Yesterday, I tried to live blog my development of AthensVacations.com, although with a few breaks and interruptions, it wasn’t as quick as I wanted it to be. I am going to be working on a few things on the site today as well, which I outlined below:

- Adsense ads on the site aren’t relevant to Athens or Vacations, so I made a few changes and added some content to beef it up. Adsense should automatically display ads based on what it thinks the site is about, so I am hoping this change works. Hopefully relevant ads will appear soon.

- I need to create the History page, which I will do at some point today. I use a variety of resources (such as Wikipedia) to get an idea about the history and create a custom page with unique content writing.

- I want to add another restaurant – maybe the Hard Rock Cafe since that’s a tourist spot, and many fans of the chain try to visit every Hard Rock around.

- I want to add a page about transportation and the airport because people presumably want to know how to get around the city and how to get to the city. I will link this page from a couple of pages already on the site, but I won’t add it to the top navigation, as I want to keep that clean and limit the number of links.

- Over the next few days, I will do some link building by responding to Yahoo Answers questions and by finding blogs that have information about Athens and Greek travel. The key is that I don’t want to be annoying and/or post irrelevant responses because people do that here all the time, and it’s frustrating.

There are also a few things I want to mention here because I am sure some of you are wondering:

If I was actually paying myself for doing this, the cost would be much more than if I bought a mini site. I realize that I could have paid a few hundred dollars or less, and someone else could have built the same or better mini site, and I could have been doing other things. However, I like doing this type of thing. It gives me a break from other things, so I don’t mind. If I had a corporate job and was sacrificing time from the kids I don’t have, it would have been a bad move, but I enjoy this and a lot of my domaining activities are automated – or they don’t take up much time.

This mini site may or may not pay off in terms of advertising revenue and earnings. It may or may not sell for my asking price down the road. It did give me a chance to show you how I go about building a mini site, and I really appreciate all of the comments received. These have been helpful to me, and I hope to others as well.

I will continue to build out mini sites. Individually, they might not make a lot of money each, but I am increasing the value of my holdings in this down economy, and when people are spending more for good, revenue generating domain names, these will be competitive.

I was having a few problems on the back-end of my blog for a couple of weeks. I assumed it was because I recently updated my blog to WP 2.8, and although I was kicking myself for upgrading, there wasn’t much I could do. After a couple of weeks, I was faced with other random problems, and it began to get more than annoying.

After my designer was unable to access the admin panel of my blog, and I couldn’t even access it unless I was on my personal laptop, I began to worry. What if my laptop suddenly lost access, too, and I was blocked from my own blog. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I was lucky to have the help of Kevin Leto, who taught me a trick.

While I had assumed my problems stemmed from a faulty Wordpress upgrade, Kevin wasn’t convinced. He had me go into the appearance section of the Wordpress dashboard and select the default theme temporarily. Once I did so, all of the problems disappeared, allowing him to determine that the fault was in my current theme coding rather than Wordpress.

Once Kevin isolated the problem, he was able to search through my files to find a really small error that was throwing off a lot of back-end functionality and he quickly rectified the error.

If you use Wordpress and encounter problems and errors, switch it to the default theme and try to replicate your errors. If the errors disappear, the problem is in your theme – not in Wordpress.