Devil Works

After my Vista problems last week I still have one major issue that I haven’t been able to fix.

Windows will no longer update itself. Every time I try to check for new updates I get a message saying “Windows could not search for new updates”. With an error code 80073712.

I’ve searched all over the internet, Microsoft’s advice is to delete a registry entry using the cmd prompt. I tried to do that but the registry entry they specified doesn’t exist and there is no further information on what to do to fix this.

All the other info I found on the error is people like me posting on usenet and forums looking for a way to fix the problem.

I wasn’t going to complain about it here, but I just got a pop up from the tool bar saying windows updates are available, when I went to get them the I get the same error.

So I’m looking more forward to the day where almost everything I do is through some sort of web interface and I don’t have to rely on Microsoft to stay online.

I logged into my Adsense stats today to check on things and I noticed I’d received a message from the Adsense internal message system. The subject was “July 2007 optimisation report” I thought wow, Google are paying attention to my sites and are going to offer me some pearls of wisdom to increase my income.

And here it is………………….. hold your breath, it’s genius at work…………..

Placing more than one ad unit on a page often generates more revenue.

Thanks Google, I would never have thought of that on my own!

For those that haven’t noticed I’m now offering paid posts for this blog. I’ll review your site or service as long as it’s not completely irrelevant to what I normally write here.
I’ve set the price at $25 to start with and I’ll see how it goes, If I don’t get any offers at that price then it’s most likely I’ll take it down. There is a limit to what I’ll do paid work for, I’d much rather work towards having a $10,000 hour than work for peanuts.

On the other hand if by some miracle I start getting more review requests than I can handle then my price will be going up. I’m a capitalist after all

I received an email today enquiring about placing some advertising on another one of my blogs.

This is a bit of a first for me and I’m not sure how to proceed, or even if I want to proceed.

The email said they are interested in placing links with “blurb” in a fashion that it doesn’t resemble “sponsored links” or “ads by google”. The email also said that they may consider paying for reviews or even writing posts for the site.

The blog is in the credit card sector and I’m against placing anything even mildly dodgy on any of my sites and the credit card sector is full of dodgy offers. One of the concerns I have is that I entered the domain that the email came from in my browser and it just refreshed to Google. A Google search for the company name also comes up with nothing useful. It makes me wonder what sort of web marketing company would hide it’s name from the web.
I don’t even have any idea what to charge. At this stage I’m happy to accept any reasonable offer that covers my time to set it up and a little bit extra.

I’ve emailed the guy back telling him I’m open to proposals but I’m reserving my decision for now.

If you’re using Wordpress and Adsense on your site and you haven’t installed the Adsense Deluxe Plugin then you’re probably wasting a lot of your time cutting and pasting Adsense code into your posts.

In it’s most basic format it turns the process of putting code blocks into your post just a matter of typing

where ever you want the code block to appear.

My only advice is to view the readme.txt file that comes in the plugins zipfile before you install it. I didn’t and I was left scratching my head wondering why it wasn’t working. I found the answer and I haven’t looked back.

I’ve decided to join the billion other bloggers that are taking money for posting on their blogs. I’d originally avoided it for many reasons, the main one being some of my favorite blogs were turning into a series of paid reviews about topics that I have little or no interest in.

I’m going to do my best to keep the reviews on topic and will be spreading them over my three most active blogs. I’ll also marking all paid reviews as that and putting them in their own catagory.

I’ll give it a month and see how it goes.

If anyone has ever going looking for free web templates for their sites then they will have waded through a bunch of spammy template sites that are indexed in Google which aren’t actually free.

Today I found a site called Open Source Web Design that has approximately 2000 templates that you can download for free.

These are truly free, not free downloads after you’ve paid for a license to use it like the spammy sites try and flog you.

Mind you I have no objection paying someone for quality work, but if you’re a little cash strapped and trying to get your online business off the ground then this is a great resource.

A while back Google announced that in an effort to reduce comment spam on blogs that links with the attribute rel=nofollow wouldn’t get any Google juice*. Other search sites seem to pretty much ignore the nofollow tags, I’m not complaining about that at all.
Wordpress implemented a system where links from commenters would automatically have the no follow attribute added to their links.

Moving on a little bit, Wordpress now has a pretty good anti spam system called Askimet. It works pretty well and has reduced my comment spam down to next to zero.

So the question has been raised “Why do Wordpress publishers still need the nofollow tag?”

I decided that I didn’t and have installed the  Do Follow plugin on this blog.

So now I’m happily sharing my Google juice with any one that takes the time to post a comment.

Please note that comments that appear to be deliberate attempts at getting Google juice will be deleted, all I ask is that you say something interesting and relevant to the post.

*Google juice is a slang term for backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the higher Google ranks your page in the search results.

I’m fortunate enough to own a five letter dot com name, unfortunately it’s not a real word otherwise I’d already be kicking back on the fat of the lamb. However it is an easy one to remember and hence should be brandable. I bought it at an expired names auction for next to nothing a little over 12 months and hadn’t been able to decide what to do with it.

I had set up Wordpress MU on it, with a vague idea of running a bunch of different blogs, but running something that needs regular updating goes against my concept of retiring.

However some spammers had found it and had furiously been submitting posts laden with unsavory links to their (my) free blogs. Google has even indexed some of them, I had evil thoughts of redirecting the traffic, but decided I didn’t want to profiting from some of the search terms being used.

So I had to come up with a new idea. I’d seen services like Tiny URL and thought that it’s something I might make with my five letter dot com. I’m not expecting to have the millions of users that Tiny URL has but it’s not a bad way to get some backlinks and once it’s up and running it should pretty much run itself.

I bought a new laptop a couple of weeks ago and it came pre installed with Windows Vista Home Premium.

It’s taken me a little while to get my files transferred across and things set up the way I like them, I’m not entirely happy yet but overall I haven’t found Vista too bad.

The first thing that’s really got me bugged is that it takes ages to unzip a file. Something that I’d expect to take less than a minute to unzip, takes 20 minutes. A google search shows that it’s not just me. Some people are reporting that disabling onecare fixes the problem, and some others have said that it’s only when the zip files have sub folders does it bog down.

I don’t use onecare so have ruled this out as the cause, but I’ve looked in all the usual haunts and can’t find a solution.

Can anyone help me ?