Today DreamHost, where Daily Pimp just happens to be hosted, had a little accident and over-charged pretty much all of their auto-pay customers for an entire year of hosting. I noticed today looking in my bank account that I had an authorization from DreamHost for $310. My reaction was instantly WTF, as would most people’s. It didn’t take long to discover that it was a big error and that thousands and thousands of people were effected. 7.5 Million dollars worth of over-charges was damage that DreamHost caused. DreamHost’s blog constantly said sorry, and that they were working to fix the situation. They tried to explain why it happened all while mixing in jokes and making fun of themselves for having “fat fingers” and being dumb.

As of the time I am writing this entry there has been over 1000 comments on their blog about the mistake. A lot of customers were really hurt by this. Many of them face overdraft charges, many of them depending on that money for bills and now DreamHost has their hands on it for up to 2 days until it gets refunded. A lot of people saying now they can’t pay their rent, or that their overdraft charges are $100+ and all kinds of other problems that have come out of this.

This is a huge mistake on DreamHost’s fault no matter how you look at it. I feel that them trying to be kind of funny or cute about the whole thing just really makes them look that much worse. You are talking about people’s money that you took on accident. 7.5 Million dollars in one day isn’t something to try to be cute about.

I am interested in seeing how they remedy the situation. If they just give me back the money I’ll be happy that the problem is fixed, but not happy with DreamHost. I am eager to see how they make everyone happy, or if they even try. They are kind of at a fork in the road. They can either save a lot of customers or they can loose a lot of customers.

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A big reason a lot of us don’t get ahead of the game is because we don’t charge enough for our services.  There is always the pressure we face to drop our prices in order to successfully get a client, but sometimes we go way too low.  I think everyone has done it, especially when you need the money.  The problem is that sometimes this comes back to bite us in the ass.  A client could come back later on and expect you to charge dirt cheap rates again.

Its good to know what the average yearly salary is for the work that you do.  I could be classified under both Web Designer & Web Developer.  I am able to design sites, and code them too.  When I say Web Developer I am not talking about someone who knows how to use Dreamweaver.  I am talking about someone who is able to code in standards-compliant XHTML, CSS and knows PHP, SQL, Javascript & AJAX, Ruby On Rails, and to a lesser extend even ASP.  Now, you don’t have to know all of those, but generally someone who just knows XHTML and CSS isn’t considered a Web Developer.  In my opinion you shouldn’t even be considered yourself a Web Designer if you can’t code your designs in a text editor without the use of tables.

</rant>

Take a look at these numbers:

Web Designer: $50,372 / year
Web Developer: $70,682 / year

Thats just the national average, but of course that changes state by state.  Generally, $20/h is the baseline for someone experienced, but starting out with a company, and thats only $38,400 /year.  Just kind of keep that in mind.  If you know a web site is going to take you 3 days to finish then don’t charge $200 for it.  That would be like charging around $8.33 an hour.  McDonalds employees, from what I hear, generally make $8 - $9 an hour in most places.  Anyway, some things to keep in mind.  Know Your Worth!

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A regular day for me involves waking up, showering, brewing up some coffee, and then hitting my home office to get some work done.  Even though I’m awake, showered, and drinking my coffee I sometimes don’t feel motivated to work.  I decided to start thinking about what might be the best thing to do to remedy the situation….

I am here to say that I figured out remedy.  The trick to really starting your day out right is to dress for success.  Anytime you are in your home office trying to get work done and start dragging here is a check list of things you can do:

1.  Shower (If you haven’t already then shame on you.)
2. Dress up as if you are going to a job interview, including dress shoes.
3. Do your hair.
4. Shave (If you need one.)
5. Put on some cologne.
6. Clean up your desk, or at least quickly organize things.

If you can work your way down that list then you’ll probably find yourself a lot more productive.  I don’t know why, but I think when we prepare like that we just set our brains into this serious mode and are no longer lazy.

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Ever have those days where you have a boatload of work to do, but you find yourself playing games, or browsing YouTube for hours? Or how about browsing Facebook or MySpace, watching the time tick by? Even though there is nothing wrong with any of that, we all fall into those habits from time to time. End the end its just poor time management.
I am someone who usually has a short attention span or an extremely focused one. There really isn’t much of an in-between for me. The trick is to make sure everything is set up properly in order to make me super-focused. What works for me?

Cleaning before working
There is something to be said about cleaning and organizing. I find myself doing that right before I have a huge task to do. While cleaning and organizing things around me I think I start to organize things in my head. Then when I sit down to work I’m not distracted by my own disorganization. I know this is one of the things you commonly read about in Zen Living books.

Make Short-Term Goals
Even though long-term goals are great, short terms ones are even better. With short-term goals you’ll notice progresses much easily. Make a physical list of things you need to do every day. I know that can sometimes make you feel really uptight, but it’ll help you a lot. Having a physical list is important, don’t type up your list unless you plan to print it out and put it up on the fall in front of you.

Failure
Don’t let failure or the possibility of failure hold you back form doing something. Also don’t let obvious failure hold back people around you. We learn more from failure than we do from success.

Set A Schedule
This isn’t a science. Just go by the hour, what you plan to be working on each hour of the day. Try to stick to it the best you can. If the schedule you set doesn’t work out the greatest you adjust it so that it does. Your first draft will never be perfect.

Read A Book
No, I’m not talking Harry Potter. Read a book that teaches you a new skill. This beats TV hands down. Right now I’m reading up on AJAX as well as another PHP book that is a little more advanced. Hard copy of books work best, but if all you can get your hands on are e-books then thats ok too.

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Even though Daily Pimp hasn’t been very daily lately, let me just say that my hustle has very much been daily.  I’ve been rolling out at least 2 or 3 new web sites a week and my earnings have more than doubled since September.  I’ve also been working pretty hard on some client’s sites, which has been taking up a lot of my time.  The pay is right, which is why sometimes it can be worth it to dedicate some of your time to another person’s project.  It puts more money in your pocket, which can then be invested back into your work, plus pay the bills and all of those real life things that most of us have to deal with.

I’m going to be stepping it up quite a lot in the month of November.  A team that is being put together for a large project is going to have more free time available in November, including myself.  We’d like to have a beta of our site idea by the end of December, which is possible just as along as we all stay focused and practice good time management.  Speaking of time management, that’ll be an upcoming blog very soon.  Stay tuned.

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I am someone who doesn’t vacation or go on trips as much as I should. I’m usually good for a 10 day + trip every other year or so. I always have a good time, but one of the side effects of traveling for me is motivation. I have lots of time to think about my projects and my ideas. Being disconnected from the internet, as well as your work, opens your mind up to think about new ideas. I always end my vacations with so many ideas swimming around in my head as well as a boat-load of motivation. Right now I’m in Chicago, and I’ll be here for a couple days. I’m just hear hanging out, visiting some friends. I’ve already been traveling and this is the end of my trip. I’ve noticed that both my girlfriend and I could hardly keep from sitting down and relaxing and opening up our MacBook Pros after we arrived. Since being here I’ve already purchased 6 more domain names for projects I have in mind as well as a few domain names I’ve been waiting to purchase because I noticed other people had them and they were about to expire. Take at least a week long vacation if you’ve been a work horse like I have for the last year. Your mind and your body and your hustle will thank you for it.

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I’ve had to exercise keeping my cool lately.  One of my clients doesn’t speak English and I’m forced to communicate with them in Spanish.  This isn’t too much of a problem because I can speak Spanish well enough to deal with them.  They just have been making weird little mistakes here and there that just keep adding up and wearing me down.  It gets to the point where you just have to let it go, laugh at it, and realize that you’ll at least have a funny story to share with people in the future.

The latest small little issue that I’ve had to deal with actually resulted in me learning a new feature of Word that I wasn’t familiar with.  My client sent me a Word document that contained all the text that they wanted on their site.  I opened it up and discover that they’ve typed it all in CAPS.  You can imagine the words that came out of my mouth when I saw that.  I started to think of a solution.  I can whip together a small php script to fix the text, but I decided to put a little faith into Microsoft (usually not a good idea).  A performed a simple Google search and found the solution.  If you select the block of text thats all in CAPS you can then hit SHIFT + F3 and it will make it all lowercase.  If you hit SHIFT + F3 again it will correct the sentence structure, making the first letter of each sentence a capital letter.  That saved me some time.  It makes me wonder how many other programs have great features I don’t know about because I’ve never had the right situation come up.

Side note:
Even though I was able to fix the text, they typed it in a mix of Spanish and English, so now I have to go through and translate and fix various parts of it because they want the site to be in English.  Sometimes you just have to LOL.

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I’ve had some people tell me that their idea wall isn’t giving them the motivation they thought it would, but that’s ok.  There are plenty of other places where you can search for motivation.  Search through your emotions.  What do you have in your life that brings out emotions?  Emotions such as love, and sexual desire, work wonders when finding motivation.

Awhile back I was watching an interview of this body builder / model on YouTube.  He was talking about what got him into bodybuilding and what motivated him to stick to his diet and daily workout routine .  His reply was something along the lines of “ I know this sounds silly, but it all started out because I wanted to look good for this girl I had a crush on.”  He was lacking a little in his self-confidence and thought his body needed some work in order to get this girl.  He used that desire of wanting to be with this girl as motivation.

You can use that same type of motivation to success with your projects.  If you try hard enough you can attach any emotion to a project in order to be motivated.  Also, that’s not a bad way to get motivated to hit the gym and start eating right!

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I know I go on and on about idea walls for your own personal use, but what about when you’re working in a group?  The solution is a wiki.  A wiki can basically be used as an electronic idea wall where you can collaborate with anyone else involved in the project.  I have a wiki that I use to collaboratively write a book with someone, a wiki to collaborate organize and develop a project, and even a wiki that I set up with some of my oldest friends to document the past people, events, and places of childhood.

You can even use a wiki for your own personal idea wall, especially if you’re someone who travels a lot. For example you could be at an airport with wireless access waiting for your flight. That would be a perfect time to brainstorm on your wiki.

What is nice about wikis is that even if you make changes you can still go back in the history and see what was there before. This has helped me out I don’t know how many times.

The wiki software I prefer is MediaWiki, which is what Wikipedia runs. Its simple to install, especially if you’re on a host that offers installation of it through a control panel. You can then make it semi secure by added a .htaccess password to the directory. If you want to make it even more secure you can purchase an SSL certificate for the domain you have it hosted on. Then you have some security logging into your wiki from a public wireless access point.  Which is good because you don’t want random people checking out your ideas.

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How are those idea walls coming along? If you’re asking yourself what is an idea wall then please see my post titled: Idea Wall

Today I have a few great things for you to print out and add to your wall. If you don’t put them on your idea wall they are still great to have near your desk for easy access. They help me from time to time, especially the mod_rewrite one.

PHP Cheat Sheet:

Javascript Cheat Sheet:

Mod_Rewrite Cheat Sheet:

CSS Cheat Sheet:

MySQL Cheat Sheet:

HTML Cheat Sheet: (If for some reason you still need this)

Thanks to ilovejackdaniels.com for those.

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