Toek's Musings

This blog has been up for a year now. Honestly I thought I would have accomplished more and written more. Meh, that’s how it is sometimes.

This year we did a repeat of the pagan feast we had at my brother-in-laws’ last year. We had NY strip steaks, green beans, twice baked potatoes, rolls, and one of my now favorites,… roasted on the grill corn. A feast I’m tellin’ ya! Everyone was in good spirits, wasn’t so much about gift giving as it was about spending time together with people whose company you enjoy,… or, should enjoy.

Over the weekend I was looking through some old folders on my computer and came across this link, The Naked Truth. I had a look see to refresh my memory. It’s about 3-4 years old. Yes I remember it now, a thought provoking documentary about “beliefs” and religion. Check it out for a fresh take on an old story.

Christmas has become such a commercialized façade of goodwill towards man. Bah! Why do people look towards only one day of the year, rather than everyday or, every other day, to give to and help each other? I mean, I know there are good people who do their best all year, but, there are so many more people that don’t and there is no reason for it except greed and selfishness. I say our American society is a direct reflection of the people who preside over it and who make the laws governing it.

Anyway…
Most of the snow we had here at Toek’s Place has melted away but, the weatherman is calling for a storm this Thursday night (New Years Eve). Don’t know yet if it will be snow, freezing rain or, just rain. Personally, I’ve seen enough snow this year already. Either way, I need to gather up some more kindlin’ to start a fire. Oh yeah, almost forgot. Our neighbor got stuck in our driveway and tore the crap out of it getting out. I’m anxious to see how it’s going to turn out getting it straightened out. Lots of big holes. Grrr

Toek

Toek | Daily Drippings | 12 28th, 2009 | No Comments »

Just a quick update, had a big snow here. Well, big for around here (Central Virginia). We had 14+ inches of snow fall here in less than 24 hours. Actually it was more like 18 inches here at Toek’s Place. Went driving earlier today, the roads are terrible. They don’t plow most of the back roads around here, so they are pretty messy. Got back home and cranked the woodstove up. Now I’m kicking back and having a few Heineken’s.

Toek

Toek | Daily Drippings, Video Blog | 12 19th, 2009 | No Comments »

Starting sometime this Friday (12/18/09) afternoon we are expected to get about 8 inches of snow. That’s right much for around here. Enough to empty the stores of all the bread and milk to be had and to cause a few accidents out on the roads.

I’ll have to get outside early and split some kindling up. I was going to do it today but, got lazy. Keeping the woodstove going, goes a long ways towards keeping the house warm and keeping the heatpump from running so much. We’re going to have to buy a load of wood soon. I don’t want to run out of wood completely, you never know when the electricity might go out.

I’m still stuck on the Dreamweaver stuff and it’s holding me back on my personal as well as business stuff. I really do need to suck it up and do something! Take action, take action, take action! Well, I will one of these days. My wife and I still have our old house up for sale. What a drag that is. It puts a damper on a lot of things we could do around here at Toek’s Place, expense wise.

This was just a short entry, documenting this winters’ first snowstorm. Maybe I’ll cozy up with a buzz and get some work done while it’s snowing,… maybe.

Toek

Toek | Daily Drippings | 12 17th, 2009 | No Comments »

So, you’ve got your Paypal (https://www.paypal.com)account setup and verified, now what? Well, if you plan on earning more than $600 per year and will be to claiming it as income on your tax filings, you will probably want to look into getting an EIN (Employee Identification Number) from the IRS for tax filing purposes. You can get one online instantly here at Tax9er.com.

Also, you will probably want to register your business with your local SCC (State Corporation Commission) or whatever state agency that oversees the formation of Limited Liability Corporations and such in your local area. And then too, you may need to acquire a business license, as required by many cities and counties. I am not giving any legal advice here, I’m not a lawyer. I’m just trying to give you an idea of what you may have to do to legally start and operate your business. By all means, please seek professional legal counsel and also do your own research too, when making important business decisions.

Okay, you’ve got all of the business/legal stuff out of the way, now for the fun stuff. I assume you already have a good idea about what you want to accomplish with your new online business. Earning money of course, but also you want to continue to grow your business as well. Automate what and when you can.

Even though you can operate a business on the internet without having to pay for web hosting, I would strongly suggest getting your own hosting account. Sure, you can use the freebies, but, if you are building your lifeblood website, don’t you want more control and dependability for something that is as important as your money site? You should. It makes a difference in your bottom line.

I use Ipower.com for my hosting and domain needs. They are dependable and a good value. They have been providing my hosting needs for over 5 years. Free domain, host unlimited domains, unlimited storage space, unlimited bandwidth, 25 MySQL DB’s, Paypal basket, 2500 POP3 accounts, WordPress and much more for $5.95 a month. And yes I get paid money if you buy through this link. But really, whether through that link or whatever, get yourself a good host provider.

If you are having trouble deciding what to sell, take a look over at ClickBank, or, maybe even Offer Vault and see if there is anything there that piques your interest. All of the offers you will see at those sites are “Affiliate Marketing” sites. That basically means that the affiliates are making a cut of the sale price for agreeing to “market” the product for the owner. There is a lot of money to be made through Affiliate Marketing programs.

There are lot’s of offers out there and when you sign up with a few of them the next thing you know is that your email box is overflowing with information. When that happens people tend to get overwhelmed, information overload. So, if you plan on signing up for some offers it might be a good idea to go and get a free email account like Google Gmail or something like that. Not that you have to, you just may find it easier to maintain. I’ll talk more about getting organized for profits in a later post. For now it’s important that you properly set your business up and think about what service or product you are going to provide. Next after deciding on a product / service, there needs to be a plan of action to generate traffic.

Toek

Toek | Mo' Money | 12 15th, 2009 | No Comments »

Time again for another post. As usual I’ve not been maintaining things the way I should be. Oh well. Anyway, I’m sitting here now squeezing out words, one letter at a time. I thought at one time that if I would post at least once a month it would surely become easier to write stuff as time went by. I think now that that may not be true. Writing is hard for me, most of the time. There are times when it’s easier to write than others. I have plenty of ideas whizzing around in my thoughts I just don’t have a good system in place to transpose them into media, yet. Yeah,…so anyway, on with the blog….

I mentioned in a previous post that I was sort of toying with the idea of earning money online. In fact, most people that have experienced the internet have had a thought at one time or another about being able to generate an income by using it to do so.

Ebay is probably, by far, the most popular way that most people have experienced selling something on the internet. I’ve done a little bit of Ebay’ing myself in the past. I found it to be too labor intensive and costly to make a decent go at it. What my wife and I did was go to yardsales, flea markets, auctions and Craig’s List and try to find profittable merchandise to sell on Ebay. We found out though, that there are lot’s of other people doing the same thing.

After that experience and doing some research I think I would try some other kind of marketing approach and sell a different type of product. More than likely a digital, informative product. This seems to me a logical choice for a number of reasons. First, there is no inventory that you have to ship unless you set your business up like that. Second, there is a high demand for information. And third, the product can be created on a very low budget. There are other reasons as well, these were just the three main reasons why I would go with a digital information product.

There are a few things that need to be planned for when starting out. If you are going to be selling on the internet you are going to need a way your customers can pay you for your product. Paypal is one of the most common pay methods on the internet today. They charge a moderate fee on each payment made to your account. If you choose to use Paypal make sure your account is a “Premiere” or “Merchant” account and not the standard account. The standard account doesn’t allow you to “sell”, (have people send you money). Go ahead and get your account “certified” too. If you don’t have a Paypal account now, you can sign up and to get certified takes about 3-4 business days.

To be continued….

Toek

Toek | Mo' Money | 11 22nd, 2009 | 2 Comments »

It has been slow going here at Toek’s Place lately. I still haven’t got my head wrapped around Dreamweaver yet. And that means it will be a while yet before the new edition of Toek’s Place web site will be posted.

Another autumn is upon us and with that comes leaves. And yes, we have a boat load here at Toek’s Place! I’ll have to use the lawnmower to chew them up soon. I built a fire in the woodstove for the first time yesterday, since moving in. It works very well for heating the downstairs.Two arm loads of split oak lasted from 6pm to 6am. Not bad, had enough coals to start another fire the next morning. The downstairs stays pretty cool most of the time, it will probably be down right cold when it really gets cold.

I’ve seen a few deer and turkey grazing in the yard. The other day I saw a flock of about fifteen to twenty turkey crossing the road. I was driving and came up on them, about seven had crossed the road and about twelve more were waiting to cross. I didn’t think to get a cell phone picture at the time. Bow season has started here in the area. I haven’t seen any hunters yet, I think most people around here hunt with a gun. Black powder season starts soon and then regular gun season sometime around Thanksgiving.

I’ve been doing a little research on search engine optimization, SEO for short. I’m toying with the idea of earning some money using the internet. That’s one of the reason’s I’m trying to teach myself web design. Not that I’m out to make a fortune, although that would be nice, just making enough to take the wife out to dinner every now and again would be nice. I enjoy working on and with computers, especially the web design/development part of it. Anyway, knowing more about SEO can earn yourself more money using the internet.

Well, this is about it as far as a quick update and blog entry. These entries are pretty boring, I’ll try to do better in the future.

Toek

toeksplace | Daily Drippings | 10 13th, 2009 | No Comments »

Well, I’ve been working on the new design for Toek’s Place. This is my first attempt at using Adobe PhotoShop for the page basic layout and design. I know very little about Adobe PS. Then I will be importing the finished layout into Dreamweaver. I don’t know anything at all about Dreamweaver, except that it’s used to make webpages and that’s about it. So, it’s going to be a real learning experience.

While looking for sites with good advice and tutorials I found a couple of neat things. One was an Adobe Dreamweaver extension called “ThemeDreamer“. Extensions, from what I have read, are like little mini programs, or, scripts rather, that adds functionality to Dreamweaver. They’re sort of like shortcuts or maybe macros. They provide a GUI for actions within Dreamweaver. ie,… Theme Dreamer enables easier creation and editting of Worpress templates in Dreamweaver.

And then, while reading up on Theme Dreamer I came across WebAssist Dreamweaver Extension Library, and wow it made me drool! All kinds of extension goodies!

But, like I said, I hardly know anything about Dreamweaver now. I have a feeling that’s going to change pretty soon.

I did another edition of the video blog. It has a preview of the new Toek’s Place web site. Nothing fancy and maybe kind of ugly. This edition turned out a little longer than I expected it to. It’s almost 10 minutes long. It has some footage of the new house.

toeksplace | Video Blog, Web Design / Development | 09 17th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

The other day I was getting the urge to work on a web site. The excuse I’ve been giving for putting off any web work, was that I needed to set up a web server on my machine so that I could practice and learn PHP and MySQL along with webpage creation.

Well, no more excuses. I found the most simple solution. I’ve looked at some different web server packages and they all had a certain amount setup involved, they were all easy to use. But, I have found one even easier to use. It self-configurates itself and it’s portable! It works from CD’s/DVD’s, USB jumpdrives, HD’s external and internal. And, best of all, it’s FREE!

Being a novice web developer, I wanted to recreate the hosting enviroment of my web host the best I could. I figured that would make it easier and less of a chance of server/PHP/MySQL software version compatability issues from popping up during my learning process.

This package utilizes open source programs and can be customized to suite your various web server needs. PHP, PEARL, MySQL, Apache, sqLite. It’s all there. I’m currently running it on a WinXP 32 bit box with no problems so far. I’m no web master guru by any means, but I’d have to reccomend this to anyone interested in web development that wants a fast, easy, simple and portable web server.

The possibilities are endless. Not only can you host web sites and try out your new webpage code and designs, you can do things like creates databases and make catalogs on digital portable media, create training tools for your company, and much, much more.

Try it out for yourself. You can read about it and download it at Server2Go. Other things in life should be so easy.

Toek

toeksplace | Web Design / Development | 09 5th, 2009 | No Comments »

Well I’m experimenting with some RSS feed stuff. I still plan on doing some more videos, but I came across this site called Feedzilla. Seemed pretty cool, so I thought I’d give it a try and add some fresh content to the blog. I’ll post the feed at the bottom of this post.

Things have been pretty quite here around the homstead. The HughesNet satellite systemdoes it’s job, a little slow though. I’ve been trying to think of some ways to bring in a little extra change, maybe eBay. It’s so cutthroat hard to make a profit, but, I guess all in how well your marketing system works. What ever it may be, one thing is for sure, you have to enjoy what you are doing. It makes success that much easier.

I’ll see how this post works out. I may start posting more, who knows. Here goes nothing… the RSS feeds;

Update:
Hmmm, seems you can only have one feed widgit per page at a time. Well, I’ll just put one on the latest post. I’ll try to keep the feeds close to the subject matter of the post. Or something about PC gaming if all else fails.

toeksplace | Web Design / Development | 09 1st, 2009 | No Comments »

Okay, so I couldn’t get the .wmv files embedded like I wanted to, so I made a YouTube account. I guess it’s okay but, I really want to host the files on my server. Here’s my first video;

I may try using a Flash player later, although I didn’t want to depend on people having Flash installed. I may just end up putting links to the video files and not worry about a player loading with the page. Being on a limited 1.5mb iffy connection makes me give bandwidth intensive content second thoughts.

toeksplace | Daily Drippings, Video Blog, Web Design / Development | 08 1st, 2009 | No Comments »