Firetop

Some of you may have noticed that earlier this month I changed the colour scheme of this website from pastel blues to ‘vibrant’ oranges (in keeping with the lovely Dorking sunset photograph I added to the header). One of the major upsides of this theme change has been the doubling of Google Advert click-throughs - which means increased ad revenue. I’m now seeing average banner click-throughs in excess of 1% each day, and it won’t be long before I receive my second payout, much speedier than the first $100 which took about six months. So why has the new colour scheme caused this increase in clicks? (more…)

Barclays recently brought out a new environmentally-friendly credit card called ‘Barclaycard Breathe’. 50% of net profits after tax (independently reviewed) are donated to registered charity ‘Pure, the Clean Planet Trust’. ‘Pure’ funds government-approved environmental projects in countries like China and Brazil to generate renewable energy and minimise carbon emissions. Pure also offers UK companies the opportunity to make a donation to offset some of their day to day carbon emissions. In my opinion Barclays have been a bit naughty with the Breathe card repayment options, ensuring that they maximise profits… and offset the carbon offsetting! (more…)

With the arrival of baby Maria in July we’ve had a lot of celebratory flowers in the house of late, some of which have been Lilies. A visitor tonight reminded me of something I read online last year about Lilies being fatally toxic to cats, having done some more research tonight I’m now even more concerned than ever… Lily pollen or leaves prove fatal to cats if ingested; eventually their kidneys pack up and any unfortunate animal goes on to die a very painful death within five days of consuming the pollen. It seems that there is a six-hour window within which to get your cat to a vet for treatment following a lily eating incident, after that it’s goodbye moggy. The main symptoms to watch out for are lethargy, a lack of appetite and vomiting. (more…)

‘Cloaking’ is a word that for some years has come to be most often used in the search engine optimisation industry. It is used to describe a website which has been configured to show one page to a visiting search engine spider such as the Googlebot, and a very different page to you and me. The idea is that Google finds a page loaded with keywords and perfectly optimised, awarding it a top ten search position, real visitors increase as a consequence but are presented with the actual webpage… which may or may not be as relevant. For about five years ‘cloaking’ has been pretty heavily penalised and as an SEO technique all but dropped. However, I am still aware of several large publishers using what appears to be a form of cloaking to drive traffic whilst protecting content with a subscription barrier / log-in. (more…)

About ten years ago I went through a transitional point in my life, one which stole away the future path I thought lay before me and put me into a bit of a depression. At twenty-one years of age and in good health ‘depression’ is probably too strong a word compared to those facing some uphill battle with a terminal illness, but it was a traumatic time for me; my life was turned upside down and left lacking purpose, I felt all alone in the world and I had quite a few debts to face on my own. It was during this period of depression and self pity that I had something of a religious experience which lifted me way above my gloom and helped guide me to where I am today. Maybe I’ll blog the religious experience one day, but what followed it were some unusual opportunities offered up by the universe and one of these was a book by Dan Millman called ‘Way of the Peaceful Warrior’. (more…)

This week I have unfortunately been rather ill - hence the lack of postings, it’s been quite inconvenient considering that I’m four weeks into a new job and have a new baby at home. Ironically both of these factors may well have influenced my illness as stress does play a big part in my own IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), but it mainly all began with a food poisoning incident four weeks ago which upset the bodily balance. Not many people like to blog about digestive disorders as it’s a slightly embarrassing subject, but most web pages on the subject are not very helpful; everything seems to be a rip off of the same source for the purpose of generating a bit of contextual ad revenue - a theme I’ve noticed with a lot of medical sites. (more…)

2007 seems to have been the year of web stats comparison questions for me. I don’t remember a previous year where so many people asked me which of their web statistics data tools was telling the truth. The main issue is that whether you’re looking at a logfile analysis report from WebTrends, or a client-side tracker like Google Analytics, both are correct in their own way – you just have to understand their methodologies. The main difference is that logfiles track all server activity – from browser based surfing to Googlebot visits and non HTML file downloads (PDFs), client-side scripts only run for browsers used by real people viewing HTML pages. (more…)

This year I made quite some effort to grow our own vegetables in the garden; lettuces and beetroot have been very successful, I also had high hopes for my tomato plants. Unfortunately, having freed my biggest plants from the confines of their plastic greenhouse covering, they soon went brown, dried up and died… closely followed by my batch of outdoor plants residing not too far away. It seems that with all the wet weather we’ve been having, combined with moderate warmth, it’s been the perfect climate for Tomato Blight (Phytophthora infestans) to do its worst. I took some photographs as the web seems to be lacking for confirmation of Blight symptoms. (more…)

I got quite a shock tonight when I found out that the Football Conference will be sponsored by Blue Square for three years and rebranded as Blue Square Premier. It’s an unusual choice, back in 2001 when I ran the website ‘Conference League’ I struggled to get any affiliate revenue from Conference betting online, but I suppose it’s not about that - just having the football results read out with a Blue Square name drop will suffice come Saturday tea time. I wonder how long it will take the TV and radio commentators to stop calling it the ‘Nationwide Conference’… they only just stopped calling it the ‘Vauxhall Conference’! I suspect plenty of people will question the validity of the word ‘Premier’, we’re often talking ‘big boot and run’ football, even my beloved Stevenage Borough FC don’t really merit the description ‘premier’ and I’ll be the first to admit that. (more…)