BillyStyle

So I was in Provo, Utah visiting family last weekend. My Dad, a car guy, tells me “I know nothing about cars!” He went on to explain how his son-in-law told him something about all cars that he never knew. He learned that the rear view mirror pivots on two hinges, not just the one attached to the mirror piece itself.

He was astonished that he didn’t yet know about this. I didn’t know either. We were in my truck while he told me this. I semi-awkwardly looked at my rear view mirror to have a look at it. I didn’t muster up the courage at the time to try it out, but I figured I would eventually give in. I didn’t want to do it because I knew it would mess up my perfect positioning with little chance of ever getting it back.

Yesterday I gave in.

I was driving (naturally) and just grabbed hold of the mirror and yanked it all around. Sure enough, it was double-hinged chaos. I didn’t remember to look and see just where it was at before the repositioning. Now I’m in the process of gradually getting it closer to where it was before. I’m sure it never will be perfect, but I just had to find out for myself. I like satisfying urges like that from time to time.

For the past few months, I’ve been keeping up on Darren Rowse’s blog, Problogger.net. Anyone who reads Slashdot has probably heard him mentioned a couple times. He makes ridiculous amounts of money from blogging. He has around 20 blogs and updates most of them at least daily. I’ve found it interesting to see just what it takes to make it to that level of blogging, as this is my first venture into the blogging world.

At the moment I’m playing with a few different ideas on how to approach making a little money through blogging myself. I think it would be a reasonable goal to get a few blogs going by the end of the year. I like how Darren has set his up. He has a couple root sites that hold all of his blogs one level deep. That seems to help any new blog get quick credibility.

This site uses Drupal as the content management system. I’m growing to like Drupal quite a bit. I just played around with it a bit tonight, and I think it will work nicely with a multi-blog setup like how Darren has with using WordPress.

I’m not sure how I’ll be at staying motivated, but the rewards if I do it correctly have potential to be great. There are a lot of great affiliate programs out there and I could always use some extra cash. I have no intentions of getting to where Darren is (from his revealed income, so far it appears as though he’s close to making over $300k per year from blogging), but I see it possible to have a side income at least equal to having a minimum wage job.

I probably won’t use BillyStyle as the home of any of these blogs, this site will remain the more personal blog where I don’t use any search engine optimization to gain ranks. I’m playing with Gallery and should have a decent looking photo gallery on here soon as well.

These, of course, are all plans and goals right now. It will take some motivation and consistency to make these ideas come into fruition. Hopefully by year’s end I’ll have at least 2 blogs up and running that I update daily. BillyStyle should also look better by then as well.

Update: I switched the site to WordPress 2.0 in January 2006. Short explanation here.

So I went to Google just now and threw in my first and last name. I love the results. The #1 result happens to be a web page about the lake at which I grew up recreating. I learned to kneeboard and wakeboard there, and searching my name will take you there, it just doesn’t get much more awesome than that on the INTERNET.

See here: Google search for Billy Park – Result is Lake Billy Chinook.

I wanted to get this up on September 5th, which it still is in some parts of the world. Right now this is a shell of a site, but I will gradually grow it into something worthwhile. I just needed to get this sucker launched to kick me in the butt on getting going.

I’m hopeful that my posts will be more meaningful than this. Alrighty then, we’ll see what happens.