Gerard McGarry

I haven't made much fanfare on here about becoming self-employed.

Oh, in my head I wanted to write a sermon about how good it feels to be achieving a lifelong dream. The last few months at Howden, I was becoming more and more aware of how bogged down in paperwork we were becoming. It's hard to be passionate about something when you can't move for filling in forms.

So yes, leaving to work on my own business has been a great feeling. Liberating. Empowering. Lots of big motivational words like that.

But I'm a realist too, and I don't want to pen some high and mighty words that'll come back to haunt me later. It's a fact of life that the online advertising market is contracting at the moment. Revenues so far have been fine, but you'd be a fool if you thought that money just comes flooding in when you've got a website that's doing well.

I use the wp-shortstat plugin across all my WordPress blogs to track visitors and show me where my visitors are coming from.

However, Shortstat has its problems – it logs everything, resulting in a massive database size on your server. The more popular your site, the more this lumbering beast of a database slows things down. In fact, in one instance, the database grew so large that Shortstat couldn’t display the stats anymore.

I have many reservations about the sheer amount of crap professional bloggers talk. Someone will proclaim Twitter the next big place to promote your blog, and off go the ADD masses looking for the next batch of hits for their wee blog.

I've been working on websites for years now (since University days), and my toolkit has changed quite a bit since those early days of hand-crafted Notepad HTML.

These days I'm using a combination of free and paid-for tools and FireFox extensions that help me code, design and troubleshoot my web pages. Here's the line-up:

I’m doing a little blog consolidation work at the moment. Maybe I mentioned in the last post that when I started blogging, I went to town registering domains and starting random blogs.

That’s a rookie mistake that I don’t intend to make again. For a start, maintaining all those separate WordPress installs at once, is a lot of work. Even with a dormant WP site, I still feel compelled to apply security updates in case there’s a chance the site gets hacked.

Plus, I can’t stand owning so many ghost town blogs. So, I’m working on a masterplan to consolidate all those blogs and domains into a manageable block of 3-4. For example, I’ve migrated all the posts from an old tech blog of mine to this one, and then finally redirected the domain so that all the traffic comes to this site.

On Wednesday 24th September, I handed in my notice at work. As of the 1st of November, I'll be a free agent. And I'm not going back into paid employment for the moment - I'll be working for Unreality TV.

A little over three years ago, Lisa and I started a little blog about Reality TV. I was working for Cleaver Fulton Rankin and doing a bit of web design work in my spare time to bring in extra cash.

Unreality TV has had its share of ups and downs. The first year was the worst, as we balanced the growing readership with the relatively poor revenues the site would bring. We toyed with having a forum. The forum failed twice, then caught on in its third incarnation.

We spread ourselves too thin, trying to start blogs in different areas, then realising that we didn't have the time to commit to them all. After a crisis discussion, we decided to scale back massively and concentrate on Unreality since it was our biggest (read: only) successful brand.

Two years of further hard work (mostly on Lisa's part) have resulted in a very successful site, averaging a million pageviews per month and a couple of thousand forum users.

Let it be known that yesterday - 10th September 2008 - officially ended my relationship with FIAT.

Somewhere on the Antrim Road, on the way home from work, the car stalled. Given that the car stereo was drowning out the engine, it must have been sixth sense that told me something was wrong. Turning the radio off confirmed that the engine was no longer running, so I tried to turn the key a couple of times to get it started.

As the clock had struck rush hour, I was aware that my stationary car was in the way of other drones heading home. I approached the taxi driver in the car behind me for help pushing the car into a nearby side street.

"Sorry mate, not being funny, but I've got a condition. Can't help. Maybe those traffic wardens over there can give you a hand?" and he pointed out the red-uniformed gentlemen walking up the road.

I've been weighing up two blogging/CMS platforms recently with a view to launching a new community site. Those platforms are Drupal and WordPress MU.

Drupal is a leading open source content management system. With the aid of some nifty add-on modules, Drupal is capable of becoming just about anything your imagination wants. Blogs, wikis, forums, event calendars and much more.

I know it's been a while since I posted on here. I've been slowly updating the photo gallery, but rarely finding the time to cobble a few words together. Hell, I've been to Italy for a fortnight, started working on a Windows Vista course and am undergoing an intensive but interesting audit at work.