Am I covered?

If you have seen one of those lists of 'things to do before you're thirty' or 'things to do before you die...' then you will no doubt have considered some of the more risky ventures proposed in those lists. Maybe you are hankering for a bungee jump or want to have a go at sky-diving?
If you've discussed it with colleagues or friends I bet somebody has piped up 'your insurance won't cover you for that!'.
On a more serious note, some medical conditions can make it very difficult to get insurance cover, and in these circumstances you may have to consider the benefits of high risk life insurance. after all, you can get insurance for more or less any circumstances, it's just that it may be more costly and you may have to shop around a bit to get the best deal...

Bedfordshire Uni Clearing 2008

It’s clearing time again, and a last chance to be considering a course in this coming school year. Once again the University of Bedfordshire will be recruiting via the clearing process from 14th August to the middle of September 2008. The University is rated highly for its’ Sports and Media courses which are proving increasingly popular, but is diverse enough to be very well regarded for its’ courses in Journalism, Law and Business. Over the last few years a lot of investment has gone into the university facilities to make the University of Bedfordshire one of the leading educational institutions in the area.
If you are thinking of taking a course, why not give them a ring on their free-phone number and take it from there…

University of Bedfordshire - Clearing 2008 on 0800 013 0925

Mozilla Email client

One of the things that I needed to do when I was trying to recover my online life after the failure of my main PC was to retrieve my emails with POP3 access as opposed to internet emails. I set up some accounts using MS Outlook Express, but for my online income mail I tend to use MS Outlook too.
It was easy enough to recover connection details (although I couldn't recover addresses or the mail archive) for Outlook Express and was up and running in no time. The version of Outlook that I had on my spare PC though was sufficiently different to my current version for me to end up in a frustrating loop whilst trying to set it up. So I took the step of deciding to dump Outlook and try out Mozilla Thunderbird.
Thunderbird turned out to be easy to download and set up and packed with some great features including automatic detection of junk mail. It looks and feels very much like the Outlook software and many of the features and set up are shared. I didn't get a chance to try email rules (which I like to use for spam), but am sure that Thunderbird functionality is at least as good as the Outlook family - and it is of course, completely free!
So Firefox and Thunderbird, two great pieces of free software but where do they get the names? Something from nature combined with an animal: Fire-Fox, Thunder-Bird what other names could Mozilla utilise - how about Mozilla WaterFrog or Mozilla TyphoonBat? Sure beats 'outlook' and 'internet explorer' for imaginative naming anyhow...
Of course Linux users will have been using this software for a long time, and there are more email programs out there that are probably worth mentioning, but if you use Windows in some form the chances are that you will be using the default MS software. I am here to say that there are good reasons to step outside the box and consider other software providers. Next to MS, Mozilla are probably one of the prime most-trusted software providers and all their software is free. If you take the plunge you may be surprised at how good this software is - and if you think MS software is free (because it was pre-loaded onto your PC) just take a look at the price of MS software disks in your local computer shop...

Why Acne?

Acne is a subject that most people are aware of without any in-depth knowledge. For instance, we usually associate acne with teenagers going through puberty, but it can have an effect in later life too.
The basic cause is blockage of the follicles and can be seen primarily on the face, the back, chest and upper arms. Why it is that some people are affected more than others is not clear but could be linked to genetic makeup, stress, ingested medication (including steroids) and factors affecting hormonal activity.

What every man wants...

Call it mid-life crisis if you like, but what man doesn’t get to the stage where he thinks ‘Hmmm a Harley….I could probably afford one of those now…’.
That of course is the sentiment of a white-collar worker, a blue-collar worker may already have an almost-assembled Electra Glide in his garage which has been there for a decade already and has just needed those one or two all-important Harley parts for most of that duration. In many cases your white collar worker will move on and end up with a motor home instead, and the blue collar half-built Harley in the garage will probably end up on eBay someday. the few however, could end up like the guy in the picture...
Such is the stuff of dreams and romance for your average man entering the middle age.

My PC adventures

I am pleased to report the the PC that I created from old parts and a £10 motherboard from eBay has been working perfectly (if not a little slowly) whilst my main PC has been at the menders...
I got a call from the computer shop to say that he had a spare mobo with CPU and RAM left over from a recent upgrade (ironic because the 'old' kit left over from the upgrade was actually better than my original one..). He fitted the new mobo and got it all running for a grand total of £50 which I am more than pleased with.
I have three new 512MB SDRAM chips coming from eBay to add the final touches to my spare PC and I am considering putting another GB of RAM onto my recently refurbished main machine. I was mightily relieved to find that we didn't need to reload the Operating system and all my programs and data are intact..but the lesson is learned and I was glad of the trial run at recovering my online 'life' after a major PC crash. One thing I discovered is that certain parts of my backup system had not been working properly, so that has been all put to rights now. I can certainly see the value of having a 'spare' PC and keeping it up to date in case the same type of thing happens again, and you don't need to spend much to acheive this. Another discovery is that actually computers are not as scary to fix as you might think, and OK we are not getting down to component-level here, but when you consider that parts that make up the whole, ths system is relatively simple to grasp.
Maybe I will start building that dual-core machine...the only thing that stops me is that it is so damn cheap to buy on off the shelf anyway at todays prices.

Moving on from text-speak..

The latest dNeero survey introduces the idea of using images to convey a meaning for those that find typical internet abbreviations or text-speak a bit of a turn off.
The 'talk it up' survey involves a new website that allows you to create visual messages online and then send them to your freinds. Is this the type of service you would enjoy using, are you fed up with text-speak... Well RU ??
Have your say by joining in the conversation and being compensated for your trouble...

Formula one push chairs

The culture around children has changed out of all recognition in the last few decades whether it be as targets for the lastest games and gadgets (PSP, Wii, X-Box etc...) or the amount of effort that now goes into producing some thing like the Maclaren stroller. The equipment that your child wears or travels in is now under scrutiny for development in terms of state-of-the-art materials, technology and most of all...fashion.
In years gone by, the teenager emerged as a target for producers to create products such as the Sony Walkman. In more recent times, this target has widened to include Nike trainers for those that can't yet walk... As with everything, there are upsides and downsides. On the downside is the proportion of our diminishing disposable income that is now ring-fenced by toddler-funding. On the upside is that push-chairs riddled with carbon-fibre and proper tyres with air in them are quite pleasant to use.

A bit fishy....

Well everyone has to have a hobby, and if you take your hobby seriously, you will spend time and money in the pursuit of it. Combining a hobby with a pet or pets is a neat way to have a hobby with added interest. If that involves an aquarium, then it's guaranteed that this is a pursuit that will keep you happy at home, apart from those frequent trips to the aquarium store.
In fact there is a lot of technology involved in keeping a good quarium going, and my preference is to consume rather than observe sea-creatures. However I can see the attraction of maintaining the best conditions to keep those beatiful tropical fish healthy and happy. There is the cleaning and the aeration of the tank to consider, the lighting and heating too. It's not just a case of whether to go for the sunken galleon or the figureine of King Canute resting on the bottom of the aquarium.
I prefer the great outdoors myself and would plump for a dog rather then a home-bound pet, but then you have to spend a lot of time exercising a dog, so the fish are starting to look more attractive.

Budget Software

No, not a post about cheap programs, but a post about budgeting software. In the days of tightening finances, we need all the help we can to run a tight financial ship. It's not just our personal budgetting that we will need to be creative with, businesses that don't budget will not survive the coming recession.
The current financial crisis will result in less spending which means that the businesses that survive will be those offering the best value for money whilst still being able to make a healthy profit. Businesses that have got fat and lazy in past years will find themselves squeezed out of the market. Sharpen your pencils if you want to be trading in two years time...

Ups and downs

I have had one of those 'good news..bad news' weeks this week:

Good News.. I reached payout from Google Adsense for the third time this year and am already three-quarters of the way towards my next payout.
Bad News.. I lifted something far too heavy at work and have suffered chronic pack pain all week.

Good News.. I successfully fitted a 'previously enjoyed' Motherboard and CPU to an old PC, upgrading (just a little project really) from a 300mHz P2 to a 533Mhz Celeron to use as my 'spare'.
Bad News.. I managed to 'blow' the Motherboard on my main PC when fiddling with the RAM. So now I am using my spare as my main PC while it is getting fixed by someone who knows what they are doing!!

Not such a bad week when considering that I will have had a welcome cash injection (even if I have to pay it all out on a new MOBO..), and my back is getting better. Overall Adsense performance seems good at the moment with one of my blogs in particular getting some good PPC results (Hey you CAN make Adsense on a blog!!).
I am also happy that the PC upgrading project went OK, I have not exactly brought my old PC into the 21st Century, but I have brought it through from 1995 to about 1998, and the MOBO only cost me £10 ($20) on eBay including postage... Maybe I will attempt a dual core next time!

Looking for another dollar...

Since paid blogging is getting harder and Adsense doesn't really bring home very much bacon, other avenues for earning cash via the internet will no doubt become popular.
Maybe you will be tempted into Forex or and futures trading but these particular routes involve an element of financial risk which does not appeal to me. My views on risk investment is that you should only get involved if you are using money that you can afford to lose, and that definitely isn't me!
That said, the current financial crisis will prove to be a big earner for some lucky investors, and if you gauge the market right, you could end up profiting from the credit crunch.

July 2008

My blogging earnings for July have been $147 raised from a variety of sources including PPP, PayU2Blog, Creamaid and Adsense. My Adsense earnings have been building nicely, I think last time I got paid, there was already about $30 in the pot towards my next payout - this time there will be $70 already in the pot so I am hoping to get paid out much quicker this time. I should point out of course that the majority of my Adsense earnings comes from sources other than blogs... although my newer blogs have contributed recently.
I also get payouts from fixed adverts which raise around another $50 per month, and the occassional privately requested advert/text link which sometimes brings in an extra $40 or $50. I have been impressed this month with the amount of traffic that it is possible to drum up via StumbleUpon, and next month I am going to try another method of raising traffic levels and generally pursue some networking ideas to build up 'readership' of my various blogs.

PC update

My 'one-step-at-a-time' approach to PC maintenance has proved quite successful so far and I am installing Windows onto my newly 'created' PC today. I still have some extra RAM and a spare hard-drive coming from eBay auctions next week, bringing my total expenditure on this project to about £50/$100. This is not the first time I have embarked on this type of project, and am happy to say that without the cost-cutting advantage that eBay offers, there is no way that I would even attempt this type of PC customisation..
There is still the chance that this project could fall flat on it's face, but the fact that I may get a perfectly workable PC that will probably be twice as quick as it's previous incarnation, is worth the £50 spent even if I end up just learning a lot more from the experience and end up dumping the PC.

Strange brew

The world seems full of potions and medications and treatments to correct defects caused mostly by our unhealthy society. Along with the myriad diet plans, come the fat burner, the anti-aging cream and the little blue pill...
It is as if we can fix every little quirk with some treatment or other. You can even get a cream for if you have dry skin around the heel of your foot (as if it mattered..). I have noticed that the market has turned it's attention to men in the last few years. In my book real men couldn't care less about wrinkles and grey hair, but it's clear from the advertising that I have got it all wrong.
I'm not even concerned about wrinkles openly displayed by the fairer sex and am frankly more disconcerted when confronted with those elderly women who appear to have a face made from extra taut cling-film with a trout pout stuck on top.
I digress..... the market (especially the internet) is awash with tablets and powders, potions and creams, would it be too revolutionary to say 'lets eat properly and do some exercise'?

TV Lifts

The sheer size of the modern TV means that you have to put some real thought into how you are going to mount the thing in whichever room you intend to view it. The modern TV doesn't just sit in the corner of the room any more, it is often the centerpiece of the room, mounted impressively as the main feature. This is when you might start to consider tv lifts and dedicated furniture and fittings specifically designed to integrate your new modern flat screen HDTV into your living area.

Messin' with computers

I have reported before that I have 're-invested' my online earnings into extra bits and bobs for my PC. I have almost (but not quite) optimised my current PC - the last thing I had to buy was a new power supply to cope with the extra drives (internal 320GB, external 250GB, external DVD-RW and internal DVD-RW...). It only remains for me to replace one of the RAM boards to take it from 1.5GB to 2.0...
So, while I am waiting for SDRAM to get cheaper, my attention has been turned to my old 'spare' PC - we all have one right? The truth is we spent so much cash buying these PC's 10 years ago that we can't face throwing them out even though they are useless...
This PC has been a bit of a playground for my forays into PC ‘frankenstein’ation in the past and sports a 20GB drive alongside the original 8GB (that was huge 10 years ago!!) and has the maximum RAM that it can stand (128MB x 3). I found out long ago that the motherboard cannot easily take a more modern CPU, and recent weeks it has become apparent that buying a new mobo (recently learned this slang for motherboard!) CPU, RAM and power supply would almost cost as much as buying a new PC. For a short while this put me off until I started browsing for Motherboards on Ebay and bagged one for £10 including delivery ($20). This is not exactly a dual core model, but it is about twice as fast as my old CPU and can take 1.5GB RAM, so I am expecting some improvement in performance if I can ever get it working. And this is the point of the post (finally)... Have you noticed how every time you decide to carry out maintenance on your PC it takes at least three days longer than you thought it would. You will be familiar with this if you ever tried to set up a wired network....
So far I have taken the whole PC to bits - the first thing I had to do was build a bench out of bits in my workshop so I could assemble all the components outside of the PC casing. Naturally the first few times I fired it up nothing happened, but once I found out where the 'on' switch was on the mobo (sticking a screw-driver across the correct pins works like a dream..). I was fortunate to find a manual for free on the 'net for the board I bought, and I have enough spares (screen, mouse, keyboard and about half a dozen CD drives...) to make up a complete system.
There are always contingencies that you don't allow for and so far these have run to: Having to 'reset' the mobo (instructions found in the manual) to default settings, the original hard-drive has decided not to work, and for some reason I can't get the CDROM to boot even though I have selected it in the BIOS and saved the setting.
So far I am adopting the method of making one considered change per day and then thinking long and hard before making the next change - hopefully, this will mean that I will make better decisions than when I sit down and try and do the whole thing in one go. Yesterday I fitted a spare hard-drive and was pleased to see that it was at least recognised in the BIOS settings, today I will try another CD drive to se if I can boot from that one. Admittedly, this approach would not work if I was maintaining my 'main' PC, but I find this method of working relatively stress-free. I have already started bidding on another hard-drive, so I will HAVE to get the system working somehow....

The Housing Market

There is no argument that the housing market is depressed at the moment. UK house prices are dropping, but in the US the problem is even more pronounced. If you are trying to sell a house at the moment, you will have to both offer it at a reasonable price and make sure that the décor is right. Although house prices are not yet plummeting in the UK, it is becoming harder to get a mortgage, and there are less buyers meaning that it takes longer to sell.
As far as décor goes, there are two areas in the house that must be right, the kitchen and the bathroom, this means having the right fittings, or kitchen faucets if you are in the US.
The look must be clean and fresh if you want to create the right impression to sell your house. Keep everything neutral and classy and although you may not get top dollar, you will sell your property faster than the next person…

Munny for Nuthin'

I have embarked on the final leg of paying off my credit-card debt this week. My method for paying off my debt (as I have documented on this blog previously) has been firstly to STOP SPENDING, and secondly to transfer my credit-card debt to a '0% for balance transfers' credit card.
Now these offers usually last for around 12 months, so if you have more debt than you can pay of within 12 months, you may have to do the same again. Bear in mind that a small charge (usually about 3%) is charged for the transfer, apart from that every penny you pay comes straight off your debt - no interest!!
I have done this twice already over two years and I have just opened my third account this week, with a view to paying off ALL the debt within the next 12 months. I will admit that I use a different card for emergency purchases, but pay this off every month.
It pays to ensure you close down accounts that are no longer in use otherwise you may find that you are potentially exposed to too much credit for you to obtain another card. I got refused when I first tried to get one of these cards, and when I got my credit report, I found that I have five or six unused but still open accounts. These accounts all had large credit limits meaning that potentially I could run up a massive debt overnight, under those circumstances it would not have been wise for the credit card provider to allow me to open another account. I closed the unused accounts and have closed off any of the new 0% accounts as soon as I no longer require them. The graph on the left shows the decline in my debt over the last two years, you can read more about it here..

Exercise or diet pills?

Whether you believe in diet pills that work or the value of exercise, the Summer months always carry more incentives for getting fit.
Lighter nights are conducive to playing sports in the evening, and looking good on the beach is incentive enough for most… There are supposedly numerous ways to perfect your physique, even using muscle toning devices that require no work, but for me exercise is by far the better way – after all good exercise works out your lungs and heart, not just your muscles.

Nostalgia in a watch

In days gone by, a pocket watch would be given as a leaving present or a long-service award. It might surprise you to learn that pocket watches are still popular and available today.
The pocket watch symbolises a bygone age when trains ran on time (or is that wishful thinking) and you could get a doctor to do a house visit. From the White Rabbit in 'Alice through the looking glass' to the legendary 'railroad watches' second only in quality to a chronometer, the pocket watch has earned it's place in history.

Google Widgets

These are, in my humble opinion, one of the coolest things that Google offer. I was bowled over by them when I first came across them, and still love them today... I use a game widget at the bottom of my blog template, currently I am using 'bejeweled', previously I have used 'pacman' and 'invaders' - for some visitors, this is the most interesting thing on my blog...!
There are more widgets than you can shake a stick at covering all sorts of subjects and applications, and they are FREEEE for you to include in your blog or website, there are even versions that you can have on your desktop.
Check out the website gadgets here...
and the desktop ones here
Google are far and away the best providers of free software on the internet, even when you consider all the Linux applications and Mozilla software. What other provider gives you these plus a free blogging platform, free email and the best search engine in the business? (and that from a blogger with his PageRank removed...).

Financial Health

With the credit crunch beginning to impact on the Western world, now is the time to get ourselves into a financially healthy state. I see the current crisis as a good time to pay off debts and look at outgoings to see where savings can be made. Amongst the options one might consider are debt consolidation loans, 0% interest credit cards and some tough budgeting. The change has to start as a shift in our attitudes before the practical steps can be put in place.
I reckon that we are going to experience an economic slow-down at least in some industries, which will last two years so the sooner we start to think about our finances the better off we will ultimately be.

Does StumbleUpon work?

I have to say a resounding 'Yes' to that question, but this needs to be qualified by describing exactly what works and in what way.
I have previously stuck doggedly to 'Digg' as my preferred method of promoting blog posts, but have found StumbleUpon to be vastly superior in terms of vloume of traffic generated. Some blogs that I have that would normally get traffic that you can count on one hand, have had traffic rocket up into the hundreds overnight, but whilst this is nice to see - what value is it?
Certainly I have not seen a massive generation of income from this traffic, but nonetheless traffic has to be regarded as good and demonstrates that what you are writing at least captures the imagination of somebody somewhere. Also I have not as yet seen a huge increase in RSS feed reader subscriptions so maybe my blogs do not capture the imagination quite to the right degree...
Nevertheless the proof is in the pudding, and I have seen that immediately after submitting stories to StumbleUpon, traffic has been instantly generated. The fact remains that if I can write some posts that really capture the imagination, I could also increase RSS subscriptions and not have to work so hard promoting the blogs... So far, I have seen traffic fade away very quickly to almost back to the starting point 24 hours later, now I have found a means to effectively generate traffic, I need to devlop the skills to retain it.

Medical Information

The combination of medical research and the openness and vastness of the internet has led to a new way of life for many people. If I need to visit a doctor, I will often ‘google’ for my symptoms or whatever I think is wrong before going so that I know the right questions to ask. I would not recommend relying totally on the internet for answers to all medical problems, but the resource is impressive if you know how to use it.
You can read useful articles on mesothelioma if you know of someone affected by asbestos. Or for example, most recently I read an article about tinnitus which helped me enormously. I find that it always helps to listen to your doctor carefully and having an insight into your ailment before you visit helps to provide you with the right questions to ask and some useful back-ground information. If you are concerned, it is always a good idea to visit the doctor with a friend or relative. Having a second person present means that you can ask them what the doctor said as often we can miss important information, especially when we are worried.

A room for the Summer

I often tell people that the best room in our house is our garden, even now at least half the house has actually been decorated, I would still maintain that it remains the most pleasant place to entertain.

Just as you require a sofa, chairs and a table inside your house, if you entertain out of doors, you will require at least some elements of outdoor furniture. For most people that is going to include a decent parasol, plenty of chairs and a big table. In recent years it has been so hot on our patio, that we have bought a gazebo to try to shelter from the sun’s rays.

That in itself is an important point – whereas it use to be normal to try to get tanned to a crisp, we are far more conscious of the damaging effects of the sun nowadays, and having a good supply of factor whatever is essential. Which reminds me, I read recently that many of the sun creams marked as high resistance apparently don’t live up to their factor rating in independent tests, so make sure you read up on your sun-creams…. And let’s live in hope of a Summer in the UK at some point.

Colorpic free software

I like to highlight free software that I have found useful, and this little tool has proved invaluable lately when I am trying to match up colours to keep a consistent look across a website or blog.

Colorpic can identify the hexadecimal code attributed to any colour(color) that your mouse points to. This is particularly useful when you want to match up a widget colour with your already existing header image or some other element on your blog. Equally useful for a website, and becoming increasingly important to me lately as I seem to be creating widgets left, right and centre and it really helps if you can colour-code all the elements of your site to give a great over-all effect.

Colorpic is available from ICONICO as a totally free download - ColorPic runs on all Windows systems: 95/98/NT/2000/Me/XP, it's only 501K.

Adequate Insurance

Insurance is a necessary evil, no-one likes paying for it, but then who wants to be caught without adequate insurance?
Whether it be budget car insurance, low cost life insurance, or cheap holiday insurance it pays to get a good deal, but it also is vital to get insurance that will meet the circumstances that are likely to occur. Inadequate insurance is a waste of money and you would be better off not paying for insurance that is not going to meet your needs.

Latest Earnings

I was very lax with May's earnings report, and still a little tardy doing one for June, nonetheless the figures are in and are showing a general slow-down in paid to blog as expected. A little from PPP - there are still opps if you can get in quick enough....but I usually can't.
PayU2Blog is the main source of revenue for this type of earnings for me currently, but ideally I would like to be making enough passive earnings not to have to make forays into the paid to blog world...
I have made just about $80 in June from blogs, though I think I may have forgotten to include Adsense earnings, normally these are insignificant in terms of blog earnings, but lately I have been showing some results from niche blogs although nothing to get excited about. On the subject of Adsense I am on the verge of a third payout since December which I am pleased with, though hasten to repeat that very little of these earnings come from blogs.
I now have two blogs approved for PPP, and have added a new (90 day old) blog to my 'sponsored reviews' profile, one more blog is sitting in the wings awaiting the magic 90 day mark which should give me two strong niches for paid posts, but gaining PR will be an uphill struggle... and gaining PR is a key to being able to monetise any site and particularly a blog.

TV revolution

The tv is becoming one of the battlegrounds for the coming technological revolution, this and the 'phone and the internet. The newest innovations in the home will seek more and more to combine products which we have previously thought of as separate.
Why not combine your high-definition television with your Hi-Fi since they have some audio components in common?
Why not combine the television with internet surfing and other PC tasks since they share a common visual interface?
Why not combine your broadband connection with your phone or mobile phone and interactive television since they all require access to the telephone network?
Where will this all end? probably with something like the new media centres coming onto the market which will combine storage of digital audio and video with cable and satellite TV. It would be relatively simple to include a PC package and wireless network between the components and the future is virtually here...

Detox for weight loss?

There are more weight-loss remedies than you can shake a stick at lately, each one claiming to work in different ways.
The argument used by Orovo detox is that much of our weight-gain is due to toxic build-up and therefore an effective detox can help to lose weight. Like many treatments Orovo was discovered by mistake during research into methods of reducing aging symptoms.

Stumbled upon an SEO website

I have been getting into 'Stumble upon' lately and my findings will no doubt emerge in a later post, but today I stumbled upon a site worth reviewing. The site has been put together by Stephen an SEO expert who uses the motto 'SEO is a flair not a science - science always gets the same results!'.
The more I thought about that, the more it rang true. There are those who say that you can get SERP through following a set number of steps or will guarantee first position in Google search, but really SEO doesn't work like that.
The Google search hysteresis that determines your search engine results position for a given keyword or phrase is not written in stone like physics, it is subject to trends like fashion. What worked even 5 minutes ago may not work again... SEO has to be viewed as something fluid not rigid, almost having a life of it's own an existence fueled by Google geeks and shady back-office characters.
Not only does Stephen offer advice, often free on SEO, he raises money for cancer research in his spare time through charity races. He tells me he has raised £8,000 (that's $15,000) so far this year, and is planning to run at least 25 miles a week to reach a 1,000 mile target.

Moving

Everyone knows that moving home is one of the most stressful things you can do – complete upheaval of all you own, your family, pets and belongings, all moved from one district to another or even to another country. In this current economic climate most people will probably beholding onto their property if given the choice, but what about when relocation is not a choice. The solution is to get a team of professional movers, people who know what they’re doing. If you plan to move to NY, then you should be 'Googling' for mover NYC to find a trustworthy team of movers.

Adsense referrals programme to 'retire'

I received an important announcement from Adsense today regarding the 'Adsense referral' programme being terminated, or in their language 'retired'. I have two conflicting views about this:
Firstly I am disappointed because I like the referral scheme, it allows you to select specific graphical adverts in specific niches, you can select the adverts that look right for your website as some adverts have a number of different graphic blocks of varying sizes.
On the other hand, I've had a total of $1 from this programme in around 18 months, so it is not the best of earners for me....
I should probably have tweaked these a bit more than I have to find the best earners, it just remains for me to track these ads down and purge them from my sites... here is the text of the message from Google adsense:

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals programme. We
will be retiring the AdSense Referrals programme during the last
week of August. After that time, AdSense Referrals code will no
longer display ads.

If you currently use referrals, either to promote Google products
or offerings from AdWords advertisers, we encourage that you take
the following steps before the product is retired:

* Remove all referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so that you can continue to effectively monetise
your ad space.
* Replace your referral ads with AdSense for content ads: If
you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page,
we recommend replacing referral ad units with standard AFC ad
units. This will minimise the risk of decreased AdSense earnings
when the Referrals programme is retired.
* Run and save all referrals reports to your desktop: All
Referrals reports will no longer be available at the end of
October.

We appreciate your patience during this transition. If you have
additional questions, please visit
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882.
Thank you for your support of AdSense Referrals.

Yours sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

PageRank explained?

Each time I do about about Google and/or PageRank, I feel as though I have not gone into enough depth. I cannot gauge how much or how little a reader might already know, and it seems to me, with the confusion surrounding these two mystical entities, that some background might be helpful...
Pagerank was originally developed at Stanford University by Larry Page later aided by Sergey Brin. Most people think (myself included) on first hearing the term, that the 'page' part of it refers to a web page whereas in fact this refers to it's originator.
The concept behind pagerank is to predict the likelihood of a random click on an internet link finding a specific URL. This is determined by the amount of links pointing to the specific URL, and also the perceived 'quality' of that link. The point of the exercise was to develop a search engine, and Google emerged from this project in 1998.
Pagerank 'compares' pages on the worldwide web, so ranking is always relative, rather than absolute, ranking is dynamic changing each time new pages are added to the web or new links are added to pages.
Via search 'bots' (small programs 'sent' out to crawl the web), a link can be examined and the originator page of that link is also assessed. If the originator page is weighted under the Pagerank system, the page it points to benefits from that weighting. All links are taken into account and a value is eventually assigned between 0 and 10. The hysteresis used for this weighting is always a closely guarded secret, and the precise calculation is always subject to 'tweaking' as new trends come and go.
In order for a page to receive a ranking, it must at least be linked to another page that is already visited by the 'bots' otherwise they will never 'find' it...Hence the quickest way to get a rank is not to submit your site to Google, but simply get a link from another page (preferably one that is visted frequently). The most popular and frequently updated sites are re-visited by these web crawlers several times a day, more static sites may not get a visit for weeks...
The last point I want to address is that YES Google uses PageRank to ascertain a SERP (Search engine results position) for given search keywords, but this is only one of a number of factors taken into account. This means that it is still possible for low Pageranked sites to get high search positions for their niche keywords.
I hope I have turned some fresh ground here, I am aiming NOT to be too repetitive, but feel free to leave a comment if you think I bang on too much about Google...

More Memory

Wouldn't it be great if we could upgrade our brain memory and processor speed the same way that we can with a PC or laptop? Some time ago I went through the process of upgrading my PC with the proceeds of my internet earnings. I am currently looking to buy a new power supply now as the old one doesn't appear to be able to cope with all my upgrades(!!).
There is no doubt that you can seriously enhance your computer by adding in some upgrades here and there, though admittedly there is more you can do with a PC, you can also get laptop memory or a larger hard-disk to help your laptop to keep up with newer models.
The desktop offers better opportunities for upgrading, I even had to have a new motherboard at one point, in fact I don't suppose there's much of the original PC left at all now!

Firefox 3

Well I have been using this for about a week or so now and can happily report that Firefox 3 appears to live up to it's hype. I am sure that there are thousands of tweeks and tricks that I could use, but I am not one to spend hours customising a browser...
The hype was that it would be faster than the previous version, which from experience I would say is probably right. Certainly some sites now seem to load up far quicker than previously. It is also supposed to be more secure, but seeing as I have very few problems with Firefox 2 security, I am not the best user to make a judgment.
What I have noticed is that there is a nice fresh modern look to the new browser, there are new icons and I have noticed some enhanced features when it comes to displaying favicons - I notice that sites like 'Paypal' have added their name to the favicon which I think looks quite good.
I am a big fan of Firefox and the new version does not have me hankering after the previous version which is always a plus..

Short-term borrowing

Short-term borrowing can be expensive, but payday loans say that if borrowers pay off their debt before payday, they won’t have to pay any interest.
This sort of borrowing should be thoroughly costed before taking the plunge and should not be considered if you won’t have the means to pay it off quickly. Ensure that you are aware of all the fixed and variable costs.
Most of us would turn to savings or credit cards for emergency cash, but if these are not options open to you and ease of access and speed of processing are your priority, and cost is not so significant then this type of borrowing could be the answer.
All types of borrowing have their advantages and disadvantages, and all can be beneficial, but please also be aware that any kind of debt can become a significant burden.

Audio Racks

I am a self-confessed audio-phile I just love all things audio from Hi-Fi systems, cd players, tape decks, DAT and DAB. I even had a go at building speakers until I realised that they cost more to make than to buy - still satisfaction cannot be purchased...
Audio is still important to me as I run a sideline in turning cassettes into CD's. I am planning (always planning, never doing) to gut my home office and install some nice shelving, some decent office furniture and some audio racks so that I can listen while I work. I have already transferred my entire CD collection to hard disk, so once I link my PC up to my Hi-Fi I won't even have to go and find that elusive CD that I know is around the house somewhere.

Promoting your blog

Always on the lookout for ways to publicise my blog and raise interest in my posts, I discovered Zimbio last week and feel that it could be an interesting way to promote a blog especially in a niche category.
Firstly your register your URL or feed (I used my feed) and all your recent posts are uploaded into your profile. Each posts is listed and you can add your posts to existing 'wikizines' that might exist, or create your own niche wikizines in the hope that others might add content to them. I think the new wikizines do not go 'live' unless others add their content.
All your posts appear in a 'queue' and you can go through ewach one adding them to different exisiting content to publicise them, or deleting ones (paid posts maybe?) that you don't have categories for....
This seems like a great idea to draw readers to your content and also to do networking and easily find blogs within your niche. I think that this is a really well-thought out scheme that offers something useful to every blogger and qualifies as a 'no-brainer' in my book!
Not merely a good idea, but well-presented too in a professional looking site that appears to work really well. It was easy to add content and to attribute it to the right wikizines, and even starting your own wikizines was simplicity itself. I only hope that others pick up on my themes...

Property Market Report

With the property market in a state of flux, it is difficult to know whether there is any profit in domestic property acquisition or commercial real estate. The commercial and domestic property markets seem to move as one, with no real distinction. The buy-to-let market in the UK is a dead duck at the moment, and from what I can tell, the ‘buy-to-renovate’ enthusiasts are having a really hard time producing a profit for all their efforts.
I am convinced however, that property remains a good investment for the long-term, short-term is a very different matter.

Diet pills? me??

I for one am the last person to talk to about diet pills as I seem to be unable to put weight on whatever I eat. I have been the same weight for as long as I can remember and never have to hit the scales, if I do, I am delighted if I happen to be heavier than the last time I looked. I guess not many people can say that…
I eat plenty and all the wrong things, but recently I have tried to make the effort to eat less chocolate (as I can’t really afford to eat as much as I would like to!) and more fruit. I am always looking for something to do and relaxation does not come easily – that’s the down-side of burning off all those calories naturally.

I have been bad...

I have taken my eye off the ball completely through my own fault... I know that I have to try and rationalise my on-line activities to make them more manageable, but what did I do? I had an idea...
I set out with the intention of writing a post about credit cards and the credit crunch. This quickly turned into a 1500 word article which has taken on a life of it's own and miraculously turned into a website called The Credit Cruncher ... Just when I thought I should be pruning back some internet activity, I now have another project to take up my limited time.
The good thing is that I want to make the new site more of a static thing than a conventional blog so there shouldn't be the need for daily posts. In the meantime, I have written little for my other sites so I must make up for it now....
I am behind on all of my other projects to the extent that I haven't even posted about earnings for May 2008 yet...Suffice to say that earnings were reasonable at about $130, Payu2blog being the most profitable paid to blog system, for me at the moment. I am earning with a couple of survey schemes and hope to be able to take some cash earnings out of Dneero surveys soon (payout $20) I will be more diligent at the end of June!

Summer is here

It's time for suncream and ice cream, swimsuits and sunshine, I have already spent three glorious days on the beach this month and am looking forward to more... We have to take the sun whenever we find it in the UK as our Summers can be a little elusive.
I am fortunate in that I am only about fifteen minutes away from the sea, and only about half an hour from the nearest sandy beach, so when the weather beckons I can head on down to the sand dunes... the wonderful thing about the beach is that you aren't supposed to do very much other than lie there and occasionally paddle in the sea or build a sand-castle. Other places that you visit require you to do stuff and walk round looking at things - the seaside offers true relaxation as long as you don't mind real sand in your sandwiches.

Brand Loyalty

The latest dNeero survey is all about brand loyalty. What makes you buy the same brand every time? How loyal are you to the brands that you habitually buy? Are you more loyal to some things than others - take part in the survey and earn a little cash...

The Credit Crunch

Don't panic... the biggest impact of the credit crunch will probably be limited to the select unlucky 'few'. These few will be those that not only slip into negative equity, but also lose the ability to make their mortgage payments. If you think there's a chance of this happening to you then you should talk to a financial advisor or your mortgage lenders.
The knock-on effects however may be more widespread in terms of available credit - more people are being turned down for credit cards, and if possible, I would urge everyone to start to manage any credit card debt that you might have more effectively. If things get really tricky, you may find this debt becoming more of a burden especially in the current climate of rising prices and static wages.

Holiday Season

As the holiday season starts to get into swing, the trend to design and plan your own holiday is growing each year. Of course this is possible simply through the magic of the internet which opens up a world previously dominated by travel agents.
What you can miss when you 'do your own thing' is the expertise and local knowledge that is provided as a matter of course through local agents of the travel company. The internet once again can bridge this gap through the prominence of on-line travel guide and advice. It is important to gather as much information about your destination to make sure that you are not missing out on hidden treasures. Both online and hard-copy travel guides are an invaluable source for intrepid holiday makers forging their own way around the world.

Holiday madness

I have been away for a week and have just found it so hard to get back into the swing of things... My first day back at work and I was ready to go home at 2pm, I couldn't believe there was another three and half hours of the working day left!
We had a very relaxing week in an apartment - we prefer to go to holiday apartments rather than cheap hotels if possible, although hotels do have the edge when it comes to housekeeping! Out of the seven days away, we managed three days on the beach where we were able to really relax - unfortunately, the holiday is over and I now have a mass of 'catching-up' to do.
I have come home to a pile of work both of my own and from my 'real' job, plus I have a load of posts to make on three of my more active blogs to cover the holiday gap - not least of which is my 'May earnings' post which is going to be late....

A good fit

Merrell shoes are reputed to fit right out of the box... and few people appreciate how crucial a good fit is when it comes to footwear. I have had personal experience of shoe-fitting for some years, and I can't stress enough how important it is that children's shoes especially are fitted correctly.

You can do an immense amount of harm to children's feet since their bones are so malleable and will mold to whatever footwear you provide. You can disfigure young feet simply by allowing them to wear their left shoe on their right foot and their right on their left for too long. - Please DON'T try this at home!

Personally, even though I am not flush with spare cash, I will always have my child's shoes fitted properly, some things are worth skimping on...

Attaining the goal

Sports awards, Sales performance or Pop-quizzes - all of these traditionally have rewarded their winners with engraved plaques and trophies - I have a stack of sports awards from when I was at school - pity there were no academic awards to go alongside them...
Nowadays, the awards are that much smarter with better graphics, holograms and moving parts. With the encroachment of the computer into all things graphical, the latest trophies are somewhat different to their predecessors.
Why not set your own goals in whatever area you want to achieve - when you reach those goals, reward yourself... Your reward may be something you can enjoy here and now (chocolate, bottle of wine...), something you have yearned for (iPod, HDTV...) or you could even buy yourself a trophy to place on a shelf to remind you of your achievement...

New Blogger features

Every so often it's worth lingering on the blogger dashboard page to read about the new developments - this can be a rich source of things you didn't know your blogger blog could do. Over time, the blogger coders work hard to bring us the kind of features that are available on other platforms.
The last important announcement was the future posts feature, this week I noticed that there is a new optional feature on it's way - Star Ratings... At the moment a glitch has accidentally enabled this feature on some unsuspecting blogs and an explanation has been posted here...
Seems like there is star rating feature on the way that will allow your blog to carry a rating... yet another thing to display, but seems like it could be useful if only for making you feel better about losing your PageRank.... this has currently been disabled whilst they sort the glitch out.
I am interested to see how this will pan out, presumably we will be able to rate the blogs that we visit as good bad or mediocre.

Posting gifts

Father's Day is coming up and I usually just send a card (when I remember..) as I live about 120 miles away from my parents. On this occasion, having just been on holiday, I will be sending some gift chocolate because it is easy to package up and post.
This got me thinking about the development of slim, lightweight feature-packed goods that now dominate our culture. There are a whole army of electronic goods such as mobile phones, ipods, pen-drives and the like which would make great gifts and are cheap to post around the country and even around the world.
In this case, I am sure the chocolate will be appreciated anyhow....

Design issues...

We have blinds on the windows of our house both front and back, but not at EVERY window. If you put blinds in every window, you can make the house look like an office rather than a home.... We have vertical blinds in our Dining room and Living room downstairs, horizontal wood blinds in the kitchen, and flat blinds in the bathroom and one of the bedrooms. We have street lamps shining into the back of the house from a fairly major intersection, so we have gone for black-out blinds in the rear-facing bedroom.
We have retained curtains in two of the bedrooms to keep a homely atmosphere, oddly enough the one room I use as an office actually has curtains rather than blinds...

Can you Digg it?

I have started adding 'digg-it' widgets to all my blog posts on all my blogs and there are several reasons why... Firstly without a doubt, someone will see your post as soon as you digg it (assuming that you might digg some of your own posts to get the ball rolling...). Your post will appear somewhere as the most recently dugg posts and if your title is interesting enough, there is a chance they will visit, if you have done really well, they might digg it too...and so the snowball is rolling....
Secondly, if your visitors are diggers (applies to 'stumblers', 'reddit' etc. also of course...), then you are providing the means for them to easily show appreciation of your story.
I think it makes sense for you to initially digg your own story so that your first digging visitor does not have to go through the rigmarole of submitting the story themselves - I honestly think that Digg expect you to do that....

What I really wanted was for the digg it widget to appear on every one of my posts to make it easy for me to submit and my visitors to join in. I also wanted the compact widget rather than the standard sized one so that it didn't look too prominent. Of course, the blogspot template is not set up to allow this to happen easily, so it means you have to go in there and insert some simple code. I chose to have my widgets at the bottom of the post on the left hand side, but there are options for putting it elsewhere, in different sizes, shapes and colours too.
My advice is to use a title for your important posts that you think will attract an audience, and digg these posts yourself before promoting the post in the places where you normally do your promotion.

How to:

First open up your blogger template (click 'expand widget templates') and locate the "data:post.body" tag. Then get over to Tips for New Bloggers, and choose the code you want depending on what permutation you require.

Fat Burners

I happen to think that the best way to burn fat is to do some vigorous exercise, however, I am getting frequent spam emails from those who feel that I might need to be slimmer than I already am - in my case wholly inappropriate since I have about as much fat as a blade of grass...

Due to the fact that there seems to be a huge market for diet pills and other pharmaceuticals, maybe a guide to the top diet pill would be useful... (though not to me as I have already mentioned).

I try my best to filter out these unwanted emails and can recommend email washer (see my sidebar) as a good way to fight spam.

What about paid blogging?

Paid bloggers must often think: "Why am I writing about this product or service for just a few dollars?" and maybe they think that they have cheapened themselves and their writing skills.
However, it occurs to me that what they do is no different to someone who appears in a commercial. Renowned actors are thought no less of just because they have been in a commercial...

In fact, I equate what the paid blogger does to those who do a voice-over for an advert in that they are not seen, they contribute to promoting a product or service and they are rewarded for their contribution.

Even those actors who do more adverts than actual TV or film work are not thought of as anything other than people earning a legitimate living. In truth, there are not that many paid bloggers who earn a living at what they do, nonetheless, they really should not feel any less of themselves for promoting a product for gain.

Value for money websites

I have always liked practical utility clothing, and discovered years ago, that the best quality clothing of this nature is made in the US. Prices were always good and the products were always first rate.
Even for the frugal shopper, there is a point where good quality represents better value for money, and for the UK buyer the strength of the currency makes the option of buying from the US even more attractive.
I have found products that promise "No Shrinking, no wrinkling, and no fading" such as the 5.11 Tactical Shirts. Since the advent of denim jeans, the Americans have been experts in the production of quality utility clothes, and now is about the best time ever for Brits to be importing US goods.

What happens if you lose PageRank?

The moment of truth... If you want to know the potential effect of losing PageRank, I have plotted the demise(?) of a website (NOT this blog...) below with relation to visitor figures and Adsense earnings in particular.
First off, it has to be said that each website is unique, with it's own characteristics dependent on it's niche, the CPC of keywords etc...
The trends (actual amounts not specified) from the graph above show the effect on this specific site of dropping from a PR2 to a PR0 at around the date indicated by the red vertical line. Some of these trend lines relate to percentages, some to cash, some to numbers of visitors and it is only the shift in the trends that I am illustrating - I have deliberately steered clear of talking about absolute numbers.
These are my observations on the above figures, bearing in mind that this is just the experience of one example website:

1. Overall, the number of Adsense clicks have remained fairly stable over the period (bottom purple line), but the actual earnings have been rising (brown line near the top) regardless of PR, indicating that the CPC must be rising.... even despite the fact that adsense impressions (light blue at top) seem to be on a downward trend.
2. The percentage of visitors that I get from search engines has been steadily dropping (yellow line) along the same line as the impressions. Unsurprisingly the visitors and unique visitors track closely (pink line and blue line 2nd and 3rd from the bottom), they too show a slight downturn.
3. The most significant result to me is the evident drop in the search results figures (luckily I don't rely on search results for the majority of visitors), and presumably this can be directly related to PR drop affecting SERP (search engine results position).
4. Another measure which I would use to estimate whether the website is performing would be the amount of contact I have from potential clients (almost entirely via email), and I have to say that this has shown no significant drop recently, though this is sporadic at the best of times...
5. The final indicator is the passive earnings through adsense which seems to be growing despite a fall in advert impressions (indicated by the brown and blue lines crossing each other at the top of the graph - ie. impressions dropping whilst earnings are climbing...)

If I had to come to an actual conclusion based on the limited data I have collected, then it is that some things are showing a worrying decline, but the earning potential of the site is actually continuing to grow. I certainly have not been put out of business by the PR drop....and can happily continue to mine this niche despite the Big G's evident disapproval....

Pool Floats

Summer is almost here and the smell of the barbie is wafting across the gardens and back yards. My little one is asking for the paddling pool to be filled, and we have bought some new loungers. All-in-all Summer can be an expensive time when you start thinking about renewing all your garden furniture and for those that are lucky enough to have a pool, your pool toys and pool floats. Come to think of it, if you can afford a pool, you are probably not worried about the costs of the Summer season...

Luxury Items

Every so often you like to treat yourself, everybody does... and we all have our particular weaknesses. Some have a penchant for luxury watches, others might enjoy a fine wine or shoes or clothes. We each of have our own way of rewarding ourselves when things are going well and we have a little extra cash to splash.
Personally, I like to look at watches that I might buy when I am in a stronger financial position (I am not that bothered about clothes and I have enough shoes!). I also have a weakness for good quality pens, for some reason I do like to have a nice pen to write with, but I lose them so often that this is not a good gift to buy me. The last thing on my list of luxury items is sunglasses. Since I started buying relatively expensive glasses, I find that I look after them a lot better than the cheaper ones. The last pair of glasses I bought have lasted me about six years which is better value than buying a pair of cheaper glasses every year...

Pet Supplies for your best friend

If you have a pet, you will want to get the best pet supplies and the best prices, the solution is to shop online. Lower overheads mean that you can get a better deal online for all types of products. Your pet is an important part of your life and you will want to make sure that they have the best that you can afford. Combine quality with low prices by getting your ‘mouse’ to do your pet supply shopping.

Summer Savings

I do everything I can both to save money and make the money we have go as far as possible, in order that the impact of the coming credit crunch will be minimal. It’s around this time of year that I am all to eager to turn off the central heating to keep fuel bills as low as possible. Fortunately in the UK we don’t really have a need for in-house air-conditioning, but most cars will be making use of their air conditioning compressor during the summer. I am always keen to turn the central heating off at the first sign of sunshine, similarly I only use the air conditioning in the car when I have to as this uses extra fuel too. .. (Did some one say mean? I’m just careful…!)
Not only am I mean careful, I am environmentally friendly too, my sweat is saving the planet!

Appeal for help in Beverly Hills

Every so often, the internet in general and the blogging community specifically is able to make a difference to individuals. I hope someone will be able to help with the following appeal:

A sufferer of a treatable condition needs accommodation nearer to Mt Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills. This lady has a form of Leukemia which cannot be cured at the moment since she is pregnant, she has sent an email to a service that normally offers a home exchange vacation service to see if there is anyone who can help - read the full story here...

Knowing how good the world-wide-web can be at getting the word around, I thought I would do my bit to highlight this family's plight... Perhaps others would like to pick up on this story and see if we can help to get a resolution.

Treat a Lady

If you want to treat the lady in your life (not your mother!) to some special lingerie, but are reluctant to venture out to buy some from a high street retailer, then shopping online could be the perfect way to get the right products with no embarrassment.
My advice would be to make sure that you get the right size and the right colour, but at least if you buy online, you don’t have the double-embarrassment of having to take the goods back because they were wrong…

The GTA experience

I don’t think I can recall a launch of a game that has been accompanied by as many TV adverts and general buzz as the launch of the latest Grand Theft Auto. GTA4 is now ready for an unsuspecting public and promises more spills and thrills than it’s already highly acclaimed predecessors. Grand theft Auto has claimed an unlikely niche amongst gamers, when the game play was first conceived who could have know the impact that it was going to have on a generation.
Add to the game play, the stunningly realistic graphics and the GTA experience is born. The playing experience is so lifelike now, that just viewing the advanced graphics in action becomes and advertisment in itself. It has both shocked and stimulated as every innovation should, leaving you unsure as to whether it is a thoroughly good thing or a thoroughly bad thing and many people remain divided in their opinions. What you can say , whether you love it or loathe it, is you can’t ignore it, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
Spawning a culture of insider tips and cheats, reviews and guides, like a rock-band this rolling monolith of a game keeps a whole industry going and shows no signs of backing down.

dNeero surveys

I have found dNeero surveys to be all of the following:

• easy to complete
• easy to monetise
• fun to do

Compared to other survey sites I have had dealings with, dNeero knocks spots off them all.
I am now officially DONE with Ciao surveys - I don't even open their emails any more. Ciao are in the habit of asking you a whole load of questions BEFORE you take the survey, each of these questions are related to information that Ciao already knows about me... then at the end of 10 questions which include my age, sex, employment status and earning bracket - they have the cheek to say 'sorry you don't qualify'. If they had any sort of system, they wouldn't be offering surveys I don't qualify for as they already know the answers to most of these questions. On top of that their compensation rates are lousy. So the new good guys are 'Pure Profile' (who pay a small amount even if you don't 'qualify' for the survey, and dNeero, who have the simplest surveys, and the best compensation scheme.
The latest dNeero survey is one that I can do as a result of having completed fifteen surveys:

Something with a little sparkle...

I am not a great fan of jewelery, and am very pleased to report that my wife feels the same way (or is that just something they say when they actually WANT you to buy them jewelery..??). There does seem to have been a jewel and trinket explosion on the internet in recent years with many different sites offering rings, gold bangle, earrings and other jewelery. I guess this is because overheads in a jewellery store can be costly, and online services have few overheads especially if they are drop-shippers. My advice would be to use reputable sites and a credit card that offers good insurance if you chose to purchase any costly gifts on the internet.

Commenting for ideas

I have talked about commenting and am a big fan of commenting on blogs for many reasons. I still don't do it half as much as I should, in fact I do it considerably less that half as much as I should, but I have realised yet another reason why commenting is so good.
When you blog on your best themes, your regular visitors will often respond sometimes just to agree, but at other times may take the subject on a different tack. At these times I find myself replying to these comments and I end up writing extensively in the reply... At this point I start to think - wait - there is another blog post here... and I go away and write a future post based on the reply to the comment I have just received.
Coming up with new posts and subjects is not always easy, so listen to your 'audience' for three reasons:

• They will give you ideas that are related to your themes, but ideas that you either missed or failed to expand on.
• They will give you ideas on subjects and themes that they may want to read about
• Interaction is what WEB2.0 is all about, and interaction will keep your readers coming back for more.

...and if you haven't guessed, this post was inspired by a comment that I had recently....

Procurando sobre seguradora?

Um portal interessante que nós visitamos hoje é o www.seguradora.info, uma ótima fonte de informação sobre seguradora. Tudo que você precisa saber sobre Seguros voce encontra neste site: , que publica textos atualizados diaramente sobre Seguradoras e fornece novidades para seguradora. Informação sobre seguradora pode ser às vezes difícil de encontrar na internet porque poucos sites dilvugam informação sobre Seguradoras. Pesquise mais e registre-se no RSS para ter mais novidades Seguros. Faça comentários a respeito do que você leu neste blog, sobre o tema de Seguradoras. Para concluir, afirmamos que o www.seguradora.info é um site completo que vale a pena a todos as pessoas que querem saber mais sobre seguradora.

Entre também em outro portal que publica informação de seguradora, que e sobre outsourcing!

Procure também em outro portal sobre Seguradoras que pode ser bom também Trabalho casa.

I've been waiting for this...

Blogger has just launched a feature allowing you to delay the publishing of a post to a specific date and time in the future, read the full details here.
This is a feature that I have been waiting for since seeing it on a Wordpress blog. Up until now, blogspot users could choose a future date for a post, but regardless of date, once the post was published it was instantly visible. I am in the habit as I assume other bloggers are, of saving up posts in draft form and then posting them at a convenient point. With the new feature, once you have written a post, you can decide the date and time that it will be published, schedule it and leave it to publish itself.
One word of warning though, the publishing time does not match with the time you have chosen in your settings, it seems to default to CET or something similar... The system works as you might expect, you edit the time of the post in 'post options', choose your time and select 'publish post', the post now appears as 'scheduled' in the edit posts screen, and will become visible at the time selected.
Blogger have also allowed you to make visible a future-dated post. In order to do this, you would publish your post normally with the current time, and then edit the post and amend the date after it has been published. They say that if you have post-dated posts already showing on your blog, then they will remain.
This is a real bonus for when you take a natural break from blogging, but want your blog to remain regularly updated with fresh material to keep your readership interested.

Rehab

Rehab seems to be losing the stigma that it always seemed to carry, almost seen as a measure of success and being the title of THE most successful song from drug rehab frequenter Amy Winehouse... For most people experiencing rehab, I am sure that they would not regard it as a glamorous place to hang out. The origins of the word have almost become lost in it's shortening, but in case you were wondering, 'rehab' is short for rehabilitation.....

Do I need a video card?

For everyday applications running on your PC, the on-board graphics is perfectly adequate. On newer standard PC’s the video chips are integrated into the motherboard, so why would you need a new video card?
In most cases, this would be desirable if you are using some high-end action games with fast-moving detailed life-like graphics, or if you were involved in the production of detailed graphics or digital photography/video. For these types of tasks, most modern motherboards have an ‘Advanced Graphics Port’ – plugging a dedicated video/graphics card into this port frees up PC memory and speeds up graphics production.

Market Research

Before you start forth on your latest commercial venture, you need to be armed with the best available market research. Whether this be as a result of your own observations, or research carried out by a third party, this information is vital to forming your strategy. Why do businesses fail? often through lack of research, why do projects get shelved? same reason....
How should this research be carried out? Firstly identify your demographic, then get a good sample and find out their views. Good research is dependent on asking the right people the right questions. Ever wondered why market researchers only stop certain people on the street? it's because they have a demographic quota to fill, if you don't fit the profile, you are not a target.

From experience, I can tell you that it is easy to write a questionnaire, and very difficult to write a good one from which you will be able to draw any conclusions.... Good research knows who it will ask and precisely how to get the answers it wants - Bad research asks random people random questions and reveals random results. Next time you are set to browse the web to find ways to get traffic for a site or blog, actively target specific keywords and themes and place comments that provoke a response - turn your browsing into research.

April 2008 earnings

April has been a good month for me with total munny4hunny earnings finally surpassing the $1000 mark after a little over a year, and the monthly earnings very nearly reaching the $200 mark for only the second month since starting the blogging to earn experiment. I have had to switch tactics to get the extra revenue, and hopefully using these tactics in the future will build up earning potential. There are now four blogs in the Munny4Hunny 'stable', two of which are niche blogs and are targets for paid text links, I have been using forums to identify possible 'customers' for text links and have brought in a little income via that route. I have also been using 'PayU2Blog' as a service to replace some of the other paid posting opportunities that have apparently dried up for me.
Away from blogging, Adsense is continuing to earn money (just been paid for the second time this year..) on my main niche website although I seem to have lost PageRank for this site for some unknown reason. I hope this will resolve itself, and will be tracking performance to answer the question 'Does lack of pagerank actually have any effect?'. I am looking forward to finding out the answer to this question...
From other projects, a further $300 has come in bringing total internet activity close to $500 for the month with a 40:60 split for blogging earnings against other projects.

Your Commute

Environmental awareness will be a key issue for the coming years, and the most mundane use of fossil fuels is our daily commute to our place of work. I am lucky enough to work within walking distance of my home, so I walk to work twice a week during the Summer months and less often in the Winter - how about you?

Go with the flow

Recently I have talked about maintaining a style and keeping an 'audience' with consistency, but the truth is that sometimes a complete re-think is required. Although we should not be slaves to ranks and visitor figures, RSS feeds and the like, if something is blatantly not working, then the knife has to come out. If you decide to cut off the 'rotten fruit', then do so swiftly and with purpose. Personally I like to give a project every chance to succeed, but sometimes you have to just let go.

I have seen sites very successfully transform from a blog into a forum overnight. Of course, this does not really happen overnight and an awful lot of thought and planning went into the switch beforehand. When the change was made, the planning paid off as the forum looked already totally established because the webmaster had put so much planning into the project.

Once your decision has been made, act on it - start your planning for your new project immediately. Maintain the 'old' project until you are ready to switch to maintain what audience you have, promote like mad and when you are ready (My second rule of blogging is that you are never really ready...) make the switch and don't look back.

Overweight and Impotent?

Each time I get spam emails I learn about medicines that I never knew existed, you can now apparently have Phentermine no prescription why would I want a medicine without prescription? Well apparently it’s a slimming drug… Obviously the email senders can’t know what I look like otherwise they wouldn’t try getting my attention with slimming drugs!! In fact if spam is targeted then I have been mistaken for someone who is both overweight and impotent – rest assured neither is the case!

Using character and voices

I realised while I was creating a previous post that I had wandered into an area that requires further explanation. I talked about remaining true to yourself or your 'character'. By character I am referring to blogs that are written in a specific style which is not the writers natural style. I know of one blogger who has written posts on a blog assuming a specific character, when I visited another of his blogs, the style of writing was so refined in contrast that you would not know it was the same person. The writer had assumed a persona for the purpose of writing on a specific blog.

Building a character helps to build an interest in your blog, in the same way that a 'shock jock' builds up his listeners. You don't have to use 'shock' tactics, though that might be appropriate... you can use any sort of style you want, but retaining that style will be essential to maintain your audience who will grow to expect consistency. If they were to 'hear' a different 'voice', they may feel that they have been misled or their interest in the blog may wane. I have never actually tried this tactic personally, though I have been tempted. I would love to create a blog with a truly obnoxious personality but with a lot of humour... Don't be surprised if this turns into my next project...!

The Rock | xTended

Joseph Rey Sator is an IT student and a blogger from the Philippines . His blog ‘The Rock | xTended’ has the subtitle: extending information through speeding highways and has a very impressive ‘night and day’ contrast theme which in itself is worth visiting this blog for alone… Jospeh has spent a lot of energy reviewing sites and presumably getting reciprocal reviews if his technorati ranking is anything to go by.

I counted over 40 categories on this blog, so we are talking general rather than niche blogging here. The categories are as diverse as comic strips, current affairs, fashion and movies.
The posts are generally well-written, the blog has a very nice layout and was easy to read. I liked the idea of mixing up blog posts with songs, the way these have been integrated into the posts really works well. Searching through the posts I found some interesting comments on blog hacking, but the majority of the posts are site reviews. Overall a very pleasant viewing and reading experience.

8 things I don't buy...

I saw this post at Suburban Wife's Daily Dollar Diary and thought I would pick up the Theme/Meme... Here are my list of things that I don't buy compared with the Suburban wife:

1. Alcohol — Well technically I do buy alcohol, but I never buy beer as I can't stand the stuff so I'm going for Beer...
   
2. Tobacco — I am so with you here... I never buy cigarettes, they are truly a waste of money if ever there was one - I am not saying I have never bought them... just that I don't now.
3. Coffee — Oh dear, I am a coffee guzzler I am afraid, so here's my first original one, I don't buy Coke (the cola variety or powdered for that matter...) I used to enjoy fizzy cola when I was a kid, but that stuff is so sugary... and I know people who appear to be addicted to it (and their teeth don't look so good!) - briefly refreshing maybe, but all-in-all NOT a good thing...
   
4. Fabric Softener — I wouldn't, but I think my wife does...maybe I should mention the environmental effects to her... so, time for another one of my own. Gravy powder or Pasta Sauce, the things that you can make yourself, but the supermarket has in a packet - I think packet gravy is an abomination compared with the real thing and people are losing the skill of cooking through these convenience foods
   
5. Make-Up — OK this one is not really fair, I don't buy makeup but then I wouldn't be expected to. Even in the days of new romantics I never got further than using coloured hair mousse... My equivalent is all those 'man potions' you can get now, wrinkle cream, moisturiser for men and all that cr**. No No No, never.... C,mon grow old gracefully men for goodness sake...
   
6. Jewelry — I am not big into jewelry, and that is something men do buy in larger quantities nowadays. Diamond encrusted ear-rings are the norm for younger men wishing to emulate their soccer heroes. I have the one ring (wedding) and that's it. I wore my Grandad's signet ring for a while until I lost it - I found it again by extreme good fortune, and that was my lesson - I haven't worn it since.
   
7. Soda Pop, Junk Food, and Sweets — Well, I've used Cola (soda) already, and will admit that I am partial to chocolate but not really any other sweets.. I need another one of my own here... Newspapers - I never buy a newspaper or a magazine, they have nothing to say that I am interested in that I haven't heard on the news/read on the 'net. My neighbour kindly gives me the sports supplement on a Saturday and that is the only time I read a paper of any sort.
8. Electronic Games — Like the suburban wife, I don't have an X-box, wii or playstation of any description... I play the occasional game on the PC (I have freecell open and do enjoy spider solitaire...)

Here's how the suburban wife finishes off her post:

So, if you’re a blogger, consider yourself tagged. Be sure to link back to this post or leave a comment so I’ll know you participated. If you’re a reader without your own blog, please don’t leave without sharing the 8 (or so) things you don’t buy. I look forward to hearing from you.

The rules are simple:

• List the 8 (or so) things you don’t buy
• Feel free to explain why you choose not to spend money on those items or just provide a list

Which just leaves me to say, give it a go - what things do you refuse to buy, and why??

Be true to yourself

If you are becoming a slave to:

1. Your RSS feed reader stats
2. Your daily Adsense earnings
3. Your PageRank
4. Your Technorati Authority/Real rank/Alexa rank

...think again...
My first rule if blogging is that you should be true to yourself, blog about the topics you want to blog about in your own style without compromising yourself to fit in with what you think is required by all these external pressures.
Why? Well for a start, PR hysteresis will change on a whim and there's nothing you can do about it, and your RSS reader figures will also change on the whim of individual visitors.
If you're trying to please everybody, then you're trying too hard. I maintain that if you continue to deliver good quality content, the rankings and visitors will follow. Naturally, you can help the process along with both on-page and off-page tactics, but unless the content is unique and of sufficient quality, there is little point....
There is good reason to use certain 'voices' and 'characters' to get your views across, but equally you will need to remain true to these characters. If you are not certain what I mean by characters, I will discuss it in a later post.

Beer pong?

Every so often, one comes across something (very often on the internet) which just makes you say 'what the...?!?'. Such an event happened to me today when I discovered beer pong. According to Wikipedia, this is a drinking game where ping pong balls are bounced into cups of beer which the opposition must then drink. How quaint you might say, but wait on... that's not the end of it, Oh no... there is a whole industry created around this with official beer pong tables available to buy and all sorts of other paraphernalia. After a little consideration, I think I'll wait for it to come out on the Wii.....