However, I knew if I didn’t start getting some new content posted to the magazine I would start to see some page rank evaporate but I didn’t expect to see it go to zero overnight. But it did.  A testament to my brilliance at SEO.

Of course your theme  and search engine optimization are very important, but the bottom line is that any blog about how to make money blogging = SPAM! If you read those sites you are reading spam. No matter how much you want to believe, it’s still spam.

It’s like a wiener in a bun advertising how much money can be made from selling chili dogs. Put some chili, cheese and onions with mayo and mustard and some dill relish on that wiener would you? If you can’t dish out some relish, you are in trouble. If you get into blogging solely as a means to make money, you are a silly fucker; you have bought into a scam. You probably already have paid someone some money, I bet, to learn how to do it. You think you are getting in on a scam on a bunch of idiots when it is you who are, in fact, the idiot. Now I may be mis-underestimating things, but the pool of available idiots is not big enough to sustain all the other idiots trying to sucker them. See pyramid scheme. See Maddoff. See Social Security.

People who write a blog because they love to write and have always wanted to write, and they somehow wind up with a big audience and are able to make some money, those are the guys who inspire me and I am simply amazed by all the fucking morons who buy in to the idea that they can throw up a web page using this trick or that strategy and that they will somehow rake in huge amounts of money–or even moderate amounts of money. These people are likely the same ones who purchase hair transplants or male enhancement pills. Call ‘em a bunch of Smilin’ Bob’s. Such pie in the sky delusions makes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds seem pragmatic. Come off your trip already!

Want to know how to make money blogging? I’ll tell ya. This is the best advice you’ll ever get: Consistently provide a bunch of great content that people want to consume and that people will want to come back to consume more of. Consistent means over the course of months and years, not days and weeks. See InstaPundit. If you can throw up decent content week after week after week, a Google blackball can’t stop you. You could serve the dish from a 28K dialup line and people would figure out a way to get it.

A series of never ending top 10 lists on how to create a blog to make money, on the other hand, bores me to tears and tends to make me belligerent.

You know who you are.

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing to the blog since I have been trying to improve my mental outlook by totally ignoring the news about politics and such, but it doesn’t make sense to have almost half a decade of writing sitting in the closet. I had to update the WordPress version to 2.7 and then export the database and import into wpmu. In the process I somehow lost all my categories and I don’t want to screw around with it.

But the obvious reason isn’t what initially got me started on the search to execute php from inside a post or page. I want to be able to add a set of custom fields to certain categories of posts and then execute sql commands against them. For example on an outdoor photography blog, for all posts in the ‘Trip Report’ category I might add some fields called ‘location’,  ‘mileage’, ‘meals’, ‘fuel’, ‘other_expenses’.  Then I could have a page called ‘Trip Expenses’ that would query all the Trip Report posts and display the results in tables, charts, and/or graphs. A WordPress page with embedded php could create  fancy charts and graphs laid out however you like, like the Quickbooks dashboard, for example.  The page would re-calculate every time it’s opened. How sweet is that?

Another example:  On a blog chronicling a fitness program I could add custom fields to the ‘Daily Workout’ posts like ‘exercise_type’, ‘total_distance’, ‘total_time’, ’5k_time’, ‘peak_heart_rate’, ‘two_min_recovery_heart_rate’, ‘etc…’. Then I could have a Page called ‘Treadmill Progress Report’ or ‘Bench Press Progress Report’ that spits out graphs based on the fields in all the Daily Workout posts.

Using this technique you could easily build simple database applications within a wordpress blog. You could also build large, complex applications like this but that would be silly, wouldn’t it?

Everything is updated to the latest and greatest. WordPress 2.7 along with my standard plugins — Akismet, Twitter tools, SEO, ShareThis, and backup — are all installed and updated. All I need now is a new theme. I’ve got plenty to write about if the urge strikes.  I guess I feel an urge coming on or I wouldn’t have done all the work to revive the blog.

The next thing up for this morning is to finish decommissioning the Dell PowerEdge 6300, which is a Lotus Domino server that has been hosting a few blogs and mail for the doncallaway.org domain, which has also been dormant for a while.  If you’ve followed me around over the years you have heard me bitch and complain about the Dell 6300 before. Yesterday I changed the DNS entries for doncallaway.org to point to my 1an1 hosted account; it now points to this blog.

Finally, nothing on the outside points to TheGarage anymore. All I have to do now is back up all the databases and I can shut the behemoth 6300 down for good and dolly that bitch out to the curb.

Shutting the server down is kinda like the final chapter of a big part of my life for the past fourteen years. There has never been a time that I didn’t have a Notes/Domino server in my lab. Domino consulting used to be all I did. The end of an era.  A lot of work over the past couple of years has gone in to moving all my stuff to a hosted environment and today is finally the day I wash my hands completely of internet hosting.   The fact that it took so long to get everything moved is the reason I had to finally bite the bullet and move everything.

I’ll have to replace the server but I don’t think I’ll ever be running Domino again. I’ll get a cheap yet very powerful PC and run a LAMP installation so I can develop in one of the hottest markets going: WordPress, php, and theme customization.