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Using WordPress and Woo Commerce to Drop Ship

I have started a business and it involves Drop Shipping. Drop Shipping is where a customer buys an item from me, and then I order said item from a drop shipping supplier and ship it to the customer. Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it. Well there are already a ton a companies that are doing this, so getting into it late into the game is what makes it hard. I am not going to get into the product I am selling at the moment, I am going to start with why I choose WordPress and Woo Commerce to start my adventure.

It came down to one thing, money. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on trying this venture and having it failing. The only money that I had to put into this was for the domain name, and that came to $15 dollars. I already have hosting, thanks to dreamhost. With dreamhost I can host as many domains as I want to. I currently host five domains, none of which do anything of any nature. They also allow Let’s Encrypt’ion, for the domains hosted on my account. I don’t need to pay any monthly fees on the encryption. The Let’s Encrypt SSL is required for accepting Credit Cards from Stripe, which leads to. The Woo Commerce shopping cart plugin is also free, and has a plugin for accepting credit cards though stripe. Which handles the emailing of the people, the product inventory, etc etc.

So all in all, my initial investment into Drop Shipping is going to cost me $15, and that is just for the domain.

Now you might think, well yes you already have the web host to do this yourself. Well If you don’t have that, you can sign up for a years service at dreamhost for $119.40. Which isn’t too bad of an investment either. If you want to get into drop shipping, having multiple stores is where it is at. And hopefully your first few sales will pay for the hosting itself. They have other plans at $11 bucks a month which is also a good starter field.

Let me know your comments on this below, I want to get much more into detail about this as I go along.

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My kids daily napping schedule

I am going to post more kids centric stuff every once and awhile. It is my life now so It is important for me. My kids, both 1.5 years old now and I am the stay at home dad, my life revolves around my kids. I don’t feel that is important for them to get a nap in when we are busy out doing things. But when we are home and I have things to do, It is important for me for them to get some naps in. We have two revolving nap schedules at the moment. They are pretty much the same except that I rotate the afternoon nap. Let me just tell you the two napping schedules.

8:00 Breakfast
10:00 Nap (depending on if we are home)
12:00 Lunch
2:00 – 4:00 Nap
4:00 Snack
7:00 Dinner

The above nap is for going out in the mornings. With this schedule we will go to the doctors, the museum, hiking, or just shopping in the morning. This isn’t my favorite nap schedule, but it is nice for me to have lunch in peace at home. During the summer time it can get a bit hot during this nap time and I don’t like to do anything. I am not much of a morning person, but force myself to get going. This is supposedly a better napping schedule for your kids to go to bed sooner.

8:00 Breakfast
10:00 Nap
12:00 Lunch
3:30 Snack
4:00 – 6:00 Nap
7:00 Dinner

This is my favorite nap schedule and I can get a lot done during this time. We have lunch together and then we go out shopping right after. This is good for afternoon shopping when there isn’t very many people out to worry about. I like to get my grocery shopping done during this time right after lunch. I am more of an afternoon person. Right after the 6pm nap we will go straight to the park and run around like crazy. Even though there naps and sleeping are so close to each other, my kids don’t have a real problem with sleeping the night.

During the week we will switch between these two different napping schedules a lot. If a nap doesn’t work I will just try again 30 minutes later. Maybe it was something that I did that made them upset and I try to notice that and do better the next time. We don’t allow toys in the bed and they understand that, and will most of the time drop the toy because it is nap time. And nap time stuff stays in the crib (blanket, pacifier).

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Places in Los Angeles where double strollers are not allowed

I have two wonderful babies and I love taking them places. I have to use a double stroller when I take them anywhere. They are only one and a half years old, so they are not so good at walking (totally there fault). I go everywhere with them, it is just me taking care of them during the day time. And we don’t like to be stuck at home, so we visit friend, visit galleries, go hiking, anywhere that we can go in Los Angeles.

Up until recently I didn’t even fathom, places don’t like double strollers. Maybe people aren’t very good at driving double strollers, or the aisle aren’t setup for wheelchair access. Which a few stores the aisles are so small I can’t go down them in the stroller. I can sort of stroll into the store look around, see I can’t fit anywhere down the aisles and then walk out. Yesterday it was a slow day at LACMA and I don’t get to go into the store because usually it is pretty busy. But Yesterday, there was nobody in the store and I thought that it was a perfect time to go in because of that. I walk in and the store clerk asks me if I would be able to put my stroller to the left and walk the babies around the store. I asked if she would help me carry the babies around the store while I look around and she replied, Well if you really want me too. I responded with, I don’t trust you very much and walk out the store.

So here is a list of places in Los Angeles where double strollers are not allowed:
LACMA Gift Store
Huntington Art Gallery (I went one day when I was the only person there not working, and they let me take the double stroller in. But when it is busy they won’t be so nice.)

Of course this won’t last, as my babies will be able to walk themselves. It is just annoying.

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Feed Diet

I don’t know how to find out how many feed I follow, and I don’t really want to know the truth. But today I am starting a feed diet. I am a news addict and this i one way to reduce the time spent looking at my feeds. There is a few that I don’t even read, or have probably never read, but I at times I found it too hard to unsubscribe to them. In the new netnewswire I can just click on the feed article to unsubscribe from the feed (GENIUS). I am going to document a few that I am unsubscribing from and a little reason as to why.

Cult of Mac – They don’t show the full posts in the feed. I only really subscribe for the mac chick of the month, who I haven’t cared for some time anyways.
Hypbot – It was interesting to read about how artists should promote themselves and I have learned quite a bit, but I am no longer in that business.
Neatorama – They just steal content from others sites who I follow. I will not miss anything here as it will be duplicate content.
GigaOM – Too business for me.
Fatlace – I love looking at the car pictures once a year, but it is just too much for me all the time.
slashgear – I don’t know why i signed up for this site.
Fubiz – The posts are great and beautiful, but I never look at them.
Achthung baby – I used to like the music posts, but I haven’t listened to one in quite a while.
WSJ.com: Speakeasy – Copy and pasted the title, I have never opened a link from them.
Techcrunch – Hacker news will post something that I am interested in from there.
Ars Technica – Same as above.
Geekolinks – They just steal content.
ProBlogger – I don’t care enough about being a pro blogger
Dajaz1 – I don’t liten to the music that they post as much as I should
A List Apart – I don’t need to understand what the web is about

Thats it for today. A lot of these post too much and some maybe post once a day. So this will help my feed diet. I will do this again this week to bring my feed count even lower.