Perfectly Petersen

by Jesse Petersen on October 28, 2007

Anyone have a Kit-Kat?

Relaxing at Sanibel Man, we sure could use a break! Yeah, I know, we just spent 3 days at a resort in Fort Myers for our first anniversary, but work kills that as soon as you get back. When you combine it with the school work that was put off over the weekend, it made last week… rough. Can say rough? I mean AAAGGRRRHHH!!!

On a good note, I finally got some feedback on 3 of the 5 papers for my literature class back on Thursday night. I got all 3 back with A’s to counter the 3 B’s I started out with, so I’m back to being a moderately happy camper with this semester. I spent just about every free computer minute I had up through Thursday working on a new theme for my other blog, and I’m porting it out here now. I really like it, so we’ll see how it works out. Don’t freak out if something is missing. I’m working on it and the developer might even help me out with new features.

I’ll post something as soon as I can, but this week is forecast to be more of the same.

Filed Under: Personal

by Jesse Petersen on October 9, 2007

Worst Websites Out There

My Technical Writing class is making fun of poor website design tonight. Check these sites out and feel free to add your own favorites. I’ll create a compilation when all is said and done.

by Jesse Petersen on October 8, 2007

Who Messed With My Permalinks?

Hey, all. It’s been a long weekend with school work and a community garage sale. You know, the important things in life. Now it’s Monday and back to the grinding reality that we go to the office to earn a paycheck to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. *sigh*

Anyway, Friday I went to a seminar and hooked up my laptop to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and checked out my blogs. I saw some links coming back to my articles and clicked them, only to find a huge white page of black text with a bunch of indecipherable errors. I’m a geek. I can read most errors that my blog can spit out, but not this one.

I determined in short order that none of the actual post pages had valid URLs any more. The file structure of putting a category first followed by the post title was not legit. I had to update my blog’s internal permalink structure to get any page besides the home pageÂ to come up at all. Then people were presented with my Error 404 page, which I’ve since customized.

That wasn’t much of a problem on this blog, but on Gitr Knows WoW, that translates into 75% of a significant number of people getting an error page that pretty much called them stupid. I customized that page to list my top 12 articles that people search by and find the blog listed in the top 5 on Google searches. I’m recouping about 95% of those people to stay and get what they want, but traffic has dropped 50% because the pages are no longer indexed with as high of a Google rating because they are seen as new pages due to the new URLs.

Did anyone else with a WordPress self-hosted blog experience a similar permalink problem between Thursday night and Friday morning? I have GoDaddy, and until I hear otherwise, I’m going to blame the SQL server on the host for changing something. I’m still running WP 2.2.1 because of some category issues I had when I tried WP 2.3 two weeks ago.

Filed Under: Blogging

by Jesse Petersen on October 5, 2007

Live Blogging Managing Multiple Projects, Objectives, and Deadlines

I’m at a SkillPath seminar today. Here’s what we’re doing so far:

Time Management

Time is more valuable than money. It is your most valuable resource.
No matter what youâ€™re doing, ask yourself if it is the most important thing to be doing right now.
Handle each thing once â€“ decide to:
- Do it.
- Delegate it.
- Defer it â€“ only defer for one month.
- Dump it.
Immediately take some action, because it is easier to cancel a reservation at the last minute than to make a reservation at the last minute.
Make the most of your unscheduled time at work.
Let go of perfectionism; strive for excellence.