Nearly two weeks on from the start of my Google advert experiment and I’m reasonably pleased with the results. My account balance now stands at $8.41 which although isn’t actually that much money, it really is for doing nothing much. I’m starting to understand how their payments work… I only get paid when people click on a link, however not all clicks will pay me, and some clicks pay me much more than others. So far out of the 519 adverts displayed on my blog, there have been 17 clicks – if I can figure out how to customise the adverts I might be able to target them a little better to improve that. As for Top Cash Back I noticed that three people signed up directly as a result of it getting a mention on my blog. One of those new cashbackers has already reached a decent balance in their account, and the other two are well on their way (I’m able to see the balance of anyone I refer until they reach £5 as that is when I get a referral fee).
Down for maintenance
August 28th, 2008 No Comments »In preparation for our house move next month I am in the process of moving all my hosted web sites from my server on to external hosting. I’m going to start with this blog which will be moved next week.. hopefully there will be minimal downtime as I swap from one to the other, but you may notice the whole site being unavailable for a couple of days (sorry to all my avid readers, I know you’ll be disappointed.. er, are you there??? hellooo????).
A new look and a new house
August 6th, 2008 1 Comment »Yes, you may have noticed a new layout here on el-bloggo. This is for a number of reasons. Firstly I was bored with the look and fancied a change. Secondly my in-laws internet connection couldn’t really cope with streaming the videos. And finally… no-one really looked at anything on this site especially as ‘da missus’ hadn’t updated her blog in centuries. So… it’s just my blog now. If you want to watch the videos or see the photos, then they are all on Facebook.
In other news… we have finally accepted an offer on our house and had an offer accepted on a house here in the village. Things were in motion last week but I didn’t want to jinx it by blogging prematurely. This is the house we are in the process of buying:
I don’t think it comes with the cat on the drive however. We are aiming for completion around the end of September so all cross-able appendages are crossed.
It never rains, it pours.
August 16th, 2007 No Comments »So yes, I managed to fix my server by Sunday evening.. but it died again on Monday morning. I now know that was due to lack of disk space cuz the error logging went crazy. All sorted. Normal service is resumed… I hope.
My apologies for the down-time
August 16th, 2007 No Comments »Yes, I know that the web site has been down for a few days – the reason being that the main hard drive with the operating system on in my server died. I have now purchased a new one and took the oportunity to upgrade the OS to Fedora Core 7 while I was at it. I am pleased to say that my backups were fine, and I am working hard to ensure that next time the hard drive dies (which I am sure it will), I will be able to restore service as normal even quicker. Those of a slightly geekier nature might be saying but Oli.. surely a single drive failure to a person of your sad geeky skills should not pose a serious problem and take your entire server down – havent you ever heard of RAID??, to which Id reply, yes, and my data drives were fine on their cosy RAID 1 array.. but not so for the operating system. The server is a mere laptop with an ordinary 2.5inch hard drive in you cant fit any more drives in the bay or I would have done.. so when the drive dies, the server dies. Previously I had a backup routine scheduled to back critical configuration files up to the data drives over night. I now realise that even though this makes it easier to reinstall my server should it die, its still a pain in the buttocks. I shall be scheduling monthly Clonezillas too from now on. I aspire to owning a bigger server room than the cupboard under the stairs.. it shall have a rack, two clustered servers, shared storage, and it shall be so. One Day.
