Category: Lloyd’s Rants & Observations

Well, Can you believe it. I was hacked. Now I know why they call it hacked.. Cos I was sure hacked off.

They actually hit two of my sites and I can believe that they managed to get in. Or, more importantly why. These are obviously skilled individuals with a talent, why waste their time hitting me when they could actually do something useful and earn money or something like that?

It is beyond me.

Apparently, they got in through my theme somehow.

Anyway, I will generate a new one and get it up as soon as possible as this one is a bit bright 🙂

I actually setup the backup for my site but it had not been activated. OOPS.. Anyway, it is all working now so hopefully I will be all safe and secure..

lets see eh?

Question: How do you eat an elephant?

Answer: One bite at a time.

Now, before you animal lovers get all upset and accuse me of animal cruelty, I am not talking about actually eating an elephant.

I am speaking metaphorically  of course! In fact, I am on a diet and therefore trying to eat as few animals as possible at the minute.

It refers to a way to of achieving large or long term goals or to help complete large tasks.

As I have mentioned before I suffer from ADD (attention deficit disorder) and have done since I was a child. This means that I have trouble concentrating on one thing, get easily distracted and therefore tend to have quite a few things on the go at once.

Some of the projects I am involved in are very big and at the start, after my initial excitement, can begin to seem daunting. The end seems so far away they it can be difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

If a job appears too big then I used to tend to put it off and lose interest in in it. This resulted in so many things getting started and never getting finished.

Then one day I found a system, and it enabled me to take on and complete massive jobs and get them done in record time. This system also helps you work on many different projects at once and get them done.

I call it chunking. I chunk everything down to manageable pieces. IT is really simple.

When I start a new project I write down the initial idea and start to make a list of what is involved and all the things that need to be done. I usually start with the main things and create headings, then I add items under each heading. I write as many things as I can.

Once I get started and come up with the main headings I then find it quite easy to come up and list everything that is needed to be done to complete the whole project.

I also discovered that, in a lot of cases, the steps were identical for a lot of my projects and tasks.  This means that the more I use this system the easier it gets.

For some reason the list normally comes out of my head in the order which it is required to be done. (which maybe means that I am more organised than I first thought?) However, it is not about getting it all in order at this stage, it is about getting it all down on paper and out of your head.

This list then becomes my master to do list. I then prioritise them  (by project and then task) I then have a number of lists for all of the work that needs to be done for every project I am involved in. Next, I mark all of the tasks that I am going to delegate or outsource, which is quite a lot. Then

I got to say that this has made a real difference to my stress levels. I used to get a knotted feeling in my stomach when I thought about the mountain of work and things that needed to be done, it all seemed so undo-able, putting it down on paper removes all of that stress and I get a feeling of achievement just by doing this one thing.

I then choose items from the various project master lists and add them to my daily task list. I then get stuck in and TRY not to vary or move from this list. This is not as easy as you might think, for me anyway, but it makes such a huge difference I cannot tell you.

The other thing is that I can get so much more done.

There are so many time and project management systems out there, I have read so many books on them but a lot of them are very complicated and long winded and involve all manner of software programs and timers and, and, and. !

My system is very simple write it all down in detail, put it in order then do it. How easy is that?

It really is amazing that something so easy and simple to do can make such a huge difference to my working day.

Now I am off to swim with the dolphins and enjoy some of the free time that my chunking system has enabled me to do.

I woke up the other morning, which is always a good sign in my book. The sun was shining and the sky was blue ( I feel a poem coming on) and it felt like it was going to be a good day.

That was of course, until I discovered that one of my main hosting accounts had crashed. How wrong could a man be? Now, in the big scheme of things, with global warming, ongoing wars and famine, my problems pale into insignificance. However, in my small World this was a major headache, not least because whilst I know I should backup my websites regularly, I don’t!

I KNOW I am not the only one who has this stupidity affliction, playing Russian Roulette with my business, but that does not make me feel any better I have to say.

IT turns out that the server was dead as a Dodo, deceased, no longer living, totally knackered.

What amazed me was that the hosting company took five days to put it right. FIVE days I spend a fair bit of money and MORE importantly my valuable time promoting my websites. How can it take so long for a hosting company to rectify such a cataclysmic event like that?

When a hosting company says 99.8% up time does that mean up and running or messed up? in the case of this company I say messed up. I am not going to mention any names as it would not be fair. Actually, who cares about fair, losing five days of revenue and the number of visitors I lost over those days does not bare thinking about. It almost has me in tears.

The company www.cyberhostpro.com took it all in their stride and showed very little concern for my stress and worries. OR loss of earnings.

Luckily for me I have several hosting companies and a number of servers. phew…

This server has at least 40 sites on although not all of them are money sites, it really annoyed me at the lack of urgency that the company seemed to have. They said in their email that they would probably move the migration forward.. Probably.. Can you believe that?

Anyway, all is well that ends well as my grandfather used to say just before he got hit by a number 33 bus.

It made me realise how important it is to have a backup of all of your money sites. What makes me really stupid it the fact that most of my sites these days are wordpress based, it is so easy to add a backup plugin which saves it all, and even emails it to you if you ask nicely.

A fool learns by his own mistakes and a wise man/woman (dont want to be sexist) learns from the mistakes of others.

So learn from this fool and add an automated backup of your website now…..

As we all know testing is the key to success and recently created a post with a word that was unique to me. A word that no one else would use. It was testingalotlloyd.

Now initally is was picked up by technorati within minutes but was soon dropped for some reason. Over time things have moved quite a bit and we then saw digg have it at the number one and two positions for a while.

Rather than post an image, I suggest you do a search for the term testingalotlloyd and see for yourself who ranks first. It was actually this site for a while www.lloydhester.com but as I type this it is now mixx.com at number one position.

Here are the websites as they are at present.

1. www.Mixx.com
2. www.lloydhester.com
3. www.jumptags.com
4. www.digg.com
5. www.mister-wong.com
6. www.twitter.com ( a tweet from www.lloydhester.com)

The interesting thing is that it is not been ranked by a lot of the sites that you might think it would be. It seems to have settled and given the fact that my website is pinged by pingoat, pingomatic as well as a number of others. It is also sent to the bookmarking sites by a paid subscription to onlywire. I was surprised that it has not been found at places like stumleupon and others that we all believe are the ones to go for.

It goes to show that a lot of these gurus do not know what they are talking about 🙂

Why not try it for yourself. Create a word unique to you and then post it to your favorite bookmarking sites and ping it and see what happens.

You will then know where to post your blogs and webs pages in future. mixx, jumptags and mr wong are a real shocker. But I make sure that I bookmark to these sites every time I make a post.

Interesting eh?

Now, this is not going to be a blog post on how I achieve so much in a day or how to get things done. This is because procrastination and getting though my own to do list is probably my biggest problem.

I start off with all the right intentions and sometimes even fool myself that what I am doing is getting me closer to my goals but this is not the case.

It frustrates me no end. In fact it gets me that annoyed at myself that I get even less done.

I discovered that I have ADD some time ago and this is a problem that a lot of people have and I have tried all sorts of methods to overcome it with varying degrees of success.

One of the big problems is that it is very difficult for me to get into a rhythm and I start a system up or buy a diary and commit to writing everything down or adding everything to the latest project manager or auto reminder software only to forget after the first day and end up doing none of it.

They say it takes 30 days to make or break a habit but I am not so sure.

I suppose there is no such thing as the perfect system.

The one thing that I have found to work the best is to stick to doing one thing at a time. Now this might sound easy to a normal person but to me I find it incredibly hard not to get sidetracked or start up 5 things at once.

IF you have one thing to do and do NO do anything else until that one project or job is finished then I do tend to get so much more done.

Now the question is, if I know this and if I have experience of this, why do I still end up getting sidetracked and doing other things half way through?

Like writing this blog entry for example when I should be editing the pictures and adding them to our new site www.portraitpaintinggallery.com ?

Who knows, but unless I stop now and get back to it, I will still be trying to get it done in 3 days time.

Wish me luck and let me know of any sure fire methods that are guaranteed to help me and I will give them a try.  🙂