Jowl and I have been struggling — both of us, really, but moreso Jowl than I — in getting up early enough to get to the gym. School starts back shortly and Jowl has been living the summer life a little too much: not going to sleep. That’s the big problem with getting up: if you stay up too late, it’s darn hard to get up in the morning.

So what does this have to do with webmastering? Well, we set a goal to get our energy level up so we could whip this site back into shape and working out at the gym is part of that plan, but even that’s starting to fall apart a bit.

We started out going five days a week, and then we fell off to every other day and now, well, I’m not sure what type schedule we are on. The plan was to go before Jowl goes to high school every morning. We figure that this time would be the best time to squeeze in the workout every day … or at least every other day.

But we are strugging to make this work. Cliches aside, some things really are easier said than done.

Alright, going to make one more run at Jowl to get going to the gym, it’s been almost two hours now I’ve been waiting to go. 3:45am I was up. 5:43am now.

Jowl went back to bed. Guess we are going to try the workout later today.

So I go to the school to sign up and I end up sitting there for a hour and a half, finally my name was called. Then my schedule was changed about 3 times but then it finally was good and I didn’t really check it. I had gotten to meet many of my friends there and it was fun. So then my Mom takes a look at it and goes Jowl you got 2 science classes in 1 semester and I go well that shouldn’t be but I didn’t really mind because I had really waited a long time for the schedule. Aside from that it was a good morning and I say to myself why can’t I wake up at 4:00 am.

I missed me and ChefTD’s workout this morning but we are going later tonight, tomorrow is a challenge for myself to get up and be ready to go by 5:00am so we can workout. Back to my schedule I got Earth Science fist period, then health, and then I have Applied math, and last but not least Biology. I struck out on my classes because I wasn’t fast enough to really get in on the ones that I needed so that made me have to switch in and out of classes but I am fine with it and will enjoy starting school on Thursday. Also today I looked at some blogs that I liked that provided some information on hurricane Katrina and some other cool stuff.

One of the most annoying things for a website to do is to have sound immediately play when you first visit the site. It’s like blinking text and very rarely, if ever, should be done on the homepage of a blog. The quickest way to make me click away from a website is to put music or sound effects — especially midi files — to play when the homepage of the site is visited.

Now when does this make sense? On pages where you tell the surfer that music will play onload, artist/band official webpages might want to play music onload. A movie/TV show official website.

These audio ads that play (via Flash) inside news articles are annoying too. So if you want to annoy and alienate your new site visitor, just make sure you add some sound that autoplays when the person comes to the homepage.

First of all I started doing blogexplosion to get some more traffic to this blog and to Orting. In one day I managed to get 100 unused credits, which I can use for making banners or I can use to send more traffic to either blog. Blogexplosion has this really cool thing called Battle of the blogs, where you put your blog against other peoples blogs and you stake credits and the person who wins gets all the credits. I tried it a couple times the first Battle of the blogs I did I never really lost or won, second I lost but it was fun. Also I started working on new things for my website and made a post there.

We did our first run at Blog Event today and it was a good thing to use it helped me think of stuff to write and stuff to make into drafts. Blog Event is where you take something your interested in making a post about and first u make it into a draft, then you check it for errors and make it perfect. Once its perfect you publish it on your blog.We discussed Blog Event last week on show # 36.

Links Discussed:
Blog Event

(NOTE: BlogEvent.com has been taken offline until 2006 when it will return)

Original live airdate: Friday May 6, 2005 at 3 pm PST / 6 pm EST
Webmaster cookBook AUDIO:

Streaming:
20k listen archive stream (dialup users)
64k listen archive stream (broadband)

download 12.7 MB (64k version)

We have been granted an exciting opportunity/invitation to run the Yahoo Publishing Network beta service here at Webmaster Cookbook. Jowl and I will be talking about YPN in more depth during tomorrow’s live show and podcast (#49).

And speaking of podcasts … show #37 should be posted and available shortly. It’s around the time we were experimenting with Google Adsense on this blog. We aren’t running the Google Adsense on this blog any more, but in our business online we’ve used Adsense on other blogs with great success.

I know we keep saying it, but Jowl and I should be caught up with all our past podcasts soon. Jowl has most the notes for the prior shows published and now we only need to FTP to the server and link up in the show notes. As soon as we are caught up our plan is to not get behind again, because it stinks for us too!

In the meantime, if you want to catch the live show, then please remember the stream is available every Friday at 3:30pm PST / 6:30pm PST via this link. You can access through the MakeYouGoHmm Toolbar (free, no spyware or viruses and available for Internet Explorer or Firefox)

Google Talk is Googles lastest new thing they got going on and well there are still a few kinks with the program. ChefTD and I were testing it last night and at first neither of us could hear anything except a dial tone which would lead to nothing.
After a few more calls to eachother we finally got sound but after a minute of talking it became very distorted and hard to hear, I would not rank it with skype yet but its getting there. I expect that Google Talk will be ahead or close to Skype as soon as they fix the few kinks they have, but for now I give Google Talk a c+.

This show was to get myself motivated and I denied what I said I would do but I did get some motivation and kept on going. My goal was to make a post each day but I still have not mastered that goal. We talked about using Blog Event next week.

Links Discussed:
Blog event

Original live airdate: Friday April 29, 2005 at 3 pm PST / 6 pm EST
Webmaster Cookbook AUDIO:

Streaming:
20k listen archive stream (dialup users)
64k listen archive stream (broadband)

download 11.1 MB (64k version)

This week ChefTD and I, in addition to working out every morning at 5 am we come back and work on the podcasts. The podcasts are going to most likely be done this week sometime. We put up one yesterday and are putting up one more today and will continue putting them up this week till we are caught up.

I now know how to do the stuff needed in making a draft and getting it all squared away so that it can be put on the site, and im putting that information to good use.

I had made drafts previously in Blog Event, but I lost all those drafts but I did remake them and look for podcasts 36-47 coming this week. Also thanks for your patience with me its not ChefTD’s fault its more or less mine because I didn’t take the stuff he told me and use it right away to make the drafts.

It was Jowl’s youngest brother’s birthday today and he stopped by as a brief special guest. Notes on changing the Webmaster Cookbook design back to the original one.

Original live airdate:Friday April 22, 2005 at 3 pm PST / 6 pm EST
Webmaster cookBook AUDIO:

Streaming:
20k listen archive stream (dialup users)
64k listen archive stream (broadband)

download 10.2 MB (64k version)