Day 37

LOG: 5p - 6:45p

Great day so far... fought my way through a tough morning and kept fighting harder into the afternoon to get to size 5, and the result is the first LEGIT completion of the ROARS ritual.

Back to design work today... for starters, I need to install the full salient.

Funnel Theory

First, here's what im thinking for the funnel order and strat:

Home page is the video and opt in.  If they scroll down, they get the rest of the site's content.  Since it's full screen, scrolling down isn't automatic.

If they opt-in, they get the killer video I made -- from there, there will be two options:

1. Scroll down, read sales letter (again, not automatic.)

2. Click button that pops up on side of video, which will be the "second slide" on the slider bar, which will be my sales letter converted into a video, which will have it's own buy now link that will pop you to the bottom of the page.

3. If they buy, they are on my customer email list and are taken off my main mailing list, where they get free mastery content every week, each piece with it's own sales pitch on Mastery.

4. If they don't buy, they are on my standard list where they get free content from advanced series and maybe some mastery stuff, each piece with it's own sales pitch on the advanced series.

Design Work

So, the "page header" on the home page is how you get the full page effect.

From there, I edited the menu at the top to be transparent and smooth by going into the Salient tab and then the "Header" setting.

From here, it should honestly be VERY straight forward as far as what to do.  It's actually amazing how easy it was and how good it looks.  Good purchase.

http://howtofixinsomnia.com/testsalient1/

How to Create FTP Users... again..

Creating a user for FTP... repost since I forgot and never actually posted:

Creating a new user on an EC2 instance is pretty simple. For example, to create the user 'bret', type:

> sudo adduser bret
> sudo passwd bret

Here's what it will look like:

You might want to create a user and restrict their FTP access to a specific folder, such as /var/www. In order to do this, you'll need to change the user's default home directory:

> sudo usermod -d /var/www/ username

In this specific example, it's typical to give the user permissions to the 'www' group, which is often associated with the /var/www folder:

> sudo usermod -a -G www username

Master User:
user: htmlftp
pass: amazon standard

ulg... all these users not working... anyways... for now it's tempdel and password is olaa.  Finally worked, and installed everything.

Day 36

Log: 5:30pm - 6:30pm

Having a hard time today... between James getting fired and Rich being all over my stats I've been trolled pretty hard.

Today I still do not have access to either the website or hostgator, so I won't be porting anything over.  This gives me the opportunity to focus on design work.

For now, think SIMPLE.

VARIOUS DESIGNS:

http://themeforest.net/item/salient-responsive-multipurpose-theme/full_screen_preview/4363266


DESIGN I WANT:

http://themenectar.com/demo/salient-one-page/

After playing around for a while to figure out how to get this "full page height" feature, I more or less figured out that my boot-legged version of salient is simply out of date and that is why it does not have it.

You can actually see the option in the page header settings right here, and I do NOT have this feature comparing side by side... i imagine this is in row settings as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrIlw4-brCg

Very cool feature on there about particle affects... might be a great way to entertain viewers while the video is going.

Also, looks like my <div> hack for the opt in has a problem -- the video doesn't scale and so the opt in box will end up overlapping on smaller pages...

Bought Salient.

Obviously, I need the newest version of Salient / Visual Composer (which comes with Salient) to get access to the features I am going for.

http://themeforest.net/downloads

User: jcmont
Pass: standard

NOTE THIS:

"Salient v5.5 separated Visual Composer into a plugin and it is no longer automatically built in - this means when you activate the theme you'll have to still install the Visual Composer plugin via the admin panel. It is included still with the theme and no purchase is necessary, just head to the "install plugins" link in your admin panel located in the "appearance" section to install & activate. Cheers!"

Okay, that's all for tonight :)

Day 35

Review of last week:

Average calls per day: 64 [Goal: 70]
Hours on ROARS: 10.83 [Goal: 10]
Average size per day: 4.55 [Goal: 5]

Better week, things are headed in the right direction.  

Review of OCTOBER:

Average calls per day: 54 [Goal: 70]
Average hours on ROARS per week: Undetermined [Goal: 10]
Average size per day: 4.1 [Goal: 5]

October was a ramp up month and I was trying to figure out what I was doing and how to do it.  Rituals failed and were re-written, schedules were adjusted and honed, word was molded. 

October's ROARS Goal:
-Website  and sales funnel 100% setup

This failed -- the website is setup, however the domain and sales funnel were not setup.

November

November's New ROARS Goals based on October's Achievements:
-Domain & funnel setup pre-product (nov. week 1 goal)
-Product setup, everything works successfully and it's ready to be sold (week 2 goal)
-Google analytics setup
-old URL NaturalCuresForInsomnia.org setup as redirect
-5 backlinks made on places online that drive traffic, and I want to see SOME organic traffic coming in from those links on analytics.

Nov. Week 1:
To achieve this week (mostly today, obviously)

-Buy and setup HowToCureInsomnia.com
-Create wordpress on site (on actual URL, not IP) & install SEO plugin RIGHT AWAY before salient.
-Get the main salient blog established and get the video and opt-in on the front page.
-Have the front page opt-in (aweber) lead to the core content video (the pre-cursor to the adv series)
-Setup the sales letter to be the logical next step from the core content video to sell the advanced series, from there next logical step will be to buy advanced series.

WEEK 2 I will work on the portfolio (the other content), like top 10 remedies, RLS, Apnea, w/e.  I'll do the main design stuff and flesh out the rest of the website then.  Week 1 is pure funnel & functionality.

Today

LOG: 7:30am - 4:15pm
8.75 hours

Linking URL to server w/ DNS -- link to Elastic Load Balancing or a single image?

First obstacle to overcome -- Domain name -- turns out to be much harder than anticipated.

The tutorials on doing this are by default for S3.  I am not interested in hosting with S3, I am hosting with EC2 as it has much more functionality.  Therefore, I need the "Web APP hosting tutorial".

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/wah-linux/web-app-hosting-intro.html

The problem I ran into when trying to setup the domain is that amazon is not setup to link a domain directly to an EC2 server.  It can be done, but doing so is kind of missing the ENTIRE point of using AWS to begin with.

AWS is all about making MULTIPLE EC2 servers, but you ONLY PAY FOR THE ONES YOU ARE USING -- hence I have a few servers to handle lots of traffic but I only pay for one since the others are turned off most of the time, they only turn on if the first one is maxing out capacity on traffic.

So, what you want to do is set up a load balancer.  The DOMAIN URL links to the load balancer, so the traffic hits the load balancer which then routes to one of the servers.  In my case, it'll only be one, but the point is I can add more seemlessly.

PROBLEM: just to run, it costs $18 a month, on top of the $30 / month I already use on the instance, and I don't have any use for it yet!!

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/wah-linux/getting-started-create-as.html

However, I finally am really starting to understand how to scale my website when the time comes.  You essentially take your instance, set everything up, then make an image of it (an AMI) the same way you'd make a disc and then make an .iso file to image it.  Then you can burn as many CD's as you want... in this case, you can use an AMI to make as many instances as you want.

And you use the load balancer to control it all -- the load balancer sees your current instance at 70% and rising so it automatically uses your AMI to create a copy of the instance, and then it redirects the extra traffic to the new one.  Once traffic dies down, it terminates the instance it created.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instances-and-amis.html

IMPORTANT NOTE!

MY SERVER IS NOT SETUP TO BE DUPLICATED CORRECTLY.  

WORDPRESS AND SALIENT MUST BE INSTALLED ON CORRECT DOMAIN NAME:

INSTALL BY GOING TO HOWTOCUREINSOMNIA.COM ; NOT BY GOING TO 52.11.177.228

IF YOU SET UP ON THE IP AT ALL YOU WILL EXPERIENCE PROBLEMS LOADING PAGES, CSS FILES, EVERYTHING.  IT CREATES LONG LINKS ACROSS THE BOARD IN THE CODE PER THE URL IT IS CREATED ON ONCE IT IS SETUP.

So this is all for later... how do I set up a single static EC2 Website?

All you do... in Route 53, you goto the record sets, and change the "A" (a being link, like <a href="">) record to this: howtofixinsomnia.com. A 52.11.177.228... which I got held up on because I didn't understand that I didn't need an "alias" like they make for Elastic Load Balancers and Static S3 sites... I just needed to edit the value to the elastic IP... that's ALL!!

GAWD. I got off track on learning everything and anything related to this.  It's important for scaling later, and yes, this is the WHOLE point of using AWS to begin with... but man... what a loss... 4 hours and due to it being scatter focused the size today will either take a hit or I'll "NA" it due to the learning factor.  But either way, the goals of this week are getting away from me quickly.

It'll take 24-48 hours to see the change with my DNS since I took the liberty of deleting the old name servers and making new ones in my various attempts to get this done.  So I really hope howtofixinsomnia.com is going to that Apache page in a few days.

/end rant /begin lunch

End of Day

So, what was done today:

-Figured out how to link domain and static ec2 instance (and explored how to scale up and link domain to the scale with AMI's to create instances with an ELB)
-Solved PROBLEM -- creating wordpress / salient on the IP vs. on the URL.
-Bought HowToCureInsomnia.com ... still pending... work will continue on http://52.11.177.228/testwp1/?page_id=14 until then.
-Learned how to use the Visual Composer in salient and how to design pages.
-Found code for placing a video with an opt-in to the right side, used <div>'s to size everything.
-Contacted Hostgator about actually unsuspending my access to my content, not just my account, so I can actually port over the content into a design.

Honestly, not a bad day.  The main things I needed to accomplish today were done, and now I have everything I need to finish up the design work and get the funnel finished with a straightforward port.

While I'd like to have made it further into the design process, it's nice to have a strong understanding about how everything works and to know how to switch over from static to scaling once the site starts getting traffic -- so I know I'm doing things the right way and can move forward with full confidence and a good understanding of the basics.

Day 32 -- Thursday the 29th

This day I failed.  The reasons why don't matter (TROLL CATCHING here  -- justification is begging to be heard, don't let it), all that matters is I push harder in the first week of november, I need this month to excel so I have a strong december, as november is typically a good month for me and december is typically where the issues start.

Day 31

LOG: 6p - 7:30p

Hostgator said yes!  They will remove all but the most recent invoice, I just need to pay that.  Very cool of them.

The plan is to start up, download everything, and shut down... lol.

Salient

Just playing around with the theme, learning how to use it.

This explains the nector slider:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLU9Pxo_RD8

Which is superior to the home slider, seems as though there's no point in using the home slider at all.

Lol tripped for like 15 min trying to figure out where the fuck i set the home page to "slider only" until I was on "edit page" for the third time and finally saw the "Page attributes" on the right.

https://www.youtube.com/user/ThemeNectar/videos

^ The rest of the tutorials.  I think "Setting up your portfolio" will be important, as I want that to be under the slider I think.

I think I'm using a slider...

I dunno yet, so many options!!  YEY

Okay... 1.5 hours of exploring... PASS

Day 30

Tough day so far... 2 cases of fraud (one confirmed, one HIGHLY suspected) and dealing with the real assholes of the world that waste my time and frustrate me...

Waking up at 1:30am is fucking ridiculous, going to have to turn off the computer tonight and pray I don't wake up...

Getting shit for the lackluster results that this month is yielding across the board...

It's been tough.

That being said, keep in mind, Salient IS INSTALLED!!!

So let's get back to work on the ultimate freedom and figure out the next steps here:

1. Design blog in salient.
2. Gather old stuff -- get what you can -- I'll start here.

LOG: 5:15pm - 6:15pm  PASS.

The Gathering

http://gator4080.hostgator.com/ should be where my data is stored.

Hostgator is obviously suspended but they want the entire sum of invoices from early 2014 TO DATE to reactivate my account... even though it's been suspended for 18 months!!

They want me to pay full price for service for months in which I did not receive service??

Anyways... I submitted a ticket... hopefully I can get off the hook here for $10 - $30... don't want to pay $200 but I will if that's what I gotta do.  Too much valuable shit on that server.

The problem is that I don't know I can get it back even if I reactive.  Will my data even still be around?

I put in a ticket, let's hope for good news tomorrow here.

NaturalCuresForInsomnia.org

Rebuy the URL, Re-Direct to howtocureinsomnia.com.  There's a lot of old videos that have snowballed a bit over the years and that traffic source is worth the $20 / year or whatever it costs.

Plus, a lot of my key content videos mention that URL I think.

Salient By Design

Following the documentation is still key -- there's an order to doing everything, go in the order written or risk missing key pieces of the tutorial.

For starters, you need to setup the home and the blog.

HOME: Page > Add New, title, TEMPLATE selection :) under Page Attributes, Publish.

ADD Blog Page as well, NO template.

TELL WORDPRESS TO USE THEM APPROPRIATELY.

Settings > Reading

"Front page displays" > "A static page" > home = "front page" blog = "posts page" Save.

And my hour's up!  Thank god this day is fuckin' done.

Day 29

Log: 5pm - 7pm

Today's Goals:

-Get the plugin install thing to work... with any plugin
-Get your Salient theme installed.

Begin

https://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions

If you want to use the built-in theme editor, all files need to be group writable. Try using it before modifying file permissions, it should work. (This may be true if different users uploaded the WordPress package and the Plugin or Theme. This wouldn't be a problem for Plugin and Themes installed via the admin. When uploading files with different ftp users group writable is needed. On shared hosting, make sure the group is exclusive to users you trust... the apache user shouldn't be in the group and shouldn't own files.)

TO CHANGE FILE PERMISSIONS in WinSCP, just right click any file and goto properties.  :)

Installing themes / plugins w/ wordpress -- here's my idea:

1. Get wordpress theme editor to FTP into server.
2. Change permissions to 777 for testwp1 (anyone in the server can read, write, and execute anything in wordpress)
3. Install theme
4. Reset permissions.

FTP access for wordpress: repost from Day 22 of initial renaissance:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7052875/setting-up-ftp-on-amazon-cloud-server

FTP Hostname should be ftp.52.11.177.228 I think

NOPE... no ftp in front :)  just 52.11.177.228

Made a new user cuz I couldn't find the old ones... he is:

wptest1user

pass is rwar###ij :)  (not the real password, obviously.  But even if someone gets it, they can only edit the testwp1 blog since that's the only place it has access to... I think.

and BANG plugins work.

Salient is installed.  My objectives are complete.  2 Hrs.

mmmmmmm look at this baby...

http://www.adimage.it/