My web design site is ready!

After a long time of messing around with different themes and functionality, I've finally ended up with something that I'm quite happy with.

I present to you my web design site, Web Design 4 You:



 

Click on the image to go to the actual website itself. Have a look around.

It's nice and simple, with a minimalist but professional look that I'm happy with, while presenting information about all the services that I offer. It's also 'responsive', which means it can be viewed on any device, regardless of the screen size. (If you resize the browser while viewing it (or even this blog), you'll see what I mean.)

I went through a few themes before I found this one, which I've worked on all day today to get to where I want it. And now I'm happy. I can relax.

I'm happy that it's completed before I head off to Melbourne tomorrow, so that I don't have to worry about it while I'm gone.

I'm taking my laptop with me though, so that I can still write blog posts or do website design while I'm gone. You never know where you might find a client...

Speaking of clients. You might be a client of mine, and you just don't know it yet.

I'm offering free website hosting for 12 months for anyone that contacts me to design or redesign a website for them, if they say they read about it on my AlansJourney blog.

That means you. Get in touch with me if you're interested in any of the services I offer you.

I'm going to Melbourne this Friday

I'm driving down to Melbourne this Friday to start physically looking for a house for Fanfan and I to live in. I'll be attending open homes and applying for the ones that I think will be suitable for us.

I'll be staying there until I find us a place, and then come back to Canberra.

Our departure date from Canberra is the 25th March. Well, for me it's the 25th. Fanfan has some work that will keep her here until the 29th, when she'll drive down to Melbourne and join me in our new house. Whatever it might be.

Hopefully it'll be near the beach. Fanfan is a bit of a beach baby, and she loves the beach, so that's up the top of the list of considerations when looking for a house. And it'll be the south-eastern area of Melbourne, which is a nice area and where Fanfan used to live before she moved up to be with me in Canberra.

I booked a room with someone on airbnb.com.au tonight. I'll be staying with them for 4 nights, but I confirmed with them that they're available beyond that, just in case I can't actually secure a house this weekend.

Between you and me, I'll be trying my damnedest to get a place that will suit us. I'd rather not be down there any longer than I need to be.

Time is passing, and the moment is getting closer. It's very exciting!

I've been busy

I should apologise, to you and to myself. I haven't been keeping up with my daily posts of 500 words. I've been focused on my web design website and the work I'm setting up for myself with that.

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time working on some documents that I'll be using for the business -  Proposal document, and a Contract. Both of them are going to be very important for generating business with a client, and then locking in a commitment from the client.

Not to mention the work I've already started doing for the client I already have.

And planning a move to Melbourne.

And fine-tuning my web design business website. And advertising it on Facebook (more about that shortly).

It's been very exciting, but most of my waking hours have been in front of the computer setting myself up as best I can with my business. It's not something I've found annoying or tedious in any way. It's been awesome.

Now, about Facebook....

I wanted to try an experiment, just to see what would happen. I purchased a promotion of my new Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/webdesign4you.biz) to get about 4-18 'Likes' per day. After 4 days so far, I've had it exposed to almost 6,000 people on Facebook in various countries and received 49 Likes so far from people who aren't my friends (12 of my friends have Liked the page). It's been about 11-12 Likes per day on average, which is ok.

But from that exposure and those Likes, no one has contacted me for web design services. I'm doing this particular promotion for 7 days at $6 a day. If only one person contacts me to get me to design a website for them, then the promotion will be worth it and I'll continue it. But if no one contacts me, then the promotion will be useless and I'll discontinue it after 7 days.

I decided to do another experiment. A couple of days ago I made a post on the Page about how anyone contacting me from Facebook for any web design services would receive 12 months of FREE web hosting!

That's a pretty good deal.

I had about 50 Likes at the time, but after 24 hours, Facebook had only shown that post to 7 of those people who had Liked the page. So I spent $5 to promote the post to all of them plus a few thousand people in various countries.

It's been 24 hours later, and almost 10,000 people have seen that post offering them something free. You'd think at least 1 person might be interested enough to contact me to discuss what I could do for them, right?

From that promotion I've had only 2 people Like the post, and 2 people clicked on my photo. From 10,000 views.

That's pretty amazing. From this exhaustive and conclusive experimentation, I've determined that advertising on Facebook is likely to be a waste of time and money. But I'm sure Facebook will reap wonderful rewards for it.

I think I'll be sourcing other avenues of promotion.

I'll continue using the Facebook page to promote my business there, because it's an avenue of exposure that I think may be good for me in the short term, even if it's just to get more people Liking it and seeing what I'm promoting. I'll probably do a weekly campaign once a month to generate increased exposure, but I won't be expecting clients from it.

Of course, if I do get a client from it, I'll eat my hat enjoy a wonderful cup of coffee as my reward for a positive and rewarding marketing campaign!

And I've managed to write 597 words tonight. Woohoo!

Feminism has won this battle

When I recently (manually) migrated all of the content of this blog back on to the server it used to be, I left behind all the stuff I wrote about feminism. I decided to leave it out of this blog and transfer it to a new blog that would be dedicated on pointing out the stupidities of feminism, so it stayed on my old Ghost blog, still sitting on a VPS, waiting for me to start migrating it to a new dedicated blog.

Which is where it stayed while I forgot about it.

And then this morning, as I was looking at an invoice for the VPSs I was using, I thought to myself, I don't need them any more. So I paid the amount owing to the VPS provider, and then proceeded to delete the VPSs and all the content on them. It was a purposeful decision - everything I wanted had been migrated, and so the VPSs were deleted.

I was out having a coffee with a friend this afternoon when I got the idea to write a new post for the anti-feminist blog I should get around to creating sometime. And then I remembered all the anti-feminist posts were still on the Ghost blog. Which had been deleted.

Everything I'd written about the evil influences of feminism was now gone.

Sigh.

[Tweet "Feminism has won this battle, but the war isn't over yet."]



I'll just have to start the new, dedicated blog with new content, rather than old, angry content. I suspect, however, that this could be a good thing.

Click to Tweet

I saw a blog post the other day that talked about offering up quotes within the writing that you do, but doing it in such a way that the readers can instantly tweet the quote to their Twitter followers if they think it's worthy enough.

I liked the idea, so I decided to implement it myself. My first post with this integration included was last night's post, Back home from the holiday.

The idea with it is to make it easier for readers to share something of interest to their followers, which is to ultimately make it easier for me to increase my exposure of this site to new people that might normally never get to know about it.

I also liked the idea because it encourages me to come up with something snappy in my writing, something I can use as a 'Tweet this' kind of quote. I like the encouragement to my creativity.

What about you? Do you think it's too much, too cheezy? Do you like it or hate it? Please let me know what you think.

Back home from the holiday

It was a brief holiday my wife and I had, traveling up to Sydney yesterday for the Bruce Springsteen concert, staying overnight, and coming back home today. Just like the concert was, it was a wild and wonderful ride.

We caught up with a good friend of mine, who's been a very good friend since I met him in August last year.

I met a very friendly fella at the restaurant tonight. He’s a regular there, he was there last night too (it’s a good restaurant, I went back to it tonight), and we got to talking. Very interesting conversations for almost a couple of hours.

As a result of all those very interesting conversations we shared, for hours every night, he and I became so close that I invited him to my wedding, and it was my honour that he was able to attend.

And then I was honoured that he was also able to attend my birthday a month later, in late November.

It's rare to find someone in your life that you can establish a strong and immediate connection with, but when you do, you really should treasure them. I certainly do.

[Tweet "Treasure those rare few people in your life who help you become a better person."]

We had lunch yesterday, and it was great to catch up. After lunch, Fanfan and I went to our nearby hotel and checked in, chilling out a bit before heading off around 5pm to the venue where we'd be seeing Bruce Springsteen.

It was less than a year ago when I saw him last, when he last played in Sydney. To have him return only 11 months later is just... well, it's just awesome.

I'm too tired to talk about it as I'm writing this. I'll write up a review over the weekend to go along with THE TWO HOURS OF VIDEO I FILMED OF HIS CONCERT!

Oh my.

As I discussed in my post, I'll be seeing Bruce Springsteen in less than 2 weeks, I was going to be taking my 'better-than-my-smartphone' camera:

This time around I’ll take my super-zoom camera and see if I can get some better photos than I did last time, when I used my phone.

I didn't take any photos. I took video instead. I think about two hours of video.

I managed to get all of his songs that he sang on video, but not ALL of those songs. Some songs I recorded all of, others I just recorded some of. Unfortunately, I ran out of space on the SD card halfway though his very final song, Dream Baby Dream, which I thought was sad, but I was happy it didn't run out halfway through the concert....

One of the things about Bruce Springsteen is that he puts his very soul into his music and his singing. It's very much apparent when you see him live. And he's been doing this since he started in 1972.

[Tweet "Bruce Springsteen shares his life's purpose with us. Inspirational."]

We got home (the hotel) from the concert and into bed by about 1:30am. We woke up this morning around 8, checked out of the hotel and went to a nearby cafe for a coffee and croissant. The weather was lovely, nice and sunny and a pleasant temperature. A nice change from the torrential downpours yesterday.

After breakfast we went off to Bondi, where I took some lovely photos and my wife enjoyed a swim in the Icebergs Pool.

I'll share some of the photos later too, in their own post. Not tonight. Need to write this and then sleep the sleep of the dead.

Why the sleep of the dead? Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but after the Bondi trip, we went somewhere else in Sydney and caught up with one of Fanfan's old friends from China and had lunch with them for a couple of hours, and then drove back to Canberra for three hours.

As soon as we got back, we had to freshen up and go out to dinner with another friend.

And now it's 11pm, and I'm so tired. But you're important to me. So I needed to write to you to give you an update. I hope you appreciate it.

"Why are holidays so short?"

That's what my wife asked me today, when she was talking about how she was sad that we had to go home after our brief two day holiday in Sydney.

And of course I had to describe that during our brief holiday, I was still 'working'. I did a brief amount of web design work in the hotel room yesterday, and I had a call with my client today about some of the templates - and I was working while we were on holiday.

I explained that today, we were living my dream. To be able to travel, enjoy ourselves, see the sights, relax, experience new and wonderful things, while relaxing, and while still working at the same time.

Today we were living my dream. And I want to continue finding and creating opportunities to make that dream a reality.

Time for sleep. Goodnight!

The migration back to cPanel is complete

Some time ago I got excited about self-hosting on Linux VPSs (virtual private servers). I got so excited that I transferred all my hosting to self-hosting solutions on my own servers. But then the pain began.

There was a huge learning curve associated with learning how to keep a Linux server operational that was hosting my most important site (this one). At first I was excited. A lot. But then it just became annoying.

I wanted to focus on building my blog, not keeping servers operational. It was a direction that I ended up being unhappy with. I didn't enjoy having to (choosing to) get up at 1am to reboot the server (a lot easier and faster than logging into the server with VMWare Workstation to restart services...) because I received a notification it was down...

So the solution was to return to shared hosting on Apache servers using cPanel for backend domain and website administration.

I know, I know - technical mumbo jumbo stuff. But at least it was technical stuff that I was familiar with and was skilled with. There was no (not much of a) learning curve. I could just do what needed to be done, and get back to what was important to me - writing.

Although lately, it's not just writing that's important. It's also web design.

So I need backend servers that are just going to work, that are maintained by someone else so that I don't have to worry about them, but with an administration interface that allows me to setup and manage multiple websites simultaneously, without any issues.

Ah, it's good to be back where I used to be. It feels... comfortable.

I'm in the freelance web design business now

As a result of my success with the web design proposal last week and getting my first client, I spent most of the weekend working on a professional website to promote myself and my web design services. I'm excited to have it completed and ready for action!

This is what it looks like:



I invite you to go have a look for yourself. Press some buttons and have a look around:

Web Design 4 You

Something shifted in me tonight after completing this.

I was looking at my profile on LinkedIn, considering how to modify it for my new web design information. I was looking at all the entries of my past 6 years as a Business Analyst working for various corporations and Federal Government agencies, and I was thinking about continuing to do that, compared to throwing myself into being a web designer and content creator.

I felt sick. I felt... apprehensive. I didn't want to do it, to go back to being a Business Analyst, to be part of the corporate machine again. It burns my soul.

Barry Morris, this is your fault, you and your damn corporate opt out...

Thank you. :)

We can go through life doing the things that make sense, that make us the most money, that keep other people happiest - at the expense of our own happiness.

Or we can do what our heart tells us is the right thing for us to do, that makes us happy and excited to think about.

I started getting rid of all the details on LinkedIn about the Business Analyst stuff that I've been doing. I got rid of all the details about the tech support stuff that I did before that. And I inserted more of the work that I've done as a Web Designer in the past.

With that action, a change occurred in me, and in my life. The nervousness I initially felt when I started deleting everything that had been so important to me began to vanish along with the content I was deleting.

(How the hell did I get those 500+ contacts in LinkedIn, from people I don't know and never talked to? Delete-delete-delete....)

I was letting go of the past in a big way, changing everything, to make room for the future. I'm a freelance web designer now, and I'm going to embrace it.

Of course, if someone offers me a Business Analyst contract in Melbourne, and I haven't earned a lot of money from web design yet, then I'm likely to take it. I've got responsibilities that need to be catered to. My soul can keep burning until the web design business truly takes off.

But I feel excited about what's going on right now. It's possible I might never be a Business Analyst again. That makes my heart sing with joy.

My web design proposal was accepted

Earlier this week I submitted a proposal to a company in Melbourne to redesign their website for them. I wrote about it over here, in New opportunities.

The good news is that it only took them two days to review the proposal and accept it, and I received 50% deposit in advance, paid today.

I was very happy about this, as you can probably imagine. It's an excellent start to a move to Melbourne and a change in direction with the kind of work I'm getting involved in.

This weekend is going to be busy. I'll be doing a project plan to outline the work and its various stages, and sending it off to the client on Monday. And then I'll be getting started on redoing their website for them.

You can't imagine how happy I am right now. I have a great feeling about turning things around and becoming a web designer.

You can find me on IRC

Some time ago - I forget exactly when - I set up IRC (internet relay chat) on this site, but it wasn't very reliable so I didn't promote it or do anything with it. But last night I got my IRC-shit sorted out and found a reliable method of integrating IRC into this site.

The unreliable method I was using before was provided by kiwiirc but they've been under severe stress lately from DDoS attacks on their network, so it was virtually unusable. However, they seem to have sorted out their issues now, and after doing some testing, I'm happy to continue using them and even promote them for the time being.

If you'd like to do some chatting with me in real-time (assuming I'm around and online), then please feel free to join in and say hi. It would be great to chat with you.

Chat with me on IRC

If I don't answer, you can always click on the link on that page to send me an email.

I have a writing disorder too!

One of the annoying and frustrating things I've had to deal with in my life is an inability to use the pen when writing. You see, I've always found that my writing is ridiculously atrocious when I'm using a pen.

It's like, I know what I'm going to write - I can even see it in my head. But as I put pen to paper and start writing, what my hands write is occasionally different to what's in my head. The end result is a lot of crossed out words, and frustration about my inability to write properly.

I have no issues with using the keyboard on a computer, because it's easier to backspace when making a correction than it is to correct handwritten notes. But the writing thing has always been annoying and perplexing.

Perplexing because it never made sense to me why I'd think of the word 'happen' but my hand would write 'harness', and I'd be like, "What the fucking fuck?!" and then I'd scribble it out and write it again.

That sounds extreme, I know, but it happens a lot more than you might think. Most of the time I just make spelling errors, which is annoying 'cause my mind knows how to spell, but my hand apparently doesn't. But when I actually write entirely different words to what I actually want to write, that's just a level of weirdness I never understood.

I'm writing about this today because I've been doing some software testing work this past week or so (helping out a friend with his workplace's testing requirements for just a couple weeks), and I've had to do a lot of writing of script errors and bugs.

Now, most of my note-taking over the past few years has been on laptops, entirely because my writing sucks, so I've adapted how I write to what works better for me. But this software testing has required me to write notes on script errors and bugs that I've found, occasionally going into some detail to provide relevant information.

Today, after some particularly annoying instances that's just been the latest in a long series of annoying instances on a daily basis over this past week, I decided to see what I could find out about this from Google.

At first I didn't know what I was looking for. I didn't know what the right questions were. I kept on finding articles and blog posts on how I could be a better author.

But eventually I found something that was somewhat relevant, and I began following a trail. What I ended up with was that I suffer from something called Dysgraphia or Written Expression Disorder.

Oh, great. Another disorder of some kind!

But anyway, what fascinated me about this is that this is mostly related to people who suffer from Autism or Aspergers Syndrome.

Some children with autism or Asperger's syndrome also have dysgraphia, or written expression disorder. This learning disability impacts a child's ability to write and spell without affecting their reading ability. Many people with dysgraphia have higher than average IQ and are able to write but may have problems with fine motor skills and coordination.

That's definitely me. I can read fine, and I can spell pretty damn good too. In my head, that is. Writing it out on paper, however, is a mighty pain in the ass.

The issue it talks about with fine motor skills was something I was already aware of with Aspergers. I've been clumsy all of my life, inept at physical sports and activities (it surprised me how good I was at martial arts, though, back in my wilder youth).

That article also mentions a number of symptoms of Dysgraphia, one of which is:

Problems organizing thoughts on paper

Yep, absolutely. I guess putting down the wrong words or spelling them incorrectly applies to that.

This research has been helpful for me though. Now I know that the reason I suck at writing with a pen is because of a 'written expression disorder' related to having Aspergers.

At least I can type properly.

Be a better man

Discovering you have passive aggressive behaviours and responses to the point that it's become a personality disorder (PAPD, or Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder) can be something of a shock. When I discovered this about myself it left me depressed for a few months before I came out the other side.

For me, I realised that all the things that had gone wrong in my life were my fault, and not anyone else's as I had thought it was. Things could have been different if I had been different.

Even though I couldn't change the past, I could change my future by making sure I avoided doing the things that I'd been doing before. I could learn from my mistakes to try and do things differently so that the experiences of my life would be different.

It was pretty amazing how much of a change that created in my life. My career and my income moved forward in leaps and bounds. I left my fiancee (not the same fiancee I'm married to now!) when I realised that we were wrong for each other, and that the biggest reason for my passive aggression was because I was trying to be a good partner to an angry woman, and what I did just inspired more anger from her, which resulted in more defensive passive aggression from me.

Instead of making each other happy, all we were doing was making each other angry. We spent three years trying to find a way to overcome our communication and emotional challenges, but eventually it was just ridiculous. We weren't suited for each other, and we needed to accept that and move on. So I did.

Healing my passive aggression meant that I had to avoid people that made me angry and frustrated, and find people that made me calm and happy.

That's pretty much the secret to finding success in relationships. Find someone who makes you calm and happy, and do whatever the hell you can to keep them calm and happy too.

Whether it's a happy wife or a happy girlfriend - if they're happy, then you're happy too. Finding that woman can be a challenge though, but you owe it to yourself to find a way.

If you're with someone that you can't make it work, no matter how much you try, then you're probably with the wrong person, and fighting to make it work just results in you fighting.

Sometimes you have to cut your losses and get out while you still can. Sort your shit out, and take careful stock of the kind of partner that works best with you in a relationship.

Understand who you are, and what you need in a partner, and then look for that person. Treasure them when you find them, because they're exactly that - treasure.

Finding someone that matches who you are, and loves you and supports you without constantly getting angry with you, is one of the most difficult things in the world to find.

But for them to love you, you also have to be worth their love. For them to avoid getting angry with you, you have to avoid doing things that cause anger.

You have to be a better man than what you are today. You have to be. There's no other choice, and you have to look at it that way.

It's a challenging road to be on, and it can take many years to feel like you're getting somewhere. But hold on to the vision in your mind of who you want to be, and who you want to be with, and you'll get there eventually.

I provide a range of services on fiverr.com

Over on fiverr.com I provide a whole bunch of 'gigs' that people can purchase. It's part of my strategy to earn money from providing online services.

If you'd like to talk to me about how I can help you outside of fiverr, then send me an email and we can talk about what you need.

If you're interested in purchasing any of my services, make sure you send me an email to discuss how I can help you, or just click on the links below to go straight to the gigs on fiverr.com.

My fiverr.com gigs:

1. I will write quality SEO friendly articles for you


2. I will create campaigns and mailing lists for you in Mailchimp


3. I will update your resume with a PROFESSIONAL format


4. I will proofread and edit 250 words to PERFECTION


5. I will setup your very own GHOST platform blog


6. I will give you tips on how to become a SUCCESSFUL writer


7. I will help you find an answer to ANY problem you have


8. I will write PROFESSIONAL business document templates for you


9. I will transcribe 5 minutes of your audio or video

Do you want to drop off the grid?

With all the talk about NSA surveillance of everyone's online activities, and how you can't trust any corporation on the internet because they're all complicit in monitoring your activities. there's a lot of people getting more and more pissed off with the invasion of their privacy, and wondering if it's at all desirable to find ways of dropping off the grid.

However, to drop off the grid means that you become untraceable by any normal means. You have to stop using anything that requires you to exchange your identifying information for products or services, so that your activities can't be monitored, and your location can't be tracked.

Dropping off the grid requires you to drop out of society. You become invisible, a 'nowhere person'.

He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
- Nowhere Man, The Beatles

Back in the 90's I thought about dropping off the grid myself, but just never got around to it. There wasn't any great urgency inspiring me to do something drastic like that.

Today, I just wouldn't want to drop off the grid. I value the lifestyle I've built up over the years, and I value the comfort that I have. I value being able to live the life that I have available to me, and I'm grateful for the comforts that I have as a result of it.

But what about the rest of you?

There's a rising tide of fear in this world. People are becoming more and more afraid of the government monitoring everything they do online, and media hype isn't helping stem the fear. Fear sells, so they're doing what they can to contribute to it by spreading more hype and hysteria about why it's so bad.

To be honest with you, I think that the only people who have cause to fear are the ones who have reason to be afraid. Only those who have something to hide are those who fear the authorities seeing their dark and dirty secrets.

I know how data works. I know how 'monitoring' works. It's all based on bits of information stored on your computer that records the websites you go to, and the information that you look for or purchase. All of this is stored on 'cookies' that help websites track you for login, advertising and marketing purposes.

There's automatic systems in place in websites and software that is triggered by this data when it's received, and it's innocuous enough, being only to help you buy things or receive relevant information, and help them sell things to you and make money from you.

This kind of system can be highly advantageous if you want to buy things relevant to what you're looking for, or what you've purchased in the past. It's a good thing if you enjoy being part of the system.

But that's all it does. There's no one sitting in some room somewhere watching what you do with your online activities. They couldn't care less what the fuck you do with yourself on the internet. They don't care about what you buy, or who the fuck you talk to.

It's just random data sitting in hard drives in data centers in America and around the world, and there's far too much of it for anyone to care about YOUR activities within it.

The only problem you'll have with this data is if you're doing something illegal, and your activities raise a red flag and bring you personally to someone's attention. For example, you've accessed websites with child porn on them, or you send emails with certain trigger keywords that only someone engaging in criminal activities would be talking about, or even worse, that terrorists would be talking about.

It's only when you don't want your activities detected because they could get you into trouble that you'd care about your online activities being monitored.

If you're not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about. (Of course, another problem you might have is in what's defined as illegal, but that's a different story.)

I was in an IRC channel this morning, having a conversation with some of the people there, and the conversation focused on dropping out of the system, avoiding the usage of compromised methods of communication, and communicating only with encryption and with self-hosted methods that you could trust wasn't compromised. There was also extensive talk about blocking and ignoring anyone that tried communicating with them that used compromised communication methods.

I had to leave. The channel wasn't for me any more. There was far too much paranoia and fear inherent in the conversations and in the premise that they're working within.

With that much fear, it made me feel they had good reasons to fear being monitored. And so I decided I didn't want to be there any more, communicating with these people who feared people knowing what they do on the internet.

I have nothing to fear. I don't care. I have nothing to hide or be worried about.

And there lies freedom.

New opportunities

A good friend of mine in Melbourne wants to help me get some website design work, so last week he asked me to do a proposal to redesign the corporate website of one of his clients.

I've just spent half the day today - and half the night tonight - working on a proposal for redesigning a corporate website for one of my friend's clients. It involved a discovery process based on the requirements provided to me, and resulted in a proposal for about AUD$4,000 worth of work.

I've been pretty excited by it. It's a big job, so the cost is reasonable for what they need done, but it depends on the corporate client as to whether or not they proceed. We'll see what happens.

I think Melbourne is going to be great for me with the opportunities available to me there. It's exciting to think about where it's going to take me.

Writing about my journey through life

I've noticed - and you've probably noticed too - that MOST blogs and websites out there are writing about stuff they can help people with. They're providing value, helping visitors find answers to the questions they have, which brought them to the site in the first place.

Every instance of a search engine being used is an instance of someone with a problem, and they're looking for help.

Every time a website is visited because it's appeared in search results, it's an instance of someone looking for help and hoping to find it on the website.

And every time someone comes to this blog via a search engine, I know they're here looking for answers.

But this blog isn't here to help people find the answers that often brings them here. This blog is called Alan's Journey for a reason - it's about my journey through life, the experiences and the observations I have as I travel, grow, learn new things, and explore who I am and what I'm doing in this world I'm part of.

If I help someone resolve a problem along the way, then that's great! And I know some of what I write is designed to help people find answers, especially if it's something I've learned that has helped me find a solution for my own problem.

This blogs' primary purpose is not to help resolve other people's problems - it's to help me resolve my own problems. And along the way, others might find my growth to be of value to them too.

That's the kind of purpose I have for this blog.

Something I'm aware of, however, is that those things which do provide answers to people, I can use in my favour. I can turn them into eBooks, or even dedicated websites that simply focus on helping people within its 'niche'.

I'll be working on that over time.

What have you enjoyed about this blog? What have you NOT enjoyed? What do you think I should stop doing, and what do you think I should do more of?

I'd be very interested in your feedback.

It's done - my new blog is now live

Ah, what a relief it is. There's now 146 posts that have been manually imported from my old Ghost blog, with categorisation enabled, and images also manually imported and configured.

Finally, we're back to Wordpress.

I hope you enjoy this new look, as I go back to the more traditional blog format. It seems to work better for me.

Please leave any feedback or thoughts you have on how you think I can improve it. Thanks!

I'll be seeing Bruce Springsteen in less than 2 weeks

On the 19th February I'm going to be in Sydney at the Bruce Springsteen concert having a fantastic time!



I just spent the past couple hours trying to find somewhere to stay for that night. Would you believe that hotels have increased their prices for the period he's in Sydney? Assholes. How dare they up their prices to make the most of the higher demand...

But anyway, I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be awesome!

This time around I'll take my super-zoom camera and see if I can get some better photos than I did last time, when I used my phone.

I learnt a lot from the experience last year, so that I can have a much better experience this year. I didn't take my 'decent' camera because I thought that it would be banned from the venue, but the signs only stated that cameras with detachable lenses were banned. Which means I can use my camera!



I also learned that I can book carparking, so I did that today. Now I have my very own 'VIP' carpark in the carpark right next door to the arena. Would you believe only $14.95 for the entire day, including the booking fee? Damn. Being disabled has some benefits...

It'll be better than all the walking I had to do last time...

Making the commitment to move

As I wrote in my last post, my wife and I have decided that we're going tomake the move to Melbourne. That was Sunday night. Since then we've created a draft list of the stuff we're going to be selling or keeping, and based on that draft, I've already sought quotes from a few furniture movers. Things are looking positive that it's not going to be as expensive as I thought it might.

This is definitely good, but it's also going to be inexpensive for us because we're not just going to be taking much with us! We'll just be taking the bare minimum stuff that we need and which is too expensive to repurchase.

Everything else is going to be sold or given away. We'll buy new stuff when we get to Melbourne, that we want to replace anyway.

It's a good thing that neither Fanfan or I are packrats. We just don't have much stuff, which is fantastic. It means packing up and moving is that much easier.

I've been looking for work since October last year, but it's been a tough time. There's been no work and too many people looking for the same jobs that I've been looking for. I've been looking in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. But as of last night I gave up looking in Canberra and Sydney and decided to just completely focus on Melbourne.

I spoke to a Melbourne recruitment agent yesterday that I was referred to by one of my regular contacts here in Canberra. They looked at my CV and suggested some changes to it, so it would be more applicable and acceptable to a Melbourne market.

I was pretty excited by that. I'm aware that different areas have different ways of doing things, but she was the first agent to actually give me some feedback about how to improve my CV based on the area.

So I redid it and sent it off to her last night. I also got rid of my job alerts for Canberra and Sydney, and enhanced the alerts for Melbourne.

With this 100% focus on Melbourne (instead of 33% focus on each of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne), I hope to get a contract down there in the next few weeks. That way I can go there and start working asap, and work it so that my accommodation down there is paid for by my employer, while I take the opportunity to find somewhere more permanent.

I feel good about this. I think things are going to be really exciting, regardless of how things work out.

The commitment has been made, and events are moving forward to make it happen. In a very short time I'll be living in Melbourne.

The 7 year cycle

I was speaking to my wife about the changes in my life which seem to work on a 7 year cycle, beginning back in 1978.

Back then, my family moved to Pt Augusta in South Australia. I was there for 7 years until we moved on in 1985, after I finished high school.

During the next 7 years I had a chaotic time growing up, trying to find myself. I left home in '88 and moved to Adelaide, South Australia. I was there until 1992, when I moved to Canberra - 7 years after I'd left Pt Augusta.

I was in Canberra for 7-ish years before moving to New Zealand in 2000. And I was in New Zealand for 7 years before moving back to Canberra in 2007.

And now it's 2014, 7 years later, and I'm moving to Melbourne.

It's quite fascinating how the cycle happens every 7 years. I'm wondering where I'll be moving to in 2021....

I'm moving to Melbourne

It's official. In a couple months I'll be moving to Melbourne.



This has come about sort of suddenly, but has been 'in the works' for a couple years now.

It all began back in 2011, when Fanfan moved here to Canberra from Melbourne, because I was earning more from my work here than she was in Melbourne.

I promised her that one day we'd move to Melbourne, where she really wanted to be. I appreciated the sacrifice she made to her lifestyle to be with me, and I wanted to make sure that one day I would do the same.

Over the past two years, I've been working and working and working and we've stayed in Canberra for it.

But just yesterday my flatmate provided me with his notice that he was going to be leaving, moving out and into another house with another friend of his. Cheaper rent, and a 'change' in lifestyle was more attractive to him.

Since I'm not currently working right now, and his move would mean we'd move too, to look for somewhere cheaper, we could see that we'd have to change houses. There would be a relocation and adjustment cost involved.

So we decided that if we have to move, then we may as well take this opportunity to move to Melbourne.

And so the plan is set in motion. The deadline is end of March, so we've got 7 weeks to find somewhere there to stay.

The clock is ticking. Change is coming.

I'm going to take a break

But not a break from writing - just a break from the urge to write every single day.

I've got a lot of other stuff going on at the moment, and I'm aware that my daily writing is taking a bit of a beating as a result.

So instead of stressing about it, I'll just give myself permission to ease up on it.

It's entirely possible I'll still continue with a post a day - especially if I have something I want to write about - but this permission allows me to just write when I feel like writing, or to write much less than 500 words a day.

When things settle down a bit again, I'll get back into the daily discipline of writing at least 500 words.

Until then, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the silence.

Some more changes are coming

[Disclaimer: this is a technical post. You can ignore this one if you don't care about blog setups and DNS stuff.]

Just when you thought things had settled down a bit, I up and change them again.



While I've been working on my new website (that I talked about here), I was doing some testing. I decided to test a Wordpress setup on a VPS and compare its loading speed to the Wordpress setup on my normal host provider. What I found amazed me.

But first, let me take you back to when I decided to use Ghost instead of Wordpress, and some of the reasons why I did that:

Wordpress was taking 10 seconds to load a page - and longer if more people were visiting - Ghost takes only a second or two...

And...

...there's just too much 'bloat' in Wordpress.Too many features, too many functions, and too much of a reliance on a database for my liking.

Well, I take it all back.

My feelings about Wordpress at the time were very much based on various points of frustration, mostly around the time it took for the site to load, followed by the fact I was unable to restore my Wordpress backup.

From You wouldn't believe what I've gone through:

...I found out that I had a third problem. Installing Ghost via Softaculous onto an Apache server was beset with problems, and unless you had direct admin access to the Apache server to do some really complicated things, it wasn't going to happen. (I didn't have that access.) Ghost really needed to be installed on a Unix/Linux server.

Ok, no problem, I thought. Since I can't install Ghost onto the same server that I'd installed Wordpress, then I'll just restore Wordpress and explore other options later. And that's when I ran into the fourth problem.

The Wordpress backup had corrupted and the blog could not be restored.

I got excited with playing with something new, and I went with it. It was further moved along when the Wordpress backup was corrupted and I couldn't restore my blog and needed to urgently develop another solution. Using Ghost was the most appropriate solution at the time.

However, my testing this past couple have days has given me a different perspective on the speed of Wordpress.

I setup a fresh Wordpress install on my old host provider's server. With no content it took about 5 seconds to load. Then I got an idea.

I setup a fresh Wordpress install on my VPS (virtual private server), and with no content it took about 1 second to load.

The Wordpress installation on the VPS gave me the same loading speed as the Ghost blog.

This surprised me greatly!

So after doing a lot more testing, using ping and tracert tools online to check ping returns and the number of server 'hops' between my location here in Australia and the two locations in America (my old hosting provider and the VPS provider), the evidence was conclusive.

Using the VPS to self-host a Wordpress blog would be very much faster than using my old hosting provider. Not only that, the speed of Wordpress was comparable to the speed of the Ghost blog.

This changed things for me.

After a couple months of using Ghost now, some of the things I don't like about it is that it doesn't allow posts to be searched or gathered according to Category or Tags. Ghost also doesn't have any Search functionality. And the last thing I don't like about it is that the simplicity of the Markdown language for content formatting is too simplistic for my needs.

So I've spent today setting up a new Wordpress installation of THIS blog on a VPS, and finding a good theme to use, and then configuring it according to my needs. Here's a small screenshot of it so far:



It's still a work in progress, but I'm enjoying the process.

But I have another challenge....

Because Ghost is so new, there's extremely limited functionality for exporting content. The developers created a means of importing content from other blogs, including Wordpress, so I was able to easily import all my content into Ghost when I set it up.

But there's NO functionality to export content from Ghost to other platforms. There's no conversations anywhere about doing this. It's like no one has even considered someone might want to move away from Ghost...

Since the original Wordpress content was corrupted, I'm going to have to manually recreate the content from Ghost, putting it into the new Wordpress setup. One post at a time.

Oh, joy.

But it's not too bad. It's giving me a chance to redo the categorisation, and also to get rid of old content that I don't want any more.

Anti-feminism will be disappearing from this blog.

All my anti-feminist stuff is going to be deleted. It's no longer going to be a part of this blog, and I won't be writing any more for this blog in future, either.

Instead, I'll transfer all that content to another dedicated blog for that purpose.

I can hear the sighs of relief from some of you already!

But of course, if any of you still want to read what I write with regards to the anti-feminist stuff, just send me an email and I'll add you to the appropriate mailing list when I set it up. (Thank you for your interest and support!)

In closing

I will be making sure there's no break in availability between this blog and the new blog. When all the content is transferred to the new Wordpress blog, and everything is set up as it needs to be, I'll do a simple DNS change of the A Record so that the alansjourney.com domain points to the new server. It should happen in an instant.

I've already got nameservers setup for the new blog, so there won't be any need to propogate changes over 1-2 days.

It's a lot of fun knowing how to make things work nice and smoothly - but I had to go through a lot of frustrating annoyance to get there! But for me, that's the best way.