Ramblings
Should We Honor the Sabbath?
I got an interesting email message this morning from a reader of WebbyOnline. His name is Carl and he says:
Just a quick thought – the Sabbath – a day of rest – is the most important thing that we can do for ourselves. Don’t neglect it and be true to it. You should take a day – weekly – where you have NOTHING to do with work – I know, it may seem like fantasy for an entrepreneur but it is the best thing that you can do for your business to keep you fresh.
Very interesting point. The Sabbath has slightly different meanings depending on the religion. In this country, it is typically thought to be on Sunday and is a day where we don’t work and we worship. Unfortunately, though, the Sabbath is generally considered to be something that only the really religious practice. But, why is that?
Many typically religious traditions come from real common sense. After all, religion is meant to better people’s lives. The whole idea of kosher food, for example, really bears out to the fact that it is simply healthier and cleaner. Pork is not considered kosher, however it is also true that pork happens to be one of the more contaminated meats you can eat. Same for fish. Kosher rules say that fish is only kosher when it has scales and fins. Seafood without scales tends to have higher levels of mercury, which is poisonous. So, while many religious tenants have been altered over the years, there is a lot of good common sense to be had there. And I think the same goes for the Sabbath.
Take a Day Off
As an entreprenuer, I work alot. And that’s an understatement. But, sometimes I just need a break. Sometimes I burn out to the point where I just don’t want to sit in my office anymore. When that happens, I typically will get all pressing matters done and then quit early and go goof off somehow. Regardless of the intensity of the work schedule, though, the idea of honoring the Sabbath is a good idea. We all need a day off, and as Carl says, it really is a GOOD thing for your business and it will keep you fresh.
Personally, I don’t always make Sunday that day. But, most weekends, I typically make one day or the other a total day off. This last Saturday, I spent some time with my wife before lunch and actually SLEPT for two hours in the middle of the day. The idea of taking a nap is so foreign to me usually, but that’s what I did. And you know, Sunday I was just itching at the bit to get some work done in the office. And I was actually pretty productive for a Sunday.
So, Carl’s advice rings true for me. And for that I thought I’d pass it on. Regardless of your religion, honoring the Sabbath has its roots in plain common sense. And those of us, especially, who work online really need a whole day per week where we literally FORGET about the computer, the internet and our precious email. Screw it all. We do all this so that we can have a life and enjoy ourselves. If you don’t take the time to do that, why are you working so hard?
Hey You! Read This Now!
Now that I have your attention (whether it be from the website or the RSS feed), I want your help. You wouldn’t be seeing this post unless you were a reader of WebbyOnline, whether you’re new or not, avid or casual. On that note, I want to know what you think.
I have set up a survey that I want all WebbyOnline readers to fill out. It is anonymous and it has to do with your needs and wants from a website such as this. I also want to know what you think of this site and what you want from me in the future.
Click here to go fill out the survey.
I have never run a survey like this for Webbyonline, so this is going to be my first structured profile of who my readers are and what they want from me on this site. So, I don’t care whether you like me, hate me, or don’t give two flips who the heck I am. You can still give me your feedback.
Thanks ahead of time. I promise it will only take a couple minutes or so.
Internet Business Club & Webcam Testing
I wanted to bring a few things to your attention this lovely Sunday day (well, at least its nice here in Tampa today). This is not the usual informational or helpful post. Just an announcement.
First off, I have created a WebbyOnline Google Group, called WebbyOnline: Internet Business Club. My intention behind this group is simply to make a free, helpful email list of like-minded people to help each other out. If you’re not familiar with Google Groups, go to the Groups homepage and check it out. Once we get some people involved, it’s one of those groups that you will be able to email when you need some input on your own website and get some help from the community of WebbyOnline readers. If you want in, just head on over to the club homepage and sign up. It is free and always will be.
Secondly, I am experimenting (in coordination with Rich, my video guy) with some webcam work on my sites. For now, I only have it up and running in a private section of WebbyOnline. You can view the feed here. It isn’t much to look at right now because this is all in the testing phase. When its running, you’re likely just going to see me in my office. Not that exciting. But, when everything is worked out and streamlined, we’ve got some more interesting things in store. In the meantime, you can watch me do stuff in my office and act like you find it interesting. 
Enjoy what’s left of your weekend!
Personal News Made Public – Baby Dave
I made mention of this in the last issue of the WebbyOnline newsletter and I figured there was no reason not to mention it here. I have a little piece of personal news I would like to share with my readers.
My wife, Malika, is pregnant. Yes sir, we’re having a baby.
She is about 4 months along now. We actually found out about this roughly 3 months ago and I chose not to publicize it on the web. This was a personal decision between my wife and I. However, now that things are moving along and seem to be moving along normally, I figure its now OK to let you guys know about it.
Its interesting and a little unnerving to put this all together with my business and what I talk about all the time on this website. When I first started this business, I was single and I was making way more money than I needed on my own. Now I am married and my wife is going back to school for her second degree in civil engineering. So, I’m holding down the fort in terms of money. Now we also have a child on the way. Since neither of us work for “the man”, we don’t have any maternity insurance. That doesn’t really scare me, though. The odds are that everything is going to go by the books. Also, I do make enough money to take care of the medical bills. But, it doesn’t mean it isn’t placing more strain on me and my ability to rake in the coin.
For the longest time, its just been me. Now I have a family which is depending on the success of what I do every day on the internet. I don’t work for “the man”. I work for myself. I sit here every day in a home office generating money off the internet. On the one hand, I am really proud of the fact that I can sit here with my hair all screwed up like I just woke up, work all day at my desk, and actually earn money that a lot of full-time employees could not earn. On the flip side, its a bit freaky and I can’t help but get a bit of a shiver at the idea of this hobby of mine actually paying ALL our bills. Will it continue like this?
Of course, all of this is most likely par for the course for any expecting father (and mother, for that matter).
The baby has a due date of December 12th. Its exciting! But at the same time – oh shit! 
Hard Drive Failure, Vista, and My Middle Finger
Sometimes living as an internet entreprenuer means you get bit in the ass by your own computer. That’s what happened to me yesterday and is the reason I was off the radar all day yesterday. It all started with my getting out of bed and my wife telling me that the power went out for about 40 minutes before I got up. She then says my office was beeping so she closed the door. Oh shit, I think. The beeping means that my UPS battery was dying and that, sure enough, my computer just died. No big deal, right? Wrong. I go to boot it back up and it locks up while I’m staring at the Windows boot-up logo. Try again. This time the hard drive is making a weird clanking noise and I get a read error on the disk. And once again, I think: Oh shit.
Hard Drive Failure
Yep, my hard drive croaked. Luckily I was using Norton Ghost on my machine and had everything backed up on the external hard drive. Right? Well, partly. As it turns out, Norton had not successfully backed up my computer for about two weeks. Which means I have lost about two weeks worth of work. Now, luckily, being in the business I am means much of my work is up on servers. So, I can go and download much of it. Unfortunately, I cannot recover the last two weeks worth of email. I also lost the last two weeks worth of statistics and accounting data, although I’m hoping I can get all that back together. It just means a bunch of repeated work and wasted time.
Replacing the hard drive was not exactly cake. I am using a pre-built Gateway machine. Its a nice box and a good value, however it came with an EIDE hard drive. Most of the drives sold today are SATA. Why Gateway used EIDE in a brand new computer is beyond me. Fortunately, the motherboard supported SATA, so I went out and picked up a couple new 320GB SATA drives. Why two? Because I intend to set up auto-backup again internally so that data is redundant. I get home and… oh, man! The power supply in the case does not have power leads for SATA drives. So, I hop BACK in the car and head out again to pick up some adapters to convert the standard Molex leads into SATA leads. Once I got those, I was able to begin setting up this computer with the new SATA drives. But, it doesn’t end there because of my new bright idea…
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Youtube Silently Sticks it to Director Accounts
As a little followup to my podcast earlier today as well as an excuse to vent, I have just found out today that Youtube has silently stuck it to Director accounts. It wasn’t long ago that you had to actually APPLY for a Director account. With the enhanced account, you would be able to do certain things – one of which was to post videos that were over ten (10) minutes in length. Well, apparently that is no more. We tried to post a new WebbyOnline video presentation today that was about 13 minutes long. Our video got rejected for being too long, even though we have a Director account. I check out their Help center and get this crap.
All videos uploaded to YouTube have a 100MB file size limit. The longer the video is, the more compression will be required to fit it into that size. For that reason, most videos on YouTube are under five minutes long and there is a 10-minute length limit for all videos.
Personally, I think that’s a load of hot air. Our video was 13 minutes long and was less than a quarter of the 100 MB file size limit. So, I don’t see how this has anything to do with the difficulty of getting sub 100 MB files. I did some looking around and it looks like others have gotten the same problem. And another. I then found this story from The Register. It talks about Youtube’s issues with people posting copyrighted video clips and why the 10-minute cap was a response to that. Yeah, well perhaps they caved, because now even Directors can’t go past 10 minutes.
What is amazing to me is the silence with which they did it. I was Googling around about this and found absolutely NOTHING from Youtube announcing the change. I had to find it from other blogs. All patterns seem to indicate they made this change some time around March 2007 and never really told anybody.
We’ll keep using Youtube, but I think they should be more open about this stuff. In the meantime, its time to go open an account at Revver. I might try Google Video, too, although that one is, too, owned by “big Google”.
Travel Plans for Gnomedex – Internet RULES
I finally got around to setting up my travel arrangements for Gnomdex in August. Gnomedex is the conference being put on by Chris Pirillo and his wife Ponzi. And if you don’t know who that is, perhaps you’ve heard of Lockergnome.com which is the site started by Chris. The conference is August 9-11 in Seattle, Washington. I live in Tampa Bay, Florida. I don’t feel like walking. Driving would suck. So, flying sounds like the right course of action.
I checked out Travelocity, Orbitz and Hotwire. Cool sites. I’ve used Travelocity in the past, but I am always impressed (from the technical side) at how well these travel sites are put together. Just slick. And besides being slick, its just convenient as hell. Sitting at my desk in my jammies, I am fully searching the database of flights and hotels in the area. Since I want to be close by to the Bell Harbor convention center, I also want to check out where these hotels are. No problem, go plug the street address of Bell Harbor and the address of a hotel into Google Maps and – whalah, I get a map and distance between the two. Well, after looking over the LONG list of hotels the sites provided for Seattle and reading reviews of them, I settle on the Grand Hyatt Seattle. According to Google, its only about 1.6 miles from the convention center. I then pondered whether it would be worth it to get a car. In one word: no. In reading the hotel reviews, I found that is can cost anywhere from $10-$30 per day to park a car at these hotels. Screw that. I’ll catch a cab.
I ended up using Hotwire to book. At first, I was looking at a 3 night stay with easy-ass flights and was looking at about $1200 for the whole thing. Travelocity was the most expensive, and Orbitz came in about $50 cheaper for essentially the same thing (just a different flight that would have a little longer layover in Dallas). I talked to the wife and she talked some sense into me (one of the many reasons I love her), so I decided to save myself a night’s stay and simply fly out right after the event is over. Yeah, it’ll be a red-eye flight and I’m going to have to hussle a bit after the conference ends to get to the airport. However, by doing that, I am literally saving $398. Hell, I’ll sit in a plane for a night to save that kind of money. So, now I’m flying Delta both ways, with a red eye flight on the way back to Tampa, and staying 2 nights in the Grand Hyatt for $794. I can live with that, and I hear the Grand Hyatt is pretty damn nice.
Definitely check out Hotwire if you need to make travel plans. I found that the prices were cheaper than Travelocity or Orbitz – at least in my case.
I hope Gnomedex will be a useful experience.
My Top 6 Internet Time-Savers
As a person who is online all the time, and seemingly ALWAYS short on time to do everything I want to do, I am always on the lookout for tools to make my life easier, more convenient and fun. Here is a collection of tools I have found and use daily.
- FoxMarks. As a user of Firefox, I would not be without this plug-in. Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer automatically synchs your bookmarks among multiple computers. When you add a site to your favorites, it works as it always does. Periodically, though, Foxmarks will synch your bookmarks with their servers (the interval is up to you). You can not only access your bookmarks from any internet-enabled computer by logging into your account at the Foxmarks website, but you can also automatically synch your bookmarks with other computers using Firefox. I use it all the time to keep bookmarks synched between my laptop and desktop.
- Google Reader. My new favorite blog reader. I was using BlogBridge, which is a program which runs locally under Windows. BlogBridge is nice, but it is quite convenient using the web to read your feeds. With Google Reader, the interface is pretty slick (thanks to AJAX). I also like how I can get an instant summary view of the different tags/folders I set up. So, for example, if I want to see what the buzz is in internet marketing, I just check out my internet marketing folder and it will show all the recent activity in my subscribed blogs in that category. Using the internet as the reader, then, means I can access my feeds from anywhere. Even on my cell phone.
- Firebug. As a web developer, I often am working with code online, sometimes on existing websites. Firebug is a Firefox add-on which allows me to analyze a site easily right from the web browser. You can inspect the DOM of the document, easily find which CSS elements are affecting a particular thing on your page, debug javascript errors, etc. I love this add-on and use it almost daily.
- StumbleUpon. Alright, I’ll be honest…this one probably shouldn’t go under the category of time saver. In fact, you can waste quite a bit of time with this thing, but this is one of my favorite plug-ins for Firefox. It uses the StumbleUpon community to organize the web and then allow you to “channel surf” the internet. You define your areas of interest and then you can use the toolbar to randomly visit sites others have rated and placed in your interest category. Its a great way to find great websites you didn’t know about, in addition to blowing away an entire weekend surfing the net aimlessly.
- Live Pagerank. This simple little Firefox add-on allows you to display the Google page rank of a website of the current URL in your browser in the bottom right corner. This plug-in, though simple, is very handy when tracking what Google is doing with your website as well as what your competition might be doing right or wrong that affects their pagerank.
- Cloudmark Desktop. This is an add-on tool for Outlook and Outlook Express that WILL take your spam problem down to almost nothing. Now, it IS a subscribed service. I pay only $3.99/month for it, but considering the amount of time it saves me, its money well spent. And, it beats the hell out of the built-in filters in any email program. It uses the community of users to dynamically train the filter, so it will be trained to combat most spam right after installation. I heard through the grapevine that they are actively working on a version which will work with Thunderbird, but unfortunately it does not work with Thunderbird as of this post. But, Outlook users will be happy with it. And I’ll admit straight-up that this add-on is one of the primary reasons I continue to use Outlook over Thunderbird.
Well, that’s my list. All of these are tried and true by myself and I use each one of them daily. For me, they’re must-have’s. So, what are your’s?
Dreamweaver CS3 Showing up in SPAM
I guess now that Dreamweaver CS3 is getting some press, the spammers think they can make a buck on it. I have been getting a LOT of spam lately advertising CS3 at ridiculously low prices. The last one? “Our price $59.95. You save $339.05″. I say – bullshit. And in the ad, they didn’t even directly link to the website. It says I have to type it directly into my browser. And, of course, the link is part of the image so that it is not scannable by spam filters. At the bottom of the email is the classic “spam poetry”, where they type a bunch of poetic crap they copy/pasted from somewhere in order to try to fool the filters.
I went and checked out the website URL. I did it in one of my virtual machines that way my PC would not be affected if this was nothing but a hoax to attempt to infect my PC with something. What I see is a totally legit looking website that is advertising TONS of downloable software for sale. And we’re not talking shareware either. We’re talking full application programs such as Dreamweaver (of course), Quickbooks, AutoCad, Office 2007 and more. There is no mention anywhere on the site addressing the question on whether this is legit or not. Chances of it being legit are basically none. These companies just don’t license their software like this. I did a WHOIS lookup on the domain and, sure enough, it is a company registered out of Beijing, China.
I sure hope nobody falls for this garbage. I’m not even going to publish the link in this blog post. I don’t want to help them with the publicity. Dreamweaver is a fantastic product and if you intend to use it, fork over the dough for a REAL license.
WebbyOnline Podcast: Episode #1
Call it a snap decision, but I decided to try my hand at a podcast for WebbyOnline. Actually, the thought was in my head for a couple weeks now, but this morning I decided to break out the mic and hit the record button.
This episode is completely unedited and unpolished and is simply an introduction to myself. Perhaps by the next one I will get with Rich on a soundtrack and adding some polish to the show. From there we’ll see how it goes. I am no veteran podcaster and podcasts, as a medium, are new to me. We do have a podcast over at PCMechTV which Rich does for me.
Enjoy! (or run away fast – the choice is your’s)
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
