romandock dot com

Ok, it’s been far to long and the time has come. I have made reference to this several times, but am just now officially launching my new site: Find Low Book Prices.

I tell a bit of a version of this story on the site’s about page, but will share it with you all here as well. Around the beginning of this semester, I was looking online to find out how much money I could save by purchasing some of my textbooks online. As I was doing this, I had multiple windows open (one for each of a variety of different websites that sell books) and was entering the information for each book in each window. It was getting quite repetitive and annoying and I decided that there must be a better way to compare prices and decide where to purchase books from.

Thus, the idea came to me of a very simple, streamlined site without a lot of frills and/or extras where a user would be able to type in information about a book (the original idea was to just be able to search by ISBN) and be returned the cost of that book at various places such as Amazon.com, EBay, etc.

Well, as I began putting that site together, it seemed to keep growing and what I originally intended to be a small simple site now contains 34 PHP files and 2,533 lines of code. It doesn’t seem like much when I look at those numbers, but it sure took quite a bit of time to put it all together and make all of the parts work with each other. In retrospect, this was a great project because along with increasing my knowledge of PHP and CSS, I also learned about API’s and XML (both which I was basically scared of before) and creating/using cookies.

At any rate, I’m fairly happy with how it turned out and hope that all of you fine readers will help me promote my new site and get some traffic to it. If you would be interested in helping me promote this site, check out the Promote page where you can print off posters and business cards as well as retrieve the code to include the 125×125 banner on your site. Also, I have included some social media interaction on the site via Twitter and Facebook. Making use of the three social media buttons that I have included is also much appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who assisted by giving me feedback during my pre-release party because I do feel that many of the suggestions that I received were quite helpful and that the site is much better because of it. If the site is not any better, at least I feel better about it and have more confidence in it.

I sat down at the computer not quite sure what I was going to post about, only that I wanted to write a post. Since I wasn’t sure what I was going to talk about, I decided to do a little wandering around the internet to see what I would come across. One of my most commonly accessed sites would have to be Google, and when I went there just now, I was greeted with the following:

It took me a moment when I first saw it because it looked like they were missing most of the letters. Now, it is well known that Google regularly changes the logo on their homepage to commemorate different days. Coincidentally, they offer a holiday logo archive that contains many of the logos that have been used over the years.

Anyway, the first thought I had when I saw today’s logo was “What holiday or special day would it be?” and then I looked again and a bit more closely… “Wait a minute! That’s morse code!”

I did a very limited amount of research, and discovered that today is (or would be) the 218th birthday of Samuel F.B. Morse. For those who might not know (yeah, like any of my readers would fall into that category) Samuel F.B. Morse was the inventor of the telegraph and creator of Morse Code.

While many consider Morse Code to be a dying art, it is still very useful in a wide variety of situations. It is very versatile and can be “transmitted” in a wide variety of media (flashing a light, a whistle, tapping your hand on a desk, etc) making it an excellent choice for many situations when standard voice communication is unavailable or impractical.

For easy reference, I have included one of the many Morse Code tables that can be found throughout the internet, you can click on it for a larger view:

One of the most commonly thought of things when people think of Morse Code is ham radio, but (for better or worse) there is no longer any requirment for knowing Morse Code for any ham radio license class. It is still used fairly regularly by quite a few people, but there are many ham radio operators (myself included) who do not know it.

I can pick out a few characters here and there and can recognize it when I see/hear it (even some place unexpected like the Google logo) but that is about it. I wish that I knew it better, but I just haven’t really set my mind to it and/or made it a priority to learn. Perhaps this is a sort of subtle reminder that I should do that…maybe one of these days when I get a few other projects finished first.

What about you? Do you know Morse Code? If not, do you have any desire to learn it?

So I’ve got my RSS reader all cleaned out again and a few post ideas both in my head and scratched on little slips of paper scattered around my desk. Oh, and I’m no longer limited to being on the couch with my laptop as I’ve got my desk cleaned off to the point that I can actually use it. I also got the power supply replaced in my Windows desktop so I can again switch between Linux and XP with ease. All-in-all, I think I’m getting my act together again and might be able to come back to posting on here on a regular basis. Unfortunately, my schedule hasn’t eased up any and finding time may still be an issue.

As for some of the other ideas I have in my head, there is at least one and quite possibly two eBooks that I’m thinking about putting together, I’m giving an increasing amount of consideration to the decommercialization and refocusing of this site, and I have a couple sites that I need to get working towards setting up.

I also have a couple new gadgets that I will likely be reviewing and posting about as well as a couple other things that I’m considering getting that might be good post fodder as well. For some reason, I just remembered that I still need to do my beta testing of Windows 7 yet too.

I also want to address the fact that I have yet to officially launch the site that I spent most of February working on. Thank you to everyone who participated in and responded to the pre-release party. I feel much more comfortable with the site now and made what I feel are some very necessary changes. I was hoping to have it released by now, but I have one or two things (probably two but I have to see how things work out) that I want to add yet as well as an issue with click-tracking that I hope to get cleared up and have the official launch before the end of the month.

One final thing I am going to add to this post is that I need to do some math and see what kind of effect my recent, unintentional hiatus has had on my ability to reach my goals for the year, but I suspect that I will probably not be able to achieve the 250 posts without increasing to more than 1 per day, which I’m not planning to do.

Anyway, here’s to keeping things on track and my apologies for falling out of my posting and commenting routines.

Ok, so I know I need to get back into the routine of posting on a regular basis but that hasn’t happened quite yet. I do have a few halfway decent post ideas that I will try and get written up over the next couple of days, but for now I just wanted to get something up because I always find it easier to write my next post if there hasn’t been a gap since the last one.

What I mean by this is that no matter what the content or quality of my next post, it will be easier for me to write and post it than it to write and post this one. I’m not sure why this is, but it is something that I have come to recognize as an issue that I face anytime that I am forced to step away from this site for a few days (or in many cases longer) and try to resume posting again.

How about you? Do you find that it’s generally more difficult to write the first post back after a break than any of the others that you write? What posts (or types/category of posts) do you generally find to be the most difficult to write? Leave some feedback and perhaps we can look into this more in depth at a later time.

Ok, so I got a little bit off track in February but it wasn’t a total loss. I’ve made what I feel is some pretty significant progress towards getting my newest project launched and spent pretty much all of my computer time the last few weeks working on that instead of keeping up with things here. I’ll get to a bit more about that in a bit, but first I want to recognize and thank my top commentators from last month.

Top Commentators

The total number of comments that were left last month is significantly less than we had in January. However, considering that there were only six updates to the site during the month of February I am more than pleased with the amount of conversation that was had on this site.

Andrea - 7 comments
Martin - 6 comments
Tammy - 6 comments
Ben Pei - 4 comments
The Blogger Source - 3 comments
Best CSS Gallery - 2 comments
Sherri - 2 comments
Ray Ebersole - 2 comments
Derek - 2 comments
Dennis Edell - 2 comments

I’m happy to note that even with the lack of updates I had 10 people who left more than 1 comment and several new additions to the list this month that were not there last month. I encourage you all to check out the sites of the individuals above and leave some comments on their sites as well.

Goals For 2009

Ok, now for an update on my progress towards my goals for 2009. I feel pretty good about my progress even though I don’t have a ton of results to show yet. Even with the lack of posting, my subscriber count appears to have held pretty steady and is currently showing 31 subscribers. Analytics shows 971 vists over the last thirty days. When divided by 30, is about 32 visits per day. Again, this is pretty close to the number from last month but not something I’m disappointed about based on my lack of updates.

In regards to my posting volume. This is the one area I need to keep on top of myself about. In the last two months I’ve had 28 posts (6 in February and 22 in January) as we are 1/6 of the way through the year, multiplying this number by 6 is only 168 which means I would fall short of my goal for the year. However, I have 222 posts left to write (250 - 28 = 222) and there are 301 days left in the year so as long as I don’t slack off too much I should be ok for this goal.

I do have another site pretty much ready to go, so this is very exciting. If all goes well, this site should significantly help me reach my monthly earnings goal. As I mentioned before, it is also what has been keeping me away from this site more than I would have liked. My current plan is to have a little pre-release party where I am going to invite people to check-out the site and give me some feedback. This will allow me to squash any bugs and make any changes that are suggested before the official announcement. I have done some moderately extensive testing and corrected several errors/bugs that I found but I just want to get some feedback and be sure that it’s ready to go. If you’re interested in checking it out as part of the pre-release party, contact me and you may get an invite.

All in all, I am still positive about reaching my goals for the year and think that they are all very achievable.