Web Blog of Greg Mathews

After 30 years I am yet again trying to give up smoking.

I started smoking at a mere 10 years old, and have on numerous occassions tried giving up but generally lasted no more than about 5 hours. This time is different, I hope, I went to bed Sunday night ensuring I smoked the last fag, that’s a cigarette and not what you might think, so yesturday morning I awoke with no smokes around to grab.

Boy it was hard work yesturday, me and Tracey bickerring all the time, the kids getting snapped at for the silliest thing and the food cupboard being raided all the time.

People say, keep busy to take mind off it, but when ‘busy’ is sat working at computer where you’ve always sat with a cig in your hand, it doesn’t help much.

We got thru the first day, it’s now 10am on Tuesday and I haven’t had a smoke for about 36 hours, I am not sure I can do this, the temptation to shoot out and buy some is so great.

OK, I am looking at categories for the new EC clone, does your blog fall nicely into the categories available on Entrecard or would you like to see another category?

Also, I am not a great web designer, I can code php and perl to fit into nice designs, I can design basic pages but I can’t design ‘outstanding’ sites. If you have a good design you would allow me to use on the new site (obviously with a credit link to your site/blog) then please let me know, it would really be appreciated.

OK, I announced my intention for an EC clone, well I am about to start work on it again. My other project is not completed but I feel that this has the momentum and is worth prioritising.

I have looked at the code I started some while ago and much of it may need redoing, I only started php a few months ago and have learned some better technics since the first time I looked at this.

I do think I should let people know about me a bit, as I do not have an about me page and people may think I am doing this just to upset Graham, but that is definately not the case.

I am disabled so working on computers was really my only option and had a few minor data entry jobs when I left school, I had some knowlege of programming in ‘basic’ but that was it. In 1997 I became an affiliate of a Web hosting company, and about 3 months later they made me their first remote Senior reseller, not based on sales but based on the help I gave other resellers on the forums. This role soon turned into a paid position, and within about 4 months I was Support Administrator and had about 8 others working for me doing customer and affiliate support.

During that time I learned to program in Perl, one of the company owners recommended some  books and helped me out now and again. I left the company around 2000 as it had been sold to a big national telecoms co and I wasn’t enjoying the work or the direction the company was heading. Since then I have mostly worked for myself, with the odd period of employment in between.

I now code for a living, but the thing that sticks with me from the Hosting days is Customer Service/Support should always be a priority.  Unhappy users/clients eventually leads to no users/clients. If you have problems with the service you’re providing then as long as the users  are   kept in the loop etc  most will stick by you.

This is why I have made this decision, I do not believe we as EC users have seen the Customer Service/Support nor been considered when decisions have been made and there appear to by high numbers of ‘unhappy’ users around because of it.

OK back to the coding now:)

OK I have mentioned it a few times before but have not got around to completing my own EC type site within the next month.

I am coming to the end of my current coding project which should be complete within the next week, at that point I have decided to go back to the project I started some time ago to create my own version of Entrecard. Much of the work is done, the widget is done, the checking of blogs for new posts is complete and awarding credits for dropping is also complete.

The design needs work, monetizing the site needs to be set up, but this will be done in a totally different way to the EC is going about it and will not be set up immediately.

There is no ‘market place’ at the moment and that could be a feature that is added at a later date, I am not sure if Credits should be treated as a ‘currency’ or just kept as ‘credits’ which are earned from dropping/displaying widgets  and spent to place ads/trade services, but I have not decided on this yet.

Any thoughts/ideas can be posted as a comment to this post and/or emailed to sales at gregorymathews.com

I am bemused, I logged into  Entrecard this morning to be presented with the following  message:

A lot of your posts contain affiliate links. This is against A2 of our TOS. Please fix within 72 hours are your site could be marked for deletion.

Please can someone find an affiliate link in any of my posts and point it out to me please? I can’t remember the last time I included an affiliate link.

Maybe they are referring to the one I used in a couple of posts at the beginning of the year for a MLM program I joined and since left.

Maybe it is the links to my own sites that they beleive are affiliate links, well if they checked them they would see they are not.

OR MAYBE it’s because I am not accepting paid ads and I have added an image (with a link) that lets people know I do not accept paid ads.

The last appears the most likely to me as I added the new image yesterday and today I get the above warning.

WHO the F*&^ does Graham think he is telling me what I can and can’t do with my blog?

I have asked Entrecard to give me evidence of all the affiliate links but I am not holding my breath.

I feel so bad, I have not done any coding, or even posting here for well over a week. That isn’t good.

I am working on a coding project which really should be completed by now but  there has been so many interuptions it is getting impossible to do anything.

I had our loft space converted about 18 months ago and worked up there every day, this was great as I was away from all of the activity and distractions around the house but it gets cold up there in the winter and running an electric heater all day was expensive so I have been working downstairs on my laptop, big mistake as this means that Tracey asks me to do things around the house all the time rather than wait for me to come down for a break or something.

This has meant the remodelling of the  bathroom is now complete after months but that doesn’t earn us any cash.

To add to that, the kids have been off school this past week and are for the next week, this is a distraction in itself but they want to do things with me during the day and as I am sat in the same room as them find it hard to comprehend that I am working.

On Monday we then had a scare, Tracey’s Grandfather was rushed into hospital, both of  Tracey’s parents where out at work, neither having their own transport available to get home or to the hospital so I volenteered to go to the hospital to see what the situation was until they could get back, I have absolutely no problem doing this and would do it again tomorrow if needed.  Thankfully it looks as if Tracey’s Grandfather is going to be OK.

My parents came up from down south later in the week for a couple of days which meant that there was no time to get my hands near the computer long enough to do anything worthwhile in the way of coding. I love to see my parents, we don’t see enough of them to be honest and we had planned to visit them while the kids are not at school .

I love my kids and spending time with them, I love getting the DIY done around the house, I would always drop anything I am doing if any member of the family is taken ill and things need to be done, and off course I love seeing my parents but it why is it when I need to get work done everything happens offline, when I don’t have much work on nothing appears to happen offline.

I’ve been browsing around and reading some blogs for views about the new Entrecard paid ads and one thing that came to me was the fact it is so much ‘cheaper’ it is to pay for advertising rather than using your Entrecard credits.

I tooked at my recent top ads, the ads I’ve placed which have had the most clicks, now using the value Entrecard give to their credits of 1000 credits = $6, on average each click is costing me about 10 cents per click, if I paid for those clicks with hard cash, I could get advertising for just 2 cents per click, thats just a  fifth of the cost.

This could well explain why then I am getting pages of ‘paid’ ad requests waiting approval but absolutely no ‘normal’ ads requests meaning I will not earn anything from showing ads if I approved them all and any existing ‘normal’ ads would get less advertising for their credits. This then makes me ask, what is the point of dropping now?  why would you drop for at least two days (2×300 drops) to earn enough credits to advertise on a fairly popular blog when you can just pay peanuts and get your ad pushed to the front of the que?

I understand Entrecard need money but they have not spent enough time thinking about the best way to generate income, this is one reason I have not yet launched my own ‘dropping’ site.

I will stress now, I am not currently approving paid ads, to ensure my ‘normal’ advertisers get the advertising they expect.

The past month has seen a slower growth in the number of blogs being monitored by Dropaholics.com and the hope of hitting 1000 blogs during March did not come to florision but we are now just 30 blogs from that target so if your blog is not yet registerred then get over there an register your blog.