Showing posts with label shoutbox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shoutbox. Show all posts

Tuesday, 24 June 2008

Blog stuff

I finally got the shoutbox in place, although I am going to move it from it's current location at the bottom of the blog. Not had any comments yet though, I am hoping that people are just shy or haven't seen it! It was really easy to install, just register on the shoutmix site copy a bit of code to your blog and voila, instant box, could not have been easier.

Currently I use sitemeter to monitor visitors to my blog so I can also tell whether I am writing to myself or not - as long as I have one visitor a day I am happy :) However, from 18 June till today my meter showed zero visitors each day? I started to get a little paranoid until I realised that I had actually deleted the meter from the site accidently so it was not recording visitors! So please, anyone who visited during the last 6 days, come back and be counted - ha ha. In the few weeks that I have been going I have had 472 visitors ... woo, it feels a little strange that all those people are visiting my bit of cyber space out of curiosity!

I would really like to change my template in blogger to one with 3 columns but I cannot find one that really suits what I am looking for. I think you have to scroll down too far on my page when I post a large post. This is one of the reasons that I only show one post per page now too instead of the whole months worth at once. I would like a fatter middle column and a skinny one each side. Personally I have a widescreen so I do not know how much of a standard screen my current blog fills, all depends upon the resolution I guess. Is anyone actually using a 3 column template that just fits perfectly to their screen size?

Picasa is another of my recent discoveries. I first read about it on the geeks on tour website where they actually give video tutorials on how to use it. I looked at a couple of videos so that I knew that it would do what I wanted it to do before I spent time downloading it on a mobile connection. Wow it is easy to use. Within 20 minutes of downloading it, I managed to upload 2 albums of pictures and add 2 slideshows to my post yesterday - and they worked first time. I'm very proud of that one - big up to the geek too!!

Finally, my ad sense income has now reached a dizzying total of $6.06 - stunning! I was going to replace the adverts with the shoutbox but now I have decided to keep them and actually learn how to make them look nicer with pictures etc. Personally I never take notice of adverts on websites myself but I figure if I leave them there and I can make $25 by Christmas then I can blow it on a bottle of baileys (the starbucks I was saving for previously is so last week!) - all I need now is the roaring fire and christmas tree to drink it in front of. Hmmm, do RV's come with wood burners?

Wednesday, 18 June 2008

Google adsense .... humph!

Got to ask, own up, who clicked on an advert in the last couple of days?

I loaded Google adsense as an experiment when I relaunched the blog a couple of months ago. In the first month-ish my Google adsense income totalled $3.75. I found this quite amusing as it would nearly cover a starbucks latte (to which I am addicted) - hence using an american company to pay for my american drink.

I then decided that if the total didn't hit at least $200 a month (only joking - hugely optimistic me, did you know we are also having a long hot summer too?) I would remove the adverts and replace them with a shoutbox.

However, someone has now increased my total to $3.88 - an increase of 13 cents. I'm all of a dither now ... what if I can actually make about 20 cents a month, by christmas I could probably afford a hazlenut syrup to go to with that latte! Quite exciting!

The indecision .... ooo! Actually, I have decided that as I have not managed to figure out how to add a picture advert (to the side column) I will just replace the adverts with a shoutbox. It will be much more useful and I have used them quite happily on other blogs as it is great to be able to post to other blog owners and readers. I'll probably change it this weekend if you want to pop back next week and be the first to post in it to say hi!

Besides ... do google not realise I work in £'s and the exchange rate is horrific?!