When you’re busy expanding your virtual empire, every now and then you’ve gotta look home and see how the wife and kids are doing ;). And, since I don’t have any wife and kids, I have to at least check and see how the house is doing. In this case, jonathanwold.com is the virtual house, my castle. It’s done well over the past year or so since I first opened its doors.

So, its time to do some reconstruction..

The first thing to go will be my blog, making the switch from Blogger to WordPress. The details remain to be worked out and I’m still VERY open to suggestions, but the overall feel I’m getting is that its time to move. The flexability I have through running my own CMS (Content Management System) is well worth the pain of transition.

One of the challenges i’m facing is my concern that switching will disrupt my search engine rankings. A strong majority of my traffic comes through good ‘ole Google and I’m just not sure how much they’re gonna like me swapping away from Blogger ;). Either way, its something I’d much rather deal with now, when I’m only getting a few hundred unique visitors a day, than later.

And my gosh.. for a few hundred visitors, you guys sure can be quiet! Ok, so a few of you may be showing up looking for ‘girls gone wold’ and being so deeply disappointed that it’s only me that you haven’t the heart to leave a comment.. but the rest of you? What’s your excuse? *smiles*..

I did a little bit of blog reading today, and happened onto a really clever little idea for a ‘homepage’.. Check out how Marco van Hylckama Vlieg does it over at i-marco.nl. I love the idea of a mini-portal.. I’d have a link to my site ‘proper’, with the pictures, articles, essays, etc.. a link to my blog.. a link to the Youthcove community and the Blog when its released, my recommendations site, and links to my various other projects. Its a nice clean way to do things and to gain interest for your projects. Yeah.. I’ll think about it.. I could even put a news snip up there, linking back to my blog.. *ideas churn*..

And that will bring me to a complete remodel of the main site at jonathanwold.com.. I’ll be building it from the ground up using XHTML, CSS, and PHP.. I’ve thought about having it built ‘for’ me.. but naw.. that’s my baby, my little castle, and though I may get help if I get all advanced and tricky, but its still something I want to invest my own time in. Hehehe.. that’ll be fun :).

And after that? Its back to expansion! I’ve got a number of little side projects just itching for my attention and if I end up not doing them, I at least owe them the courtesy of sharing the ideas with others. So we’ll see what I decide to do.. I haven’t earned the time to go off onto side projects yet, I’ve still got a lot of big ones to wrap up ;).

And on that.. I think its just about time to head off to bed.. Youthcove is my big project for the week, as well as finishing up development of a software tool I’m having made. After losing 2 hours of work creating web hosting accounts for a huge list of domains for future minisites, I decided enough was enough and found a programmer to help me develop a tool to automate the process. Drop in your list of domains, choose the settings, and boom! All your accounts made immediately.. yes.. I’m liking it :).

And on a final note, I have one of my own challenges to meet this week! I challenged the Youthcove community to:

Take 15 minutes out of your week to do something that you have NEVER done before.

I haven’t decided what I’m gonna do yet and the good news is that I’ve got a week to figure it out.. *grins*..

Alright, off to bed I go! Goodnight World!

-Jonathan