The brochure for “being your own boss” has pictures of laptops overlooking beach-side cabana decking and a lot of creative latté foam art.
Here in the real world, being my own boss has meant pinching pennies and saying “no” or “not now” to a ton of opportunity. More accurately, it has meant putting my priorities front and center and evaluating every decision in light of how much money it will take to make it work.
As I sat in my apartment parking lot watching my boys ride their bikes down the pine straw-covered hill recently, I couldn’t help but take a deep breath and appreciate where we are right now.
For us, the keys have been a relatively crappy old minivan and prayer (not necessarily in that order).
We don’t have any car payments, we’ve never paid for cable TV, and the only debt we still have hanging around is the battered remnants of a student loan. That meant that when I was shown the door at my not-even-that-lucrative sales position, we had a little bit of wiggle room and that nobody was going to come haul the minivan off on a flatbed truck.
It’s amazing how freeing it is to not have a payment. I purchased a relatively high-end commuting bicycle a few months later for the cost of two oil changes and a set of tires on the minivan, and now not only do I get great exercise daily on my way to and from work, I am saving the $50 to $100 per month in gas. Related: my two boys will grow up with memories of riding bikes with their dad. Often.
Furthermore, being forced to look within a bike-commute’s radius for a new rental house means that even after our move we are still a stone’s throw from our church and the community there.
Saying “no” to a nice car or even a $150/month car payment has made room in my world for deeper connection with my wife, my kids, and my church. The only downside is the commute on mornings like today.
That’s after it warmed up about 10 degrees. I’ll not pretend I didn’t consider taking the minivan.
What payment can you eliminate in your life in order to make a family memory?
Here’s a snippet of the cover. Very well done stuff!I have access to a free copy, but I believe in what she is doing so I went and forked over the extra dollar to read it myself. I just spent the last hour or so breezing through it.
Spoiler alert: this book is refreshing.
The only critique I’ve got is that if you don’t know Lexi, you might come away from this thing thinking how impractical and pie-in-the-sky some of the ideas she shares are. Surely nobody could practically put into action the things she talks about, in the real world!
But if you do know Lexi, say for example you work alongside her every day, you’d know that she’s simply saying out loud what we see every day. This is her play book for actually enjoying her job.
The way Amazon works, they reward (and showcase) books that are popular, which makes them more popular. Launch day is crucial. The more people who buy it today, the better. Also, leaving a review helps tremendously.
I am not an Amazon affiliate (I live in North Carolina where that is impossible because our lawmakers live in 1998), so you can know that I am legitimately trying to help Alexis with her first e-book.
Think of your WordPress web site as a (relatively disorganized) drawer in your garage. In serving up a website, a browser and server work together to organize the contents of that drawer according to what a user wants to see. Each page has potentially dozens of resources associated with it, from tracking scripts to images to CSS files to php scripts. Each time a new resource is needed, it’s as though your web server is having to open the drawer, root around inside for the resource, and close the drawer.
Depending on the size of the resource and the bandwidth it takes to deliver it, you are often looking at “opening and closing the drawer” hundreds of times for even one page. Multiply that type of action with even a modest bump in traffic, and it’s easy to see why your $3/month hosting package crumples under the weight of your WordPress site.
What makes a WordPress site so great (usability, simplicity for even the most novice end user, etc) is precisely what makes it such a generally sluggish website platform, especially over time.
But that doesn’t have to be true, with the right planning and optimizing.
Our goal in optimizing the site is to take as many resources as you can and put them elsewhere. Think of it like an embedded YouTube video. Though it is appearing on your site, all of the bandwidth (the “opening and closing of the drawer”) is on YouTube’s side. The process I’ll outline below takes almost everything on your site and houses it on Amazon’s server, making Amazon open and close all those drawers for you. Your WordPress install will hum like the first day you read the words “Hello World!”
Amazon’s storage service is called Simple Storage Service, or S3 for short. Though not a true Content Delivery Network, it will act as one, serving content to users without taxing your server.
First off, this process does cost money. You have to have a card on file with Amazon to even sign up for the service. But, behold the costs I accumulated 14 days into my February billing cycle:
I’m safely within a less-than-a-gumball territory.
Also note that I host my church’s podcast and their web files on my personal Amazon account. Come to think of it, there are about 4 different domains using my S3 resources.
If a faster website is worth a couple of pennies every month, then read on.
After you’ve set up the account, return to your WordPress Dashboard and install/activate two plugins: Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront These two plugins will automatically upload any new media files (like when you add a picture or an audio file to a post) to Amazon.
A new link named “AWS” will appear in your dashboard’s left column, toward the bottom.
Only a couple more technical steps to get things up and running. Bear with me, here.
Then, using an FTP program (I use Cyberduck on a mac) open the file wp-config.php (located in the root of your WordPress install) and add the following two lines (replace the stars with your copied keys): define( 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', '********************' );
define( 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', '****************************************' );
Save that file back to the server.
Now, click the “AWS” link in your WordPress dashboard, and the “S3 and CloudFront” link that drops down.
On that settings page, you’ll need to name a new bucket. S3 bucket names have to be unique (in the whole world) so I recommend going with your URL. It’ll also make it easy should you decide to create 35 websites and host all of their content on S3, for like 45 cents a month.
You can ignore the CloudFront settings, and here’s how I have ticked the boxes on my setup:
<img src="https://benandjacq.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-shot-2014-02-11-at-11.33.00-AM.png" alt="Settings for the Amazon S3 and CloudFront plugin." width="549" height="214" class="size-full wp-image-347010755" srcset="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws buy tamiflu.com/benandjacq/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-shot-2014-02-11-at-11.33.00-AM.png 549w, https://benandjacq.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-shot-2014-02-11-at-11.33.00-AM-300×116.png 300w” sizes=”(max-width: 549px) 100vw, 549px” />My settings for the plugin.
Once that is saved, you are all set going forward. New images and other media that are uploaded to the site will be placed into Amazon’s capable hands for delivery to your readers.
If your website is new, you’re all set. But if like me you have years of blogging behind you and megabytes (or gigabytes) of images and other files in the /wp-uploads directory alone the fix above only slows the bleeding of server resources. I’m still researching the best ways to modify existing links. I found a plugin that is doing it for me, but I’m not very comfortable with how it’s doing it, leaving me open to some security risks.
Do you know of a fix? let me know in the comments!
A little Taste of my Moto X home screen (I’ve clearly got a bit of a Google addiction)In switching to Republic Wireless last month, I almost immediately began receiving telemarketing calls from one specific number, and sales texts for the first time since 2009. Mildly annoying the first time, unacceptable after about the third one.
I don’t know if it is related to switching my number to Republic, or all of the rental applications we have been filling out lately as we look to move.
Android operating system to the rescue.
In two clicks, I downloaded a Call Blocker and have installed it, adding that number to my blocked call list.
My favorite client. Buy something from her and tell her I said hey.
This is a bit of a sequel to my employment bio, adding the clarity that comes from almost a year of “going solo.”
Over the past few months, I’ve landed a few clients that have paid the bills, and challenged me to grow in so many ways.
The role/client that I am proudest of over the past six months is my work with Socialexis as “Lead Overachiever.”
First off—and this is a thoroughly unsolicited plug—Alexis Grant is the real deal. She’s some sort of superhuman mixture of top-notch writer meets shrewd and intensely driven businesswoman. I’ve been perhaps most thankful for her management style: she allows team members freedom to shine without micromanagement, while at the same time not letting go of what makes her brand special—her. When you are a Socialexis client, you are getting the best of her, dumped into all of us.
I’ve taken over many of the day-to-day activities that Lexi did in her business in order to free her to work on her business. And that has taken some time (we’ll call it “ongoing”) as we have learned to work together and I’m growing in my ability to manage more and more tasks exactly how she would. I’m so thankful for her patience with me.
There’s no doubt that she took a chance on me back in July, asking me to help out. I am so grateful for that chance. Keep your eye on her, as I am confident she is going places.
So, do yourself a favor, and subscribe to updates from Lexi. She’s most applicable to folks who are writers, or entrepreneurs, or just generally interesting in living the life they want to live. While you are at her site, buy a guide or two. I’ve read all of them and can tell you they are what I wish I wrote on the topic, in most cases! They are all worth the money.
