Devil Works

I thought it was just me when I logged in this morning and got an error from AVG anti virus that said “can’t find .bin file”

Then my girlfriend got the same message when she started her computer up.

I googled the problem and didn’t find much out except that we weren’t alone.

So I tried the old reinstall trick, but that didn’t work.

So I headed to the AVG website, it appears to be massivley overloaded and when the page did load it wasn’t saying anything useless.

So I asked on Twitter and got sent this link to a possible fix. I haven’t tried it, too busy backing up in preparation for my move to Ubuntu

I rank first page on Google for How The Devil Works

My site name has actually nothing to do with religion. I was trying to think of a name for a long defunct web design business. Some days I have little creativity so I combined the name of a native animal and drove past a business called Office Works. Put the two together and now I’m stuck with it on sentimentality grounds.

Actually the only reason I created this blog on this domain was it had a PR of 4. That’s gone now so maybe it’s time to move to something a little more relevant……

I moved house in mid November and had a lot of difficulty getting the phone and hence ADSL connected.

And I guess during that time I got out of the habit of spending my evenings on the Internet.

Anyway, I’ve been back online for about 3 weeks now and this is my first effort at doing anything web wise since then.

The only thing of note to happen during this time is that I sold a domain for $15o0, though after brokerage and stuff I’ll end up with$US1275 and I’m not going to predict what that will be when it converts to Aussie dollars.

So besides the domain sale I’ve pretty much done nothing online since I started moving in early November. My plan is to take a look at a few of my half assed projects and turn a couple into fully fledged projects.

Hence you should find this blog updated a little more now than it has in the past.

I’ve just come across Xinu through Stumble upon. It’s a great little site that let’s you check your rankings at more than a couple of dozen places all at the one time. I could waste hours hear looking at all my sites and how they rank…… but I won’t I know they need a lot of work before I worry about doing any tweaking.

Well none of it’s real exciting, but might explain why I haven’t updated in a while.

I’m moving house in a few weeks, my lease has expired and the owners want to turn it into consulting rooms. Not sure if that will pass planning but who am I to knock someones dreams.

Initially I was going to get myself another rental but I’m now considering going into the share housing thing. Haven’t done it for a while but it does have it’s advantages. I’m not locked into a lease and I can move on anytime I like. The rent is cheap and until I win lotto or start making a fortune on the net it’s a good thing.

The downside is the friends house I’m looking at doesn’t have a landline connected, which I thought would make broadband impossible. But I’ve looked into wireless broadband, initially I was looking at $200 a month plus a $300 modem on a 3 year contract which just isn’t justifiable.

So I did a bit more digging and found out I can add a suitable data pack to my 3G phone for $119 a month. This might sound expensive, but consider that I’m currently spending $55 a month for ADSL and another $35 for a landline that I hardly ever use (6 calls last month). So for an extra $30 a month I’ll be completely wireless.

The downside is that both the packages I looked at are limited to 3 gig of data transfer a month, which I thought would never be enough. But looking at my usage history with my current ISP. If I stop doing the P2P thing I shouldn’t have a problem.

The upside is that I can get online almost anywhere, The warmer months are coming and I’m making plans to do lots more camping. I can go away for a week and still feel productive.

Though I do need to look into alternative power supplies. I’m not going to be able to run a laptop and the phone for a week without an additional power source. I’m thinking of some sort of dual battery set up for my car and maybe some solar panels. Stay tuned and see what I work out.

As much as I’ve been in a world of blogging slackness this last month I haven’t stopped thinking about where I’m headed.

I’ve decided that I’ll complete the 10 paid posts through Pay Per Post to enable me to list another blog, then the only paid posts on this site will be direct orders.

On my other blog I’ll keep churning out the PPP opportunities that are around, but I won’t mind because that site is full of SE keyword fodder anyway.

So please excuse the rash of paid posts you’ll see over the next week. It’s all about the numbers.

If you’re interested in direct ordering a paid post I guarantee you an hour of my time where I’ll  research your site/topic and write the post and throw in some juicy deep links.

It won’t be the short fluffy cash for comments you’ve been seeing so far.

I bought an expired 5 letter dot com about a year ago. Unfortunately it’s not a dictionary word, otherwise I’d probably be retired in the tropics by now. However it is something that’s easy to remember and therefore brandable.

Since I bought it I’ve been pondering what to do with it. I initially set up Wordpress Mu on it, thinking that I could set up a lot of blogs with subdomains on it. I only installed Wordpress Mu to see what it could do, I set up a couple of blogs with it and then forgot about it for a couple of months.

When I went back to see what was happening with it, I found that 50 odd blogs had been set up on it. I took a look at them and found out they were all spamish type sites with lots of links pointing to other sites. I wasn’t really keen on this but the search engines were picking up the spam blogs and sending traffic.

As it wasn’t costing me any extra I let this ride for a couple of months. Then I started getting adult sites setting up spam blogs with content that I wasn’t comfortable living with.

So I needed to take the blogs down, but as I knew it was getting traffic to the site, I didn’t want to let leave it empty.

It was a short domain so I came up with the idea of setting up a URL redirection service.

I downloaded a free script from hotscripts.com and set it up and the site and promptly forgot about it.

Today I took a look at my site stats for July. I’ve had over 40,000 hits through the redirection service. I took a look at the database for the site and found that only 36 people have set up URL redirections, but yet the traffic they are pushing through my site is about 5 times what all my sites combined receive.

I think this one may have a future, will need to do some programming (or pay someone to do it) but I think once it’s properly set up it’s something that will be a stress free money maker.

I’ve decided to do a semi irregular post full of links and things I’ve found interesting on my daily troll of money making blogs. This is for a couple of reasons. Number one is that I waste a lot of time reading so posting about it will make it feel more productive. Number two is that I read so many posts that I struggle to find the good ones to go back to, so this should help.

Shoemoney has said phooey to industry stats showing use of Microsoft’s search engine offering has increased. He’s blaming the integration of search features into the 40 million copies of Vista that has been sold. I’d have to agree, I’ve been directed to the MSN site so many times since I got my new laptop……. but I’ve learned how to stop most of it

Aimee from Foximus tagged me with an 8 facts chain mail/posting thingo. I don’t go in for these sort of things, but I thought I should thank her for thinking of me Now I will probably have bad luck for the next 30 years. I can tough it out !

I really can’t complain about Askimet, since I’ve installed it on my blog it hasn’t let a single spam comment through on any of my blogs. Though checking a couple of them today there was a couple of comments caught in moderation that Askimet didn’t immediately label as spam.

So how did they get through ?

The clever individual used a Google translation link instead of linking directly to the site.

For example  instead of linking to

http://offensive-site.com

the link pointed to

http://translate.google.com/translate?u= http://offensive-site.com

I’m sure Askimet will get onto this one quickly and I can happily sing it’s praises again for ever and a day.

I’m posting this for no other reason than to see if my blogs value increases over time. From what I’ve read it’s completely based on your Tecnorati ranking and as such isn’t much of a reflection of it’s actual value.

My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?

It will be interesting to look back in 6-12 months and see what’s changed…… and for the record it’s not for sale at this price.

I checked a couple of my other sites and my credit card related one was rated at $1,129.08, it’s not for sale at this price, It makes me $100 a month even if I don’t post on it and has done so for the last 12 months.

My recipe blog is currently values at $564.54. Again it’s not for sale, I have a great 6 letter dotcom domain for it and with a bit of development it will be worth a lot more in the long run.

Funnily enough my ringtone blog was valued at the same price, I’m thinking that $564.54 is the starting price for any blog.