I’d love to be the person who could write this article from first hand experience.

I’d like to have people hanging on my every word as I explained how I built a business from nothing using my intelligence and tenacity.

Instead I’m feeling a bit miserable about my lack of progress.

You’ve heard the same tales as me, plucky entrepreneur starts selling things to his friends in primary school. They seem to naturally fall into the role of the merchant, the dealer. Bold enough to sell, clever enough to see the opportunity.

I’ve always been shy and I don’t like making small talk but I can wax lyrical when the topic of conversation is really interesting.

Lately though I’ve been worse than I used to be, I’ve been anxious, scared. I avoid contact with other people and jump when the phone rings.

This isn’t what entrepreneurs are supposed to be like. This isn’t even what normal people are supposed to be like. Why am I getting further and further away from my goals?

Morpheus: Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.

If I believe that I can improve my situation and outlook on life by learning and thinking and practising then it also stands to reason that I can make things worse for myself by thinking the wrong thing and practising the wrong thing.

If trying something new makes me nervous but I push through and do something I’ve never done before? I’ve learned that the fear I feel will be rewarded with an “achievement unlocked”.

If I put it off, avoid the challenge and turn to browsing reddit/buzzfeed instead? Then I’m learning some different and self sabotaging.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I am getting better and better at running from what scares me.

This should be the dramatic moment where I declare “No More!”

Music swells in the background as you too imagine yourself striding into the future a changed being – confident, bold, productive.

But I’ve done that before and its never worked.

So instead we have to do something different. There will be no epiphany, no life changing moment.

You’ll simply have to practise. I’ll have to practise.

I will get frustrated because I can’t figure something out.

But instead of getting increasingly angry with the problem I will ask for help – in person or online – and wait for an answer.

I will worry about not having enough money to pay my mortgage.

But instead of panicking and not acting I’ll realise that the best way to earn is to consistently work towards building a business.

I will worry that I’ve let my wife down

But instead of feeling unworthy I’ll be the best husband I can be everyday

I will be scared of doing what I know I should

But instead of avoiding things I will say to myself:

I want to be the person who can do everything I want to do.

I will want to believe that I’m not good enough

But instead I will realise that I am neurons away from being better than yesterday.

I will want to believe that my problems are insurmountable

But instead I will write about them on a blog and I’ll see that written down, my problems are only a few pixels high.

This isn’t a tutorial

This is a tutorial -

Cory over at django djourney is doing a series of screencasts showing how to set up a development environment for django in windows 7.

I was able to follow all of his instructions in that video and now begin my django work by

cd Envs

lsvirtualenv

cd kanjimap/scripts

activate

This puts me in virtual environment where I can specify exactly what libraries are loaded and what version of python I’m using.

I ony have python 2.7 installed and using pip I can ask for the latest version of django

pip install django

Once that’s done I can see what has been installed with the

pip freeze command

I don’t know if this is of huge benefit since I’m only working on 1 application, but it is recommended so I’ll give it a go and do what all the cool kids are doing.

I had some fun putting together Pong using Unity but I also had some frustration.

Because Pong is a 2d game I had to be careful to keep everything in the same plane.

I am not a clever man

I ended up using the XZ plane to put all of the objects, which was fine but did mean I had to allow for it in any of the code.

I also kept putting things 6 units towards the camera without realising they were now in completely different planes. Especially annoying when I was trying to figure out why my collision detection trigger boxes were not working.

Nothing was colliding with them.

Once I found that problem and fixed it I thought I had successfully completed my tutorial but I still wasn’t seeing the desired result.

Once the ball passed the collision box ( the goal ) it was supposed to respawn in the centre to start the next game.

Even after fixing their position I still had nothing. There’s a small script to handle the respawn logic, and like the other scripts I was dragging it from the project to the scene view.

But for some reason this doesn’t work for the box collider script. I had instead to drag from the project to the OutofBounds objects in the hierarchy view.

Once I figured this out by way of profuse profanity I had a working, extremely basic, computer game.

Pong in slightly more than 1 post. Job Done

I’ve been interested in Unity 3d for quite a while because it seems awesome, frankly.

You can create games on both Mac and PC versions and it compiles to web playable games, iphone, android, PC, Mac, calculators and human tissue. ( not all of those are available yet )

It seems like a great set up for bedroom coders who might want to go on and have their work seen by a wide audience but it’s also being used by professionals in more commercial efforts.

So I thought I’d give it a go and downloaded the latest version 3.5  (which is free).

How did I get here?

I started it up and there wasn’t a text editor in sight.

How do I program a  game if I can’t even add any code? Back to the drawing board and google. I found some basic tutorials on the interface and had watched 1 or 2 when I spoke to a friend of mine who has been doing quite a bit of development with Unity.

He recommended a mini tutorial called Pong in a Post by Rock Paper Shotgun

which, as its title suggests, tells you how to create a version of pong and explains it all in a single post.

Look Ma, I’m making a game

I followed instructions and soon realised that using unity was akin to using visual basic back in the year 2000 ( for a beginner like me at least )

You use the graphical interface to choose elements and then drag them around to position them. You can choose from dropdowns to give these elements characteristics and then when you need more precise scripted behaviour you can attach a text file containing javascript ( as per the pong tutorial ) or c#

I had happily created some objects

• ball
• boundary walls
• paddles

and I needed to add a script so that the paddles would move in response to user input.

One ping Vasilly, One ping only.

The handy tutorial provided the code so I just followed instructions and pasted it in.

I am not good with computer

But it didn’t work. The simplest step by step lesson I’d found so far but I couldn’t get it to work.

There were only a few lines but I couldn’t see any problem. Searching using the error message led me to a few threads but nothing seemed to match what I was trying to do.

Nothing seemed as simple as what I was trying to do.

Way down the comments of the tutorial was probably where I should have started looking but I was put off by the discussion on whether or not Farscape is better than Firefly.

I think the answer to that is obvious ( I have never seen Farscape )

But someone mentioned that they needed to edit the pasted code because wordpress converts standard double quote characters ”

into something called smart quotes which are actually “different characters”

I am aware of the irony of trying to show you how wordpress changes things in wordpress. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

Once those 4 fecking characters had been changed, everything went as expected.

I have conquered the problem of getting text from a webpage into an application, everything else required to make computer games should be straightforward, ne?

Just before dinner and at the height of my frustration I figured out what was going wrong with my django form.

With some rudimentary form posting I can now update and edit my sample sentences as part of my application.

It’s actually the first time I’ve gotten user forms working with django so it was nice to break new ground and then go for dinner and a beer

Apart from coding, I’m also trying to keep reading useful content. I was emailed this by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com, I’m on his list, it’s not like we’re friends or anything.

It’s an interview talking about how to co-create products with an audience so you develop exactly what they want and are eager to buy. Seems like a really clever approach that’s better for developer and customer – win win.

Periodic Table of TODO Progress –  is up to Boron

I’ve spent some time with tutorials, now it’s time to move onto generating some of my own code.

I want to build a flashcard application with loads of amazing features, but since I’m pretty new to python and django I’d better start with the basics.

Building on the previous tutorial I want:

• a test page which will display a sentence.
• a series of buttons which rate how well I know each piece of text.
• an algorithm which shows me the best known phrases last.

This doesn’t fit exactly what I want the final product to be but I think it’s better to be writing working code than just reading about doing something more complicated. Practise makes perfect

It’s easy to get an empty shell of a website up and running with django

Now let’s try and add some meat to those digital bones.

…

I’ve added some super simple models and edited urls.py so now I can browse to the index of the site and see a message telling me I’m at the index of the site

Programming is so easy.

As long as you don’t want your programs to actually do anything.

I’m going to bed and marking this as beryllium

Will continue tomorrow with a views for a user and counting scores via POST.

And some new content for that affiliate site I started a few days back.

Still working my way through http://jarv.org/2011/10/django-jquery-tutorial-part2/

I have a working app running on localhost from part 1 so I’m eager to see how it’ll take me to break it.

There’s actually not so much to do in this part of the tutorial so I’m just reading through explanations rather than following instructions.

Moving through the next 2 parts seems similar, in order to add another item to my ‘done list’ I’m going to start coding from basics using this tutorial as a guide.

Reading instructions isn’t really immersive enough for me to learn anything

This is task 3 in my periodic table of progress, so we have moved on to Lithium

After some setup and typing yesterday, today is going to be all about programming.

I found a nice looking tutorial at jarv.org on how to build a question / answer app that uses django and some jquery for the front end. I’m hoping that I can learn from it and change things around so that I get closer to the flashcard application I want to build for myself.

The tutorial was easy to work through, I just thought I’d do some digital housekeeping before getting it done. This spawned a couple of hours of profanity and confusion as my computer refused to let me access one of my external hard drives … while displaying it to me.

Bastardly shitebag.

With that still not working, but providing fewer error messages than before I was able to setup a basic django app, import files from the tutorial author and get it running on my machine.

It uses sqlite3 for the database and should be a handy introduction for the kind of app I want to do myself.

On to part 2

- Keeping the chain of elements going, finishing the first tutorial in the series brings me to Helium

I decided to create a brand new affiliate site recently and have been adding some details about my progress to the forums at Wealthy Affiliate.

I’ve started more than one in the past and many of them have ended up unfinished or abandoned so I really want to talk about my progress in the hope that it will keep me on track.

Since it is an affiliate site and I’m going to earn money from it, I’m not going to reveal the name or the niche, but as with almost all of the sites I’ve got there’s an element of personal interest in it.

I bought the domain years ago and have done almost nothing with it since then.

Today, determined to get some work done I read up on the pomodoro technique and ended up reading through delicious tomato recipes. My procrastination abilities remain strong.

Moving on, I logged into my hostgator account and added a sub-account for this particular domain. Once that was created I logged into the new site account and found an option for a one click install of wordpress.

Very convenient.

Except it didn’t work.

I went to the site root and found some pretty php errors about files being missing. I’ve done a bit of php programming and if there’s one thing I know well it’s error messages.

While cursing the software that had done the installation I noticed that the sub-account I’d created had just 1 MB of space, which is far from enough for wordpress ( since the compressed 3.3.1 download is more than 4 MB )

Back to the drawing board ( webhosting control panel ), upgrade the account to a more robust 1000MB and delete the small number of wordpress files that did make it.

With a fresh start I decided to go for a regular install of wordpress by downloading, uploading and editing some database settings.

Worked like a charm

WordPress is incredibly easy to upgrade as well, there’s a link on the dashboard which tells you there’s a new version available and you just need to click to get up to date.

With a blank install done I went and did some keyword research for the site, looking for search phrases are used fairly often but don’t have much competition in existing pages.

I just used the google keyword tool and jotted down my results in a google document.

I’m going to associate these efforts with my first memory map keyword – which is hydrogen.

I’m not sure whether to try and create a parallel memory map for different tasks like programming or language study. It’d probably be best to try and stick to one list so that I learn it more quickly and see all the items in consecutive order.

Not much point in associating hydrogen with Ireland and its capital, Dublin – other than the O’ Hindenburg disaster.

Great Scott!

Most of the things I’ve written here have been set in the future, intentions, promises and ideas about how I’m going to do something.

I need to write about what I have done in the past.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions