Some of these chores might be:

• Renewing domain registrations
• Renewing hosting
• Patching server software
• Patching and upgrading any site software such as forum scripts, CMS’s etc
• Updating third party code such as invocation code for ad servers, or analytics snippets
• Updating contact details, about us pages, copyright dates etc

All this is before you even think about writing fresh content, adding new functionality or doing SEO or SEM.

One of the biggest swings in perception I now have is that any change no matter how small, has some kind of time commitment. For example if you’re running a single site and need to update your robots.txt and ftp it to the server it might take 2 minutes. In the past this kind of time I never consiously thought about (after all if you’re explaining what you’ve done in a day, telling people it’s taken you 1 minute to correct a typo seems inconsequential).

Lets take that robots.txt example again. If I had to update and ftp a robots.txt file to every Inter Site across the Network at 2 minutes a site, that would take 100o minutes (just over 16 1/2 hours). That’s two whole working days for some people, even if we ignore the time taken out of the day to check mail, make a cuppa, or the toilet breaks all those cuppa’s require! In reality it’s probably more like three days.

Now when I look at a 1 minute change I see it as a whole day’s work, and a 5 minute change takes a week. Think about that next time you update your wordpress software, or change the copyright date on your blog at the beginning of the new year!

If you’re running large numbers of sites automation is your friend, and without it all progress can quickly disappear into an endless series of updates, tweaks, changes and fixes. Some of ways we minimise extra manual work is through:

• Standardising everything we can, such as: themes, plugines, script versions on each site
• Documenting previous update sequences for re-use in the future
• Running multiple sites of a single CMS codebase
• Outsourcing everything non-core
• Extensive shell scripting for common tasks, such as backups, software updates, new site installations etc

These are just a few examples and I’ll come back and talk in more depth on any of these people are interested in, in future posts. As always, leave a post if you want more info.