Have you ever felt like just trashing your web site? Melting, burning, shooting, shredding, oozing? But then you realize how much work a site is and you think better of it.

Then you start to wish that you could destroy someone else’s site. Especially someone else’s site that is ugly, has invalid code, or promotes political views that just aren’t sane.

If you want to melt down your site, trash someone else’s, or simply waste some time, check out Net Disaster.

Here’s what happened when I took a machine gun to my site:

My wife and I have been looking for a house to buy intensively in the last month. Most of my free time has shifted away from my site and over to house-related tasks.

We were really close on one deal—we made an offer on a duplex that was accepted. We were within 2 days of closing when the deal fell apart. We were out a good chunk of change and a lot of time from this, and we were kind of discouraged about the prospects of actually finding anything we’d like to live in at a price we could afford. It’s been super hard for me to stay motivated to write blog posts when I have been so busy, etc. Excuses, excuses, I know.

It Was Worth It

We finally looked into building a house, and we started looking at communities in our price range. There weren’t a whole lot of them, but there were some good options. We finally picked a community being constructed by Fieldstone. We’re building a house! It will be almost 2,000 sq. ft. with 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths. The construction timeline is really loose at this point—it could take anywhere from 6-12 months to finish. That’s ok with us because we’re stilling doing pretty well in our apartment, and our financial situation will only get better the longer we wait. If we get to move in sooner, we’ll be happy because we’ll have a brand new house to live in.

Now that the pressures of looking for homes, filling out applications, etc., are easing up, I hope to get back to my web site again. No guarantees, but I am excited about working on it again and I have some good content coming up soon.

I think that most people are more motivated to finish their goals if those goals are made public and are based on financial costs that have already been incurred—I don’t want to look foolish and I don’t want my money to go to waste. Understanding that many people, including me, operate this way, I am going to make some of my goals for DiamondLime public.

Interestingly enough, this may be the first time I have formally gone through the process of setting goals for DiamondLime. I have written many to-do lists for DiamondLime, but those lists contained mostly simple, fix-it kind of items and were designed to keep my site from being embarrassing and broken. It’s now time to establish this site’s direction and objectives more concretely (whether or not I have succeeded in making the site unembarrassing and functional!).

DiamondLime Goals for 2007

1. Pay for Itself

   This is the big goal for the year—I would like DiamondLime to generate enough affiliate/ad revenue to pay for the costs of hosting the site.

2. Write an Internet Marketing Ebook

   The whole purpose of DiamondLime is to help me and others learn and share more about Internet marketing, web design, and business. I think preparing an ebook about marketing on the Web would help me to make solid, quantifiable progress in this direction. However, this ebook doesn’t need to be 600 pages long, wax your car, and cook dinner. My goal is to write 50 pages of solid content, or one page a week.

3. Write a Web Design Ebook

   Again, I’m going to shoot for a modest ebook here—about 50 pages, or one a week.

4. Get 15,000 Visitors

   This works out to an average of 1,250 visitors a month. I currently get approximately 600 a month, so this will be quite a stretch - I will need to triple my traffic by the end of the year to reach this goal.

5. Update the BYU Blog and Web Site Directory

   Many of the listings in the directory are out of date—I’m pretty sure many of the students have graduated—and it’s time to add some new listings. I will set a modest goal of adding 20 listings this year.

So those are my goals for DiamondLime this year. I feel like I am going to have to stretch to reach these goals, but that’s what goals are for—to compel and aid us in achieving greater things than we normally would otherwise. Hopefully DiamondLime will become more than it would have without these goals.

I hope that everyone had a great Christmas, and I wish you all a Happy New Year!

I love Christmas—I appreciate the extra focus on the Savior of the World, Jesus Christ. I like the chance to spend extra time with family and friends. I love the meaningful and enjoyable traditions. I also really like having a stay-at-home vacation—time off but not time away from familiar places.

New Year’s is great too. I like the chance to examine my life and make resolutions, even though I don’t keep all of them. The act of examining myself periodically really helps me to understand where I’m at and especially where I’m going. The end of one year and the beginning of the next provides us all with an incentive to “right the ship.”

Brain Dump

One of my favorite ways to go about setting a course for my life is what I like to call a “brain dump”—rapidly “pouring” the contents of your brain onto paper. I sit down with several sheets of paper and write down everything I can think of that I would like to do, see, or achieve in my life, especially focusing on, but not limited to, the new year.

After I’ve spent what feels like a good amount of time doing this, I categorize my ideas. The categories that my goals and plans usually fall into include spiritual, exercise, creative/talent, financial, educational, and recreational areas. Once most of my ideas have been categorized, I like to prioritize what I have. During the year, I work on the top priorities, and that way when I don’t finish by the end of the year, I know that I have achieved what was most important to me. While I’m prioritizing, I copy over goals from last year that didn’t get done and that are still worth doing and I assign them new priorities (whether higher or lower)

I usually flesh out some of my ideas at this point—I think scheduling, required resources, price, and whatever detail I feel is important and that I might forget later. This phase is really a work in progress, too—the most immediate tasks usually get worked on first. This step is super important to me—it removes many of the unknowns and breaks my large goals into managable pieces.

Another New Year

I’m excited for 2007. I hope we can all make it a great year to remember. Enjoy the celebrations, and stick to those resolutions!

Professional networking using blogs is a relatively new idea and surrounded with much hype—when people get a new technology, they’ve got a shiny new hammer and everything starts to look like a nail. You have to be careful to assess what a tool’s real strengths and productive uses are.

In this case, I have found that professional networking using blogs works.

What Makes a Good Professional Networking Tool?

To establish whether or not (or why) a blog would work for professional networking, I’m going to outline the elements of a good professional networking tool as I see them. Good networking tools would be:

• Searchable

  If I am trying to find someone I know but have lost track of, I would like to simply “Google” their name.

• Persistent

  If I have found a resource associated with a contact and want to bookmark it, write it down, or keep the business card it was listed on, I had better be able to come back in several months or even years and find that resource again.

• Up to Date

  It’s always good to find information about my connections that reflects their current professional and life situation—I like to be able to start an intelligent conversation with my contacts about their current projects and goals. This also helps me to evaluate whether current projects or opportunities are right for them.

• Personal

  Many of my contacts have been made solely online—I have never met some of my contacts in real life. A networking tool that helps me to see what my contacts are like, how they think and feel, is very valuable.

• Connected

  Finally, a networking tool would be even more useful if I could see who my contacts trust and which contacts we have in common.

How to Use a Blog for Professional Networking

Blogs can be used for virtually all of the above criteria of a good networking tool. Blogs are searchable—they are publicly available and crawlable. A good blog is persistent and up to date, letting your readers know what you are working on and staying on the World Wide Web for more than a few months. By reading your posts, your contacts will gradually get a feeling for your personality. Blog rolls and cross linking connect your blog to the contacts, resources, and projects that are important to you.

There are other tools for networking that everyone should use and that produce benefits that blogs cannot, but blogs are so good at meeting important networking needs that they should be part of most professionals’ networking strategy.

Blogs Are Effective Professional Networking Tools

I know because my blog has recently increased my opportunities. Three times in one week. I’ve landed a new service contract through my blog, with another potential contract in the works. I also strengthened a relationship with a very good contact. The first contact found me by typing my name into Google. He found my blog, read my current profile, and sent me an email. We talked on the phone, and we are now helping each other with some of our individual and mutual goals.

The potential contract I have came through someone who found my name while looking for someone else—he found me because I was connected with the person he was looking for through my blog. Finally, one of my best contacts told me to keep posting on my blog because he reads it regularly—it was a good pat-on-the-back that can be hard to come by when blogging.

So there’s some more motivation for maintaining a blog. It can be really hard to be diligent about blogging, but the benefits really are worth it. Blog relentlessly—it will be good for your professional development.

I have recently seen the influence of Google’s Jagger update at work on DiamondLime.com. There were three steps that occurred with my site:

The Jagger Sequence

1. Traffic Changes

   The first thing I noticed was a shift in traffic patterns for my site. I saw a sharp increase in traffic for most of the important keyword phrases relevant to my site (which makes sense, since I have been adding content regularly) and a slight decrease for a few terms (which I have left stagnant).

2. Only Supplemental Results

   It was scary when I typed in site:diamondlime.com one day to find that only 3 of my pages weren’t supplemental results or eliminated altogether—my home page, the Lime Blog, and my business page. I suspected it was only the site command that was inaccurate, though, because my traffic didn’t hiccup. My pages were still being served in Google’s results pages.

3. Updated Listing

   After a week or so of being in supplemental results limbo, my entire site was re-spidered and listed in Google again. My reported page rank has been updated, too.

Weathering the Storm

It looks like DiamondLime.com managed to weather the Jagger Storm intact. The important things, like traffic and being ranked for keyword phrases, survived or even improved. I attribute this success to the fact that I have done my best to build a reputable, white-hat, recommendation-abiding web site.

A curious thing that happened to DiamondLime that isn’t likely to happen to other sites is that the reindexing of my site happened during the 1 hour period it took for me to upgrade my site! Consequently, the titles of my pages were scrambled before I could adjust them after I upgraded Wordpress last weekend. I have missing spaces between post titles and the name of my blog (”» 2006 » JulyThe Lime Blog”). Hopefully it won’t take Google until another major update to reindex my site and correct these goofy page titles.

I’ve run DiamondLime on version 1.5 of Wordpress for about 8 months now. Everything has been working fine, so when version 2.0 of Wordpress came out, I was reluctant to change—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you know?

Eventually, though, I would have to upgrade—support and updates tend to shift towards newer versions, and I don’t want to become the victim of some hack of old versions. I’ve waited for several months since version 2.0 was released to make sure it is stable and happy, and I finally took the leap and upgraded this weekend.

Simple Upgrade

Upgrading Wordpress is, thankfully, a simple process. The most difficult part was backing everything up before I installed the new files, but even that was easy with this great tutorial on backing up your Wordpress MySQL database.

Spam Is Gone - Akismet Saves the Day

I also enabled Akismet (I was going to install it anyway, but having it installed by default is great!), grabbed my API key, entered the key in the configuration, and kissed comment spam goodbye. I haven’t seen any get through since I installed it, and I hope it stays that way!

Spit Polish

Finally, I took some time to update a few visual items on the site, hopefully improving the overall look, feel, and usability somewhat. The biggest of these updates is simply adding a more prominent picture of myself so that my readers can connect with me better.

For the most part, readers of the Lime Blog won’t even notice the difference these changes make, but I was happy to get them done and to be able to continue with creating content instead of spending time on management issues. I can also personally vouch for Wordpress v. 2.0 and Akismet—you want your blog running these two pieces of software!

I feel like my existence has been validated.

Well, at least my web site’s existence. You see, two very awesome things have happened in the last week. First, Google indexed my site for the first time in months since I had to move and then redirect a lot of pages. Second, after lots of careful scrutiny, the Lime Blog now validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Indexed by Google

Being indexed by Google (and ranked for some key terms) validates my site’s existence because Google knows where it is, and, by indexing my site, states that I have followed some basic rules of good web site development and content creation.

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional

This is exciting because it means that my site’s XHTML is written according to web standards. It is and will be more accessible and usable than a site that does not follow web standards. My site is more likely to require less maintenance to display correctly in current and future browsers. Valid code is one of the basic standards of web design, and now I know for sure that I can do it, even with multiple external solutions and plugins.

Is This All There Is?

Of course not. Being indexed by search engines and having valid code are only two parts of a huge range of important factors that determine how successful a site is. For example, DiamondLime could use a few more visitors, and I’m still working on the graphical presentation. But at least I’m making progress.

How’s your site coming along?

DiamondLime is a year old today. Hurray!

It’s been quite a year. DiamondLime is on it’s third design (which I’m not completely happy with yet) and second blogging system. I’ve written 67 posts, or about one every 5.45 days. I have moved, graduated, and started a full-time job, and I will be moving again in the next few weeks.

I’m excited for the future, too. I “get” this blogging thing better, I have some real work under my belt that I can show off, and I have some neat-o projects to work on.

Hopefully DiamondLime and The Lime Blog will continue to become more useful, interesting, and entertaining as time goes on.

Today is a historic day. I have completed my migration from Blogger’s ultra-basic blogging service to WordPress, including salvagable comments and page redirects. I’m absolutely thrilled that I never have to work with Blogger on a serious blogging basis again.

Lost Comments

Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties and limited resources, I couldn’t copy all of my users’ comments over. I apologize to all those who wrote thoughtful comments and to all those who would have liked to read those comments. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. I’m not migrating ever again. Feel free to comment on any of my posts!

Redirects

I am redirecting all of my old blog pages to their newer versions. Please let me know the URL (location) of any page that still uses the old site template so that I can fix it. Thanks.

So please, relax and enjoy the new and improved Lime Blog!