Rudd-O.com

Hello, hello! Today is a big day for me. I’m happy. Today’s the day I start with a new project. What’s the project about? The consolidation of all my Web assets and software projects. Why should you care?. Stay with me for a couple of paragraphs and you’ll be hooked:

Everyone who knows a bit about me knows that:

• I have this blog. I’ve been wanting to redesign it and turn it into a magazine, with different sections for each group in my audience.
• I sell free software. Since sales haven’t been so great, I urgently need a new strategy.

Today is the day I begin leveraging what I’ve already done into making me more money and recognition. Bear with me if I sound smug, but I know I can do it, and I definitely want to do it.

But I almost didn’t do it. When I came up with the idea, everything seemed so rosy: I’ll just move some stuff around, refactor some code, redeploy it, change a few images, a new marketing strategy… and the cascade of things I had to do simply overwhelmed me. I was overwhelmed at the prospect of slaving for weeks and not getting anywhere or (worse), failing.

Stress got the best of me

Why? Because I came up with so much to do, in order to do it “right”, that I simply avoided commitment. I became paralyzed.

Fortunately, that’s over. And in the next installment of this series I’ll share with you my secret that got me out of the proverbial mental wheelchair. But let’s procrastinate that for a couple of days. Let’s talk about the challenge.

Barriers overcome — all systems are go, and here’s the challenge

I’ve dubbed the challenge The R Network. It’s quite simple, actually:

• reorganize my Web sites (rudd-o.com, turbochargedcms.com, and software-libre.rudd-o.com) in a manner that boosts my Web presence, attracts more visitors, generates more faithful and thankful readership, and extracts more money out of my software products and advertising spaces, without doing distasteful or unethical things
• maintain all the hard-working status and acknowledgements I’ve gathered so far (which mainly come in the form of inbound hyperlinks)
• turn software-libre.rudd-o.com into an independent location for a free software think tank, and ensure it’s available in (at least) Spanish, English, and German; more information will come in the form of master’s thesis from close friends in the free software field
• create a brand new Web site that aggregates my friends’ most valued and interesting Web assets
• create an umbrella site that both aggregates my sites in overview fashion, and serves as a presentation/promotion center for them
• do it all with nothing but free software

Some challenge, huh? Of course, I have no other limitations, except for only three daily hours of time to do it, and the free software thing. But why free software?

The free software thing

Simple. I wrote my entire thesis using almost nothing but free software (and I even ended up writing a program to help me). Now, this challenge is more technically oriented. Hence, there’s a lot of free software available in my area (which is, mainly, software engineering). And I love free software. Why would I choose to not use it?

And here’s why you should follow this series closely

As a testament to you, my reader, I will document each step of the process, in possibly excruciating detail, so you can apply what I’ve learned (and we’ll learn even more, I promise) on your own endeavors of life. You’ll be learning about project planning and execution. You’ll learn about software development practices and computer programming. You’ll learn about server management. You’ll learn about blogging. You’ll probably learn a bit about marketing, Web promotion and graphical design. And I’ll learn (among other things) to be a better writer.

Thanks for sticking with me. Let the journey begin.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 12:00 and is filed under Blogging, Mi weblog, My journey towards Web consolidation, Turbocharged, Yo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.