Personal Blog of Ricky Mills; Web Developer, PHP Programmer and Mobile Application Developer
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The woe’s of website development

February 22nd, 2008 | Posted by Rick in Personal | Project Updates | RikeMedia - (1 Comments)

We had a meeting a few days ago to discuss the Rike Media projects. We came up with several things that needed to be completed in order to help continue the growth of the currently very poor network of sites.

Despite our somewhat productive meeting, I feel that we’re currently in a ditch and are struggling to get back up the other side. It seems that both myself and Mike are at a point where we cant seem to get motivated enough to work on anything at all. I had a feeling this would happen at some point as its happened before in our past projects.

The only problem this time is that I dont think we will get back up the other side….I have a gut feeling that everything is going to come crashing down on WebmasterStash because of our own personal lives and laziness taking priority.

This isn’t something I would normally blog about, maybe its just one of those things where you have to get it all out before you can feel better. One thing’s for sure, I woke up this morning expecting to crack on with some work, and have accomplished nothing. I feel upset and angry at myself for not doing work, and even more angry at the fact that I know I can do it, but cant….if that makes sense.

On another note, we had some professional banner ads made for WebmasterStash which look rather snazzy. You’ll be seeing them around soon. Also, I started and stopped working on moving WSDReg over to AWBS due to the fact that both ResellerClub and AWBS have an inability to communicate and have created a useless product for us. I’ve spoken with AWBS however and they are “looking into” adding functionality that quite frankly should have been put in place before the first version.

Well thats it for today. I’m hoping that I’ll have something less depressing to say later this month.

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A look back at: January 08

February 6th, 2008 | Posted by Rick in Project Updates | RikeMedia | Uncategorized - (0 Comments)

Ok, so January, the first month of my new site. Every month I plan to have a post summarizing what I did during the previous month towards my goals. so, lets take a look back at January shall we!

RickyMills.com (Re)-Launched
I relaunched RickyMills.com and ditched my old self-made portfolio site in favor of a nice WordPress blog, which would be used to track my progress towards being in control (either through sole ownership or through myself and Mike‘s Rike Media brand) of websites that would generate a long term income.

The blog got off to a great start, however I don’t feel I made enough effort in my first month. This was mainly down to having a lot of coursework to do (and catch up on) as I received 5 conditional University offers.

FotoRazor.com

After looking around at some websites for sale, I purchased FotoRazor.com, a free image host. The site was earning $70 income from text link sales and pop up adverts. I managed to increase this income to over $100 a month by adding optimized adsense adverts on the site.

I found that after this, I really didn’t want to run this kind of site. It had the multiple revenue sources that I was looking for, however I don’t really want to run an image host. Because of this, I placed it up for sale again. I’ve currently had many offers for the site, all of which I am considering. I did have one $700 offer however it turned out to be from a fake bidder. You can bid on the site over at DigitalPoint or DNForum.

WebmasterStash.com

Not much has changed around the site. Mike released some updates for StashNews, which is really turning into a great news systems. I dont think there is a better flat-file news system out there, feature wise. Its got everything that you would expect, plus that little bit more. For example; Integrated template engine with web-based editor (very few flat-file template engines can boast this!), easy and fast site integration, multiple users, captcha image verification on the news comment forms to help battle the spam bots, and more.

In addition to this, I started work on a concept for a new area to WebmasterStash; webmaster tools. Basically the idea is to have custom tools that allow users to check pagerank, backlinks, generate meta tags, etc. I’m still working on this, however I hope to have it live with our first bunch of tools online towards the end of February.

I’m hoping that once FotoRazor has sold that we can get a vbSEO license and/or some decent Photoshop tutorials written as mine aren’t exactly the best! Also I want to get the site promoted more, however I really dont think sticking some banners on a few sites is going to do much to help. We need some quality content. The templates and scripts are good, but the site needs tutorials to survive.

Other bits and bobs

I moved all our sites (except our old WSDeluxe project) over to a single VPS server as our hosting costs were about $60 a month. It was the right time to do it as our Dreamhost account is due for renewal in Feburary and after their “minor” billing problems I dont fancy staying with them (even more so when I saw that our 2007 uptime was only 85%). I moved off our JaguarPC managed VPS as we dont need a managed VPS so I was paying for a service that I didnt need.

The new VPS is a Link 4 at VPSLink.com – We’ve used them before and they have a good reliable service. The only downside is they have hard-drive speed issues which make sites seem a little more sluggish, however this isn’t really a huge problem for us at this stage.

So, thats January! I’ll be posting more progress soon, including the status of the FotoRazor auction!

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Another site – Now under the RIKE belt!

January 14th, 2008 | Posted by Rick in Project Updates | RikeMedia - (0 Comments)

Thats right – Rike Media now has another site under its belt!

I’m happy to announce that we acquired FotoRazor.com – a free image host making a nice little income! I’ve not done any major work on the site yet. I plan to redesign it from scratch and include extra options such as registration, user galleries etc.

The Rike Media empire has begun!

On another note, we’ve seen quite an increase in traffic over at WebmasterStash. Although our forums still remain rather inactive.

Oh No’s where’s the site gone!

January 6th, 2008 | Posted by Rick in general | Project Updates | RikeMedia - (0 Comments)

Well as of today, RickyMills.com is no longer a place to show my skills and portfolio. Over the last year or so, I’ve become increasingly interested in becoming an entrepreneur. More specifically, a web entrepreneur. Now I hear you cry “But theres no such thing as a web entrepreneur”, and your right, officially there is no place for this job title. However its more of a generic term used to describe what one does. Let me explain.

A web entrepreneur is involved in creating, buying and investing in websites. These websites draw profit from various methods such as advertisements and user subscriptions. What many people dont understand is that there is more money in websites than in most “regular” jobs. I’ve decided that by the end of 2008 I want to be earning enough money to live off. I’ll explain my plans in my next post which outlines my 2008 goals.

So, RickyMills.com is now where I will be blogging about how I’m getting along as a self-employed entrepreneur. Myself and my business partner, Mike Barlow recently opened RikeMedia, which is our brand name which we operate our sites under. All our sites are listed on the RikeMedia website so be sure to take a look!

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