First Web Site is Up!

Today I got my first web site up and running and it looks powerful!

I'm excited that the whole process was much simpler than I thought it would be, and, of course, the next one will be easier still. Just take a look at some of the offerings I have found -- many of them free -- which make the whole process a lot easier than I could have believed. Yes it helps to learn a little HTML, but that's only because sometimes it's quicker to code stuff directly than to use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor when it's small stuff.

Like they say, don't sweat the petty stuff and don't pet the sweaty stuff.

The interesting decision now is what do I want to do with this. I have several choices:

1. Become a professional web site builder.
(I don't think that's where I want to go, but it's a possibility.)

2. Become an affiliate marketer.
(I'm doing that -- it's a great way to started with low cost and the potential for good profits. Just look at some of the deals on my site, and you'll see how they could be very profitable for anyone who wants to take advantage of them.)

3. Develop a web site to link to my USANA site.
(I think that will be my next project.)

4. Develop and sell my own products.
(That may be the project after next!)

5. More things that I'll think of later!

The best news is that I can start making this all automatic, so that when I'm off traveling the business will still carry on. There is so much help available from the people that I'm teamed with that I don't need to be there personally.

It doesn't get much better than that, does it?

Oh yes, the web site is currently at
http://www.alanjenkin.com/ja/

My First Home-Grown Web Site!!!!

I'm excited!

I've finally finished putting together a five page web site.

Tomorrow I plan to have it uploaded and ready to go. It's been an interesting few weeks getting it together, and I've learned a whole lot more than HTML. It sure ain't perfect, but one of the things I learned was that if I wait for it to get perfect, it won't happen.

When I get it uploaded, I'll post the link and wait for the comments -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

One of the best things I learned is that there is SO much information out there on how to do this that the problem is finding the good stuff. Fortunately, I started with good stuff, but found it easy to get led astray into other areas -- but for this, I would have finished sooner. I'll know better for my next site, which I plan to start on soon.

If anyone is interested to know more, put in a comment on this blog. I can show you how to get a site up in an hour or two, if that's what you want, or how to get help to set up something more complex. Just let me now what you'd like -- I'm an expert on getting started and will probably forget that experience in a few weeks!

One of the benefits of being retired is that I now have time to play with some of the new technology and can even use it to earn some money if I choose to. Sure beats working for a living!

Happy Holidays 2007!

Well, I'll be durned! It's that time of the year again already, and Billie has sent out her annual Christmas letter. Every year, we try to pool our ignorance and dig out all the addresses we can remember (why does it get more difficult each time?) and every year we get Christmas cards and letters from people whose addresses somehow got left off the list.

As often as not, they're people who could be mortally offended by the fact that they've been forgotten.

So if your name fell through the cracks, please forgive us! It was certainly not intended. Most likely Billie and I each thought the other was handling it, which means that you SHOULD have had TWO Christmas card from us. There, now, doesn't that feel better?

On the other hand you may just be one of those people like me, who doesn't even notice when they don't receive a card from someone. In that case, you are beyond hope.

(The penultimate sentence above should have read "... doesn't even notice when he or she doesn't receive ...". I think I'm going to avoid the PC trap in future by using the neuter form, so that the sentence would read "... doesn't even notice when it doesn't receive ...". But that looks just as ugly, so I prefer to use the grammatically incorrect and possibly non-PC form "they", even though I secretly believe that anyone who advocates Political Correctitude deserves to be referred to as "it". But, of course, I'd never admit to that.)

Read on ...

Dear Friends,

“They” say time speeds up as we age. If not for our digital assistant,

it might be impossible to recall the joys of this Mach 3 year, which

now races to its close.

Our electronic memory, though, reminds us that we spent January and

February on Roatan, where we relaxed, snorkeled in the sea, and

prepared Alan for a Honduran root canal. Just as the dentist injected

the anesthetic, Roatan’s famous electricity went out! The project was

happily aborted until we got back to Texas!

Spring and early summer took us to Mexico for health assessments; two

trips to California for seminars; a trip to the Smoky Mountains for

recreation; and a trip to Nashville’s “Fan Fair” and Trent’s first

“Ropin’ Pen” party. In July, Chris’s daughter Andie, Trent’s daughter

Montana, and her little sister entertained us for a week, following

which we enjoyed a month in the UK, France, and Spain - visiting

friends and family; exploring bits of Spain and France (including a

French country music festival. Yes! Texas and Nashville music in the

escargot land!) In August, a “TB scare” prodded us to our own research,

resulting in a retraction of the diagnosis and Alan’s avoiding

dangerous drugs. (Yes, Virginia, “false positives” do exist).

In September, to celebrate Alan’s 75th birthday, we visited Chris and

Kristie (who also celebrated birthdays that week) in Corpus Christi,

TX. A beach party in October lured us to Puerto Aventuras, Mexico,

where we had vacationed our first three Christmases together. A few

days later, Alan headed to Roatan to begin maintenance on our house

there, while Billie followed a week later (using the interim time to

visit family and gather repair items unavailable in Honduras). A

three-week working holiday left the house looking great! Next time,

though, we’ll plan to play!

Even if days and months seem to blur, this year has brought

re-evaluation of who we are, what’s important, and what we want to do

with our lives. To live with unforgiveness toward self or others, to

retire to a rocking chair, to declare we’re too old to learn and be

challenged – none of these suits us. Life is so precious, so short,

that we want to experience as much as we can. Though we’re not likely

to be accused of “acting our age,” we’re enjoying new adventures,

meeting new friends, and sharing a moment, a day, or a beer with the

sojourners along our paths.

We are thankful to have crossed paths and walked a few – or many –

steps with you. Thank you for the special warmth that thoughts of you

create in our hearts!

I found it! --and why I have so many e-mail addresses.

Remember those bumper stickers?

Well, I lost my blog -- duh! Now I found it again.

What happened was this:

A few months ago we (Billie and I) became dissatisfied with our ISP. Sometimes the service was great and sometimes it sucked. (This, of course, is the U.S. ISP. The one in Roatan always sucks.)

So we decided it was time for a change.

If you've ever changed ISPs (and who hasn't?) you'll know that we now faced the agony of e-mail address changes. It would be nice if we could just tell everyone in our address book (via a blast e-mail) our new address, but spam filters would block the blast even if we could get it to go out!

By way of history, another reason for the change is that our ISP had changed its domain name twice in the previous year. So people who were writing to a year-old address were getting dumped and people who were writing to a six-month old address were also getting dumped. Meanwhile, we had three inboxes for each e-mail address, to correspond with the three different domain names!

So, in a stroke of brilliance, we decided to create our own domain name and forward from there. If you're keeping up with this, you may remember the domain alandbill.com, as in alan@alandbill.com and billie@alandbill.com. Now we didn't EVER need to change our e-mail address again, and we were freed from the tyranny of ISPs.

Alas, it didn't work out that way.

From time to time e-mails would be bounced from our own domain without our knowledge. And sometimes messages would just disappear into that great bit-bucket in the sky. What had promised to be a solution became a bigger problem!

But to get back to the ISP story, we tried a different ISP. So we now also replicated our previous e-mail addresses on the new ISP. And probably told some people those addresses -- are you confused yet?

But wait -- it gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view!) When we found out that alandbill.com was losing e-mails, we decided to try something different -- Gmail. And we also found that we could use our Thunderbird e-mail client to send and receive from Gmail.

So far, apart from sometimes selecting e-mails as spam which should not be, Gmail seems to have been 100% reliable . It even saved me yesterday when Thunderbird starting acting up, because I could use the Gmail webmail account.

What has all this got to do with the blog, you ask? I was coming to that ...

When I set up the blog, I used a Gmail account and password. However, by the time I came to make a second entry (several hours later) I couldn't remember how to get there! Today, it dawned on me that I can link to it from my Gmail account, if only I could remember which Gmail account it was!

The rest is history.

Except that I forgot to mention that after running two ISPs in parallel for a few months it became apparent that the new one is too slow for us and cannot give us more bandwidth. So we're planning on dropping it and reverting to the old one. The good news is their bandwidth seems to have improved and is now streets ahead of their competitor.

I just hope they don't change their domain name again.

We're back from the Third World (or is it the Fourth?)

After a month in Roatan (mostly in the rain) I made it back to Texas last weekend. Billie missed the first week, but joined me there for the last three weeks. As usual, we tried to fit six weeks' work into three!
We had been away from Roatan since February and needed to do a lot of work to the house. Not helped by the fact that we had a break-in while we were away. I lost my power tools, but apart from that no damage was done.
Much of the time was spent making sure that the house is as burglar-proof as it can be made until the next visit. This took time, and cost a lot more than the things I lost so far, but we both feel much safer than we were before. Anybody breaking in now will need to work REALLY hard, as we have secure doors and windows all around (provided we remember to lock up).
The rest of the time was spent renewing our residency. One of the joys of living on an island thirty miles offshore of a third world country (hence the fourth world!) is that rules change with the wind. The lawyer we had hired to update our residency in February seems to have processed Billie's twice and failed to process mine, so the papers were totally messed up. Also, this year (for the first time) we had to go to the mainland to complete the process. It was when we got there that we found the problem with my residency, but, of course, my papers were back in Roatan; hence another round trip was required. All this at a time when Roatan airport is closed most of the day for runway repairs and the mainland was closed part of the time due to floods!
Still and all, I always feel sad leaving the island.
Now I'm back and working hard on catching up with an Internet Marketing course I've been taking. Once I can figure out how this blogging works, I'll let you have a link -- it's a wonderful course for digital cripples like me! If you can type you can do it.
Billie has gone to Dallas this weekend. Trent is performing at Gilley's and his girl friend is taking Klemmer's Personal Mastery course in Dallas. So Billie decided to audit the course to be with her. Since for me that would mean four days away from home, I decided to let her go alone. Probably bad news, as I didn't lock up the credit cards ...
Let's see if I can give you these links:
First Step Internet Marketing: http://tinyurl.com/2kljz9
Trent's web site: www.trentwillmon.com
Klemmer's site: www.klemmer.com