Don’t panic

Being calm is the most important part of dealing with a stressful situation. If you are having difficulty staying calm, one strategy is thinking about the worst thing that could happen if you fail and what you would do in that situation. Say a high-profile customer is complaining about an issue and you still can’t fix it, what then? You could consider your options to get more help, hire an expert for a short amount of time, or communicate frequently with the customer. All of those things you can do without directly making headway on an issue. Knowing there are alternative solutions to your problems is critical to not being overwhelmed. Have a backup plan and know your options.

Define the problem

It’s real easy to say something doesn’t work the way it should, but defining the problem fully can prove more difficult. Do you understand the problem based on the description given to you? If you’ve found the problem. have you confirmed the scope and impact of the issue? Can you establish a timeline of when it started? Resist the temptation to jump right in and start fixing things. Unless you immediately know what the problem is, researching an issue should take much longer than implementing a fix. This ensures (most of the time) that you can fix the problem the right way and never revisit it again.

Break tasks down into their smallest indivisible parts

Dividing your big overwhelming task into smaller tasks makes troubleshooting more manageable. For example, if you have some vital component of your infrastructure break down and you have no idea why,  it can become a scary and stressful situation fast. Thousands of dollars are draining from your company’s pockets by the second and people are banging down your door for answers. But proceeding methodically and systematically will ensure that you can eliminate the most likely causes of your issue and will help you find the root causes as soon as possible.

Establish a goal

So there’s a problem, we already know that, but there may be a wide array of possible resolutions. By stating your ideal outcome (doing so in writing helps), you can then backtrack to how to achieve it. In the same vein as setting a goal, understanding that fixing a problem 100% may not be the ideal solution. Are 90% of the people happy with a 90%  solution? Does the extra 10% cost twice as much? Will the 90% solution return as a -200% bug or design issue in the future? Finding the middle ground is difficult and far out of scope of this post, but simply confirming that the solution will satisfy you, your customer, and the bottom line means that you don’t have to thrash at a problem,  instead you establish a plan and follow it with confidence and dedication.

Set expectations and give status updates

When you have a problem that is affecting others’ productivity and happiness providing them with an explanation and an expected timeframe of a fix can be crucial to your sanity. By explaining the issue and the possible solutions to another person you will help yourself better understand the issue and the solution. However, under no circumstances should you commit to an exact time that the issue will be resolved by. Expected completion dates should be only reserved for the development of a fix, and tentatively at that, but you should not commit to the unknown amount of time it takes to discover and troubleshoot an issue. As you proceed with your plans, give frequent status updates to the interested parties. This will show them that you are both concerned and actively working on the issue and it should help keep the dogs at bay for a quick fix.

Keep a list of your failed attempts

Sometimes debugging an  issue can take an undue amount of persistence. To help yourself feel like you are still being productive, try keeping a list of each of the failed solutions you’ve tried. By keeping a list of the these negative accomplishments, you now have a real list of the things you are actively doing to fix the problem instead of feeling like everything you try is failing.

Break time!

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, take a break. Most problems aren’t solved instantly and most can wait an extra 15 minutes for you to get your head together. If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels,  it’s probably break time. Get up, stretch, use the bathroom, or have a snack; whatever it takes to get you away from your desk, do it. A real break will help your endurance in a stressful situation and will allow your mind to wander and you will revisit your problem with a fresh pair of eyes.

So far, AdSense has been easy: just sign up, format your ads, and put Google’s code on your site. It’s painless and low risk, but it’s also very low return. There are many stories like the founder of the dating site plentyoffish.com who was making close to a million dollars a month off of his AdSense ads. I don’t have any delusions of grandeur for AdSense (nor do I have millions of visitors), but if it makes me a few bucks, I won’t turn it down. Still, AdSense revenue can be very fickle and given that Google can change their policies at any time, I’m not counting on AdSense to line my pockets with gold.

Setting up AdSense

Here are the steps I needed to do to setup my ads (your steps may not look exactly like this if you choose different options early in the process).

More resources
Here are some more resources I came across while writing this post (your mileage may vary):

• Eric Ries on Minimum Viable Product
• An interesting take on AdSense positioning
• A poll on AdSense
• Tips on AdSense
• Previous AdSense changes

Wants

1. I want to do meaningful work. More specifically, I want to create something meaningful to me. Like most people, I want to feel valued, I want my work to be something positive and constructive, and I want to have purpose. When I’m following my own compass, when I’ve got an idea that preoccupies me so much that I can’t think of anything else, I feel energized and alive. At one point, I used to go to bed with a problem on my mind and wake up in the morning with a solution that I was excited about. I don’t just want that feeling back, I demand it.
2. I want to pursue my interests. I want more time in generally, but I want to spend my limited time on things that interest me. Not just work, but hobbies, travel, and adventure. Life is too short, why should it be spent doing things that I don’t feel passionate about?
3. I want to feel confident in my direction. I don’t want to feel like I am frittering my life away in a cubicle doing something when my heart’s not in it. This is a similar theme as the previous two. I don’t want to waste my life away doing something I resent. I want to conquer life’s challenges instead of feeling like I’ve been defeated before the challenge arises.

Needs

• I need time to accomplish my goals.
• I need money to replace my salary and fund my entrepreneurship.
• I need to be persistent in pursuing my goals. Procrastination and neglect are the enemy.

Commitments

Have more time

• Outsource menial and time consuming tasks
• Telecommute
• Automate manual tasks

Make more money

• Ask for a raise
• Freelance using my core skills
• Do odd jobs
• Sell something physical or service
• Advertise
• Use my capital / invest
• Get a job

Maintain Persistence

• actively keeping a TODO list
• reevaluating my priorities, goals, and tasks as they fit together
• setting small attainable tasks with short deadlines
• taking breaks to recharge and reflect

Now that I’ve defined wants, needs, and commitments, the easiest part is over. It’s 10pm, I’m tired and need to go to bed, and I have a dozen different excuses to keep me from the next step. So what the hell am I waiting for before I get started? Absolutely nothing.

Remote Hosting

I am currently running this site on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP) hosted through Linode. When I initially looked for hosting I found this helpful comparison of virtual private servers (VPSes) for Linux and I found that Linode offered the best hosting when compared to other hosts. It’s approximately $20 a month for the most basic hosting package, which is more expensive than the cheapest hosting packages out there, but it’s pretty inexpensive if you want full control over your server, easy access, and good support. The technical guides at Linode allowed me to setup a server very quickly (we’re talking a few hours from purchase to a live site) and add additional features easily. You will have to connect through SSH via the command-line, so you will need basic familiarity with the Linux shell environment. As for moving files around, I usually end up using rsync to transfer my files to the remote destination. As for the operating system, I chose Ubuntu as that’s what I was the most familiar with.

Local Testing/Development Environment

I decided to see if I could use a virtual machine as a development environment instead of the OS on my own computer. By doing this, I can have backups of the OS in various stages of being installed and configured with software.  And more importantly,  I will have no reservations about making a change as I can simply rollback nor will I be dependent on my physical operating system, which means I can upgrade or reinstall my computer’s OS without having to touch my test environment.

Using a VM has also encouraged me to document the requisite software and configuration steps I need to create a working environment in both the test region and production. For me, it was simply easier to begin to automate the production environment in the form of bash scripts to perform each task. Once I had my install scripts working, I was able to host the install scripts on my local machine, but share and run them on the virtual machine.

Setting up the environment

1. I first downloaded the OS from here: http://www.ubuntu.com/server/get-ubuntu/download.
   There are a number of ways to download it, I chose to use a torrent. If you have a slow connection it may take some time (the image is about 700mb). I then burned it to a CD; this will vary for your OS, but the Ubuntu website has documentation for the major OSes:
   https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto
2. Download VirtualBox and create a new image: http://www.gilsmethod.com/how-to-create-a-new-virtual-machine-in-virtualbox.
   I found that creating a “fixed” size image was taking a very long time, so I chose the dynamic option instead and it was created immediately. The recommendation I’ve read against fixed size  is that if your OS may grow unexpectedly fixed size may be an option to keep it under wraps, but for me, that’s not a likely scenario.
3. I then had to configure the VM for sharing files between the VM and local machine using the “guest additions” software from VirtualBox, see http://joergweis.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/install-virtualbox-guest-additions-on-ubuntu-server-810/
4. Setting up LAMP. See the guides at Linode, they are clear and concise for your flavor of Linux: http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides/. I did not setup an IP for my local environment, but had to for my production server. Also, in my local environment, I just ended up using the IP address my router automatically assigns to the web server. I then added an entry in my local hosts file with a more friendly name for the server.
5. Get your files onto the server. From your own machine (this assumes you have rsync installed), run this from the command line:
rsync -ave ssh /source/directory youruser@yourhost.com:/destination/directory
   The options here are, ‘a’=archive mode, ‘v’=verbose, and ‘e’=transfer protocol. For option ‘e’, I have specified SSH. You then should be prompted for a user and password to your site and once you’ve entered your credentials, the files should transfer.
6. The last thing I did was install WordPress to use as content management software. This was probably the easiest thing out of everything I had to do. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.
7. I also decided to host WordPress outside my root directory using these instructions. After that, I installed a few plugins where I felt WordPress native feature’s were lacking, specifically Bad Behavior to block spam, Google Analyticator for google analytics tools, and sCategory Permalink to allow me to pick the category that is used in the my WordPress posts’ urls.

Once I was satisfied with all of these steps in my test environment, I then rolled them out to my production server with very little hassle.

For the time being, check out the links I like and stay tuned for more.