Like anyone, i suffer from boredom. However the difference between me and somebody else is that when i’m bored, i’ll create… i won’t read or play games or watch TV…

I’ve worked extremely hard to eliminate ‘wasted’ time from my day but by doing that i’ve wired myself to be active from morning to night which means i need to create even more to keep myself busy. Which is good. Some of the results can be seen first hand on this blog

Don’t get me wrong, i’ve tonnes of assignments and different things i could be doing, but the problem is they’re just not interesting. And that’s a big problem. College is becoming ‘work’ which kills motivation and enthusiasm…. i don’t have that problem at home because everything is just ‘play’ to me. Take this blog – it takes more energy and time to produce posts here daily than it does to complete one assignment, but given the choice i’ll always blog first even though it’s certainly not the easiest option.

photo credit: Kiwi-Lomo

I think the core problem is the fact that i know any assignment work i do will go virtually unnoticed. Putting in a huge amount of effort in to an assignment that will be looked at once, then dumped and forgotten about isn’t very ‘rewarding’. I’ll still do it and i’ll still pick up the marks, but my heart isn’t in it and that’s my problem, but it’s also the system’s problem. I’m sure there are a lot more like me…

With a blog post, i know that if i put in the effort, i get rewarded in the form of traffic, comments, retweets etc… plus the entire internet can see what i write and perhaps benefit from it…. so that ‘potential’ exposure definitely makes me up my game. The reward is more personal. The development and results are ‘real’, they can be seen by you, I or anyone who’s online.

If my exams or assignments were put up online for all to see and forever etched in to my online history, you can be sure i’d put a hell of a lot more effort in to everything because i’d know there’d be more at stake. What about attendance… if that could be accessed by future employers…. i’d attend more or at least be more conscious of my attendance.

Ethical? Legal? Probably not but overall there needs to be either more reward or more punishment, or both. As things stand, everything is offline, it’s old school, it’s unrewarding which lowers motivation.

I can see why grade inflation is being talked about these days… i do think (in general) we’re becoming smarter at getting results, not necessarily becoming smarter or working harder. If more reward for creativity was introduced, it might just force people in to not just working smarter, but working harder too.

For the past 3 years or so i’ve always planned on organizing my hosting accounts and domain registrations better. As things stand, i have 4 different hosting packages with 3 separate hosting companies. I also have 68 domain names registered across 5 different registrars. Chaos.

Domains

You might be wondering why i have so many domains or so many different hosting accounts and that’s a good question. The majority of my domain names are sitting idle. Most of them are decent names which i could develop but just don’t have the time to. I won’t let many of them expire though… maybe one day i’ll sit down and do something with them.

Hosting

The 4 different hosting accounts are completely unnecessary, unlike the domains which may actually be valuable / useful one day. I really only need one hosting account, but i like to have another as backup. Currently i’ve two accounts with dreamhost, one with lunarpages and one with blacknight. I’ll most likely ditch one account with dreamhost and one with lunarpages. That will leave me with a dreamhost package and a blacknight package. More than enough juice in those two to keep all my sites ticking over.

Rehousing

Although it sounds easy to just shut down accounts, it’s not. It might be easy to cancel the account and stop billing but the hard part is moving the site from one server to another. It’s just hassle and dirty work… especially if you have dozens of sites to transfer. Then you have to update domain name DNS settings to point the domain to it’s new home… if the domains are registered with multiple registrars it’s just more hassle. But it has to be done and that’s what i’ll try to do this week.

The benefits

The obvious benefit of all of this is that it’ll save me money. Less hosting accounts and fewer domains means less expense. Once the big move is all complete, all of my sites will be easier to manage and things will just be more efficient. Hopefully i’ll get this blog moved to an irish server too (at long last) which should improve speed for us irish readers – that’s been a common ‘complaint’.

Although i’ve delayed the launch of itisdown.com (i’ll probably launch it on monday now), here’s a bit more info on what it is, what it looks like and how it’s put together…

Easy Access

One of the biggest obstacles to getting feedback or even just getting people to talk about something laziness. Take those ‘how was your stay’ forms in hotel rooms. Sometimes i’ll fill them out if i’m bored or because i genuinely like the hotel. Most of the time i don’t bother.

If someone comes up to me on the street and asks about a survey – not gonna happen. Same on the phone. Personal one on one feedback is not proper feedback. Most of the time it’s going to be filtered, biased or toned down. That’s because it’s just less hassle and time to ‘ok’ something rather than criticise it, because if you criticise something, you need to back it up with reasons and explanations, plus you risk making enemies. That’s all way too much hassle and work.

With that in mind, i’m allowing users to ‘login’ via social networks using a plugin from rpxnow.com. Once logged in, these users are effectively ‘members’ and have the same rights as a typical wordpress author would (they can submit posts).

Front End Controls

The problem with wordpress is that in order to add content, you need to be in the backend which is very intimidating for average users. With the p2 theme, users can post articles from the frontpage – eliminating the need to use that intimidating back end. Once a user logs in, they’re directed to the wordpress administration panel but i’ve change that slightly so that they’re redirected to the homepage and bypass the administration panel. It all results in a better user experience.

Voting

All democracies have voting systems in place. So on this site everyone can thumbs up or down a ‘problem’ (which is a wordpress post).  They can also comment on problems and thumbs up or down comments too. A bit like digg i suppose in that sense.

Rewarding popularity

All blogs need a popular posts section in my opinion. Any website does really. It makes sense that popular content is brought to the front. Websites aren’t grocery stores – if popular content is buried away in a corner, people will just leave – simple as that.

So the site has a ‘hot topics’ list and i’ll probably add more features along these lines too in the future (highest rated comments etc…).

Facebook & Twitter

I have facebook and twitter logins. I also have a facebook fan box on the site and i must add a twitter follow feature too. The facebook fan page grabs all the latest submissions from the site and displays them on facebook via RSS feeds. Likewise with the twitter account. It means that people don’t need to come to the site to see what’s happening, they can see it through facebook or twitter updates. Again, it’s all about ‘less hassle’.

SEO

photo credit: smemon87

This wouldn’t be a website i could put my name to unless it was well SEO’d. This site is an experiment in many things and SEO is one of them. We all know wordpress is king in search engines… so provided the site gets a bit of use, i’d imagine it can go places. How far can it go? I wouldn’t rule anything out…

I said last week itisdown.com would be going live. It will be, but just not for another couple of days…

What’s the hold up?

There is no hold up… i’ve been working very hard on it and you’ll see that when it’s launched. I’ll just be too busy over the next couple of days to sit down for a few hours and let it set sail. I don’t want to launch it and then go away for the day / weekend

What happens when it goes live?

I’ll be pushing it on facebook and twitter and making sure every single flaw i come across in college is noted and put up on the site. I’ll be leading by example in that sense. Every community needs a few fanatical hardcore supporters to grow. I have to be one of those guys otherwise this project falls flat on it’s face.

What do you hope to achieve?

This is an experiment more than anything else. I believe this system is the way to go – keeping everything public and online. Problems can be logged quicker therefore they can be fixed quicker. We’ll see over time if i’m proved right…

On the technical side of things this was a real challenge for me, so the fact i’ve done what i set out to do with wordpress is already an achievement It’s not perfect and no doubt there’ll be a long list of problems i discover as time goes on, but it does the job and the site is looking and performing really well. The icing on the cake will be seeing people using it and hopefully liking it.

Although rewards can be fluked or undeserved, the majority of them are a direct result of one thing – hard work. One thing money can’t buy is a good work rate and it’s not really something you can learn either.

Is it a skill? A trait? A natural gift? It’s hard to know. Work rate is defined as ‘The quality of being productive’ and although the definition of being ‘productive’ can differ from one person to the next, it generally involves goal setting, meeting or exceeding expectations, sticking at something when it’s easier to give it up etc…

Although i don’t think i spend any more time online these days than i did a year ago, i know that i’m much more productive. That’s because i’m producing more output – visible work which you and i can both see.

photo credit: Iain Browne

I’m not really *that* concerned with the quality of output on this blog which may seem strange, but i believe that getting myself in to a routine will eventually pay off. One post per day, one custom designed image per post; they’re the goals every single day on this blog.

So far i’m doing well… hitting that goal daily without problems. Has my writing improved? Maybe, i can’t really judge that myself. But i know that my creativity has increased. I know every day that i must come up with a blog post, so i’m constantly thinking about what to write about & how to write about it. I know that’s a good thing

Because i’ve forced myself to design daily, my design skills are also improving. Are my designs themselves improving? Again i can’t really judge that myself yet, but i do know that i’m learning more and i’m adding more resources to my armory every day (styles, fonts, patterns etc..).

A lot of bloggers will say it’s quality over quantity and that’s the defence for churning out one or two posts per week. However, if i was to adopt that same mentality, my skills would suffer or at the very least not improve as fast as they are at the minute. In general, hard work pays off so i’ve no intention of slowing down, even though things are getting pretty busy for me right now.

Set goals, hit them. Rinse, wash & repeat. It’s the only way to move forward in anything.