Not long till the big day!
Time is certainly creeping up on me now, I’ve just had to renew lyndon.biz - so that means that this blog is almost one year old! Great, but not because I’m about 300 posts short of my original target - so there’s my main goal for the next year - try to average a post a day.
Another big moment is just around the corner, although much larger by comparison - it’s just over a week until I get married!!! I’ve got absolutely loads to do, but in the best Lyndon style, here I am writing a post on my neglected blog watching I am Legend - killing time until I pick the kids up from school. I REALLY need to get motivated.
I’ve been keeping up with the poker playing, in fact you can keep up with my progress on the club website - Late Nite Poker - You’ll just have to try and guess my nickname…
Oh yeah! I’ve got a blog!
After all the waiting to get lyndon.biz, you think I’d update it a bit more often… I’m working on a post or two and will be back real soon!
Re-Adding Content to “Closed” Sites
Following on from yesterdays post - Acquiring Domain Names and Sites - I thought I would add a quick post/hint on helping you retrieve some content from closed sites.
The Wayback Machine can be found at archive.org and can help you find the previous content and design of most sites, sometimes going back to the sites inception.
Before using content found on archive.org however, it would be highly advisable to check with the copyright holder before actually publishing it - however if they are the person you bought the domain from, there usually shouldn’t be a problem.
The Wayback Machine is also a fairly fun way of looking at a sites evolution… Why not checkout Ye Olde Worlde John Chow.com
Aquiring Domain Names and Sites
Don’t you find that when you have an idea for a great site, all of the great domain names are taken?
I was looking around the other day for a domain name to fit a new project and got rather fed up with searching for available domain names so I just decided to Google several keywords related to the niche.
On about my third search I found that the #1 ranking site for that term had “shut down” so I promptly called up the whois information for the domain (as no contact info was listed on the site) and emailed the domain owner to enquire as to whether they would be interested in parting with their now dead domain.
After a series of emails back and forth it appears that they might just be willing to part with the domain for just the cost of the registration fee. Not bad considering the domain is currently a PR5 with hundreds of visible backlinks targetted my desired keywords.
Following that up with a Google search for “site has closed” reveals more hidden gems that might be worthy of further investigation. (Especially for lazy people like me!)
Busy Week!
Wow, it’s been over a week since I last posted here! Naughty Boy!
Well, my sister has had a healthy baby girl, named Courtney Grace, I have my new car, I got to be restaurant manager (for a day!), I quit my job (the first time I’ve EVER walked out of a job without giving notice) and I start another new job on Saturday!
What a week! But this time I’m doing things differently. Life is all about learning from your mistakes and that is what I intend to do. The new job is for a rather large company, but this time I’m definitely not setting foot in the kitchen - I’m going to be working just 30 hours a week as a bar-person/waiter and spending at least 14 hours a week dedicating myself to retraining as an ASP.NET developer.
I’ve spent about 10 hours so far this week learning C# and it’s been fairly steady going. To be honest I should have at least doubled or tripled this amount but with it being half term, the kids are home and getting anything done is a mission and a half! But I got a good rhythm going and I’ve promised myself that I will do at least one chapter of my C# guide a day (or two on the days where I’m not working!) As usual I’ve neglected my sites, which is becoming something of a naughty habit.
On a side note, congratulations to Matt Coddington, who sold his 5 month old Net Business Blog this week for $13,000 over at Sitepoint. I hope that the new owner continues with the same great quality of post.
Restaurant Manager for a Day!
Well today I finally get to do the job that I applied for. After 4 weeks of sweating my nuts off in the kitchen I am standing in for the restaurant manager today - a job that should have been mine four weeks ago!
Even though I’ve never set foot outside of the kitchen during service I’m now restaurant manager on the busiest day of the week, running a team of 8, where statistics dictate that we will send out around 6-700 plates today.
Despite some apprehension I am actually looking forward to it, I am pondering how the rest of the kitchen and front of house staff will actually take to me being the “boss” today, especially as tomorrow I am back in the kitchen! But I suppose it can’t be all that bad, can it?
Wish me luck…
Get Backlinks Writing Reviews
One sure fire method of getting backlinks to your blog is to write a review about other bloggers work.
Not only will you gather backlinks as fast as you can write reviews but your Technorati rank and authority will increase as each reviewed blog links back to you. However filling your blog with reviews will do nothing to increase your readership - I mean, who wants to read endless reviews about other blogs?
Another problem, to my mind, is that most reviews tend to be overly positive in their feedback as the reviewer doesn’t want to risk not getting that valuable link in case they offend said blogger, though this is not always the case as can be seen over at the XEIT blog, where a review of the famous JohnChow.com blog is entitled How to Ruin a Blog by John Chow. One of the comments from the post just goes to highlight my point:
“Wow, I don’t know if he’ll link to this review. I don’t mind his food posts because it is, after all, still a personal blog. His site can be a bit cluttered with ads, paid reviews and the like, but I can still learn a heck of a lot from John and keep reading him every day.”
With that said though, I’m going to start reviewing a few other blogs shortly, the link love won’t hurt and will hopefully increase my readership too. And ‘ll also try and keep my reviews as honest as possible.
Top Commentators Now Online!
It’s time to give some link love 
I finally got the plugin working, although I will freely admit it was my fault all along!
This Hemingway block thing can be a bit confusing but, for those that run it, you just need to reset your options (just like it says in the instructions!) before new blocks work….
This is just typical of my week so far, but things are finally coming together. I should have a newer car around the weekend (a Landrover Freelander ) as my faithful Mondeo needs to be retired to the great scrapheap in the sky and Amazon have finally dispatched my ASP.NET learning guide (after a credit card hiccup!)
So here’s to a great weekend (and I’ve got Saturaday off! YAY!)
Blog Spam Getting Out of Hand!
Akismet does a wonderful job of keeping the 200+ spam comments per day that lyndon.biz receives out of my moderation queue, but it’s not uncommon to find the odd genuine comment being flagged as spam and when you’ve got as many comments to manually sort through as I’ve got (not that I get many genuine comments) sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth it!
Fairly often I’ll clear the Akismet queue, only to find 3-4 new spam comments left in the seconds it takes to hit Delete! So I’ve added another new plugin to my Wordpress arsenal! I use a similar plugin for my vBulletin boards and it seems to keep the majority of automated spammers at bay. It’s based on a simple maths logic question - simply put it will ask commentators to add two small, random numbers together before considering their comment for inclusion.
The plugin is called Challenge! and can be found at http://lordchaos.dominatus.net/wordpress-plugin-challenge/
Im also adding the now famous Top Commentators Plugin to give some link love back to commentators, so feel free to grab yourself a link by telling me how much you love me 
[EDIT] I’ve had to remove the Top Commentators Plugin for now as I can’t seem to get it to work as a Hemmingway plugin - I’ll keep playing and add it back as soon as I figure out how to get it working…[/EDIT]
Desktop Blogging and Yet Another Domain!
As I seem to accumulate more and more domain names for blog ideas that I have, the task of keeping them all updated seems all the more daunting!
For example, I’ve just registered the domain name - learning-asp.net to record my journey into the self study and certification of ASP.NET. You may wonder why I’ve registered yet another domain rather than just keep posting here, well I’ve always found it helpful when self studying to keep notes that I can refer back to and when I write things down (or type them) they seem to stick in my head more easily. Plus I didn’t want my personal blog (lyndon.biz) to be cluttered with random VB.NET code as well as the fact that searching a blog is much easier than searching 500 pages of notes!
Anyway, to assist me with the ever growing number of blogs I’ve downloaded and installed BlogDesk, a FREE, neat little off-line blogging tool that copes with multiple blogs from multiple vendors. So far, it seems great (providing this post gets published!) I’ll try and remember to post a more comprehensive review once I’ve got to grips with it a bit more and posted across a few blogs, but setup was a piece of cake with it importing my categories and testing upload capabilites automatically.
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