Gadooney.com

Pretty hectic and crazy week, despite the fact that I got two extra days off from work, due to ice and sleet and what-not in central Texas, of all places.

Much of that was due to switching over to a dedicated server at HostGator, and all the work involved in that. There’s not much joy in switching hosts, especially if you have a lot of databases to move over, but I didn’t feel like I had much choice, as my old host couldn’t come up with a solution to the fact that performance across all my sites of late would inexplicably (according to them) bog down at times. Umm, okay. Bye.

Weekly recap is going to be pretty high level, as I need to get my butt in gear and crank out some content myself, having spent much of the week on behind the scenes sort of things. I’m still picking away at Cisco Certifications, but that project goes very slowly. Let that be an object lesson to you, as far as how it’s much harder to write content for a topic that you have little interest in.

It’ll get there, and I’m not really sweating it’s glacial, slumbering pace of getting done, but a good contrast is the Patio to Pool site I launched this week.  Less than a week into that one and I’ve already got tons of pages up, and banging out new pages with relative ease. Don’t get me wrong, I have no great love for pools and/or patios, but it doesn’t put me into an immediate coma, and there are different things to write about to jazz the content creation process up slightly.

I’m still re-vamping some older sites, including Oddsnark, Pig Iron Malt, and Science Fiction Robots. These are hard as they get lots of traffic but they’re also broad and sprawling, so it’s hard to wring much money out of the traffic. The narrower the focus of the site, the easier it is to monetize the traffic it gets, as nearly everyone that comes through the virtual door is a decent, pre-qualified lead. Not so much with broader sites that are about “sports” and “weird” and “technology”, as it’s hard to serve up ads or links that surfers are inclined to respond to and click on.

The plan for the next few weeks is to really grind on the content front, as I’ve got probably half a dozen ideas for new sites lined up, and now that the hosting is sorted out the goal is to just put my head down and get as much stuff out there as possible.