live, this is for my eyes only so who cares.

...had to figure out how math works....so yeah

When you take the average of lets say three numbers what do you do? (x + y + z) / n where n = total numbers inputted

The thing is I did not want to do the calculation every time my average number in my DB changed....so the question becomes how do you calculate the average of something without adding all the numbers together.

Googling such a question is complicated and yielded no results...so I did it all school math wise.

The answer is

Lets say you have an average number result of X with N entries and suddenly you want to add number Y and calculate your new average. Well then its

(Y + N * X) / (N + 1)

...anyway, I have created 30 pages total to add / edit and process my backend

I am having some trouble with some math involved to get some results and I can't figure it out, which tells me I have worked on this too long.

Taking a break

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 42

...........I never posted this....

Sunday, lets go again.

Figured out my math issue, I had my decimal field setup as a 3,2 (so only x.yz), changed it to 5,2 (so now its xyz.km) so it was a DB fubar.

Did a lot more debugging for one of my pages, took me about two hours only to realize I had mispelled my variables in two different places.

Meh.

Updated my master backend page with all the new pages I made.

I accidentally found another bug, I don't have a solution for it yet.

Time to call it a night, I hope this week I do the basic front end and specific page front end so I can go live. Then I can prettify and tweak.

:bootyshake:

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 45

Just realized I only worked about about three hours today...next week I need to capitalize on my weekend time better. I ended up working 8 hours this weekend, I could have worked 16 easy.
 


Sometimes I just want to quit my real job because its taking too much time out of this.

Then again this has not made me money yet....yet but its coming.

I can put two solid hours, let's do this.

Have one more thing to debug before working on front end stuff....well it took me 25 minutes to figure it out, it was some kind of weird cache issue, took out my variable completely and added it back in the old variable association disappeared, I have never seen this happen before, but whatever I figured it out.

Oh man, tested everything, things work great. There are still some error checking I need to make on the backend but since its for my information only at this point it can wait. I need my site to go live ASAP.

Designing the front end of my website.

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 47
 
^^ Fuck you and your attempts at cookie stuffing. I hope you fucking die.
 
amanda11 said:
wiredniko, my nigga, you're over-complicating things.
Click to expand...

I always do, which is why I want to create a big site, if I like complicating everything then maybe a big site will work


If it fails I am going to go super simple and see if that works out instead.
 
wiredniko said:
Uhm, where did you get that idea, if I was cookie stuffing I would be done at this point.
Click to expand...

Haha, not you mate! There was a poster who was raping his way through the forum with images redirecting to Amazon, Justhost and Hostgator.

emp, may peace be upon him, removed him and his posts making me look like I was directing my vitriol at you. :)
 
Looking for free CSS templates, of course I could not find anything I liked and I am trying to avoid doing what I usually do with my wordpress themes. Found a nice CSS menu that I snagged


Read on CSS best practices for a little refresher.

Overall an unproductive day

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 48

Wednesday....time to do some CSS work, unfortunately I have 1.5 hrs to spend on this, gym took longer than expected.

Figured out the color scheme I am using including the RGB colors representing it.

Started working on my CSS, the basic page breakdown is complete, I have links and header to create and maybe change my footer font.

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 49.5
 
-God- said:
Haha, not you mate! There was a poster who was raping his way through the forum with images redirecting to Amazon, Justhost and Hostgator.

emp, may peace be upon him, removed him and his posts making me look like I was directing my vitriol at you. :)
Click to expand...

I should have realized that God is always right.
 
wiredniko said:
I always do, which is why I want to create a big site, if I like complicating everything then maybe a big site will work


If it fails I am going to go super simple and see if that works out instead.
Click to expand...
I agree with amanda11.
Motivation and productivity are often hard to come by for me, and reading your journal it sounds like we have this in common. I constantly have ideas that I have to corral, and usually identify them as distractions. The limbic system loves to use the shiny object diversion to keep you from doing real work.

I think you're putting together a big project because your lizard brain knows you will never get it perfect, and you won't be able to realize this victory because something will always need to be tweaked to be just right. It's a "fun" thing to do right now because you can't really fail.

Start with the simple site, and then go work on your elaborate project. Focus your 80% time on ranking the simple site until you see what it's going to take. Hopefully it will make you a little bit of money as well.

Coding out tables and scripts to make your site perform like a Ferarri probably isn't going to make you much money, at least not in the near term. Getting a Wordpress site up and with content and ranking it most likely will. Do the fundamentals first. Find a niche, get content, get rankings.

And, if what you're working on is the next facebook, and you're committed to success or die trying, then carry on. :)
 
Hey I am also still a semi-noob and I also always have had the idea to want to create a big site due to all the google panda crap and shit and people saying authority sites = the way to go in the future..

Until I realized that unless you have a topic you can really write about the whole day it is kind of pointless (some might say everyone surely has a passion of some sort - but I really dont except that I wan to slack around at home whole day doing nothings..) and if you don't have a surefire passion you know of you would probably give up on that site sooner or later thinking that u want to change topic etc etc..

so like what DenWasson has said I decided to just start building niche sites and stop thinking so much and learn how to rank simple sites properly.. then maybe do the big site on a side project , i.e. once you generate some income from the smaller sites you can easily outsource some articles for your big sites , etc.. I think that is the better way to go than just trying to make a huge big site right from the start.. it can be really demoralizing as it is going to probably take more than a year before you will see any results from such a site..

just my 2 cents
 
To reply to my last two comments. Yes I understand that small can be good, but small can only grow so much. Having said that if this fails and I am giving it a time limit, then I will try something small. Either do something like launch 10 campaigns $100 each or 10 micro niche sites with like 5 articles each. However I am not thinking about failing too much, cause I think I am unto something.

I think big, if it pans out, well you will find out in this blog...and silence usually means failure :rasta:

Well regardless, time to kick some ass, got another two hours to work today and I am hoping at least 16 this weekend, I might go for 24.

Continuing on my CSS breakdown work....and the dreaded logo. Sometimes I wish I could outsource, logos and graphics would be first on the line.

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 51.5
 
Saturday, woke up late, slept for 10 hours, kind of ridiculous.

Finished my CSS, create a header / image for my page.

Re-arranged some of my website topology to flow better folder wise.

Created the infrastructure of my index.php

....hmm my CSS needs some more work now that I am seeing it take shape. Tweak, tweak, tweak..

Changing my navigation menu, its a good menu but does not work with the look and feel of the site.

...truly finalized my CSS, looks like a professionally built website. This is pimp :rasta:

Configured all my navigation menus and submenus. My design is coming to life.

Alright everything is there infrastructure wise. Tomorrow I need to build my main page content section, probably need to finalize my design as well.


Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 59.5
 
Sunday...this is the third day I have dreamed about this website. I think my subconscious is getting involved with my site design :ugone2far:

Worked on my main page design, I am pretty happy with it. I am planning on launching without advertisements while my site is still being developed but I know exactly where it will go once I am ready to implement it.

Working on my sidebar first since its a bit simple

OMG....weakness identified: CSS

Fucking fuckity fuck, spend one hour trying to debug something only to realize I had to setup my margin to 0. Booo

PHP / mySQL work for the main page, the fun part.

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 63.5
 
A day off for some, a day to grind for me.

Alright, all that's left is PHP / mySQL work, and about 6 pages worth of code that then I will have to slightly alter about 5 times to cover my sub niches.

Let's go! Lock in!

Crazy day, a bunch of stuff happened IRL that interrupted me. No worries though. Worked on my sidebar and almost completed. Also created a PHP script to upload pictures and update my DB when pictures are added so my front page looks a bit more pimp associating elements with pictures.

Its looks tight. I have been using two test subjects that belong to the type of traffic I am targeting. I ask them while I am designing and when I am done to give me their input. I try to make it as blind as possible so they do not know which page is mine and which one is from other sites...speaking of which I have three big competitors in this niche. One of them is doing really well with major corp support. The other is in the decline, bought out by a big corp but its not getting any love, the page looks like its from the late 90s. The third was also bought out by a big corp, but its the same corp that owns the first page, so I am guessing they are interlinked.

They are giants, I want the first spot, but hitting the 3rd spot would be awesome as my smaller goal. They have size, age and staff on me. But who gives a fuck. Their staff is working, this is my life.

Sidenote, this is an awesome song: Deadmau5 - Raise Your Weapon (feat. Greta Svabo Bech) (4x4=12 CD RIPP - BEST QUALITY - FULL LENGTH) - YouTube

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 68.5

...
Tuesday, worked on the front end again, create some div based tables to display my data. I know the design I want but getting it to look right with CSS is proving challenging.

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 70
 
I took today off thinking I was going to a wedding, but the wedding got cancelled. That means more time to work on my site.

Note to self, because you don't like CSS that does not mean that you can stop working on it....

More CSS work styling a table on my sidebar, hopefully I will be able to reuse this for my content table, just increase the width values.

Sidebar CSS tables and links look flawless, all dynamically generated. Had some issues with stored mySQL dates and converting them to human readable form but I figured it out

Code: 
// split YYYY-MM-DD
list($year, $month, $day) = split('-', $release_date); 

// format to human readable set time to 0, now looks like Sep 9, 2011
$release_date = date('M j, Y', mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year));

Had to create a default generic date for proper date sorting.

I am amazed how professionally my site looks. :thumbsup:

...ended up not paying attention to time its 1:17am. Calling it a night.

I have one more CSS table to add to my sidebar with minimal data, then work on the meat of my index.php

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 79
 
The weekend....best time to grind.

Working on my sidebar....have to figure out a div bug I think.

... I had a dream that I was coding CSS last night. Unfortunately I did not get an answer on how to fix the div bug...

Anyway, ended up fixing my div bug in less than 10 minutes.

Finalizing my last sidebar table. My color pics, I am having second thoughts on them. It does not help that I have issues with color coordination. Well thanks to CSS changing colors is not that difficult. It would affect my logo color pic as well, but now that I have done the logo once changing the color scheme won't be that hard.

Sidebar has been completed. At some point I will add some social button on it, plus my social feeds, but it can wait until after my site goes live.

Changed all my font sizes to percentages for better usability. Also discovered a lining up bug in my navbar menu which I fixed pretty easily.

...while I was at it I redid my page CSS structure to be more elegant.

Working on main content frontend.

..tried to optimize my code and make it a bit more Object Oriented and I ended up overwhelming myself. What a dork. My php includes can wait until I actually have traffic...

Its 11:34pm on a Saturday night, still grinding. I do not want this to be yet another failed project. Doubt sucks. I often wonder what I am capable of compared to what I have accomplished. I pretty much spend my days doing three things. Working 9 hours at my regular job, going to the gym and working on my site.

I have not burned out yet which is good. I just really want to accomplish something amazing in my personal life. I have always been an amazing employee, but my personal life has had issues.

Going to the gym has made me realize that change comes slowly...the funny thing is that no matter what time passes, might as well spend it becoming a better human being and person.

Now that I think of it, even if this site ends up doing nothing, at least I learned what does not work. I have been working on AM stuff for a year and some change now. At some point something has to fucking work out.

Enough with the complaining. I can probably put a good 1.5 hours right now.

Main content page is about 50% complete. I am not sure how much I like the separators I am using. Kind of need to figure out a way to break my main content better.

Its 1:04am, time to sleep.

Total Cost: $18.56
Total Hours: 88
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back