I do have to laugh, how do these sites come up with such far fetched figures?
who puts together their formula?
Who convinces these site owners that their formula is correct.

The site also shows me a map of where my traffic comes from, ie where you all are around the world. This map is provided by Google and it appears to be the same map as found in my Google Analytics. Surely this information should mine and not easily accessible by any Tom Dick or Harry.

Anyway, the cost of the trip is £350, (about $500 USD), again this is not a figure that surprised me, and a deposit of £100 ($160 USD) is needed to secure the place. Alls good, over a period of time we can do that.

Oh NO, I read further down the letter, the trip is at the end of February 2010, the £100 deposit has to be paid by this coming Monday, and to make things worse the £350 doesn’t include meals.

Now this is from a school which is in a town that is still generally ‘economically depressed’, this is just 2 weeks before Christmas which is a hard enough time financially for many anyway.

I did email the teacher organising the trip and it turns out that this will be the only chance that the Spanish class will get to go on a trip to Spain as  their next school year is exam time and trips do not generally take place. He also claimed it was short notice as they was unsure if the trip could take place.

There was a French exchange last school year and we had a good 6 months notice. Why not this time?

These people are meant to be teaching our kids yet they don’t seem to be able to plan ahead.

Our son has said it could be his Xmas present, that is a nice gesture  as he knows things aren’t as good as they have been at the moment but it is an educational trip so if he goes it won’t be his Christmas present.

So if you have a long url that you want shortening then do give URLuda.com a go. Get in quick and you can enter your own custom url.

If you want to create a URL to hide your email address you can also do that, ie in the ‘URL’ box on the form enter mailto://email@address.com and then when someone clicks on your new url, rather than them being redirected to your blog or an affiliate link their email client will open with your email address in the ‘to’ address box. This is a great way to reduce the chance of your email address being harvested from your blog/site by spammers.

An example is the URLuda.com/contact, which will allow you to send me an email.

It is still just available for the US/Canada and UK and Europe, you can select the card you want sent, select how you want the card signed and provide the name and address of who you want the card sent to, we then write and post the card for you.

But how much is your phone actually worth?  I have quickly put a small site together that allows you to select your phone make and model and it then searches for the best price for you.

Take a look at What is your phone worth? and give it a go, there is also a list of recycling companies on the selling page including a couple of US companies. I was disappointed to discover that the US does not appear to be recycling phones anywhere near as much and I was only able to find a couple of companies.

I am a season ticket holder at the local football team, (soccer for those that are unsure what football is), and each match I take one of our boys. If its a good game the kids love it, they do get bored though if there isn’t much action. One thing they don’t do is kick the seat in front of them, nor are they up and down every 20 minutes to the loo.

Why do people take their kids to these events armed with a hand held games console such as PSP or DS? If they are going to play that all the time then play the bloody thing at home.

Today we went to the match and there where 3 other kids near us. One was playing his DS and tapping his feet on the back of the seat in front, he was asked a couple of times to stop and at half time his father moved to another seat. The second sits behind my Father in law and each and every week is asked to stop kicking, and it doesn’t matter who he is sat with in terms of the adult they do nothing to stop him. In addition he seems to be up and down to the toilet or to get food every few minutes. This kid is obviously bored stiff, why take him week in week out.

The 3rd was a girl who sat behind me, I must admit she did stop kicking once I asked her, but she would sit whistling songs out of tune.

All these three have something in common, they are all youngsters I would say younger than 10 years old. You could partially blame the football club as they allow under 13’s free entry when accompanied by an adult, so parents are taking the kids rather then leaving them with friends/relatives or not going at all.  Come on if you’re taking your kids, control them, set ground rules etc. If they are not interested then don’t take them, bored kids is not good for anyone.

Greg

On Friday I received an email from the Adsense team, yet again complaining that the site contains ‘mature content’. I thought that I had solved this problem by blocking words, but obviously not.

Adsense gave me 72 hours to remove the mature content or they will stop serving ads on the site. Now, the site Bookmarkcenter.com is a Meta Search engine, so a visitor uses the site to search the web.

I had to act quickly, I don’t want to loose my adsense earnings. Firstly I found a list of ‘bad words’ that someone had created, this contained a list of about 400 words, compared to the list of about 20 I had previously, so impletented the new list. This initially meant that if someones search phrase contained 2 or more of these bad words the search would not be carried out. It also mean that if these words appeared in the output they would be censored.

This was great but then it lead to another problem, many of the searches carried out are foriegn, Malaysia, Indonesia and India are the major ones and these searches where in many cases in their native tongue. Heck I can’t speak these languages, how do I block the mature content in those searches.

I introduced another script, it runs behind the scenes and checks the language of each recent search, if non English it attempts to translate the search term. If the English translation then contains any ‘bad words’ the search is removed from the database.

I hate censorship, and I could have decided to just remove the Adsense ads from the pages with ‘mature content’ but I am sure that as the site generally has Adsense ads Google could still get upset and at the end of the day the site is there to make me money, or at least pay for the hardware it uses.

What I have found also is that now my page impressions have dropped drastically, but at the same time my Adsense eCPM and Clickthru has gone increased.

Well I have totally rebranded the site, reduced the chance of mature content finding its way onto the site and also resolved other problems, such as percieved hidden text due to the use of hidden blocks of text which appeared once a link is clicked etc.

Well Adsense had dropped down to about $300/month but  it’s now starting to rebuild again, if it continues to grow over the next couple of months as it is at the moment and then settles I will be happy, any further growth will be a bonus.

It’s interesting to see as you look down the top 100 DropaHolics list there are still a few droppers that have been floating up and down the list from it’s incarnation, but then there are lots of ‘new faces’ that haven’t taken long to get themselves onto the list.

There have been problems over the past year but I hope most of them have been resolved before your blog suffered any detrimental effect because of it.

Periodically the site does try and update your blog information and image by checking the details in the DropaHolics system against that on Entrecard, the internet being the internet means that on the odd occassions blog images are not updated correctly etc, normally though this is fixed when the next update is carried out.

If you think of anything else you would like to see on the site then do let me know.

I was thinking it could be just EC, but then I went to adsense and when I  went to look at the full report for this month it said ‘no data available’ or something. I revisited some blogs and found also that some CMF ads where timing out aswell.

I rebooted my broadband router but that has made little difference, other sites appear OK, ie this blog loaded fine for me as did other sites.

Oh well, post this to my blog, try rebooting my laptop to see if that’s the problem and if not give up for a few hours and come back later. I work online, apart from periodic backups all my work is done on my server so a bad internet day is a bad day.