When it comes to my personal projects i am hopeless - I have far too many I want to develop. I end up starting for 5 mins on one thing, then get an email, read it, and start on something else. That is one of the reasons I prefer working for clients - I know what I must focus on.

So I’ve come up with some tips for better time management and just generally to get more work done in a day!

• Plan - have a plan of things you need to do and what you also want to do if there is time. Write this the day/night before once you have all your work done for that day, and stick to that plan.
• Allow for fun - allow time to read your email, play the odd online game, read loads of blogs. Don’t not plan it, if you know you will do it.
• Focus - as you are doing things, do one thing at a time. Shut down your email client, turn your instant messengers off (or at least to “busy”), and just focus on the current thing you’re doing
• Do the worst job first - don’t like the thought of backing up your site? Make sure you do it first and get it out of the way. Then you won’t waste time doing things just to avoid doing that. Try it out - it does help a lot
• If you do the same thing each day, get a program to do it - this could be harder for some non tech’s, but even if in Word you always do the same thing (make a table a certain size, put a header in and change the font) either make a macro do it or make a “template” pre set out. It may save only 2 mins a day, but it all helps.
• Reply to emails straight away - don’t put them off, you will only forget about them or spend more time looking for them…

Of course there are lots more, a Google for time management ideas would come up with loads, but those are what I use and what actually work!

Another tip for noobs who are stuck (see previous post…). Sorry about this being a bit useless. But I couldn’t work out how to do it!!

Ok. Earlier i was playing with the pcmcia (some people call these pc cards or smart cards) and pushed it out but couldn’t get the release button back in. It is quite simple. Just use a pen or something to push it in further than you can with your hand (but don’t force it).

I really should get back to some SEO posts…

(If you don’t have to install the Orange livebox software, ignore this post…). Click read more to read it.

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Techcrunch is ranked at #468 at the time of writing according to Alexa. They have been going for only a year or two, have over 150,000 feed subscribers (according to their Feedburner pic), and make hundreds of thousands of $.

Making a site as popular as Techcrunch is probably the dream of almost all webmasters. I was talking to a friend about this, and we were talking about how they became so popular.

So… how did they do it? And more importantly, how can you copy them to follow in their footsteps?

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Making money from Myspace is quite easy. It used to be easier but they have cracked down on spam.

If you want to make sure they (probably) don’t remove your profile, make it look as crap as you can. Search for myspace layouts, put everything, glitter graphics, songs, the works. Upload a picture of an attractive girl, get a few friends, get some comments etc.

Now you have a few methods to make some money:

• Use the groups thing to make a group in your niche. Collect people who have a similar interest to what you are promoting/selling into a group. Use their search function to find people. Only bother adding people who are actually interested or at least your target market in/for your product.
• Get lots and lots of friends. Use auto adders (Google for them, most you have to pay for). Don’t do too many at once. If I were you, I would set up 5-10 accounts now, occasionally login add 5-10 people. After a couple of months after it looks like you’re a regular user (not a spammer) then start mass adding. Don’t do too many, they do remove profiles that spam friend requests. Once you have all these friends, then send bullitens or send messages/comments saying something such as “Hey, talk to me on here”, here being a webcam site such as IMLive (affiliated link, through their company Pussy Cash. You can even get around $2 per free sign up there - it is easy money) etc.
• Leave lots of comments with affiliated links. Ringtones etc. Make it seem you are not a spammer.

A good way to get people who are interested in your product, is to do a google search like site:myspace.com “your keyword”

You can also get a load of backlinks, by spamming links on comments.

Let me know in the comments for your thoughts etc on spamming myspace.

I haven’t posted for a few days so thought I should. Might make a more constructive post later. But for now it is just a post ranting about RegisterFly. (non SEO related, quite off topic)
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Howdy

If you want to do a cron job, but don’t want that email giving you the result, such as for example when doing a wget command, do this:

wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://www.urltoget.com/

It will still email you with errors, so if you want it to never email you, add this:

>/dev/null 2>&1

to the end of it.

You see them all the time when a page gets dugg on digg.com or suddenly becomes very popular -

Can’t select database

We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the xxxx database.

* Are you sure it exists?
* On some systems the name of your database is prefixed with your username, so it would be like username_wordpress. Could that be the problem?

If you don’t know how to setup a database you should contact your host. If all else fails you may find help at the WordPress Support Forums.

Well recently I needed to make sure that if oen of my wordpress installs couldn’t connect or whatever that it showed a different page (well, different text). So if you want to do the same (at your own risk), open up wp-includes/wp-db.php and edit:

• line 46 (connecting to server)
• line 66 (selecting the database)
• you may also want to edit the html from around line 312

Hope that helped you. Now digg me (just kidding - who wants this at the top of digg!) to prove that it works (although - of course my host will cope with it ;). They have before)

Some ideas to put on your messages:

• Tell them that something is wrong!
• Put a link to a Google cache (in the form of http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.example.com/)
• Try the coralize site - in the form of http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8080/
• Put a retry button/link

Google is buying Youtube - the biggest online video sharing site, for $1.6 billion. But why would it want to? It already has Google Video

Get more market share

Youtube has between 40-45% market share of online video sharing. Google Video has nothing like that. So combining Google video and Youtube will mean that Google almost dominates the video sharing market.

Why pay for advertising?

Google paid $900 million in a deal with Myspace to sell advertising space there. By buying youtube it can put all the ads it wants - and keep all the profits. At the moment Google adsense ads are on Youtube, but Youtube currently will get 70-80% of the profits. Now that Youtube is Google’s, the big G can keep 100% of the profits itself.

The lawsuits

Many people recon the reason Youtube hasn’t been sued yet is because they have no money to pay out. But then, Google video has lots of copyrighted material, and Google has lotsof money - but where are the lawsuits against them?

And hey, this is Google - the guys that decided they would scan thousands of books and display (parts of) them online! And they got away with it!

Also some big name companies such as Warner music have already done deals with youtube. Rather than keep setting lawsuits against each other etc they work with each other.

This is easy. Make a 404 error page, call it 404.php (or whatever) then in your .htaccess file enter:

” ErrorDocument 404 /404.php”

That is it!