Monday, August 18th, 2008
at 11:44pm
Over the next few days i’ll be working on two new sites. Both will be blogs, both with a focus on ‘reviewing’ stuff.
I believe both will do well - i’ll just build up content on both of them myself and try to get some writers on board if they want to help out.
Apart from this blog, i generally don’t write on any other sites much. These two blogs combined will allow me to sit down and write about stuff in any spare time i have.
Although i’ll be launching these new sites publicly, i’ll be working on several others you won’t hear me talking about - they’re part of what i’m now calling my ‘jackpot’ network of sites.
At times, it can all get a little overwhelming when you’ve so many domains, so many ideas and so much to do… at the minute, i own 75 domain names - 37 of which i plan on selling.
Only about 10 of the domains are actually developed sites 
and even then i still have more big plans for them (BeerChief, The Leaving Cert are two that spring to mind).
So it’s not easy and at times i have to question whether it’s wise to produce sites on a mass scale like this - why not just focus on one? I think the answer to that is i get bored very easily… i also believe it’s too early in my webmaster career to think like that… i should be testing, failing, experimenting and doing everything i can possibly do to get that crucial experience.
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Saturday, June 28th, 2008
at 1:19pm
I’ve been pretty busy this week and i’ll be pretty busy next week too. All of course courtesy of BeerChief 
For the first time ever, eyeballs other than myself and Adam’s will be viewing the BeerChief website. It will be very interesting to see people’s initial reaction, i’m not really looking for ‘great job, well done’ kind of responses, that does nothing only lull us in to a false sense of achievement I want honesty and a list of positive and negative points 
I’m well aware there’s more work to be done, and in fact, i’m already putting together plans for a complete revamp. As i keep saying the bones of the site are in place, and it is looking pretty slick, but i believe there’s room for improvement… in terms of adding features and modifying things, our current set up makes it difficult. We are running open source software, but it’s heavily hacked (hacked meaning taken apart legally, not the other form of ‘hacked’)
It’s a bit like running a modified version of wordpress… it makes it very difficult to add plugins built for standard versions, particularly if we can’t find and fix bugs ourselves… it means more cash and more time wasted on problems that really only appear due to the fact we spent so much time and cash modifying it in the first place!
We won’t radically overhaul the site - the only time we’ll do that is if we’re getting a full custom built solution from scratch and that will take upwards of €50k. So if we get to that stage we’ll either have major investment or else the site will be paying for itself.
But over the coming weeks, we’ll have a good look at feedback, see what you guys think and see what you want etc… and then we’ll act accordingly. A ‘revamp’, if it does come, will come pretty fast and cheap. The only thing that would be required is a slight template re-design and adjustment of some functions code.
But exciting times ahead… starting Tuesday, 1st July, BeerChief will become my biggest project to date and hopefully, my biggest success story to date. Only time will tell though… it’s impossible to predict what will happen, you just never know with the internet. But i believe i know enough to (a) promote the site well and (b) get it to the stage where we can comfortably say we can sell this for what we paid for it.
We never will sell it of course (certainly i won’t, for any amount, within the next 2 years), but knowing you have something that is worth the same or more than what you have invested in it is incredibly important for morale and confidence.
