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Showing posts from October, 2011

The Rebuilding of Hockey Gear HQ

What a pain Russian hackers can be, eh? My last couple weeks have been consumed by an infestation over at my side project, Hockey Gear HQ , which ultimately required burning the site to the ground and rebuilding it from scratch, making sure that my WordPress installation is air-tight this time around. I'm not completely done with the job yet, but the site is back up and running (quite safely I might add). There was an opportunity in this effort, however, to freshen up the look of the place, which I was never quite happy with. So I've gone with the Genesis Theme Framework from StudioPress, using the News Child Theme , and I'm thrilled with it so far. The site not only looks more integrated and professional than my previous attempt, but the flexibility of the platform is amazing, I've only begun to dig into the various features that it offers. In particular, I like the basic setup I've got in the main column, with the 5 most recent Featured articles showcased i

Making sports blogging pay: 1 for 2 ain't bad

This summer I  set a goal for myself of completing and marketing two products for hockey readers, as a step towards turning what has been a longtime hobby into something which might provide at least some kind of significant supplementary income. Well, here we are at the start of the 2011-2012 NHL season, and while I fell short of the goal, I am encouraged by what I did achieve, and the prospects I see going forward. I think I've finally passed the first milestone, which was to bring in more money from writing about hockey and the Nashville Predators than I would by scrubbing toilets at their games (4 hours per game, minimum wage, 40-50 games a year depending on playoffs... do the math), so that's something. For the first product, I was able to record a partial success, because while I didn't complete a full commercial product there, I was able to publish a  fantasy hockey draft strategy eBook  which I made freely available over at HockeyGearHQ.com, asking only that peo