Web Blog of Greg Mathews

I was watching the news last night and it did a peice on http://computertan.com/ so today I decided to take  a look.

If you are one that spends hundreds at the tanning salon then take the site a look and give the free trial ago.

It appears that Today.com has announced that all Entrecarders with blogs hosted by tiday.com must remove their entrecard widget within the next week or so as it is against their terms.

My question is, what is it that keeps you on Today.com? is it the ‘get paid to blog’ or is there more? I’ve never used them so this is a genuine question.

I have a domain called yzooblog (uk,com,net and info) on which I used offer a blog service, offering wordpress blogs,  but it became overcome with spam and junk rather than real blogs so I took it down. I am thinking that maybe I could relaunch it for people effected by current entrecard/today.com situation.

What features does today.com have that you would need to see on your blog host? Is Entrecard important enough to make a move to a new host worth while?

Well it’s been a hectic weekend this weekend, on Saturday I thought about what Willem said in response to my Domain sort out – Adsense for domains post so I played about a bit and have come up with Parkedpagecreator.com which is a simple script that allows you to create a simple ‘holding’ page for new or unused domains within minutes.

The site uses templates where the user just ads details such as their domain name, an image if they have one and some text etc and can then download or cut and paste the html code for the page, ready to upload  to their server.

I dont expect it to be extremely popular but it may be of use to a few and it gave me a break from my other projects.

We then had Mothers day here in the UK so we went out for a meal along with Tracey’s mum and dad followed my Tracey’s dad tiling the walls of our bathroom. I don’t mind tiling the floor but I don’t bother attempting walls these days.

I was sent an email today to http://parentswish.com/site01/big.html by my parents, it requires sound on and plays in full screen and I think it does no harm to show it to your children whatever age you/they are.

It’s not new so you may have seen it before but it is the first time I have come accross it.

Greg

I own about 60 domains at last count, out of which only about half a dozen or so are currently in use. I have a habbit of thinking about a new project, registering a domain (or two) for it and then thinking ‘OK will start that next week’, trouble is next week something else comes up.

Now that anyone can set up ‘Adsense for Domains’ I thought I would give it a go, I thought domains that currently just have my own ‘parked’ pages I could set them up on Adsense for Domains.

Just today I have started with just 2, Webprosperity.biz was the first, this was a domain I registered to point to an MLM opportunity I joined at the end of last year, well it didn’t pay off so I have the domain doing nothing.

The second domain I have tried is ThePaidBlogger.com, this was for one of those projects I had planned that never got of the ground.

Neither of the above get much traffic so I dont expect them to make me rich, but I do have some domains that have been popular in the past. A couple of years ago I started a meta search site called Yzoo,  but then I launched yzooblog and yzoomail which both offered free services so I renamed the search site YzooSearch and even registered some other related domains, but eventually due to spam etc the mail and blog sites became to much hassle so I took them down. These will probably be my next batch to add to Adsense for domains.

Do you have any ‘Adsense for Domains’ domains? do you get much from them?

Graham at EntreCard has announced some changes for EC that will be introduced in the next week. There are two major changes, the first, a minor one in my opinion is a ‘above the fold’ rule. Even though I prefer to advertise on blogs that have their widget above the fold I think it’s wrong for it to become an enforced rule.

The second is a change to help Entrecard raise capital, which we all know is needed to keep the service running. The problem is how the money will be raised, not by advertising on the Entrecard site, but by introducing third party paid for ads on  your blogs. You can reject the ad but it will cost you credits each time you reject an ad.

I think Graham is going about this all the wrong way, and I responded to his announcement with the following comment:

Graham

I understand from a business point of view that you need to raise capital to keep running but I do think you have made a big mistake going this way.

1. A few months ago you pointed members to the OIOPublisher script that allowed publishers to sell advertising either for EC’s or cash, you earned from every sale of that buggy script, now you are selling the advertising on those same blogs, what was the point of us buying OIOPublisher. Maybe if you promoted that script more you would earn some $$

2. I have not seen anything that shows what bloggers get from the ads you sell on their blogs, Do we get a %% from the sale or do we earn the current credit rate as if it was another blog ad or do we get nothing?

3. Most free services have some kind of advertising on their site, apart from a few ads on this blog you have no ads on the EC site. I understand you may have problems with putting something like adsense on the inbox or category pages because they are at the end of the day just pages of links but there would be nothing stopping you selling advertising on these pages, considering how many people view their inbox and putting ads on every other page of the site.

4. You say you expect a handful of bloggers to leave, I think you may be underestimating this. I have not decided which way I am going to go but I know a lot of other bloggers that are more that likely going to drop EC, especially as there are other similar networks coming through, heck I considered starting one last time there was major changes and had a lot of interest from others when I suggested it.

What are your thoughts on these changes, do you think Graham is doing the right thing?

It is great to see that in these times of financial problems millions of people still want to help those less fortunate. At time of writing, the total raised on yesterdays Red Nose Day broke all Comic Relief records and stands at almost £58 million (about USD$80 million) for good causes here in the UK and in Africa.

9 Celebrities climbed to the summit of Kilimanjaro and raised £3,326,142!

The whole day if aimed to be fun but for a serious cause, it was great seeing all the kids going to school in fancy dress, with red noses and red hair and all raising money.

Smithy and the England team was one of my favourite sketches from last nights telethon

I  think Robert Webb was the deserving winner of Lets Dance for Comic Relief:

The official Comic Relief Video

If you wish to donate you can do so on the Comic Relief website via Paypal

I am so pleased to be able to be one of the many sponsors of Lainy’s Blogoversary competition which she is launching on the 15th March.

Lainy's blogoversary competition

I will be donating a domain (.com, .net, .biz, .info, .org or .name) registration for 1 year with wordpress hosting, again for 1 year. This will give the winner a chance to have full control of their blog via the wordpress backend, using their own unique domain of their choice and ftp access to upload wordpress plugins of their choice.

Make a date in your diary to check out Lainy’s competition on the 15th.

Note, this post may sound like some kind of affiliate promoting some sites etc but it’s not, the links are not affiliate links and this is a genuine post.

A few weeks ago my father in law recommended that if I am doing any DIY I should check out Screwfix. Now I had no planned DIY so put it to the back of my mind, I had recently joined Quidco which is a cash back site here in the UK and found that Screwfix is one of their listed merchants giving a 6% cashback which makes it worth remembering in my view, oh and the screwfix prices are slightly cheaper online compared to their catalogue prices.

Anyway, having a quiet moment a few days later I decided to browse the Screwfix site, we had been talking about replacing the bathroom suite so you guessed it I found one for just £195.74, including all taps and wastes etc and free delivery. That will do, so I went back to quidco, followed their link to screwfix and placed the order, the best part was that Quidco had a discount voucher code giving a 10% discount on screwfix orders.

The delivery for the suite was set for 2 weeks, however screwfix phoned me within a day or so saying there would be a delay of a further week or so, do I wish to cancel my order or am I happy to wait? As I hadn’t even started work on the bathroom I was happy to wait and impressed that they informed me of the delay so early rather than weeks down the line.

When I checked the quidco site, and my screwfix order online, I was pleased to see that I had earned £11.91 cashback on quidco (6% of price less TAX), and £19.57 discount on the actual order, a total saving of £31.48 ooh thats good in my book.

Now the DIY bit, taking out the existing suite was not a major task but the bathroom is currently tiled (badly by  me) so we stripped the tiles of the walls to find half the plaster came of with them so the first job was to get the bathroom re-plasterred. This was not a job for me, I had to call in a builder who at the same time replastered the ceiling. I am so glad we have a downstairs WC and shower:)

Over the weekend we fitted the new bath, neither Tracey nor myself are plumbers but heck with compression fittings and flexi pipes it is a dodle, well apart from the odd leak and the fact we couldn’t find where to turn the hot water off. I then laid the floor tiles, again I am no expert and this took a bit of time and it has been agreed that the father in law will tile the walls for us as my tiling leaves a lot to be desired.

I am worried that temptation will get the better of me, my father in law obviously works during the week so can only get over at the weekends, this is not a problem per say but I desperately miss having a bath and want to get up there and tile.

Last evening I ordered a towel radiator from screwfix, via quidco (a 5% discount code this time, I didn’t order it until 17:30 and it was delivered about 10am this am, wow now thats fast delivery in my book.

I hate DIY, not the doing it, I love that, but more because I am not good at it and Tracey won’t give me full reign to do (wreck) it so there is a lot of waiting.

I would really recommend those in the UK doing DIY to look at Screwfix and order via Quidco, I have placed 3 orders now totalling about £342 (or about £355 using offline cataloge prices), I have received £25 in discounts from screwfix on the actual orders and £19.27 in  cash back from quidco. In these times, saving nearly £45 is more than appreciated.

Now I am skint so need to get back to work

almost 900 blogs being monitored.

I am so suprised at how dropaholics continues to grow. The site will be 4 months old next Wednesday, it would be great if it broke through the 1000 blogs being monitored by then but I think thats a big ask.

Sorry  this is just a short post but I am concentrating on coding another site at the moment at the same time as having a builder in the house doing a few jobs for us.