John Hesch

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools. 100% free.

I’ve been using activeCollab for a month or so and it is the most adaptable, easy-to-use project management application I’ve ever used. Unfortunately the developer is closing up the source as of v1.0, but 0.71 is still open source and hopefully some developers will take that code and begin a new branch of activeCollab.

There is a close-knit active community that is hacking the 0.71 code to add functionality but it hasn’t taken off like I’d hoped.

I’m getting ready to launch my newest project. Since selling Blogging Pro I have been searching for a replacement blog project. One of the problems with Blogging Pro was it required several posts a day to keep up with all of the new releases. My schedule doesn’t permit me to spend that much time on one single blog.

Trying to find a new blog topic was difficult. I soft launched a web hosting blog and another blog about celebrity blogs but neither of those excited me enough to commit myself. One thing I have found is that if you’re going to blog for an extended period of time, you need to talk about something you’re passionate about.

I have always been a geek when it comes to finding and installing cool software. I’m usually right on top of any new technology that is software related. For example, WordPress, iTunes, Skype, Firefox, Thunderbird, RSS, GreaseMonkey, etc. I have more Extensions installed in my copy of Firefox and more Plugins installed in my copies of WordPress than I care to admit to.

So my new blogging project is going to be about sharing cool software for the beginner to intermediate Internet user. I’ll include a short review, download links, installation and usage tips.

I have purchased two domains and haven’t decided which one to use yet. I’d love to hear your feedback. I have appscene.com and warecrazy.com. I hope to have something online within a week or two.

I released the WordPress 1.5+ theme called Pink Winter today. I also reorganized my Projects page, which now includes my current and past projects as well as my WordPress themes.

Google has undergone a PageRank update. This site was upgraded from a PR4 to a PR5, and Planet LDS went from a PR4 to a PR5. All of my other sites remained the same.

I have created several different WordPress themes which I’ve released under Creative Commons licensing. Between the two themes, they have been downloaded over 5,000 times. This is great because in the footer there is a copyright message with a link back to johnhesch.com. The one problem I did not anticipate is a pornography site using one of my themes and keeping the copyright tag in place.

I recently found that an adult site is using my Gila theme and right down at the bottom of the page next to a woman licking her lips and saying “spice up your marriage” is my name and a link back here. I see the smirk on some of your faces.

So what do I do? I could write to the webmaster and ask that the copyright tag be removed but I don’t want to spend my time digging around adult sites looking for contact information. Beyond adult sites, what happens if my themes are being used for a hate site or some other site that I don’t want to be associated with?

Maybe it’s not a big deal.

I sold Blogging Pro today to Jacob Gower. I was paid a good price for it and I think Jacob will add a new dimension.

Now my Adsense revenue is going to plummet from $250/month to $100/month. I need to replace that revenue somehow.

The old Planet LDS wasn’t working out too well. The Python script I was using was borking on all the Blogspot blogs. I don’t know why, but I didn’t have the time nor the patience to figure out what the problem was.

So now I’m using a standard WordPress install with a plugin called Feedwordpress. Works similar to the Planet software but is so much easier to configure and add blogs. I’ll probably change the template soon.

Check it out.

I have listed Blogging Pro for sale. I have too much going on and can’t keep up with the amount of time it takes to research blogging resources and then get them posted. Minimum bid is $2,000 but I’m sure if I held onto it for another year or two I could get five times that much, but it requires a huge time commitment that I’m not able to give right now.

Who knows, I may end up having to keep it if it doesn’t sell. Oh well, sleep is highly over rated anyway.

The computer has got me a little burned out. I have been spending a lot of time on the KZION website rewrite and it’s getting to me. I really wanted to get it released with the new KZION rock station but it’s not going to happen.

I need to take a break from writing code. There are a few different areas that have me stumped and I’m tearing my hair out trying to figure them out and I think that’s leading to the burnout. I have a lot of new music to add to KZION so I’ll take the weekend and work on that.

BloggingPro has also been a little slow lately. There are just not a lot of new plugins and themes being released lately which I guess is good. Give me an opportunity to take a break. BloggingPro now has 560 feed subscribers and gets over 4,000 unique visitors per day. The site was removed from planet.wordpress.org for a short time because I wasn’t providing full feeds. I went ahead and changed over to full feeds for now. During the time I wasn’t listed my traffic dropped but my Adsense revenue stayed the same.

I started two new blogging projects. I soon found out that I not only don’t have the time for them but I also don’t have the passion for them. One was a listing and mini review of celebrity bloggers and the other one was a blog on web hosting.

I have become a fanatic at watching my Google rankings. I check every day for three of my websites. I use a cool online tool called Keyword Tracker from Digital Point Solutions. I have all my keywords setup and the URL’s I want to track. Everyday I activate the tracker and within a minute or two I can see my search rankings for each of my keywords along with their daily, weekly, and monthly changes. I can even create charts based on my specifications. If I was ambitious enough I could create a cron and run the report everyday for me. The only downside is it can become very frustrating to watch my hard earned rankings dwindle right before my eyes. The key is not to get anxious over short term swings. I have seen one of my sites go from ranking number one to not even showing up in the top 100 all in a weeks time. I think I know what it feels like to be a gambler.

Anyway, the point of this post is to announce that for the first time in almost five years KZION has overtaken BYU Radio as number one out of 208,000 for the term LDS Radio. I have been working on tweaking the KZION home page little by little to see if I could get to the coveted #1 spot. I probably won’t be there for very long so I took a screen shot for posterity purposes.

Also, LDSTeach ranked number two today on Google for the search term home Teaching, which is a highly competitive search phrase as people use it to search for home schooling. There are 132,000,000 search results for home teaching and to be number 2 I think is pretty darn good. I have never been able to get LDSTeach to rank very well for either home teach or home teaching. Surprisingly, all it took was to change the phrases home and visiting teaching to home teaching and visiting teaching. You would of thought I would of caught that long ago.

Now I need to work on getting KZION moved up the ranks for the term lds music. You would think KZION would do well with that particular search term but I sit at #95 and #96. I think that lds music would be a much better term for attracting new listeners so LDS Musicworld watch out.

Here’s a screenshot of the new What’s Playing Now on KZION. It’s not nearly completed and I’m not really happy with it. I would like to add some color or style but I’m so NOT creative. If you have suggestions let me know. The links you see for the current song will be expanded to include:

• Clicking on a year will provide search results of all albums released in that particular year.
• Clicking on genre will provide search results for all tracks in that particular genre.

I think I’m going to go back to the old search page. If you remember it was a lot more user friendly.

You can see a larger screenshot by clicking on the image below.

I will be shutting down my server Sunday evening at 8:00 PM MST so it can be moved to a new data center. johnhesch.com should be back online by Monday morning. Also, email will be down so I will not be able to answer any email until Monday morning.

KZION has been asked to broadcast the 2005 Pearl Awards. I streamed them back in 2002 and had a lot of fun but this year I want to take it to the next level. I’m going to need several volunteers to help. I’ll need a DJ, someone to interview the winners, and perhaps a technician.

The awards are usually in May or June and are held at Cottonwood High School in Sandy, Utah. If I remember right. Let me know if you want to help.

Juan from Chile wrote and asked how I implemented Matt's Asides into my Yadda theme here on johnhesch.com. It was a really easy modification to the index.php file located in the Yadda theme folder.

First create a new category and call it a unique name that will only be used for your mini-posts. I called mine Mini-Links. Then go back to the category section in your admin panel and see what the category ID number was given to the newly created category.

Now open up index.php in the Yadda theme folder and right below the following code

add this

What this does is look at the post to see if it's in category 29. (Remember, you need to change this to the correct category ID). If the post is in category 29 then style the post differently then the others.

Right before

add the following

Now open up the CSS file and add the CSS code you want to use to style mini-posts. I'm using the bullet image from the MinimalPlus theme from Thought Mechanics.

That's it. Now whenever you want to post an Aside just use the appropriate category.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Tonight I created an open project page that displays the current projects I'm working on with all the notes, ideas, reference links and other data.

At first I was going to use custom fields to display some of the data for the project but after playing around with custom fields it was more work to add the custom field then to enter the information into the actual posting.

The open project page is similar to a WordPress index page but it displays only category 34, which is my open_project category. I did this by entering:

right before the wp-blog-header include statement. This instructs the page to only display the open_projects category. I also replaced the_content() with the_excerpt() because I want a short list of open projects. I can click on the permalink title to get to the details if I want. When a project is completed it will be recategorized to closed_projects and will no longer show up on the open projects page.

I edited the quicktags.js file so I can easily create an open project template when writing a new post. You'll see that all of the open projects have the same format:

In quicktags.js I added the following code:

Here's a quick explanation of what's happening.

The name of the new element. This must be a unique name.

The name of the Quick Tag button.

This is what is entered when the Project button is clicked the first time. The \n creates a blank line, similar to a paragraph tag.

This is what will appear when the Project button is clicked a second time (closed).

I now have a new button called Projects on my write post page along with the other Quick tags. Clicking on Project creates my template.

I'm sure I will be creating additional Write templates as I begin to use my PIM.

I have a couple projects listed if you would like to see how I'm using this page.

I also installed the Auto-hyperlink URLs plugin so that I can copy and paste URLs without having to manually linkify them. This will save me some time.

The majority of the work is now completed on my PIM. I'm pretty happy with the results. There are few more features I would like to add so I'll wrap up this series on creating my personal information manager tomorrow.