Auw, 9 October 2015
Hello again,
More Time Available For WordPress Help
With some changes here in Switzerland earlier in the year, I have more time available to do things with WordPress Help than there was time for before. Example: I was driving 25 km each way through a medium-sized city (Zug) which cost me about 2 hours per business day. In addition, I was occupied most of the day to do this and that and what ever else, such that – of roughly eight hours potentially available – I used one hour to take care of the dogs (Labradors) and two hours for chores and miscellaney, so I had a maximum of about 5 hours left, and some of that went into lunch (can’t miss that!). With the current situation, I still use the time for the dogs, and maybe an hour for other things, but the day is not destroyed by the trip back and forth. I can be a lot more effective now, at least that is my impression.
Exchange Rate Hurt
For those of you who are not aware of what happened in mid-January 2015, the Swiss National Bank – which had been supporting the exchange rate of the Swiss Franc against the Euro at a certain minimum (CHF1.20 per Euro) – ceased all support with no notice on about 16 January. This resulted is an instantaneous loss of the exchange rates for the Swiss Franc against the Euro and the US Dollar as well. On a personal basis, my pension income is about 50% US-Dollar-based, and I suffered an instantaneous 16% paper loss in Swiss Franc income. This did not happen right away, of course, and the worst of the decline had reversed itself by the time that my February pension payments arrived in early February. My net hit was a loss of about CHF 400 per month, which is still not a drop in the bucket!
Since then, the Dollar has recovered to about 3-5 percent under the start-of-year 2015 exchange rate, so the hurt is not so bad now, but it still presents a challenge each month to balance the books.
Websites To Get Priority – Including WordPress Help
Anyway, I have decided to try to start keeping up with the various websites that are still online, this one, Consulting by Hesser at www.hesser.ch being one of them that has suffered up to now. The paid websites of course receive continuing attention, ones like Winston’s Inn Bed Breakfast Peterborough Ont that just got a complete revamp, and Susan Hesser Realtor that is very attractive.
Future Music
I am also looking at ways to make money on the Internet, without direct selling. I have had one attempt crash and burn so far, and I will report on that, but in my next missive (or later). The project theory was good, but the practice had one fatal flaw that killed the entire project. Now, I am working into more website-oriented income models, combined with WordPress consulting, plus two “own products” to sell (one of these also crashed for various reasons that have more to do with the (free) competition than my product).
New Capabilities
The other one is available now and it hidden in the “Other WordPress Help Services” page under the title “automatic website backup services”. What this entails is a system to automatically back up your WP website on a periodic basis, and store the backups off of the domain, in a standardised backup storage system. We prefer Dropbox because it has certain flexibilities that other systems lack, and it is free for the first 2 GB. If your site is not very complicated, this should be enough for between 5 and 10 backups, maybe even more. We figure that you probably only need 3-5 sets of data, spaced anywhere from daily for a very active site to weekly or even 2-weekly for a relatively quiet site.
We also offer the possibility that Consulting by Hesser = WordPress Help does the maintenance on your website, including overseeing the backup system and making sure on a periodic basis (from x times daily to once weekly) that your site is ok and has not had any hacker attacks, whether successful or not. We will also make sure that your WordPress and theme and plugins are up to date. We will not do content addition, unless we make some special arrangements with each other. We call this service “WP Safety Pin”. There is a website at www.wpsafetypin.com but it is not up to date at this time (I hope to update that in the next few weeks).
Hang in there everybody, and thanks for dropping by.
Craig