you didn’t design it? I don’t know. In any case, I in fact, did not design this. This was the wonderful work of Mister Derek Punsalan of 5thirtyone fame. Just look.. isn’t it pretty. Yeah.

Update!: Vote for this reboot at CSSReboot here.

Koray! You’re lazy!

Yeah I am. I can’t help it. I recently got a promotion at work. Although I now get more money (ladies, I’m single) I don’t have the time I once had to dedicate to this blog. So I contacted Derek and asked what we could work out. And in only a couple weeks (at an amazing price) he had this ready to go for Spring Reboot.

We all let work and life get ahead of us sometimes. But I worked a way around it. I cheated life. Life, not death. I still haven’t seen Final Destination 3, and I don’t plan on it. So now that the new design is rolled out, after I smooth out all the bugs, I’m going to make it a goal to post at least twice a week. I just have obligations to readers and friends, and myself (although I went over this a few posts back ;)).

So whats new?

Uh.. not much is new. I mean, everything is new. But as far as whats under the hood, it’s the same. I’m still ironing out this live deployment, but that should be done soon. And after that, I have a few ideas. But everything is still how you like it. Baby. And through it all, Derek is still offering help getting things together.

I plan on live search. More feed integration. And a few other usability type things. Basically if it screams “Overdone Web 2.0 junk” I’m adding it. You know how I do. If you have ideas for spiffy things, let me know. I like spiffy, don’t you?

Before I move on, I will talk about whats old. Namely, the asides portion. I stopped writing asides long before I paused (like how I chose paused?) writing posts. And I think the main reason is because they weren’t in a featured position. So now that my asides are prominently displayed, I will start to write more of them. Good asides. I promise. So ignore the asides until those good asides start rolling out.

Reboot thoughts

Now since I didn’t design this, I can’t break the process down for you and all that jazz. But hey, there are so many other rebooters doing that. You don’t want to read it again here. So instead, I’m going to let you know why rebooting is so important.

It’s simple. It’s not boring. After a while, blogging gets stale. Stale for everyone. I don’t care how diehard you are, blogging loses it’s charm. Especially when you stop, look around, and notice everyone with a computer has a blog. But rebooting, it does just that, it reboots. You get that luster back. Ideas start forming. You start looking for ways to improve. I mean, I didn’t even design my reboot and already I am stoked. Imagine (because we know I have to) what it’s like for people who actually decided to go through it all themselves.

It’s just a good event. It’s something that tightens the community. Gives exposure to designers who aren’t the most recognized designers in the world. And gives smaller blogs a chance to soak up some limelight.

Anything else?

If you were wondering, I am going to release the last theme I used to the public. It wasn’t the greatest by any means. But I figured hey, I know some people liked it so why not? Especially since Some People have already knicked it.

I don’t think I have anything else to talk about. I mean, I totally have lots to write about. But if I intend to keep my twice a week promise I should probably talk about said things in a later post. So yeah, I’ll leave you with this little bit of wisdom: “Don’t blow your load in one spot.” Pretty good right? Yeah I thought so. Wisdom. Heh. I can’t believe you people read me sometimes.

Learn from me. Learn from others.

Don’t self impose deadlines.

Never set unrealistic deadlines for yourself. I only say unrealistic because its more practical than saying “Never set deadlines for yourself”, which is what I feel like saying. All it does is hasten production and detract from the end product.

Not only that, but it takes away from time you have to spend on the content. While designing this page (4 redesigns total) I had no time to post, and went over 3 weeks without a single post. Trust me, this is not good for traffic. Not only do your readers lose interest in your site, they lose faith in you as a blogger.

And if you find that you have to set a deadline for yourself, don’t announce this deadline. In fact, don’t announce you are even redesigning. Sure it builds the hype machine, but if you don’t follow through, you leave your viewers confused and more importantly disappointed. Announcing my redesign and making promises did nothing for me.

Make room for error

I came across quite a few unexpected errors when implementing this design. Errors that I had not accounted for. This probably more than anything pushed the design process back.

So when you are designing, leave time for error checking. I know this seems silly but hey, you would be surprised at the little things we overlook. A lot of little errors make a big problem.

Don’t leave anything for last

You better have a design process. Don’t pick and choose at elements of design. You need to have the design done, and the code thought out before you start work.

Make a checklist with goals, think over everything before you even start. There are lots of elements of design that you may forget about until the very end. Don’t fall prey to the “this can wait” syndrome, it can’t. Trust me. I “this can waited” so many things that I ended up with everything waiting in line, with nothing in front.

Have a plan

Have a damn plan of attack. Really. Nothing turns out how you expected when you just launch. Don’t be afraid to launch things piece by piece. I know a smooth transition is preferable, but you just can’t always have that.

End.

So the design is launched, although incomplete. I have minor tweaks that need to be made, things that need adding, and things that need addressing. If you see something that looks wrong, let me know. I need all the help I can get. So I hope you enjoy it. It was a learning experience to say the least.

Also, I plan to get out at least two more posts that I have cached. But after that you may see another week of no posts. Christmas and I’m off to ohio.

Well I actually had another post planned today. It was going to be about the redesign and how it was almost done, and about analytics. Fortunately for you, there are plenty of posts about analytics elsewere.

“Why don’t you just post what you had?”, you ask. Well it is because today, I received an email from Scrivens himself letting me know I was accepted aboard the 9rules team.

Needless to say I was floored. When I submitted Koray Online I didn’t expect to be chosen. I didn’t hit ‘get email’ in thunderbird rapidly. I just did it for kicks. Yet here I am, chosen out of 509 applicants. I think its a true testimant to how 9rules is run. Though my blog (this version at least) is relatively new, and I don’t have the traffic that some other members have, I was accepted. It shows that 9rules really does care about content and people, rather than numbers.

I’m just grateful for the chance to share my words with others and to be able to interact with the 9rulers.

Anyways, now that thats all said and done. The site design is almost done. I just need to talk to a few friends and get it hammered out. Its quite the change, but I like it.

These days, blogging has taken on a whole new face.

The goal is now traffic, popularity, money, and exposure. I don’t think this is true of everyone however. Sure we all love seeing our traffic go up. Sure we all like to be linked to. Sure money makes the world go ’round. But some of us still blog for the sake of blogging, and if we get some of these things in the form of an added bonus, we are happy.

I ask myself, do you write for pleasure or do you write for content’s sake? And I think the answer I have arrived at, is that I write because I feel I have an obligation to. But where I differ from (most) others is that I enjoy that obligation. Is that cheating? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I enjoy writing for others. Be it a small readerbase, or a large one. Que Sera Sera.

The question is, do people feel an obligation to write? And if so, do they feel that obligation because of possible money and exposure, or do they feel it because they genuinely care about their readers.

With all the “How to make your blog succesful” and “How to make money blogging” guides, blogs, and posts that are popping up, is it even possible to escape the “Blog = Money Only” mentality?

So my question to you folks is, if you blog, do you do it only for traffic, or do you do it for yourself? Don’t make me feel stupid by asking a question and getting no answer. Speak up.

Microsoft has made quite the flub up.

On www.msn.com, microsoft links to an article that supposedly tells us how to “Earn $1 million more on your 401(k)”. Unfortunately, the link has a little problem.

The link is to a LAN machine, and as such, instead of a real domain it has the machine name in the URL.

http://edpreview/content/Investing/Mutualfunds/P132921.asp

Now users who click this while browsing with firefox will see something.. interesting. Instead of a 404, firefox takes it as a searchterm and gives us the first google result for “edpreview”. Which as it turns out, is a hardcore ebony porn site. Uh oh.

The real article is here if anyone just needs to know how to earn 1mill more on their 401(k).

I laughed and sent the error to CNN in a news tip. I hope to god we see it on the morning news.

On the bright side, I bet the webmaster of that porn site is happy as a pig in mud with the undoubted surge in traffic.

Edit: Screens thanks to a friend.
The link, plain as day under the Money section.
The site that firefox redirects you to. (Warning: Graphic)

So after much deliberation, we have decided to downsize CollateralFX.

As many of you know.. I started a ‘hosting’ venture a while back with a few friends. It started out pretty small but rocketed upwards in a short amount of time. Of this, I am most proud. We managed to do what many upstart hosting companies can’t do: grow.

But now we have grown to such a level that the rewards of our business don’t merit to work we put into it. I mean, I love most of our hostees but we have reached a point where we just put too much of ourselves into this.

So yes, we are downsizing. Dropping monthly hostees at month-end and moving yearly hostees to a smaller box of their own until their payterm expires. The company will all but disappear once the yearly hostees’ terms expire.

But there is good reason for this. We are regrouping, strategizing, and refocusing our efforts in the niche hosting market. This includes Game servers, Shoutcast servers, Chat servers, Ventrillo and Teamspeak server, etc. We will get a DBA and rename our company Lithic Servers. Yeah, we spent tons of time coming up with that name.

The market for these things is just not as saturated as the plain jane hosting market. Less competition and less work. As lazy as that sounds, the less time we spend wasting time on server maintenance and the like the more time we have to spend on the individual hostee.

As for a bit of proof, take this bandwidth graph of our hosting server. Compare it to the bandwidth graph of our gaming server. As you can see, the bandwidth difference is amazing.

Anyways, I have gained a lot of wisdom throughout this little experiment and I thought I would share it with those of you looking perhaps into starting your own hosting business.

1. Don’t start as a reseller. As cheap and easy as it seems, you will only lose money in the longterm. People are smart these days, and they know they can get it cheaper straight from the horses mouth. Not to mention they want to talk to the provider, not the middle man. Go for a dedicated server to start with.
2. Be sure you have money. Hosting is not a “Get Rich Quick” business. It requires a lot of time, patience, knowledge, and money. You are going to have a lot of unexpected expenses, not to mention the obvious ones.
3. Your datacenter is your lifeline. Be sure to do a lot of research on your datacenter before deciding to lease a server. They must have an excellent support policy. If you don’t have support from them, how can you support your customers? I suggest LayeredTech. I really do. Right now, they are the best out there. In my humble opinion of course.
4. Try to move to co-location when you get bigger. Pretty soon your demand will catch up with supply and you will be forced to turn away customers. The best way to deal with this is to purchase a server and co-locate it at a datacenter. This way all you pay for is the space and the bandwidth. Costs will drop and profits will rise once you are able to buy your own hardware.
5. Be professional with support. People don’t want you to be their buddy. I am not trying to say you shouldn’t be friendly, but if you try to hard to be personal friends, they will realize you don’t have much of a support staff. They want cold hard support. Fast and efficient. But don’t be afraid to throw in a “And have a nice day” at the end of your emails.
6. Love it. If you don’t love what you do, you’ll want to close up shop real fast. You have to love the hosting community. The hosting atmosphere. And the customers. If you can’t get joy out of providing hosting for your customers, you are making a mistake. Because thats pretty much the only reward you get for a long time. Money isn’t instant.

Take this advice, and file it away. It will do you a world of good down the road.

And as a side note: Anyone I am hosting right now, as a friendship type thing, will keep their hosting. Don’t freak.

So i wanted to talk about Web 2.0 today. A sort of sustaining post. Something to mull over for a while. Why? Because I’m going to be gone camping (hah!) for the next few days. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? Lets start..

Whats Web 2.0

Well it would seem that there is a lot of debate about the true meaning of 2.0. But I’m going to give you what I think it is and you can form your own opinions..
Web 2.0 is internet revolution. Not a violent upstart type of revolution, but a slow ’sneak-up-on-you’ revolution. A step towards standards, a step towards new tools, a step towards new ways to utilize the internet, a step in the absolute right direction.

[…]

I know I know, two posts in one day (actually, im 24 minutes into the next day but, eh). But I don’t really care. I felt the need to write about this. It seems anymore if you make a post more frequently than once a week you are uncool. But I digress..

Rollyo is a pretty new concept. It aims to put the search engine in the users hands. It allows you to create a specific “SearchRoll” that searches only the sites you want it to. For example, I could create a SearchRoll that would only search CollateralFX sites.

The problem I have with this is, is it really purposeful? I mean, I understand that it can make searching for a specific thing much easier, but if you know how to use google you can do the exact same thing.

I can see how it could be used for certain networks of sites and whatnot but, I just don’t see it being too incredibly useable.

On another related note.
The logo was elected “Logo Of The Month” over at BrainFuel(Great Read). I personally like it. People are scrutinizing the logo because it isn’t realistic. By that I mean, the center isn’t a swirl (which was intentional) and the band that comes off the role isn’t at the right angle.

It’s a logo people. The idea is to be simple. Not super-realistic. I think it does the job.

Anyways, what do you think? Useful or not? And have you created a SearchRoll? Link me.