This past weekend was the most unproductive I’ve been since the holidays. It’s not like I had nothing to do either, I just had a hard time staying focused. I did manage to experiment with a few different plugins though, one of which temporarily broke the Wordpress. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to recommend a test installation.

Basically, I keep a parallel instance of each site running privately so I can test things before rolling them out publicly. I just install wordpress to a domain subdirectory, and in setup I opt not to make it visible to search engines. Since I use DreamHost, and they have one-click installations, it literally takes me 5 minutes max to set it up. I copy the theme over to the test environment, and take the installation active.

Over the weekend, I was installing and testing the Adsense Deluxe plugin and placing adsense ads for tshirtreviewblog.com. By doing this in the test environment, I was able to try different ad sizes and locations without breaking or distorting the theme publicly. In fact, another plugin I was testing for managing 301 redirects broke the site pretty badly whenever a link was active. Again, this was thankfully done in the test environment and was invisible publicly.

This doesn’t just go for plugins of course, it’s great for trying new graphics or CSS tweaks. Once I know everything will work alright, I simply switch to the live installation and repeat. You could use one Wordpress test environment if you run substantially similar sites, but I have fairly unique plugin setups for both sites. If I clone T-Shirt Review Blog, which I may do in the future, I could continue to use the same test environment for multiple sites.

Update: Here’s a good personal example of how this setup can save your ass at some point.

With the explosion of new blogs online in the last few years, it’s been easy to overlook the pivotal role forums have played in the development of the web as we know it today. The evolution of the message board is a fascinating story in and of itself. I have experience in online communities, and it’s been exciting to see the evolution of the medium with the advent of social networking websites. People are finding more and more ways to network, communicate, and share ideas.

The management of these communities often ends up an overlooked and thankless job, but it’s crucial to the success of the community and can be a rewarding experience. The technical side of things has been covered countless times, but a community admin would be hard pressed to find some good advice from beginning to end, the how and the why. Managing a successful community is much more than installing some software and crafting a theme: you have to deal with people, promotion, direction, and trolls.

I don’t know anyone more experienced in this arena than Patrick O’Keefe. Though we haven’t always kept in touch, I’ve known Patrick for a number of years and have always kept an eye on iFroggy Network, his umbrella entity for nearly two dozen successful online communities and blogs. Patrick has poured himself onto the page and shared his knowlege of online community management in his new book, Managing Online Forums. You can check out the details at Amazon.

A discussion board can be an excellent addition to an existing website, or can be a standalone entity. I encourage you to learn from Patrick, whether you’re looking to create a new online community or take your existing community to the next level.

Patrick’s original post announcing his book is also an interesting read for anyone who isn’t familiar with the process of writing and publishing a book. I learned quite a bit about what is involved and how complex the publishing process really is. It’s a good read even if you’re not interested in the book’s topic.

Well this weekend certainly seemed to fly by, is it Monday already? Lunch with Microsoft on Thursday was pretty good. It wasn’t the best steak I’d ever had, but I certainly can’t complain, it was a wonderful experience. I had the chance to learn a lot about their unified communications tools and licensing, two things I’ve been out of the loop on for a while now.

I do know that Cisco has an amazing unified communication/PBX type system as well. While I have an extensive Microsoft background, I also trained with the Cisco Academy for two years. I learned everything I would need to attain CCNA certification, but never actually took the test. Don’t ask me any questions about spanning tree protocol, I don’t remember.

In any event, I spent the better part of the weekend catching up on some much-needed housecleaning and running some errands. I fell quite a bit behind being sick in bed the first week of the year. Things are finally back to normal on the home front, and that feels good.

I have read on various blogs where people have trouble trying to work on a side business while also holding down a full-time job. I have to admit I can certainly feel where they are coming from. It’s indeed a challenge, not just fighting for the time, but also for the motivation. There are a lot of nights where I come home and I’m looking forward to unwinding, maybe playing a little guitar or something. I look at a computer screen all day, some days it’s just not that appealing to do the same when I get home.

That being said of course, I do find at least a part of every day where I get charged about the next step for BKE. I’m a procrastinator though, and I do need to work on my execution. You can plan forever, and sometimes you just have to pull the trigger.

My friends at Microsoft have invited me to lunch at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Troy later today. I’ve known of Ruth’s Chris for quite a while and have been waiting for the opportunity to go. I’m certainly looking forward to it. The focus will be on maximizing productivity and getting the most out your company’s relationship with Microsoft. Alright, the focus will be on a great steak, but that’s what we’ll be talking about anyways.