Two laptops, HP or Dell?

Posted on August 28, 2008 by Swog

I’ve never been a strong advocate of laptops until recently.  Until a month ago, unless an individual had an extremely compelling reason not to do so, I would always recommend buying a desktop for the same money as it usually bought you more.  Previous generations of laptops were notorious for being out of date the instant your peeled back the wrapper.  However, two weeks ago, I bought two laptops and my opinions changed.  Here, I’d like to speak a little bit about the two machines and contrast their relative merits and demerits.

First, let me say that I have owned laptops in the past.  Also, I’ve also worked with laptops as part of my job, so I consider myself fairly well versed with them, at least in their previous incarnations.  The reason I bought two recently is that I have quite a bit of travelling planned over the ensuing months and, as anyone in IT will tell you, laptops are indispensible under such circumstances.

So, what did I buy?  The first was an HP machine.  Officially labelled an “Entertainment Notebook PC” (and part of the dv6800 series) it is equipped with some nice multimedia features, including a series of QuickPlay touch keys along the top of the keyboard.  The three overriding factors that made me choose this machine over its neighbours on the shop shelf were: the 3GB RAM, the size and clarity of the screen, and the X2 64-bit processors.  I thought all this for under $800 was a steal.  Other positives for this machine include a well contructed and highly usable pointing device (usually I have problems with laptop pointing devices, but I am getting along with this one very comfortably), built-in wireless support (which these days, I think I am right to say, is a given), and a surprisingly robust exterior (the machine looks rather delicate, with what appears to be only thin plastic in certain areas of the shell, but it is surprisingly strong thin plastic!)

On the flip side, I have the following criticisms of the HP machine.  The keyboard seems quite frail, particulary in comparison to the keyboards of other laptops I have used in the past.  The keys seems to be very thin.  Also, they appear to have a small area of contact with the underlying pads that connect them to the laptop.  As a result of this, I often find myself typo-ing (usually missing letters, although the SHIFT key is a particular culprit in this) more than previously having not struck the key in the middle, but slightly off centre and therefore not registered enough force to depress the underlying pad.  My second “issue” is not one with the machine, but with company policy regarding distribution media (which I understand might be dictated by Microsoft, and might not be confined to HP).  The first thing I wanted to do was to see how FreeBSD or Linux would run on this puppy instead of the standard distribution of Vista.  So, I immediately wiped out Vista and replaced it with FreeBSD.  After doing this, I thought what would happen should I wish to reload Vista in the future?  (Perhaps if I chose to sell the laptop to a Windows user).  The machine did not come with distribution CDs which I found to be very odd.  Anyhow, after talking to the HP support people they told me they no longer ship laptops with distribution CDs, but have a portion of the HDD configured to hold the distribution files from which the OS can be reloaded.  Of course, FreeBSD doesn’t know or care about these files so they were wiped.  To get the distribution CDs I had to pay an additional $16, and HP shipped them within a week.

These days, the majority of my computer work is done in either a remote shell, or a browser.  Occasionally I will use a graphics program (such as GIMP) and a few other small utilities.  But in terms of resource use, I would consider myself a light user.  So, for my daily regular tasks the 3GB RAM and increased processing power has made a significant increase in desktop speed and operation.  Has it made me more productive?  I would probably answer this affirmatively.

Posted in Tech | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Changing plans and focus for this blog

Posted on August 26, 2008 by Swog

For the last few months, I have been overwhelmed with other ventures and issues pertinent to my impending move to the extent that I have neglected this blog entirely.  Although I founded this blog on a particular precept that has now expired, I plan to continue this blog as a general  blog and reflect a little more on my efforts over the last few months, in addition to broadening out a lot of the commentary to include exploratory reflections and ventures.

Posted in Misc | Leave a comment

eBay Feedback Changes Seem Unfair

Posted on May 20, 2008 by Swog

Occasionally, I buy and sell a few things on eBay. When selling, I always try to provide the best service possible and have until now maintained a perfect 100% feedback score. However, this week, eBay made changes to the way its feedback system works that seem to make the entire setup very biased in favour of buyers. The most important aspect of these changes is that sellers can no longer leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers. eBay claim that this will permit buyers to give fairer feedback without the threat of a quid pro quo negative/neutral strike being made against them should they leave it for someone else. However, I believe it will undermine the credibility of the feedback system for a number of reasons. First, I think seller feedback will be devalued; sellers, having been dictatorially stripped of any choice, may now leave positive or no feedback – where is the value in that? Second, a certain species of eBayer, often pedantic and overbearingly picky and previously kept in check by the possibility of receiving a reciprocal negative strike will now feel emboldened by his/her new found freedom and run around leaving negative strikes at will.

What eBay are doing here is indirectly admitting to a marked weakness of the feedback system. These are major changes to a system that, at least to my eyes, has worked quite well as a broad indicator of reliability over the past umpteen years. Prejudicing the system against sellers in this way will not result in tangible benefits, but it will ensure far more undeserving negative strikes against sellers over trifling aspects such as miscommunication. I, for one, will look for other places to sell my occasional items and even if I do sell again on eBay, I will probably take extra safeguards to offset the effects of potential abuse of these changes.

Posted in News | Tagged | 7 Comments

April Traffic Numbers

Posted on May 16, 2008 by Swog

The only way is up someone or other sang (rather painfully) in the late 80s and that seems to be the way for my portfolio’s traffic figures.  This month, I tightened the criteria for inclusion in the monthly traffic tally.  Essentially, the criteria are two-fold:  i)  the site should not be a trash site (like proxies etc.), and ii) the sites should get at least 1000 page views per month.

Also, I parked about 20 domains at sedo.com this month to see how that pays and the preliminary results seem to be quite good.

With these rules in place, there seems to be an apparent drop in traffic for April, due largely to the reasons mentioned above.  Aggregated page views come in at 589055.  However, most of the better sites did see small traffic gains.  And this blog registered a 70% increase in traffic.

This month, May, will be a big month as I plan on acquiring several additional sites and beginning a significant promotional campaign on a good number of sites.  I am very much hoping these efforts will begin to show in the May traffic figures.

Posted in Misc | Tagged | Leave a comment

March Traffic Numbers

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Swog

March saw quite a spike in traffic for the sites in my portfolio.  Aggregated across all non-trash sites (discounting sites such as proxies, MySpace resources sites etc.), 649926 pages were pushed which is a healthy increase of about 61%, far in excess of the target 10% monthly increase.

Target for April remains an increase of about 10%, which will take us over the 700K pages per month threshold.

Posted in Misc | Tagged | Leave a comment

Get Matched with $150 per Month

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Swog

There have been numerous takes on the basic ideas of PPC and CPM style advertising. I recently discovered a further offering from the guys over at matched.co.uk. On the surface, their offering looks like a fairly easy ~ $150 per month provided you can get matched to advertisers from their pool in your niche and are wiling to place the full complement of ad blocks (5) on your sites. They offer a flat GBP 3 per ad block per month and you are permitted 5 ad blocks per site and up to 5 sites. A little second grade math indicates that this amounts to 3 x 5 x 5 = 75 GBP/month. With the US dollar weak against the pound sterling, this can yield a very respectable USD 150 of additional monthly income.  Also, since their ads are not contextual, they are permitted to operate alongside Adsense.

Posted in Tech | Tagged , | Leave a comment

February Traffic Numbers

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Swog

It seems a popular monthly ritual among webmaster bloggers to flaunt their numbers whether it be earnings figures, or pictures of AdSense checks or some other seemingly important numbers. Well, for the last few months, I have been keeping aggregated traffic stats of the sites I run and have just finished totting up the numbers for February. These figures are pulled from the tools I use to analyse the raw Apache log files. For February, the aggregated page views were 400223 which was up about 7% on January. This does not include the numbers from “trash” sites like proxies and MySpace resource sites (the last time I checked, the page views for the proxies sites I run were > 1 million pages per day.) Also, I did not factor in a few subdomains and one or two newer acquisitions that would conservatively inflate that number by another ~5%.

Target for March is about 450 000 page views, continuing the ~10% growth rate.

Posted in Misc | Leave a comment

Three More Blogs Strengthen The Portfolio

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Swog

I’ve been a busy boy over the last month or so and have not been able to find time to squeeze out an update here.  But, here goes.

Mid-February, I commenced a mid- to long-term project centered around blogging that I hope will open up a solid revenue channel.  I did the groundwork and read a little behind the scenes so although I use the word “hope” I am confident there will be a stable return within 45 days.  I started three blogs, each in a separate niche, and much of my online activity since then has been focused on providing content for them, in addition to promoting them.  Rich content is the key to this endeavor.

My efforts are beginning to show some results with organic traffic increasing daily – the busiest hit 57 unique SE referrals on March 3rd, which isn’t too shoddy for a three week old blog ;)

Another is in a highly competitive niche (> 100 000 daily search volume.)  I am resigned to the fact that it will take me a little while to compete on the niche’s main keywords.  However, I’ve been a little sneaky there and targetted one or two popular misspellings in the niche and it seem to be working with low XX visitors reaching the site through searches on misspellings.

If this method turns lucrative over the next 45 days or so, then I will leak more detail in upcoming posts, so stay tuned.

Posted in Misc | Leave a comment

More Traffic to Your Blog #1: Forums

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Swog

Here’s the first in a series of entries I have planned on promoting your blog.  One of the revenue streams I intend to significantly strengthen during the 2008 calendar year is through blogging.  Consequently, I wil most likely reflect quite a bit about the process of blogging over the coming months.

Let’s face it, we all want readers.  And as bloggers, the only way to acquire, and subsequently increase, a steady readership is to get good quality traffic to your blog.  As an inveterate forum junkie, I understand the importance of, and frequently use, forums as a potent promotional mechanism.  Well run forums draw in huge (often targeted) audiences, and the blog promotion tip in this entry will help you leverage forums to promote, and direct traffic to, your blog.

So, how do we go about using forums to promote a blog?

Here’s a brief outline that you might like to take as a foundation for your forum-related blog promotion.

i.  Identify several mid- to large active forums within your blog’s niche.  There are numerous forum directories (such as http://www.big-boards.com/, http://www.vboogle.net/ and http://www.forumlists.com/) that conveniently list forums by category.  Additionally, you can use search engines to ferret out more specific requirements.  For example,

Google search term:  -inurl:vbulletin cellphone forum Jelsoft

will bring up a nice list of cellphone related forums running vBulletin, omitting the vBulletin forum.  Likewise,

Google search term:  "Recent blog:" cellphone inurl:showthread

on Google will bring up a nice list of cellphone related forums that allow the use of RSS feeds in member profiles.

Remember, you are looking for active forums.  So be sure to peruse the statistics at the foot on the forum’s main index page.  In order to gauge the activity on the forum, you should look to see:

  • how many users are currently online;
  • how many users have been online in the past 24 hours;
  • how many posts have been made in the last 24-48 hours (ideally, you want to target forums with at least high XX posts per day);

Also, you want the forums to permit the use of signatures and, better still, allow blog feeds within profiles.  Looking over recent posts will determine whether signatures and profile RSS feeds are pemissible.  And most boards will have a written policy regarding signature usage.  RSS blog feeds in profiles are usually detectable by looking over posts and seeing whether “Recent blog:” appears.

I usually work with 3 or 4 forums concurrently.

ii.  Participate!  Sign up and participate in the forum on an ongoing basis.  The quality of your contribution to the forum(s) will often influence the amount of traffic you gain from it.  Remember, you are seeking to build credibility among the user community.

iii.  Add an engaging signature to your profile.  You should read over the forum’s policies regarding signatures and linking.  Some forums require that you make a certain number of posts before they will allow you to use a signature, or use a live link within your signature.  Others have no formal written policy on the matter, but will look unfavourably upon immediate linking.  So proceed with caution! Usually, if there is no written policy, I refrain from adding signature links until I have made at least 10-15 good posts, or a week or two after joining whichever comes first.  Also, bear in mind that you are competing for clicks and therefore should formulate your anchor text so that it stands the best chance of piquing interest.

iv.  Add an RSS blog feed to your profile.  Nowadays, many forums permit this and it is a great way to get readers directly in to your blog.  The same mode of thinking applies as in (iii) above.  Read the forum policies regarding linking and add your feed when you have taken some measure to establish yourself a little at the forum.  As a blogger, you should understand the importance of writing compelling entry titles.  The RSS feed added to your forum profile pulls the title of the most recent post and adds it to your blog profile as a live link to the article, so be sure to seize this opportunity by writing forceful titles.

Due to their very nature as high traffic/activity sites, and if used cautiously and on an ongoing basis, forums provide an excellent blog promotion mechanism.  If you follow the basic steps outlined above you, too, can leverage forums to steer more traffic to your blog.

[ Today, I started using this method as the principal means of promoting this blog.  Although I have used the technique for promoting niche blogs outside of the webmaster user space, promotion of this blog will be an interesting objective gauge on the success of the method in this very busy and competitive niche.  Putting my money where my mouth is, if you will ;) ]

Posted in Tech | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Goals for 2008

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Swog

As we get going again (and in order to facilitate a distinct feeling of deja-vu), here are my goals for this blog project for the coming year.

i.  Report on making $25 000.  Yes, the final target remains the same, folks.  Although I set this as my target some four months since at the commencement of this blog, the aforementioned dose of Real-Life® put things on ice for a while.  So I have re-aligned the project to run one calendar year, beginning January 1st, 2008.

ii.  Acquire steady linear traffic growth.  I’d like to see steady growth in readership and organic search engine traffic and will apportion my promotional efforts and expenditure so to make this real.  I want to try to keep the monthly moving average of unique and page views on an upward trend.

iii.  Break the 50K threshold on Alexa.  Sitting rather un-prettily at a mere 7 546 976 at present, I realise this is both quite a tough target and of mythical importance.

iv.  Establish several diverse revenue streams.  As the online earning arenas continue to fragment and become increasingly more  granular, I  would like to gain a solid foothold in at least three distinct areas each offering its own unique revenue opportunities.

I consider these humble and manageable goals and even if I fall short on one or all, it is guaranteed to be both a fun and educative experience.

Posted in Misc | Leave a comment