Nick was home from college this past week, and I took a lot of time away from working on the blog and BIOSLEVEL to spend some time with friends. It was a good time for sure, but I always come to regret it when I realize how little work I've done.

Hopefully I get things back on track over the next few days. I'm way behind on several reviews for BIOSLEVEL, and some of the products were just released in the last two weeks or so.

I also rebuilt two of my computers in to new housing, with a few new components that were sent to me for review. Let me say that I hate reviewing some CPU coolers. A certain company that will go unnamed for now sent two CPU coolers that otherwise seem impossible to install on an Intel machine. Stay tuned for a review, if I ever get them installed.

On top of all that, I somehow started playing World of Warcraft again.

Oh, these years go so fast anymore. Two-thousand and seven seemed to go by so quickly that memories from September and October still seem fresh in my mind. It's weird.

As far as 2008 is concerned, I do have a few goals and expectations for myself. It's always about the self-improvement at the beginning of the year, and I'm always hopeful at that point. How much of it actually happens, though? Well, I'd rather not look back on last year's post and find out where I failed.

Instead, let's look at what I have this year:

• Continue work on my websites. Traffic has improved significantly for all my sites. I want to continue building on this, as well as building up ad revenue. How awesome would it be to make my current income from my websites?
• Improve my grades in college. Oh, such killer college is. My grades have more or less been on a gentle declining slope since I started college. I'd like to make it an increasing slope before I enter my senior year in the fall.
• Put my knowledge to work on something other than websites. Sure, I can code in PHP. I've been wanting to make some contributions to open source projects for years now. Whether it be a plug-in for Pidgin, or a FireFox extension.
• Lose Weight. I might say this every year. I'm always to drop some pounds.

I think those are the big goals for the year. Of course, you'll be able to judge my progress by paying attention to my blog. Sooner or later, I'll hopefully meet all my goals. For now, however, it's back to website work on BIOSLEVEL. Enjoy!

Colin finally received his OLPC XO laptop that he got through the Get One, Give One program. He wrote a fairly full review of it for BIOS_LEVEL yesterday, which you can read here. It's a fantastic review, with plenty of pictures and several videos of both unpacking and usage. He was up reallllyy late last night creating the videos, and I think they turned out pretty well.

I posted the story this morning before work and tried to get out e-mails to other review sites to post. At the moment, I've found the article on Linux.com and LXer.com, which should both send fairly significant amounts of traffic our way over the new 2 or 3 days. What I'm really hoping for is that the story hits the front page of Digg or Slashdot. Those would be fantastic!

So, read the review and then Digg it.

Now that I'm attempting to manage and create content for 3 sites on an almost daily basis, my time is split up more than ever. During times when my time is overly taxed and there just isn't enough free time to go around, I have to pick on site to focus on and stick with it. Rather than allow all my sites to suffer, I think it would be better to let one or two slip a little while still maintaining atleast one on a daily basis. This has been the case with BIOS_LEVEL over the course of the last month.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that BIOS_LEVEL was gaining significantly more visitors per day than any of my other sites, and it was a positive curve. Most of these visits were legit referrals from other sites such as LXer.com and StumbleUpon. Surprisingly however, BIOS_LEVEL is my least profitable site. Most of my ad revenue comes from this blog. I'm not entirely worried about any sort of revenue right now, and have a much bigger concern over building traffic. Optimizing the layout for ads and affiliates can come later.

So what site should you focus on when you're in a predicament such as mine? I wholeheartedly suggest the site that generates the most visits. With proper advertising and linking, more traffic to one of your sites can promote extra traffic to your other sites. This can potentially make up for any traffic you lost from failing to provide new content while focusing on a single site. Of course, nothing generates traffic like fresh content.

This comes from the simple fact that I've posted a minimum of 3 news articles a day on BIOS_LEVEL in the last 2-3 weeks. I've slowly watched traffic crawl up between 10 and 30 visitors each day to the point where it's getting more regular traffic than ever before.

I've been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now, but couldn't come up with the time (surprise, surprise). I'd like to introduce a new project I started a few weeks ago, but have been in the process of brainstorming for the last several months. In the past, none of my websites have really fit in an underpopulated niche, but rather niches saturated with other sites. I think this one is the first site I've come up with that fits in a smaller niche, and I'm proud of that fact.

Cocktail-A-Day is a blog about what the name entails: One cocktail a day. Or, at best, one post a day relating to alcohol. I've employed the help of Nick and a few other friends to help me accomplish this feat. On my own, I don't drink that much or that often, and really doubt I'd be able to come up with 5-7 drinks to post a week. The others probably drink more than I do, plus they don't have other websites to deal with. While they drink, I bartend. This creates what I believe to be a unique mix and perspective for the site. Under ideal circumstances, they can review all those drinks out there, and I can focus on some other tasks.

The alcohol / bartending niche isn't exactly saturated, and a few google searches don't bring up any overly popular sites with Alexa or Technorati. I'm really hoping the site catches on with some popularity. It's a relatively untouched niche, so it seems.

In addition to reviewing drinks, we're also going to look at different bartending techniques, from pouring, to mixing, to ripping off the customers' whose tips I appreciate so much. Err, I mean, hi! Scamming customers and bullshitting drinks when you don't know what's going on is something we'd like to do as well, just to look at effectiveness and overall productivity. Are you saving the bar money, or simply ripping off an unknowing customer?

We haven't really kicked off a grand opening just yet, but it's something we're slowly working toward once we feel we have enough posts up that people won't get bored with the first post they stumble upon. I'd also like to get some restaurant-related gift cards to give away for an opening contest of sorts, just to raise awareness and generate some excitement for the site.

Spread the word.