Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

So apparently I am an epic fail at advertising. Aside from a few select places on the net, my attempts at advertising so far have not… gone well. :-(  Call me a little overly ambitious, but I advertised my new side project on 27 different places across the net. Most people said things like “good luck with your gold sales” and other such comments. MMORPG.Com didn’t shun me though which is promising. My hopes are that the few places which haven’t shunned my advertising will start to spread the word. Hopefully my story gets Dugg as well and more and more people start to get exposure to the site.

Once I have a ton of people signed up for the newsletter then I will announce the beta launch of the site. You know after dealing with this advertising crap, I think back to my days of owning my own business. I loved doing the work, but hated the advertising.

I guess since the word is out, I might as well announce it here:
http://www.mmoleader.com

I am a very honest person. I like speaking my mind. I especially enjoy spreading good news. This is why I am HORRIBLE at keeping secrets. I really… really… want to leak information about the top secret project I’ve been working on. Every time I go to the site to customize something new, do data entry, putting up articles I’ve written over the years (to help jump start the site) and otherwise do things to make the site more and more awesome, the more I want to tell people about it.

I’ve told my guild and I’ve told people I know and trust, but I want to tell everyone else out there who is going to be SUPER excited about this project. My site has a very focused user group that I’m targeting, but that user group will be very interested in this site. Right now Kerrie is working on the branding design for the site including logo design and other things which will give us a professional look. Also I know a friend who is an Internet journalist who is working on pointers and will get back to me soon. I also have a friend who’s mom is an Internet marketing consultant who has been doing it for so long she works via word of mouth through contracts for big customers and not under some big agency. I don’t have any upfront capital for any of these people, but they are willing to help out which is great.

I can assure you this, the subject matter is… related to the MMO industry. I’ll leave the rest of the clues up to your imagination to figure out.

I’ve started an interesting side project recently which is why I haven’t blogged in a couple of days. It really has been bugging me about what I’ve been wanting to do with my blog. I don’t want my blog to loose too much focus on ME as a person because again as I’ve stated before, my blog is mostly for me and my internal thought processing. So the tone of this site will stay what it is, but I’ve been wanting to do something more… something… bigger. In all the years I’ve been making websites, running websites, and building things professionally in my career, I’ve never taken the time to start a personal project of major worth for myself.

So an idea hit me and I went with it. The website is still top secret as I continue work on putting it all together and getting starting content in there, but so far here is what people are saying. Who knows if you comment on this thread, maybe I just might give you a sneak peak. Here is what people are saying so far:

A very ambitious project, for which I will be the first to pledge my support! To my knowledge, this has never been done before, and innovation is something to be commended. 

Wow! That’s an excellent idea for a website. I dont think anybody has ever done anything like that before.

Worked on the Stitchjones website hardcore today. Figured out how to better customized ZenCart without editing core files. Setup her template. Got her graphics implimented (although didn’t mess with the CSS too much). Setup her categorites and got all her products entered. Along the way also realized that ZenCart formats images in 3 sizes, small, medium, and large. This means that it’s a little extra work for Kerrie but we can avoid the downsizing of images all over the place that Zencart does and have custom thumbnails for the 3 common sizes.

Check it out: http://www.stitchjones.com/store/

I got caught up in Math, got A-Red-Thread.com/Store launched, I got all my schoolwork done early so… I figured it was a good weekend for WoW. I ended up grinding a ton of PVP points, getting my belt on Thursday, my Neck on Saturday, and my Merciless Gloves on arena week reset. Now my resillience is 218 and I’m an unstoppable machine. Good times. We went back to Karazhan this weekend, killed a world dragon, and have been having a huge boon in recruitment. I’m pretty excited because it feels like the guild is coming together finally. We’re on the cusp of taking the 25-mans seriously. I’m more interested still in having 2 stable Karazhan teams. Even a month of solid Karazhan and we should be able to start doing the 25-mans regularly.

I lost a week of journal’ing. I don’t know what happened in the last week. Time has flown by so fast.

Well here’s the short and skinny of what’s been going on. Got all my reports done last week for the CIA application. I got really sick this last weekend and I think that’s what caused me to ‘fall off’ the horse if you will. Been spending a lot of time helping Kerrie getting her website www.a-red-thread.com rolling. As a company we decided that we’re NOT going to VB.Net but rather C#, which is awesome. As response to that I’ve been converting CIA.Net to C# which currently is done minus a few things and testing. I got my passport turned in finally. Last but certainly not least (does that even apply in this case? meh), Kerrie’s serrogate little brother passed away this week. She’s been a pseduo mess, I think the only thing keeping her together is focusing on the stress of getting to the East coast in time. Once she’s there I think it’ll finally sink in, maybe even on the plane. Tonight I’m taking her to the airport and she won’t be back until the day I’m going up to Seattle for PAX. Life is going by fast right now, all this along with the economy going crazy right now, things are interesting. At least the drama recently in the guild has died down. I’m caught up on Math homework so I should be able to get some good WoW time in this weekend.

A Red Thread launched today with great success. Not only did she sell 2 necklaces, a bracelet, but also several earrings. The total was around $250 which wasn’t bad for a first day showing. The biggest stresser of the day was if we ran into Eden and if she was going to start some drama. Turned out that no drama happened although I was stressed when warned that her Mother was going to show up. I’m glad Kerrie’s first day at the market was such a success although it sounds like she really hurt herself trying to pack up the booth herself. I dunno it sounds like there might be some issues that need to be dealt with. I really really want to help her out as much as a I can, but at the same time I don’t want to add to my already complicated schedule.

Finally the data entry is finished. Not only 197 pieces entered, but all the labels for them printed out, all bracelets and necklaces are labeled, and pictures taken of all of them. After we were done Kerrie checked out the pictures and it turns out a lot of the Necklaces are REALLY over light saturated. This sucks because she has to re-take all the pictures, at least the most important ones. Suffice to say those pieces are ready for sell though which is a HUGE improvement over yesterday. The only thing left that has to happen before Saturday is taking pictures of and labeling all the earrings. We have the labels printed, it’s just a matter of getting through it all now.

Before today Kerrie had 15 pieces entered into her jewelry software. A sad sampling of her pieces with not even a light at the end of the tunnel with finishing the data entry. Now she has Every single necklace and bracelet entered, some earrings, and only around 40-50 earrings to enter. The earrings that aren’t entered yet are organized, sorted, and numbered, those numbers entered into the database so now it’s just filling in the holes. The cool thing is this is the first time she’s had an accurate count of how many pieces she has. I’m so excited for her.

Hung out with Kerrie today, although medically I wasn’t feeling good at parts today. Spent a lot of time getting excited about her business and went back to my folk’s place to show them what she’s been working on. They were excited about her pieces and to quote my mom “there isn’t a piece here that I don’t love”. I can’t wait till she starts at the market because I knew her business is just going to explode.