Bush Mackel

While it might sound silly (with me being a business owner), I don’t think that I’m a numbers guy. So when it comes to filing our taxes and figuring out which number goes on what line – I’m pretty useless. And since this past filing was really the first time where my main business made any money, I was even more useless than normal and my wonderful wife had her work cut out for herself.

So at the advice of my mom, (who herself is more or less self-employed as a Real Estate agent), I visited her CPA who gave me the skinny on what I should be doing financially with my business, how I should be tracking my money, and what deductions I was probably missing.

Why I Need to Change
After an hour or two of talking with this guy and frantically scribbling down notes, I knew that it would really be to my company’s benefit to start taking my financials more seriously. Plus I knew it would take a lot of pressure off my wife too. I mean, even though I’ve never been one to make people do things for me and the business is for the family and not just me… I really don’t feel good about having the wife do all that work every year since I know others could do it faster and easier. Additionally, (and this is honestly new to me but would’ve made sense if I had stopped to think about it), apparently when you apply for loans and such from banks, you generally provide your financial records which at this point I’d be unable to do because they’re in such disarray.

I’ve Started with Quickbooks!
And yes, it was what my CPA suggested. Basically I can track all of the monies of my business in the program, and at the end of the year (or quarterly or whatever), I can submit a file to my guy that he can use to easily do my taxes. Now, I’m not sure how easy I thought it was going to be to jump into the program but there is def a learning curve to it. For me, it took me about a day, the help of a “Learn Quickbooks” DVD and searching through the Intuit forums to really get going. And by “going”, I mean halfway through getting my records up to date for the year.

You see, I started Quickbooks what… Yesterday?, some 5 months into my company’s fiscal year. And if you’re as new to this whole thing as I am, know that Quickbooks wants to account for EVERY SINGLE penny coming and going from your business. “Of course it does, what’d you think it’d do?” Well what this means in practicality is that every transaction from Jan 1st 2010 to now has to be entered, and correctly, so that your balance from Dec 31st 2009 goes up and down to the correct balance on your statements now… For me, that’s a lot of statements to enter!

But It’s Worth It
At this point I’ve setup all of my clients and their current contracts into the system (which again took me the better part of a day) and I’m sure it’s gonna take me another full one to get all my year’s transactions into the system. But already I can see that this will be great for my peace of mind and organization. It has tons of reports you can run, invoicing, and a bunch of other stuff that I could go into. For me, I’m just very excited to be able to (at a glance) figure out how much money is still coming to me by way of contracts. Of course I could set this up in Excel or something but setting up all those relationships so that sending invoices, receiving invoices, reporting and everything else plays nicely together would take QUITE a long time so again – I’m glad someone did the work for me.

Running your own business is a funny thing.

I’m trying to remember how long I’ve been in business but at the time that I write this, (like every other time I can recount for the last couple months), my mind is so… BUSY, that it’s hard to recall the small stuff.

But i will say that at least on the financial front, I’m finally breathing a bit easier. There have been so many highs and lows since I left my job… So many times where I’m just trying to move enough money around that I can make the minimum payment on my business credit card that it feels like a great accomplishment to FINALLY have a small amount of funds in the account.

And don’t read it any different – It’s a small amount of funds. But it’s enough to keep the family afloat for a month should a check not go through (or come) and we have not had that small amount of security for a long time.

Assessing My Current Situation
So today when I finally took a breath and found myself in a “good place” – My mind immediately began to race towards all the things I could buy now that I couldn’t before. In my younger days before I had these kids and a wife, I would probably have gone out and bought an LCD, new computer or SOMETHING! Presently however, I’m very content to just not have to worry for a little while and to have the chance to future proof my business!

*whew!* Everything is coming up Millhouse.

Saying that installing Bugzilla was painful would be the understatement of the year. From what I’ve been able to piece together through this nightmare, it probably took me 9 hours to get the whole thing done – 3 hours on 3 separate days. And if it wasn’t for @mkanat suggesting that I give it another try, I probably would’ve walked away a LONG TIME ago.

I mean, I believe that everyone who works on large computer projects like myself should have some kind of issue tracker setup and while I’ve been using Mantis very happily – It doesn’t look very attractive (which is important when opening this up to clients and associates). So I began searching for something that it looked a bit better which is when I found Bugzilla. *shaking head*

First Things First
If you’re thinking about installing this on your server, know that it’s not for the feint of heart. There are A LOT of “moving parts” with this thing (Perl, CGI, db stuff) and many of them are things that I don’t have intimate experience with. Aside from that, the install guide that comes up Bugzilla is very vanilla in that seemingly ALL the issues that came up for me were not addressed in the guide either in notes next to the instructions or in the troubleshooting section. Even Google searches weren’t yielding me the help I really needed. @mkanat suggested that I use the Bugzilla newsgroup which I tried, but look – I’ve never used a newsgroup before and at 11:30pm at night well into hour 7 or something… I just wanted to get this done, not learn yet another thing.

So hey, I finally got things going last night so I wanted to put something out there that might help others who are going through the same pain. This isn’t an install guide but just the problems that I had that I didn’t see answered anywhere else. Oh and keep in mind that I don’t fancy myself a Unix Administrator either so if I get things wrong or sound stupid – It IS what it IS.

Getting Started
First you’ll need to probably shell into your server using the username for the website you’re installing it into. That’s to say, even if you think you can only or SHOULD shell in as “root”, you should instead shell in as the group/owner of the website where you’re installing Bugzilla… This will probably fix problems for you later. After you download the Bugzailla tar file and untar it, you have to run this script called checksetup.pl. (You run it by typing “./checksetup.pl” at the command line. When you first run it, you’ll be told about all the Perl modules you need to have installed to get things going. It will also say that to install all the modules, do “./install_modules.pl –all”. When I did that, everything went fine until it prompted me for “pg_config” which is when the first big headache started.

Installing the Modules – Oh and “pg_config” or “pg_path” is the Devil
I found out later that the “pg_config” prompt was for a PostgreSQL module. Here’s the thing, I have MySQL. You can think that you can just skip this by pressing [enter] but when you do, the script quits out and then I was getting an error when re-running it saying “Can’t locate Constant.pm in @INC” blah blah blah. At this point, I couldn’t go forward in my installation. The only way I found to deal with this was re-installing Perl (if you use CPanel, you can follow the instructions to do so here: >http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/11_24/AllFAQ/PerlFAQ#How_do_I_upgrade_Perl After doing this 2 or three times, I think I stumbled onto something through Google searches saying that you may NOT want to install ALL the modules. This was a big turning point. Instead, (after I was able to run checksetup.pl again), I ONLY installed the modules that were required (I think there was about 3). After that, I got past this HUGE hiccup. And again – Why this information isn’t included as a note in the install guide is beyond me.

And Then There Was the Group Owner Permission Problems
After all this, I finally got to the point where I could try and run things again (./checksetup.pl and the like) and I was still getting problems. Turns out now that I had group/owner permission problems… Remember before when I said you should make sure to shell in using the group/owner account of the website where you’re installing this? Well see, I’m using something that I found out is called SuExec… From what I understand, it makes individual websites on your server run scripts by that website’s group name… If you let them run as “nobody” or “root”, it’s a big security thang. So anyway, when I installed all of this Bugzilla stuff as “root”, my owner and group permissions for all these files were all over the place (which is obviously bad). Using the commands “chown” and “chgrp”, I ended up fixed things and I made sure to update the “localconfig” file with the right group name.

At about this time in the process, you can run “testserver.pl” to try and see what’s wrong and even though things were a little broken, it was saying that the group name on the “localconfig” file was different than the name being used by the webserver. Even though it says “this MAY not be a problem”, when nothing is working you tend to second guess yourself so obviously I spent hours changing my Apache httpd.conf file, restarting Apache and then changing Bugzilla’s “localconfig” file and hoping it all worked. Bleh. Let me sum up things for you if you’re a bit confused:

Let’s say that I’m on my Linux box running Apache with Cpanel installed. I’m going to install Bugzilla onto hockeyrules.com – A domain that I own (for conversation’s sake anyway). When I FTP or or login to the CPanel for this domain, I know my username is “hockey”. Chances are, this is what SuExec is using for your group name when running scripts. So this is what you’re going to use in your “localconfig” file’s $webservergroup variable. Got it?

403 Forbidden My A$$
At this point, “checksetup.pl” was lookin’ good but I still was having problems with “testserver.pl” saying that it couldn’t retrieve some PNG file or something. When I checked out the site through my browser, I saw that I was getting a 403 Forbidden error. I mean seriously, could this thing just work!?!? After a little while searching and a little while investigating, I found out that my Bugzilla directory that was supposed to be serving files didn’t have the right permissions. What tripped a flag was when I saw that “Other” didn’t have read permissions which is when I think I chmodded it to 755 to get it to serve…

And that my friends is when it FINALLY worked.

So now I have a working version of Mantis AND a working version of Bugzilla. Oh, and I tried to get into Bugzilla a little while earlier today, but I found myself bamboozled. There’s a lot in there and it’s going to take a while to suss out I think. And don’t worry – I still plan on comparing the two so check back in a little while and you may see a FANtastic (or mediocre) review!

This weekend was remarkably unproductive, not to say that I really had a hit list of things I wanted to accomplish or anything…

But ONE of the things I DID want to do was really doing some damage to my gamerscore and I think I ended up getting oh… 10 or 20pts this weekend. Ha ha… BUT, I did set the foundation.

Though honestly I’m not sure if I’m even going to get around to those games this week because of work and web design.

Long story Short
I’m not sure if it’s apparent on here (’cause I’m hardly posting anything these days) but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this blog, LSO, and my web design stuff I’m desperately trying to get off the ground… The web design stuff is hitting and missing right now but I really want to keep at it because I believe that I can make it work. For everything else, I knew that I needed to do something different because I’m not particular happy with this blog or LSO. The reason why I’m not happy with THIS blog is because the design/layout of it just isn’t working for me. But that’s a relatively quick fix. The LSO stuff is a bigger thing.

LSO Can Work!
If you guys aren’t familiar with one of my bigger projects, Learn Stuff Online was intended to be a huge content site whose primary source of revenue was AdSense. And as most of you know, AdSense is really a numbers game so when I started LSO, I had friends of mine come onto the project with me and start writing content. Unfortunately, all of them turned out to be horrible writers or horribly unproductive so LSO kind of fell by the way side.

But I always knew it could work.

My AdSense Account
So I’m checking out my AdSense account the other day for LSO, and I noticed that I’m close to payout! Turns out that basically my 24 pages on there are doing like $5 of revenue a month! I know that’s like nothing, but they’re being hit for n00b keywords and still doing KINDA decent numbers (AdSense) wise. So last night I finally made a decision about LSO. I had already integrated WordPress into a new test domain for LSO (for affiliate marketing) and I now wanted it everywhere on the site. I tried this once before (installing WordPress mu) and I never could get it working but last night I tried again and after MUCH effort, I managed to get it done!

Going Forward
Here’s what I’m thinking: I’ve learned so much from blogging over this past two years or whatever. (I think it’s my anniversary or something!) I think I can leverage that power with AdSense and SEO and finally get Learn Stuff Online up and running generating income. I made a mistake before of trying to do too much too fast (running multiple sub domains at once), but if I can get one sub domain up and running and making money, then I SHOULD be able to bring in a copy writer to keep it going and move onto the next! See where I’m going with this?

OK – More to come on the Mu install later! But I hope you’re as excited about this as I am!

I’ve once again hit a patch of pretty busy things for myself, and thankfully this time around it looks like those things are definitely of the positive sort.

And I’m beginning to come out of them now so I think it’s time to throw some updates up on here. Well actually… Now that I write that, I don’t know if I’m really coming out of them as much as I’m starting to see the proverbial light at the end of tunnel.

The big things on the hit list are of course the impending house purchase, finally finishing up that pesky website I’ve mentioned on here, Little Mac’s 1st birthday party, getting more business for my design company, and learning ColdFusion *bleh* at work. Why don’t we go in order of stress shall we?

Getting More Business for BWD 0 stress
Right now, my business Bethesda Web Design is doing just the right amount of business for me right now which isn’t too much. (#):) As I’ll point out in a hot minute, I’m putting the finishing touches of the company’s first real client site and I’ve had another person inquire about a new website too which I have a good feeling on. But probably the biggest thumbs up for the company in the past month was getting an old client back on board which means my hosting costs are no longer dragging me down to nearly the extent as they were before.

Finishing Up That Pesky Website 2 stress
This used to rank much higher on the stressful scale but I’ve recently put a lot of work into it addressing the harder parts of the service, and finishing up some nagging issues that I personally had a problem with. NOW the only thing I’m really waiting on is the “client” to get back to me with the rest of the text so I can put the seal of completeness on this one. And don’t worry, I’ll be talking a lot more about this project next week in a Postmordem of sorts.

Little Mac’s 1st Birthday Party 3 stress
I’ll admit it that from jump, I didn’t want to have a birthday party for the little guy. He’s not going to remember it and it’s just going to mean a lot of time commitment from me along with the whole catering thing *rolling eyes*. BUT the wife really wanted to have it so here I am, having to fire up the BarBQ (which NEVER goes smoothly) and having to figure out what food I’m going to make to feed all these people that are allegedly coming. bleh

Learning ColdFusion 4 stress
It should come as a surprise to no one that I’m more familiar with PHP for database manipulation than anything else. (See wordpress). But when I was originally propositioned at work to learn this technology I of course agreed and now I really wish I was doing something else. Of course it doesn’t help that I’m basically learning as I’m going through the joy that is the Internet Tutorial, but it really feels like ColdFusion is forcing me to learn a new scripting language that is just different enough from most standards that I have to stop and look everything up every 5 seconds. And as there’s basically only one other guy in the office with CF experience, I bet I’m gonna have to start doing this a lot more in the future.

Impending House Purchase ? stress
And finally on the pain train is the impending house purchase for which I have settlement on Monday. For some reason, it’s really not stressing me out as much as it should be. Maybe it’s the fact that I probably won’t be moving in ’till Sept or that I’m ok paying copious amounts in the way of bills. One thing is for certain though and that’s that I have very limited time to renew my real estate license if I’m going to be able to get a referral fee off the purchase. Busy weekend for sure coming up. (#):)

Anyone out there doing anything of interest?

I was so happy when I finally finished the new look of my design site last night.

Obviously this was the main project that prevented me from posting on here (or at least that’s my story) and it has been a monkey on my back for a really long time.

Of course in the grand scheme of things, getting the site up probably isn’t the biggest thing I’m going to have to do. THAT dubious honor would probably fall to attracting clients and getting work.

Bethesda Web Design
As you’re probably already aware, that’s the name of my design site/company. Recently, amongst the 3 or 4 big projects that I’m focusing on for the future I decided to make this one a priority because I thought it would be the quickest avenue for me out of the 9-5 that I could find. Additionally, I’ve had design clients in the past that I’ve had on retainer and it’s really nice to know that your hosting costs will be covered month to month without you having to go out and get people to say…

Buy ads on your site. (#);)

The Design
I’ve said it before but I think it deserves repeating, I don’t fancy myself a designer. I like art, I like design, but coming up with original work in that area is a bit of a struggle. So coming up with a look for the site that I felt good about was a very taxing endeavor. And unfortunately (or fortunately), I had to come up with something good because I couldn’t sell my company knowing that my site was utter trash. Thankfully before I started the site (and my company in earnest), I did what any upstart does and order really flashy and expensive business cards. (#):)

Sure that doesn’t sound like a good thing (buying expensive cards before you have a site or anything), but the company I went to make my cards also did free logo design and consultation. And what they came up with helped me out quite a bit. In fact, what you see on the site as far as the company’s logo is about exactly what you see on my cards. Sure it’s not super over the top, but it definitely works for what I needed.

The Main Content
Outside of the logo is the main content, and I needed to find a way to present everything in a way that was clean but still (pun not intended) flashy. What I came up with was what I think of as very clean (even if a bit too simple) layout, where my main content is presented with animation in a Flash movie and I came up with the message, “Because everyone deserves a unique home on the web”. Recently with my projects, that whole ‘message” thing has become very important for me, and I think that’s what really drove me to overhaul the site into what you see today.

What Do You Think?
I know the readers of this blog (the few of you who are left) are a very talented sort. I’m hoping that you’ll check out the site, and let me know what you think of it. What you like, what you don’t, and what I can do to improve it. Much appreciated and can’t wait to see what you have to say!

Last week I introduced you to the project of mine that is probably nearest and dearest to my heart, Learn Stuff Online.

Before I had this blog, before I kinda started with web design solutions, I had LSO. It was AND remains to be a pretty ambitious project – But I think the good ones often are right? (#):)

So before we go into all the problems that came up for LSO, I’ll get into the nitty gritty of what I originally envisioned for the site so you can get a glimpse into the mind of a madman.

Why I Made Learn Stuff Online
Now I’m not talking about why I created a website… Most of that reason was to create residual income for myself. But as I mentioned before, I love teaching people about things that I enjoy. And at some level we probably all like doing that. Lots of times when we talk to our friends we’re just sharing are various passions with them. That’s kind of where LSO came from I guess. It gave me the flexibility to talk about whatever I wanted to, and hopefully have a place where it would all kinda fit. For instance, I couldn’t really talk about song composition on here because for one, it doesn’t really fit with the theme of this site and for two, you guys probably wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Anything About Everything
And THAT would be the tagline of the site that even now I really like. Not only is it pretty catchy, but it’s pretty true to the point as to what I envison/ed for the site. My first section on Learn Stuff Online was home theater setup. You know that it’s definitely one of my passions so it made a great place to start from. After that, I continued with other subjects but didn’t cover really more than 3. The thinking there was I didn’t want to extend myself too far before I knew if it was going to work or not. Recently, I just started the first new section in a while, iPod Help and iPod Information. More on that later…

Money Making Goal
Admittedly, I naively came up with various formulas that would net me Y amount of money based on X traffic. And while I don’t think I ever had a concrete goal in mind (say like $500/mo), I expected the site to… work out. But you know the more I think about, the more I realize now how doomed I was during my first go around.

And if you wanna see what I’m talking about, stay tuned while I cover *drumroll*… “The Problems – LSO (Part 3).

I told you that I was coming back and HERE I AM!

Part of the time I haven’t been “around” much is because I’ve been busy getting some other projects out the gate.

One of these projects is Learn Stuff Online.

This is the first part in this mini-series which we’ll look at where LSO has come from, its previous problems, and how I hope to fix them all to finally make it successful.

The Premise
Like I said, I started Learn Stuff Online years ago. As I write this I’m not at home, so I don’t have the bevy of LSO paperwork ahead of me where I documented potential AdSense formulas, and topics I was going to cover on the site. And for the life of me I can’t remember how I came up with the idea of LSO.

I’m guessing that shortly after I learned about AdSense, (this terrific thing that could make you “money for nothing” on the web), I just HAD to come up with a website that could harness this PPC advertising for my own nefarious schemes. I might have tossed around a couple of ideas, but I knew that one thing about myself that I love is teaching people how to do things they don’t already know how to do. And at the time, there weren’t many good sites that could do that, so I came up with Learn Stuff Online.

The Problems
Looking back, LSO had a lot of problems. And because I was the one at the center of it, I think it was really my fault that so many cropped up. Most of them probably came from me not being honest about things or more to the point, deciding to overlook some things desperately hoping it’d all come together in the end.

Looking at things now, I think the biggest problem I now know how to handle and have already taken steps to that end. Still – There are other issues that I don’t think I’ve quite addressed but will surely have to do so if this project is ever going to hit that $500/mo goal I setup for it a little while back.

Solutions?
Unlike other series I’ve done on here, this isn’t one that I’ve necessarily given a lot of thought to. So buckle up if you want to come along for the journey as I continue to BREAK DOWN everything with Learn Stuff Online and sincerely hope you kids will give me some pointers so everyone can benefit! (#):D

Thanks again for the reminders to fix my RSS footer guys!

I was reading a couple of posts on ProBlogger yesterday, namely about how he became a professional blogger and what he thought of the professional blogging industry.

They posts make for interesting reads so I won’t summarize them, but after reading’em I got to thinking about the big professional bloggers – John Chow, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Shoemaker and in particular started to ponder how all of them were able to become professional bloggers.

Thought 1 – How Did They Get So Many People to Frequent Their Blog?
On the subject of making money from your blog, this was the first thing that popped into my head because obviously, the more people that come to your site, the more value ads have for advertisers, the more money you can charge. So naturally I said, “So to go PRO, you gotta get those people to your blog right? Well why would people do that?”

Thought 2 – Why Would People WANT to Frequent Their Blog?
I wish I could remember where I first saw it but simply put, a user visits a site because it provides some kind of value. Maybe it’s humor, maybe it’s web development lessons, but whatever it is, it’s something. So then I thought, “Ok. So to go PRO, you gotta provide something of value to your readers… My blog is about technology, video games and blogging…”

Thought 3 – Am I providing substantial value on my subjects for my readers?
This was a hard one to think about because it’s never easy or fun to deal with your own faults. For me and this site, I again talk about three things… Technology, video games and blogging.

• Strike 1 – On the technology side, I think it’s fair to say that I rarely bring news or reviews of technology (aside from video games) to my readers. Nor do I share technological items with them.
• Strike 2 – On the video game side of things, there are sites that are better than mine. They do more comprehensive reviews, often review full games, and give games to their readers.
• Strike 3 – Out of the three things that I mainly talk about on here, I’m probably best qualified to speak about blogging and web development. But I rarely do so. Instead, I spend most of my time speculating on how to make money online which relative to others, I haven’t done yet.

Thought 4 – If I were ever to go PRO, something has to change.
You know that ol’ 20/80 rule right? Well I think if I honestly analyzed how things have been going on here, I’d probably be more “successful” at things if I decided to talk more about things that I have authority on such as web development and blogging. After all, most people who visit the big bloggers’ sites go there because they want to know WHAT TO DO… What WILL work. The biggest problem for me is that I think I’d get bored if I limited my topics like this.

Even if I just wrote about web development and blog tips, I’m too interested in web entrepreneurship not to bring it up. But I really don’t have much authority to speak about it which brings me to my final thought…

Thought 5 – To be an authority on making money online, I have to start making money online.
Going back to the big make money online bloggers, we all visit their sites because we consider them to be authorities on what they write about. They’re authorities because they’ve become successful making money online.

But did they make their first monies with the blogs we’re familiar with?

Probably not. And I guess that’s the thing we often forget about. I kind of think it like these guys have corporations. And the only part we see is their public front, kind of like their PR dept. But what started making them the money is their individual departments and subsidiaries that we tend to overlook (such as Darren’s photo blog or Shoemoney’s past experience in the ringtone market).

Now don’t worry, this post doesn’t mark a “midlife blog crisis” for me or anything but more a reminder for all of us that if we’re looking to go PRO with our online efforts it definitely doesn’t happen overnight, and often it comes from the sum of our various projects – Earning us not only money, but invaluable wisdom that we can share with others.

“Woah ho hO HO! STOP THE CAR! We got an emergency can’t you see!?”

If you hadn’t heard – That emergency is the one year anniversary of this site and me having to find a way to celebrate it! WAHOO! (Can you tell I’m very excited for a Monday!?)

But hey, you should be excited too because I’m giving away some tremendous prizes for all of you kids out there in blogland! Because I wouldn’t still be at it if it wasn’t for all of you!

“You gotta be IN IT to WIN IT.”
So here’s how the contests are going to shake out. First off, they’re going to take place between this week and next week and are aimed at not only giving YOU guys some cool stuff, but also upping my subscriber count. So to play two out of the three contests…

1. Subscribe to my feed!
2. Once you’re reading it, check out the footer on the post to get the “Word of the Day“.
3. At the end of the week take the five words, put them together and shoot me an e-mail to enter the contest!

You HAVE to e-mail me all five words to enter the contest. So after you e-mail me, you’ll automatically be in the runnings with one entry. If you want more entries do the following and make sure you let me know with URLs on your entry e-mail…

• Comment on this post +1
• Post about the contest on your site. +5

And that goes for each of the RSS contests – One this week (starting tomorrow) and one next week (starting Tuesday of that week too).

The Mystery Third Contest
I’m not gonna tell you what the third contest is, how to enter it and when it’ll be… Only that it’ll be during these next two weeks. So stay tuned to the site and to the feed, and when you see it, pounce like a cat!

Prizes
At this point, I’m going to say what the prizes are for any of the contests but I’ll say they’re certainly things I’m going to spend money on (i.e. not services) and should be stuff that you guys will like if you like this site. You kids gave me a lot of good ideas on my previous post on the subject, and I’ll probably take a few ideas from there. (#):)