KnowProSE.com

After considering a lot of different strategies for some of the sites I am running, I've decided that KnowProSE.com will go the direction that it had fallen into years ago - book reviews and so forth. While the site itself was lost some time ago, it wasn't specialized - something that is required for a site to generate money. But generating money doesn't make a good site.

Since I fully intend to buy a Barnes and Noble Nook, I decided that I should probably look at the affiliate program for Barnes and Noble again - especially considering that in the past, Barnes and Noble hasn't bothered to allow direct linking to products in the manner that Amazon.com does. In fact, when it came to selling actual products, Amazon.com has always lead the way.

In checking this evening about how Barnes and Noble does things, I was surprised to find that their new method for allowing affiliates involved going through Google's Adsense. And of course I still don't know if Barnes and Noble has begun taking their affiliate program seriously - whereas I know that Amazon.com's affiliate program seems even less so with each passing year (especially with not permitting book review links on their site).

As I mentioned before, I'm rethinking the KnowProSE.com site. To do that, I have had to analyze what I was doing with it for the last 9 years and what my motivations were. I'm also trying to figure out what the new motivations are.

The last 9 years were an exploration that started a little before KnowProSE.com. I'd already bought the domain for a company I was starting in Florida. And it followed me around for a while - 'Knowledge Professional, Software Engineer'. KnowProSE. And then I started branching out whenever something interested me - and so the taxonomy became as focused as some accuse my life of being. It's not my fault that some have focal baths while I have focal showers. I get to connect the water however I wish.

So here I am, late at night, considering the many twists and turns. Having just read Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success, there is a bit of a reaffirmation of the way I approach subjects. I don't want to lose that. And I realize, too, that I can't keep doing that on one site. On one blog. It just becomes... unmanageable. And that is something I learned - something, perhaps, others avoided by conforming to the wisdom of the day as preached by the bloggers-for-bloggers.

But I got to learn exactly why it doesn't work whereas others just went with the conventional wisdom. I have an advantage - hard won, but an advantage nonetheless.

Yesterday, I got an email from a friend who pointed me at my flagship site - KnowProSE.com. The site was - and presently is - down. So I emailed the host to find out that they had done a database (MySQL) update on December 13th and that their only backup was from December 14th. Given the fact that my life has taken some sharp twists and turns, I haven't been doing my own backups... as I should have been. The host did provide me with a backup from earlier this year, and I started working on it last night. I also stopped working on it last night.

So while what the host did seems very stupid, I have to admit fault. A site is supposed to be bigger than the host. And while KnowProSE.com represented 9 years of my writing at this point, I couldn't really explain why I immediately felt relieved. And here I am, feeling relieved.

When I first started writing in my teens, I had a habit of writing and then burning what I wrote. The process of writing was always more important to me than the result. Inadvertently, I've done it again.

The truth is that KnowProSE.com had become a massive juggernaut developed as I first set out using content management systems (Drupal). It had a lot of my ideas and thoughts as well as ideas and thoughts of other people. Truth be told, it was just a mess to manage and upgrade because of the fact that it wasn't focused on anything; it was focused on everything. To move it forward in any direction would have required a lot of work on my part - work that required time that I simply haven't had between dealing with land, business and other issues.