Hi. I’m Shazzalive; owner and creator of Kkomp.com – Beyond; the blog that you’re reading. I thought that I’d like to bring you a brief account of my blogging-life to date.

In 2008, just about the time that the global-recession began, I was building desktop PCs for a living, under the business-name of Kustom Komputa. I had a website; a web 1.0-style static-site that I’d managed to put together and make appear something-like-passable; but it was hell doing all the coding on an almost daily-basis to keep it updated.

As a geek I used the internet a lot, and built my own PCs for that purpose. During my browsing I’d discovered David Risley’s tech-site, pcmech.com, which I must say was very impressive. I received the regular newsletters, read the new posts, and had even ordered one or two of David’s own products from it; such as a book called “Build Your Own PC”, for instance, from which I’d gleaned a few tips and tricks for my own usage in my work.

David had created the site around 1998, initially as a hobby, and from thereon had started generating an online-income from it soon afterwards, when he realised the potential of his cyber-baby. Initially he coded his own content-management system, which functioned similar to a pre-existing version of WordPress. On the release of the ultra-versatile WordPress blogging-platform, however, he started using it as a replacement, and has continued to do so from thereon.

At that time that I was following pcmech.com closely, there was a free public tech-show running, produced by David and his partner-in-crime, Rich Menga, called “PC Mech Live”, which interactively discussed all matters geeky on Ustream. Through that show I got to know the hosts and struck up an online-association with David Risley, who advised me to start a blog, using WordPress as a platform.

After several months of um-ing and ah-ing, during which I gave myself a crash-course on basic php, I announced to the world that my new blog; kkomp.com – kkomp being short for kustomkomputa – was going into full swing. This was where my total naivety and inexperience came to the fore: The theme I’d chosen was the worst theme I could have chosen, my web-design skills were all but non-existent – otherwise absolutely awful, and I wasn’t as good at my newly acquired php-coding skills as I’d thought. In short I soon managed to hack up the theme so badly that it absolutely ruined the cosmetics. I also tried to hack the kernel and crashed the blog.

Having tried to run before I could walk properly I hurriedly started again from scratch – on the same kkomp.com domain – only this time I intended to do it properly and become a professional blogger. Again I hacked-up the same awful pink-coloured theme and managed to make it look worse. – But undeterred by what I considered such a minor-failure I began posting; mainly my own take on technically-flavoured news items, which became lost in the massive online-echo-chamber and drew very little readership.

2008 became 2009, and although my theme-hackery left much to be desired, I noticed that people were actually reading my posts; particularly my few technical-articles that were not news-oriented. This, then, was going to be my niche – technology and computer/electronics help-articles. Despite my continued atrocious web-design and over-hacking of the awful pink theme – eventually, during 2010, making it into an even-worse-looking blue, pink, and grey, theme – my readership increased to a point where, on my best day, in April, 2010, I recorded 355 unique-visitors and over 600 page views in a single day. I somehow even managed to get into the top-million-blogs rated by Quantcast during September 2009 – But that was bloody hard work; I was sitting at my PC most of the day, every day – even at weekends – and what social life I still had went to pot as a result.

2010 was a funny year: I fell in love in February, and the blog with its over-hacked theme – now looking as if it had been designed by a nine-year-old – was all but abandoned except for a few posts made as a token-gesture during that summer. During 2009 I’d taken David Risley’s Blog Masters Course on its first run, and from what I learned from it I realised that I was doing it all wrong… But I was on cloud-nine and had “better” things to think about than blogging at the time. – Until it all came crashing down around my ears in one way or another… and then to  top it all the blog crashed in a big way. – Having said all that; 2010 was the first year that this blog actually made any kind of a profit. – It is a commercial-blog after all, and I was hoping that it would pay for itself and bring me in some income from the word go. In reality, however, there was a lot that I should have been doing that I wasn’t doing; and I found out what that was, and more besides, from the Blog Masters Course.

I’d been renting a dedicated-server from fasthosts.co.uk to run all of my online server-related-affairs from. In short; fasthosts were rather fly: They said that they managed to give me such a “great deal” because they rented me the server only, without any technical assistance. (In hindsight, around £50 a month for a dedicated server with a 30GB HDD, dual-core CPU, and 500MB RAM under those circumstances was a bit steep.) This meant that I was fully responsible for my own maintenance, backups, and server-operation, via the command-line on an Ubuntu Linux-powered server. The program PuTTy helped a lot; but learning everything I needed to know – in other words becoming a self-qualified remote Ubuntu Server Service-Technician – was beyond me in the time allotted, bearing in mind my affliction with various traits on the Autism spectrum, as well as the time allotted being pretty much imminent. The alternative to doing everything myself was to hire one of their technicians at £120 + VAT per hour – which I was forced to do on a couple of occasions. Fasthosts were a moaning bunch of useless incompetents. Heck, when I was on a shared-platform server with them – before I started renting my own dedicated server from them – they put my blog on a backroom scripting server, sharing a platform with resource-hogging sites that all but made this blog unreachable every time it started performing properly. The server-crash that I’m just about to tell you about was the last-straw: fasthosts would have to go without my continued custom.

In October 2010 all the pages on my blog simply vanished – followed by most of the rest of the blog shortly after. I’d made backups of both files and database; but even attempting to restore these by FTP did nothing. I phoned fasthosts, who eventually escalated the issue to the second-line technicians. After a week or so they informed me that the operating system on my server was suffering from corruption and it was my responsibility to sort it out – or I could hire one of their technicians at £120 + VAT an hour…

To cut a long story short I quit the server. In fact I all-but-quit fasthosts. I moved kkomp.com over to a shared-platform server with JustHost.com, and even changed the nameservers. JustHost.com have been a good host in the 11 months I’ve been with them at time of writing, and they’ve never given me any of the constant hassle and aggro that I got from fasthosts – PLUS their services are costing me much less financially than fasthosts cost me, and I’m getting a much better deal from them too. – So if you’re a fasthosts customer – or if you’re with any other, similar, semi-ethical money-grabbing rogue-host – I do seriously suggest that you move everything to JustHost ASAP, as a matter of urgency.

The problem was that, although my file-backups were fine; my database-backups had all become corrupted due to the messed-up server. When I attempted to restart the blog from where I left off, on JustHost’s server, the database wouldn’t install. Fortunately I had copies of some of the articles I’d written, so at least all was not lost.

- So I rebuilt the blog. What you see now is another stage in the on-going improvement of the blog’s capability and design, which began in November 2010. I’ve stopped rewriting old posts now and am only publishing all-new-material. I dropped the awful multicoloured over-hacked theme I’d been using since the start, and I hacked-up the Twenty-Ten theme instead. I’m rather pleased with the way it has evolved.

Well I guess that’s about as brief as I can make it. Thank you for reading this far. I won’t go on much longer. – But there is just one thing that I want to say before I conclude: -

If it hadn’t have been for the Blog Masters Course, I’d probably be amongst the ranks of failed bloggers who have never generated any real income from using their blog in their online-activities, have never really got anywhere with it, and as a result have given up and allowed their blog to lie almost dormant as a piece of cyber-trash – littering up the blogosphere with unwanted forgotten failed relics of wannabe-entrepreneurship.

I will say – and I’ll stand by these words through thick and thin – that course touched me and gave me the tools and information I needed to be more than just a failed-pro-blogger or a hobby-blogger. I have to admit that I haven’t even yet applied all that I’ve learned; and that’s maybe partly through lethargy and a bit of procrastination on my part perhaps, combined with the fact that there’s a lot to learn. – There’s so much in the Blog Masters Course that it’s just not possible to apply everything all at once. If you haven’t already done so, click the linked text directly above, or click the badge below, and see for yourself.