As some of you may know, I’ve been pushing for the last year to get my copywriting business back up and running. By the hand of the good Lord, I’m starting to pick up steam again. As writing projects have poured in, however, my time has shrunk as I balance projects, a little bit of free time, wedding planning, and 40 hours a week working nights in an office. It’s been quite hectic!

Amidst all of this, I’ve been discovering more and more problems with The Nerd. I started this site from day one to build it into something great, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a “Me Too” blogger. My site used a free theme, and formatting problems abounded. I was never quite happy with the design. It came time to make some changes here, as I’ve felt a little lost on here. So here’s my game plan moving forward:

A new tagline (again).

Yeah, I had changed it to “Redefining nerdiness since 2009″, but a very smart fellow told me that you need to know what the tagline means. I boiled down what I felt this site was about by changing it to “Try something new today”. This site isn’t always about being a nerd in the traditional sense. It’s about beating your own path and carving out your own life – how you want it. And to do that, you need to try new things: new activities, new attitudes, new approaches to life.

A new, *premium* design.

For the first time ever, I’ve purchased a WordPress theme. This is the “Headway” theme, which allows me to change the design as I see fit without using a bit of code. I’m still ironing out the kinks, so you’ll see the site change and evolve as the next week or so moves on. But now, I can have the clean, sharp design that I’ve wanted without sacrificing formatting or anything else!

More Twitter involvement.

If you’re not following me on Twitter, get going. I share tons of links almost every day from my Google Reader, and I try to add value wherever I can. Plus, you’ll see tweets in the sidebar of this site, too, as always.

My picture (hey, that’s me up there!).

You can see that the header image at the top of the page includes what is a 6-year old picture of me. It’s the best I can do right now until I have head shots taken or something down the line. It’s just a simple reminder that this site is written by a human being. I’m not afraid to put myself out there.

Better content.

I’m going to push myself to do the very best writing I can do again. I want to tell stories, I want to help people. I want to include screenshots. I want to get back into podcasting. I want The Practical Nerd to be the quality resource that I envisioned it to be from the beginning. That means more work on my end, but hopefully, a better experience for all of you.

More surprises.

I don’t know how/when/where I’m going to pull the trigger on some of this stuff, but I have some ideas up my sleeve. Stay tuned!

If you have any feedback, let me know by firing me an email or leaving a comment on this post. I’m always happy to hear from any of you, and thanks for sticking around while I feel some of this stuff out!

It’s a time of maturation for The Practical Nerd. As you can see, a lot of changes have been made to the site, and I’m really excited about where it’s going to take us! There have been some problems on the backend in the last few months or so, and I took some time to finally clean them out and update the site. Let’s take a look at what’s new:

Cleaner site design

I have a soft spot in my heart for the last design – it was an uncommon theme and it grabbed the eye. However, the theme itself caused quite a bit of problems for the way the site ran. After a while, it felt like the site design was getting cluttered and bogged down. I was not a fan of that.

This new theme is simple, but still has a nice splash of color to it. There’s a sophistication to it – just like us nerds. I think this will go a long way in making this site more pleasant to spend some time on.

The return of the podcast

You bet. The podcast has been strangely absent, but that has mainly been due to a month-long battle with bronchitis that saw me fluctuate between endless coughing and sounding like Barry White. The fiance and I both had to load up with antibiotics and cough medicine, and it just wouldn’t make for a very good podcast to listen to. I’ve since cleared up and I’m excited to record one this week. I also have since upgraded my microphone, so we will have a nice, clear sound – again, a little more professional!

ACTUAL related posts

One of my pet peeves over the past few months has been the "Related Posts" section of each post. Previously, it would just list the most recent posts for some reason. I have since fixed that, and now you can see posts actually related to the one you’re reading from the full Nerd Archives! How cool is that?

Condensed categories

As a baby blogger, I thought having a bunch of categories would help in organizing the site. Now, I realize simpler is better, and tags are where it’s at. So I pulled back on the categories for a more streamlined approach to organization.

New tagline

I have retired the "Helping Cooler People improve and enjoy their lives." I had a dream that I could make "Cooler People" the official buzzword of the blog – a derogatory term for people who live in the mainstream. I now know that I should be focusing my efforts on the word "nerd". So now I am redefining the word "nerd" and the tagline zeroes in on that. This was also aided by the surprise popularity of my "9 Reasons Why Being a Nerd is Awesome" post.

A return to WLW

This one doesn’t mean a whole lot to you, but I have installed Windows XP on a virtual machine within my Ubuntu operating system just to use Windows Live Writer. If you are a blogger, you understand why: WLW is quite possible the best thing Microsoft has ever put out. Ubuntu just didn’t have a comparable solution. I wanted consistency in formatting and WLW is the way to do it, so we’re back in that regard.

More focused sidebar

As of press time, there are 236 posts on The Practical Nerd. That’s not a lot of content for some bloggers, but that’s a good chunk for me. And I want people to be able to navigate through some of that and enjoy all of this great content that I’ve put up here over the last year and a half (if I do say so myself). The simpler sidebar highlights the "Random Posts" section and the tags. Start browsing around and enjoy some classic Nerd stuff!

FIXED FEED!

My most hindering complaint about the site, technically-speaking, over the past year has been the broken feed, which screwed up how the posts looked if trying to subscribe to the site (via Google Reader and others). Happily, we can chalk that one up to the previous design as well, as the feed is fixed! This means I will be setting up the Facebook feed once again, and those looking to subscribe can finally see the content as it is supposed to be presented!

Cleaned up backend

Once again, I believe the last design caused a number of problems on the backend of this blog. You probably won’t notice much of a difference in performance, but all the blog plugins have been updated and the entire system is running remarkably better. To be honest, this whole update has restored my faith in WordPress, and it gives me a better feeling to be writing in a nice, clean blog again.

This update was a long time coming and is a big step for the future of this site. I thank everybody who has stuck around, and I hope to continue to see you guys (and more) throughout the near future!

Note to self: a Flickr search for “first birthday” will bring up a large number of pictures of crying babies.

On May 1st of last year, The Practical Nerd was born. It’s been a long and frustrating year, but endlessly rewarding as well. Here are some things I learned about life and blogging during the past 12 months:

Apple fanboys don’t care who you are. They will destroy you if given the chance. Don’t believe me? Check out the comments from this post, which morphed into the second-highest trafficked post on the site, just because I talked about how I don’t like Apple stuff.

Twitter is more than a bunch of narcissists. They are actually a very vibrant, giving community. I mean, yeah, the narcissists are out there, but a lot of them love to share content with each other and joke around a little bit. I like that.

No matter what you think, somebody is reading. If you’re an aspiring blogger and you don’t think somebody is reading, you’re wrong. I’m always surprised at the reaction I get on occasion from a little post here and there.

We all can afford the equipment to podcast. I have a cheap headset that I use for Skype calls, and I record in the free program Audacity. It really couldn’t get any easier.

You can hold a contest, but you can’t make them care. I got ONE entry from this contest I held back in September, and that’s only because the guy tweeted it to try and get me some reaction, and a tweet counted as an entry (thanks again, J. Money from Budgets Are Sexy!). He got the custom poster and proceeded to do nothing with it. I got one too, and I proceeded to do nothing with it. Maybe I should start looking into Amazon Gift Cards. Hmm…

Practical personal development is easier to write about than ‘90s pop culture. Devotees to this site know that I originally authored a blog called Vintage ‘90s, which now no longer exists. There was a wealth of content, but I lost all passion for it due to the difficulty and stress of trying to be funny. I don’t know how Cracked does it.

Money can’t drive your life – you need a bigger purpose. If your job is only there for monetary reasons, you’ll be miserable. You need to believe in what you are doing. I haven’t made a dime off this site. I’m here for the interaction and the exercise in writing.

Getting the “big boys” to notice isn’t hard. I’ve gotten small mentions on Zen Habits and Lifehacker, two of my favorite sites. All because I asked. And you’ll see below, Zen Habits gave me a crapload of traffic!

I should be doing this more. I’m not reaching out nearly enough.

15,306 visitors isn’t a lot on the Web, but I’m still proud. It’s pretty cool to think that my words have been read by 15,000 people. Pretty, pretty cool.

See those spikes up there? Those spikes are hope. This stuff is capable of driving traffic, and I didn’t buy that traffic. Sadly, that leveling off afterwards is a direct result of a failing business and a need for a 9-to-5 job for now, but it’ll be back. I have a feeling the next year will be much better…

Fourth of July was just plain fun. The highest spike up there (the left one) is from the July 4th, which was when I was linked to on Zen Habits. That was a lot of fun to watch that day.

On top of the numbers, this site has been viewed in 114 countries. When I started, I thought it was cool that Canadians were reading. I had no idea I had a Belgian following.

My cats are popular. Looking at the most-visited posts of the year, it’s clear that my cats have generated some interest. Rusty and Chandler are minor celebrities from one post that garnered the 3rd-most views on the site (and that includes the homepage!).

Original content rules. #10 on this list is a link to another site. The rest are all original posts done by me. Something for me to think about.

Comments from readers make it all worthwhile. The best moments I’ve had over the past year have been as a result of complete strangers commenting on my articles. That means I struck a chord with somebody. That’s the goal!

Here’s to another 12 months of awesomeness. Thanks for reading.

I’m exhausted.

This week has been a "Power Week" for me. I’m sending out a sales letter to hype my business to about 150 Milwaukee-based businesses. This has involved spending my free time doing the following:

• Narrowing down my list to determine which 150 businesses were getting the sales letter.
• Putting polish on the sales letter so that the wording and formatting are correct.
• Building a spreadsheet for all those businesses.
• Literally spending hours researching each business to get names for people to address these letters to.
• Figuring out how to do a mail merge for the first time in my life, so that each letter is personalized.
• Printing out all the letters.
• Hand-addressing each envelope to increase the chances of it being opened by the recipient.
• Folding and stuffing the letters into each envelope.
• Reprinting letters that had mistakes on them.
• Sticking stamps on all of them.
• Sealing them up.

This has taken a LOT of hours this week. It’s drained me quite a bit, and I’d be working on them into next week if I didn’t get help from my wonderful fiance in folding all of them for me. Five of those steps above involved staring at a computer screen. It also doesn’t help that I spend 40 hours a week answering emails.

That said, writing has fallen by the wayside this week. Sometimes, you have to prioritize, and while I love this blog, I had to focus on my career for a few days this week. All the progress in the world doesn’t matter if you are making yourself miserable while doing it.

Next week, we’ll have another pile o’ links and plenty other good stuff that you love from The Practical Nerd. Stay tuned!

Wow.

That’s what I have to say. From January 1st to January 1st, The Practical Nerd had over 12,000 visitors for exactly 22,000 hits! How cool is that?!? And it gets better: these numbers start in April. There’s no place to go but up!

This is why I keep doing this, people. It ain’t about finding a way to make money or garner fame. It’s about entertaining and helping all you “Cooler People” out there any way I can. I’m very blessed and thankful for each and every one of you, and I can’t wait to start pulling out all the stops in 2010. We’re going to start giving back – to you and to others.

In the meantime, I’d like to reflect on 2009, the year the Practical Nerd was born, with some of my favorite posts. These aren’t necessarily all the most popular posts, but they were ones that I really enjoyed writing and thought were useful to anybody:

• What’s YOUR $500 La-Z-Boy? A look at one of my favorite all-time dumb purchases.
• "Wait, so we should be engaged by now?" In April I shot down all the talk about getting engaged… then I got engaged in October.
• Use Goal Setting And An Attitude Adjustment To Overcome Adversity The post that made it onto Zen Habits.
• 7 Steps To A Complete Money Management System – For Free! Ditch all that expensive software and outdated checkbooks.
• 6 Ways The Average Person Can Use Twitter Without Feeling Like a Loser I still feel that Twitter is one of the most underappreciated and underused services on the market today.
• The Most Important Article on Hype You Will Ever Read (It Will Change Your Life FOREVER!!!) One of my favorite article titles of the year.
• 10 Things Major League Baseball Teaches Us About Life The metaphors are endless.
• Even Dr. House Can Be Happy Sometimes This picture still makes me laugh.
• Are You Choosing Unhappiness Over Uncertainty? How the status quo is killing us.
• 8 Ways To Ditch Bloated (and Expensive) Software For Free Seriously, why are we still paying for software? (These are all legal solutions, by the way!)
• Why You Need An Online Backup Solution, and How To Make It Dead Simple Learn from the horrors of my failed hard drives.
• You Don’t Get Rich By Spending a Million Dollars Seems rational, doesn’t it?
• 3 Icons Dead this Week: Let’s Remember Them For The Joys They Brought Us When Ed, Farrah, and Michael died, lots of people just wanted to talk scandal. I wanted to talk about the good times.
• How I Hurt My Back, and The Difference Between Taking Chances and Being Stupid In other news, apparently a 24-year old in decent shape can still throw out his back.
• Cable/Satellite TV is an Outdated, Broken System: How a TV Addict Can Liberate Themselves If there was one tip I want to share with the world, it’s this one.
• Google Sync: Is There Anything Google Can’t Do? Easily my favorite Google tool, and such a simple one at that! Set it on your cell phone, and forget it.
• Are You Living Up To Other People’s Expectations? Other people are annoying. It’s a scientific fact.
• 9 Life Lessons My Two Cats Can Teach You One of my more popular posts of the year – Chandler and Rusty take us to the School of Life.
• If You Want the Freedom To Be Lonely and Grumpy at Society, Don’t Read This Post Seriously. It will just make you less lonely and less grumpy. Who wants that?
• One Of The Simple Joys of Life Bill Cosby tap dancing.
• The FREE Tool Everyone Can Use to Rock Their Lives and 7 Ways To Use It Right Or as I like to call it, “The day I discovered the library.”
• You Suck at Life, And How to Change That Right Now My entry into Chris Guillebeau’s writing contest.
• A Look At My Firefox Setup: It’s Productive, It’s Quick, and It Rocks I keep trying to switch to Chrome, but I just can’t do it.
• How I Use Netflix and an XBox 360 To Save $676.12 Every Year I live in my parents’ basement now, and I have free cable. I don’t even have the cable hooked up because I love this system so much.
• iPod Fans Show We All Need To Learn How To Debate Respectfully Hey, want to know how to piss off the entire Internet? Tell people you don’t want an iPod. They’ll crucify you right then and there.
• How The Internet Went From "Waste Of Time" to "Essential Tool For Your Life" My history of the Internet.
• Pointless Headlines and Ungodly Interfaces: Why Mainstream News Websites Are Obsolete The time I railed on the media. You know, that one time…
• What Your Vacations Are Trying To Tell You, Featuring Calvin and Hobbes I love the fact that I wrote this headline and then couldn’t find the right Calvin and Hobbes strip, so I just put a different one in, anyway.
• The Brewers, The 0-Hour Workweek, and The Value of Having Fun I can’t believe I have to defend fun.
• I had a new post all ready in my head, but instead… The night I got engaged to my fiance!
• The Jeff Foxworthy Guide To Happiness If you’re not going to read it for the advice, read it for the jokes.
• In Life and In Football, Don’t Be a Tom Brady He’s a turd.
• Are You Forcing Happiness In Your Life? Are you actually happy, or just pretending?
• Let’s Be Positive Today I open up my heart and list a bunch of things I’m happy about in life.
• The Wasted Potential of your iPod, Zune, or Whatever Your media player does a lot more than music.
• A Smart Christian’s Attack on "Organized Religion" I’m so disgusted with the whole concept of “organized religion”. I had to say something.
• The Practical Nerd Rule #1: Do Not Accept The Status Quo. My preview of our newsletter, “The Practical Nerd Rules For Life”!
• 21 Things That Should Be Kicked To The Curb My rant against stuff that sucks.
• John Mayer Sums Up How Stupid The 2000s Were John Mayer is another reason you should be on Twitter.
• Use Facebook Without Wasting Your Life Facebook is awesome – in doses.

Whew! That’s a lot of great stuff! Thank you again to everyone who has supported this site, and I look forward to making The Practical Nerd bigger and better in 2010! Stay tuned!

I just want to take a second to wish all of you a very blessed Christmas Day. Now, get off the computer and get back to spending time with your family!

But one thing that has suffered this year is our email newsletter. The Practical Nerd Newsletter has been hanging at around 100 subscribers, but has been suffering from an obvious lack of direction. So what is a writer to do?

Starting this week, we are cranking out a new series for the newsletter, entitled, The Practical Nerd Rules To Live By, a weekly series of practical tips and rules that will help you change from a Cooler Person into a Practical Nerd without becoming a big ol’ geek.

A quick definition: a Practical Nerd is a normal, everyday person that applies advice to improve their lives, sometimes bucking the mainstream. A Cooler Person is someone who wastes their money, time, and intellect by settling for whatever the media and society tells them they should do. You want to be a Nerd.

So what kinds of tips will this include? You’ll have to wait to find out! Tomorrow, I will be posting a special sneak preview of the Rules, with the first Rule for ya! Until then…

I’m going through a few changes in my life right now. Last week, I had to spend all my free time attempting to secure full-time employment. That way, the pressure can be taken off my business (and my blog!), and I can start working on it the right way. It’s a bitter pill to swallow at times, but it’s what I needed to do. I have a post I really want to write about big changes in your life, and I was going to write it last night, but instead, everything fell into place, and I wound up asking the love of my life to marry me.

Living in this technological world, we needed to tell everyone in our families and our closest friends before it hit Facebook. So we spent the night driving to houses and making phone calls in the car. I’m still a little exhausted, but it was worth it. I trust you can understand.

Tomorrow, we’re getting back on a regular posting schedule. See you then!

While you're here, check out the Open Letter to the Cooler People, where I speak to all the "average" people of the mainstream world, and I tell a little bit about The Practical Nerd and why it's here to help you out. Then, please throw your name and email address into the box in the sidebar to subscribe to my email newsletter, and you will get a FREE copy of my ebook, "The Practical Nerd 3 Keys to Happiness", where I show you quick ways to immediately improve the quality of your life (note: of course it bears mentioning that I won't do anything else with your email address – like sell it, or anything!).

Thanks again for visiting, and please feel free to take some time and explore. If you have any questions or comments, drop me a line at tom@thepracticalnerd.com. I would love to hear from you!

Tom "The Practical Nerd"

Posted via email from tommeitner’s posterous

About two weeks ago, The Practical Nerd put together a great, easy system to track and manage your money without relying on commercial money software. It’s the system I use to keep track of my expenses and income, and it’s darn-near foolproof, while being accessible anywhere. If you haven’t read it, check it out!

I felt that more people needed a system similar to this one for the following reasoning:

Not cost a dime. I don’t have that kind of money.

Be upgrade-proof. Buying Microsoft Money is a great investment – until the next version comes out. This system is free all the way through. You can’t be burned by new versions here.

Among other reasons, of course. Big software companies are notorious for not making their software changes retroactive. In other words, to turn a profit, they make you buy a new version of the same software you’ve been using. I understand it in business terms, but as a user, it sucks big time. But fortunately, there is news on that front.

According to Mashable, Microsoft has officially discontinued development of Microsoft Money after 20 years of development. Here’s Mashable’s take on it:

Well, as I’ve written in my lengthy post about the reasons for Twitter’s success, it’s partly due to the fact that users want their applications to be connected, to be accessible from anywhere, to allow collaboration with other users: all those things that the web 2.0 movement has brought us. Furthermore, users have gotten used to the widget approach; they care less about humongous applications that do everything, and they want widgety, simple applications that do one thing well.

And that’s exactly what my money system does. In fact (not mentioned previously), Google Docs’ collaboration features means you can share those online checkbooks with whomever you want. That would come in handy with a joint checking account, wouldn’t it?

So, in conclusion, it looks like Microsoft is getting smarter and catching on. It seems kinda coincidental that this announcement comes recently after my brilliant money management system hit the Internet. Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is one of my subscribers. You be the judge…