Archive for July, 2006
Today is my birthday. :)
This past weekend Sandy took me to Ocracoke Village in North Carolina as a birthday present. Ocracoke is small fishing village on North Carolina’s outerbanks just south of Hatteras. It is an island and you have to take a ferry or plane to get there.
We had a great time.
This is the first time that we have been down there during season. We usually go in February and just before the summer season starts in May.
I really enjoy Ocracoke there is not much to do there, especially off season, but relax. Yes there are still a lot of visitors but the island is just kind of layed back.
We took off early on Friday and headed south. Stopping at Southland just across the Virginia/NC border for lunch. Then heading on south. Was not much traffic, figured we headed out early enough to beat the weekend rush.
When Sandy and I go down by ourselves (with out the rest of the family) we always stay at the same place, The Bluff Shoals Motel. It is nothing fancy, just a clean room and it is cheap. The owners and employees are nice, the view from rooms 6 and 7 are great, they have a private deck on the water, and free bicycles for guest to use.
I have a lot of things that I want to do to several of my websites. So I am going to list some of them here, mainly just for my reference.
- Redesign http://www.ridinggearonline.com/
This site actually gets some decent traffic and I do make a few affiliate sales off of it every month. Nothing to get rally excited about but there is some potential there. I had originially set it up as a review site but there has been no participation in it so I think it is about time for a redesign.Not really sure what direction I am going to go with it but it does need to be done. - Clean up index and ads at http://www.vabiker.net/ads/
Now here is where I get a lot of traffic and the splash pages do well. I do really good with commissions from this index. Problem is that several of the pages link to affiliate programs that are not active anymore, a few of them are just thrown together, I really need to get this area cleaned up. - Figure out what to do with http://www.customchopperbuilding.com/ and http://www.custombikebuilding.com/
Currently both of these point to http://www.custommotorcyclebuilding.com/ need to actually create seperate sites for them. Not sure what I am going to do yet but I will figure it out. - Clean up Meta Tags on http://www.vabiker.com/ and set up search engine friendly URLs.
I get A LOT of traffic to this site but no conversions. Going to do some fooling around with the design and clean some things up. - Need to clean up my database a bit, there are a few databases in there that I am no longer used. Just need to clean things up.
There is more on the list but I think that is enough for now. Not sure when I am going to find time to work on this stuff. Think I might start with #2 actually. This area needs the most work. I reckon I will get around to it sometime, hopefully soon.
This past weekend was my son Johnathan’s Birthday. He had a pool party on Sunday at it was a really good time. The kids played in the pool and had cake and ice cream. They really had a great time. Trying to keep everything straight for the party and what not I did not even think about the camera so I have no pictures, which sucks.
Friday when I picked him up for the weekend I asked him what he wanted for his birthday and he said “I want a Mohawk”. No problem. I had one when I was in High School so it is cool with me. I had to call his mom though, that was the last thing I wanted was to go get him a mohawk and then she freak out. She ok’d it and my wife Sandy ok’d it so off to the barber we went. I usually cut his hair, but I just buzz it with the clippers and I did not want to screw it up so I took him to someone else. At least if they screwed it up I could throw a fit about it :)
Anyway he got his mohawk and he looks really cool. We ended up having a great weekend. Even though his party was on Sunday, Saturday was his actual birthday so we let him choose whatever he wanted to do that day. We had breakfast at Ed’s Place in Suffolk and then Dinner at Red Robin. They sang happy birthady to him and he got a kick out of that.
It was a great weekend and the kids had a good time.
This coming weekend is my birthday and Sandy is taking me to Ocracoke for the weekend. Looking forward to that. Ocracoke is one of my favorite places to get away to. It is close and quiet and a great place to relax.
This was another popular entry before I scrapped everything and restarted the blog.
Looking for an inexpensive and easy way to give your scoot a custom “old school” look? Try wrapping your pipes with exhaust header wrap. Perhaps your pipes are blue or scratched but other than that they function fine - why spend the money on a new set of pipes for the look when wrapping them will give them an awesome look for a fraction of the cost of new pipes.
Besides the nice look there is also a chance of increasing your performance a bit. Wrapping the pipes with the insulating wrap keeps the pipes from radiating heat. This keeps the exhaust gases leaving the engine hotter which improves the flow of the gases out of the pipe. Another advantage is that this also keeps the heat that would normally radiate from the pipes off of you.
The exhaust header wrap is an easy way to get a nice old school look for under $100. Here are the instructions for installing the header exhaust wrap.
Just installed a mod to the X-Cart Shopping Cart at ChopperStickers.com.
The mod is the DSEFU (Dynamic Search Engine Friendly URL) mod from SafetyNetWeb. Basically is what this does is takes the dynamic URLs for the categories and products and makes them a little more search engine friendly.
Here is an example the old url for the All Helmet Stickers Category was http://www.chopperstickers.com/home.php?cat=1
The new DSEFU is
http://www.chopperstickers.com/All-Helmet-Stickers-c-1.html
Notice that the new DSEFU contains the category name All Helmet Stickers, this should help a bit with keyword density and search engine indexing.
The module took about 30 minutes to install. There is a lot of manual changes to the x-cart core php files and templates but it was not to bad. Right now SafetyNetWeb the company that developed the DSEFU mod is offer free installation with the purchase.
I wanted to do the install myself for several reasons the main one being if it gets hosed up there is no one to blame but myself. The other reason is I manage this site on a day to day basis and it is just better know exactly what has changed when.
The mod is installed and everything is running smooth. Check it out at ChopperStickers.com. You can purchase the DSEFU Mod here.
SEOChat.com Great site with a ton of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools.
Check out your sites keyword density, page rank, generate meta tags, check your search engine positioning, and tons of articles and tips on optimizing your site.
Sandy and I decided to take yesterday off. We just needed a bit of a break. She needed it a bit more than me since she has been putting in some really long hours at work.
We didn’t do a whole lot. Went to Ed’s Place in Suffolk and had breakfast then ran a few errands then spent the rest of the day just hanging out by the pool.
It was a great day, but today it is back to work.
I have been looking for an open source accounting software alternative to Quickbooks for ChopperStickers.com and I think I may have found one - TurboCASH.
The shopping cart I am using, x-cart, will export order data to Quickbooks and it looks like it can be imported into TurboCASH.
If anyone out there has any other suggestions on an open source accounting application please leave a comment. I am going to download and install TurboCASH tonight and mess around with it. From the features page it looks like it will do what I need as far as tracking income, expenses, and inventory.
I am not against paying for commercial software and if I cannot find anything else then Quickbooks will probably be what I use, but I try to use as much open source software as possible (It’s a geek thing).
I did run across several solutions that are SQL and web-based. This is not really what I am looking for. I am looking for a stand-a-lone application that runs on Windows XP.
By the way, ChopperStickers.com launched last week and things have really taken off. I am extremely happy with the results so far. Stop by and have a look.
Ran across this online and thought it was kind of interesting. It is suppose to defeat red light and speed cameras. Now we use to have the red light cameras down here in Virginia Beach but the Virginia General Assembly voted to not continue the program. Seems there were some studies that suggested these cameras might be doing more harm than good with accidents actually up on intersections that use the cameras.
Anyway came across this site.
Not sure if it works but I reckon it couldn’t hurt to try it.
It was hot and muggy yesterday and as it usually is on summer afternoons thunder storms started popping up.
The storms started around 4:00 just as me and the kids got home and they pretty much lasted all night. Snapped a couple of pictures of the clouds when the storms first started rolling through.
Lots of rain, wind, and lots of lightning. Lost power a few times.
It is still raining this morning but it is suppose to end soon then there is a chance of more storms tonight. Hopefully the weekend will be nice though. Sandy and I are planning on going to the ABATE of VA State Rally at Jamestown Campground this weekend. We are not going to camp just going up for the day on Saturday.
Take Care - Ride FREE
