I’ve pretty much spent all day living vicariously through a friend of mine while he’s prancing about at SXSW, which made me think about some of the newer technology that’s being introduced and promoted there and how I could benefit from them.

After already having a few traveling adventures under my belt, I realized there were certain obstacles I needed to address, namely, how can I write and blog about my experiences in a fluid manner while it’s still fresh on my mind? Usually I would get so caught up in exploring my new locale that by the time I got back to the hotel I was too exhausted to even stay awake, much less blog about the day. Even worse was the exhausting work of uploading my photos, then organizing, captioning and tagging them all. It’s the sort of thing that can literally take me hours to do. Time is a luxury I cannot afford to lose during my travels, so this is something I need address before I go off on my next adventure, although that won’t happen until May.

For the time being, I am experimenting with ways I can interweave blogging vignettes I want to write with my day’s activities during my travels, without it being too much of a burden. One of the ways I’m exploring doing so is by trying out geolocation apps on my iPod, such as Foursquare and Gowalla

From there, it’s just a matter of how I want to present it all on my blog. Do I write about my travel experiences all in one lengthy post, or do I break them down into vignettes that are spread out via separate posts instead? Something else I will have to experiment with. In the meantime, let me know what you might prefer. :-D

Today marks the third year anniversary since my first ever post on this blog!

It’s certainly been a weird ride too. Originally I started out thinking I would be using this blog to chronicle my journey through law school and into the law profession, but unfortunately life has a tendency to poop all over my best laid plans, so instead of writing about adventures in law school and beyond, I found myself rambling about topics of no particular interest to anyone but me. My blog went for weeks without any updates, and my traffic was virtually nil. Then I started wrapping myself around the idea that I could turn my blog into a money making machine, getting my hands on whatever material I could find out there that could help me figure out how to turn this site into a magical land of milk and honey, from whence I could quit my job, retire, and live it up as a self made man with a pizza on one hand and a babe on the other.

Then I went from there to wailing about all my health problems, which really put a damper on my blogging spirits for a while. Then I went on a streak where I raged and ranted about dating sites and women and why they all sucked and disgusted me to no end, and not just them but people too, and they sucked and everybody sucks and the whole world sucks and why doesn’t everyone just explode and DIE????

Come to think of it I think I’m still on that streak. :-D

Under normal circumstances I probably would have closed this blog by now and moved on.

Only the thing is… this is the first time I’ve ever created a blog that provided a solid income stream for me. I won’t be retiring or quitting anytime soon of course, but then again, I don’t just throw away something that’s earning me $200 a month, even if I have nothing worth writing about these days. My feed count also surpassed 200 readers for the first time ever the other day, and it seems apparent that as I keep this site going and keep blogging, my audience and traffic will continue to expand, slowly, but surely. $200 a month might some day become $300 a month, then $500, and from there, who knows how high it could go. Love it or hate it, me and my blog, we’re stuck together for the long haul. And who knows, just because I haven’t been able to earn a living NOW doesn’t mean I can’t earn one down the road, even if that road turns out to be a long, winding one that takes years to cover. I know of one person who ran a math site since 1997, and it took her over ten years before she finally saw the fruits of her labor and was able to earning a living from her website alone. From what I learned about search engines like Google, the older your domain gets, the more trusted it becomes, resulting in higher rankings and more traffic. Some say the tipping point is 4 years, so by this time next year, I could end up seeing a dramatic difference that will boost my earnings potential even more.

In the meantime, this blog is still searching for an identity, a clear purpose, something to help focus my writing and truly make it blossom. It’s sad that I find myself in my early thirties and even after all these years, I still don’t know who I am or who I was meant to be, if I was meant to be anything at all. Am I destined to be a drifter, living a small life where I have no impact on anything, or am I meant for something bigger? Can I overcome my inner demons and become the man God wants me to be, and the man that a future wife could be worthy of, or will I slowly fade away into obscurity and failure?

The story continues…

I’ve been trying to figure out how I could work side posts (mini-posts or the equivalent of tweets on Twitter) and a featured articles gallery onto my blog, that way it would be easier for new visitors to dive right into my content and get a good feel for what my site’s about. Normally what people do is build a front page that highlights the best content and then push the blog itself to a subdirectory. But then again I’m not normal.

So check it out: the featured articles can be seen on my home page and the side posts can be seen on the top right. You know, where there’s a big honking image that says “SIDE POST?”

Blogging had been super light lately, mainly because I’ve been spending an awful amount of time under the blogging hood, trying to boost the speed and performance as much as possible without sacrificing any of its major features. Speed is everything when it comes to traffic and keeping people on your blog. If your site doesn’t load fast enough you not only lose traffic, but a potential audience too.

So I spent the better part of the week testing the load times and discovered to my horror that it would take an average of 3-4 seconds for my blog to load, when the typical load for other blogs would only be half a second. Oy.

Improving speed meant I had to sacrifice a lot of much needed plugins though, including my emoticons. :( So I carefully went through each plugin I had to see which ones were acting as bottlenecks, and which ones I could afford to get rid of. Then I read up on MySQL databases (since MySQL powers my blog) to see how I could optimize my settings to the max without taxing the server. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I must have spent over 50 hours doing all this. Yes I can be a little obsessive like that. :-D

In the end, I made a compromise that allowed me to keep most of my plugins’ functionality by simply switching off a few things here and there, and managed to cut my load times down to 1.5 seconds. It’s still not where I’d like it to be, but at least it’s MUCH better than before.

The only major difference you’ll notice is that “Related Posts” no longer show in my individual posts, except in my feeds. I hate to see that go but it did improve speed times markedly. I’m pretty much done now, but if you happen to notice things moving really slow here, let me know.

And now, MAYBE I can finally move on from this and resume my regularly blogging schedule, this being a new month and all too.