Web Blog of Greg Mathews

We took the motor home out for the weekend for the first time, we drove about 190 miles to stay at a site close to my parents, well it was fathers day the weekend before and my mums birthday on the Monday before we went down so thought it would be a good time to visit them.

The drive was fine apart from the rain, which strangely enough no one either at home nor at our destination had, it was as if the rain cloud just hoverred above us all the way until about 15 miles from the site when it stopped.

Due to the traffic and weather we did not get there until about 20:30 so didn’t do too much. Do the normal, connect electric etc and then sort out TV arial. That was a joke, we managed to get 2 terestrial TV channels and no digital channels. By 22:00 we gave up:)

Woken by the kids in the morning I asked for a timecheck, 7:30 I was told so I got up and washed to be told, ’sorry dad I misread my watch, it’s now 6:50′.

Everyone was now getting up, this was not popular as Tracey does like her lay in at the weekends. Once we were all up, had a few cups of coffee and breakfast I thought I would get the ‘camping satellite kit‘ out and give that ago.  With Tracey sat on top of the Motor home with the satellite dish I was tuning  and making suggestions on how to angle the dish. Within about 15 minutes we had a good choice of channels although BBC 2 wasn’t being received but that was not a concern for us.  As long as Tracey could get her fix of Casualty then we’re happy.

The rest of the weekend was a ‘normal’ caravanning weekend, wanderred down to the local resevoir in the morning, met up with my family later etc and then on Sunday packed up and came home.

Before we left I had heard about a way to get mobile internet for your laptop for a year for less than £30 which I tried over the weekend.  I will post about it over the next day or so.

and we are so excited:)

The past week has been hectic, we managed to get the stump ground by a tree surgon, this was needed so we could put some kind of hard standing at the end of the existing driveway for parking the motor home.

We had thought orriginally about getting a builder to extend the driveway with a concrete slab, this had two downfalls, the first being that planning permission is required and the 2nd was the cost so we decided to just level the area off ourselves and lay two rows of paving slabs.  The two rows should be the right distance apart from each other for the motor home, I did measure so lets hope I did it right.

We had to remove a fence and pedestrian gate from the end of the orriginal drive which means we have had to commission a set of gates to go at the front of the driveway so the dog can’t get out.

We pick the motor home this afternoon, the dealer is going through bits with us and then letting us stay on their rally field so we can play with the awning which is  not being demonstrated. Then it’s home to fill up with the normal bits.

This morning we are making the most of having nothing to do for the first time in a week, boy it feels good:)

I cut down a large conifer last week and now need the root ground.

Last week I contacted a ‘Tree surgen‘ and he quoted me over the phone and said he was be able to do it Monday or Tuesday, he said he would confirm over the weekend. The weekend came and went, Monday came and went, Monday afternoon  I emailed them to confirm when they will do the work. No response. It’s now Thursday and they still have not bothered getting back to me.

Yesterday I called another tree surgen, he came out later to look at what is needed and gave me a quote, he said he is grinding stumps today and can do the job about 13:00. By 15:30 he had not arrived so I telephoned him, a lady whom I assume is his wife said that the grinder had broken down and he had gone out to get replacement parts. I accept this happens, what I don’t accept is the fact that he could not phone me and let me know he would not be able to do the job today. I’ve sat all afternoon waiting for him to arrive when I could have been out doing other things.

I phoned another company this morning, they were tied up and he said he would phone me back within half an hour, guess what, 6 hours later still no call back.

Businesses off all sizes but especially small businesses are struggling in the current climate, is it no wonder if this is how they treat customers.

I do have a 3rd ‘Tree Surgen’ coming out tomorow morning, I do hope they take their business more seriously.

OK so in the past two weeks two major things have happened, I purchased a Motorhome and then within days Google stopped serving adsense ads on one of my sites. It’s like Google read my post about the Motorhome and then thought, ‘we’re not paying for that, lets stop ads on his site’ #

So now I need to make up the difference, I have tidied up the site and am hoping to get at least some earnings from it, but it has reminded me that I should not put all my eggs in one basket.

I now have two projects I have to get complete, I’ve just got to decide which to do first LOL. Project 1 is the EC clone site, I know there will be at least a small membership to get the site going but at this time no confirmed method of monetizing the site. Remember it must at least pay for itself.

The second project is one I have been doing on and off for a while, when complete it would not have any users to start with but could become a nice money earner once the membership grows, in addition the scripts will be sellable and from doing research in demand.

OH well maybe I should toss a coin.

What a sudden turn around, I have a meta search site called Yzoosearch on which I have been serving a single adsense ad unit on each page for the past few years, it hit a high a couple of years ago but in recent months has brought in about $1000/month. Not an amount to be sneezed at.

I received an email from Google about a week ago advising me that one of the pages had ‘mature’ content and unless I resolved the issue then my they would disable ads on the site.

Considering the results produced by the site are taken from main stream search engines there is little I could do, what I did do was filter out some obviously mature words and words that are beleived to be Google ‘Stop words’, ie words that could have a detrimental effect on how google views the site.  So these words should no longer appear.

Well it appears this was not good enough, and sometime on Tuesday of this week they stopped serving the adsense ads on the site.  I have tried an alternative ad network but it just isn’t doing what is needed.

I may rebrand the site, this worked once before when there was an issue a couple of years ago, I resolved the problem then but the effect was not quick enough to please adsense so a rebrand was the only option.

I really don’t know what has changed but I liked my old life.

I would get up in the morning, see the kids of to school, get the laptop out and do a bit of dropping, some reading and then spend the rest of the day coding. I loved it, coding was my passion and I enjoyed it.

Recently things have changed, I’ve spent lots of time in the garden, which I am loving. Yes it has been warm over the last week but this has been going on longer, I’ve built some decking which took me forever, we’ve started cutting down tree’s (got to figure out the roots) so we can extend the drive for the motor home, and this afternoon we have a French exchange student arriving for a week.  The worse part is I am not missing sitting at the keyboard.

Part of me feels I have let people down, I stated I hoped to have my EC style site completed within a month, well more than a month on and to be honest it is not going to reach completion any time soon (Sorry).  I have another project which I dropped to do the EC style site, again this should be complete by now but it’s not.

Is this the signs of getting Old, the kids in our house say yes, ‘Dad you are an old man’, but heck I would like to think I am only half way through my life, sure that means I am not Old just yet.

I know that I will get coding again, heck I have to but I want it to be because I want to and not because I have to, I know once I get started in the morning I will get into it, love what I am doing and get some work done.