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I was sitting at my desk this afternoon procrastinating as I usually do most days, flicking between songs on iTunes, reading news stories, RSS feeds and visting / contributing to a few of the forums I frequent and I realised that I’m going nowhere at the moment. My life has become very tiresome and it seems the only thing I’m living for at the moment is for football and going out and getting drunk, which really pisses me off when I know what I could be achieving.

I’ve got a very laid back attitude for most things, but I’ve been in the web development business for a good six years now and I really want to start making websites that I’m proud of and turn some of my ideas into reality. One of the main reasons behind it is, you guessed it, money. Now, I’ve made my fair share of money through websites since I started developing them but I think it’s time to step things up a gear now. Instead of the money coming in dribs and drabs, even though at times it can be a huge amount, I want the money I make to be a constant thing, every day / week / month or whatever.

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to chart my progress over a period of time, so a lot of the posts will be regarding website revenue and money but at the same time they will be interesting and they will bring a thoughtful insight into how I’ve developed the website from earning nothing to whatever it’s earning at that time.

I’ve already got some of the things in place to start making a constant revenue, I co-own a very large and popular website with traffic in excess of 200k unique visitors a month, however we’ve let the site sit there for a while without making money. So this week my plan is to effectively monitize the website and to start making some consistent amounts of money with it. Even though I will start to monitize the website and the forums I think I will start building the next version of the website and add some new features which will keep the website ticking over on its own for a while.

The re-development of the website brings me onto my next point. I’ve been using my own little framework for a while, but I don’t think it would be a great idea to use it for a website with the amount of traffic we’re getting at the moment and what we’ve predicted the sites traffic will be a few months down the line – so I’ve decided to look into using one of the popular ‘mainstream’ (if you like) frameworks. The ones that have caught my eye recently are Zend, CakePHP and CodeIgniter. There are plenty of others, like Symfony which a few of the Yahoo apps are built from, but I’m going to look into using one of the three I’ve mentioned. I think I’ll watch a few tutorial videos to see what I like the best and go from there. It should be interesting though.

I’m starting to get back into gaming again and I got my hands on the COD5 multiplayer beta today and I was very impressed. Infinity Ward who created the last COD have left this version to Treyarch who created COD3 so they can concentrate on bringing out the next COD, which will be COD6.

I’ve always prefered playing WW2 based shooters over futuristic type shooters, mainly because I’m fascinated with the first and second world wars. Although COD4 was excellent online and offline, it didn’t really “do it” for me, but we’ve got to give Treyarch a lot of credit; they haven’t tried to re-invent the wheel, they’ve just built on the successes of COD4. They’ve took the whole game and skinned it to a WW2 setting, with 1930’s and 1940’s weaponary.

I haven’t really read much about the game or many games really as I’ve been out gaming circles for quite a while because I haven’t had the time, but it’s going to be really interesting to see how they have developed the game even further. The thing I’m most looking forward to is the single player side of the game. I’ve always enjoyed playing games from the Call of Duty series mainly because of their story lines, so I will be very keen on getting my hands on the game and seeing if it lives up to my expectations.

I’ve only played a few games of multiplayer, most of them on the War gametype and the three maps they have released for us to play (Makin, Castle and Roundhouse) are brilliant. I haven’t played much on Roundhouse yet, but it’s my favourite so far.

I’m going to give the beta a serious playing over the weekend and post back on my thoughts and write a more indepth post, but I just though I’d post this and open the blog up!