February in review

Posted by stuart as online marketing, make money online

I must admit that my online endeavours have been the last thing on my mind this month, what with the new kidney and all.

Surprisingly, income across my blogs didn’t drop as much as I expected through February, although the closure of the performancing partners network has cost me a few quid.

As I was out of action for most of the month, I only made about half a dozen posts across all blogs.

Adsense income for the month was down by about 30%, and ad sales revenue was down  about 15% as I lost a text link ads advertiser.

Number of feed readers of this particular blog has actually nearly doubled over February. I’m not sure why, as I mentioned before, posts have been few and far between. Go figure

I’m still resting and spending time in the hospital a lot at the moment, but hope to be back in something resembling a regular posting pattern soon.

How did you do?

A quick transplant update, and returning some love

Posted by stuart as kidney transplant

I’ve been out of hospital a week now, and whilst I must say being at home with my beautiful wife and adorable kids is great, the daily trips to the hospital are wearing me out.

On Wednesday, a biopsy revealed that my body was starting to reject the new organ, so I’m being given 1,000 miligrams (daily for three days) of prednisolone to combat the rejection. This is a horrible drug which leaves me an emotional wreck, bursting into tears at the slightest provocation.

Other than that, things are going as expected, I’m still peeing every half hour or so (When you have kidney failure you don’t pee, so your bladder shrinks to the size of a small coin, and it takes time for it to stretch once it is in use again). This is keeping me awake at night, and consequently I’m bloody exhausted.

I’m still in considerable pain from the surgery itself, but I’m ok as long as I keep popping the little white pills!
There’s not really much more to tell, so now I’d like to individually thank the people who were kind enough to leave encouraging thoughts in response to my last post. Each and every one of you brightened my (pretty dark) days over the last week or so with your comments:

Tom at Nothing Ventured

Sarah G at SarahFreelance

Mark at 45n5

Chance at JC Commerce

Will the internet marketing fool

Empress at Building My Empire

Adnan at Blogtrepreneur

John Murphy at Invest Journal

Pimping out my internal organs

Posted by stuart as kidney transplant

Been out of action the last ten days or so. Got a phoe call at 1:30am on the 7th of Feb that a new, shiny kidney was available to me.

Apart from lots of pain from what is a pretty major operation, and the kidney not wanting to turn on initially, it is now working well and I am relieved to be home.

Looking forward to re-acquainting myself with my friends in the blogosphere.

Tired, must sleep now, more details later

Cheers

Is your domain registrar stealing from you?

Posted by stuart as mydomain.com

A roundup of my previous posts on the matter, then I’ll be moving on to another domain registrar:

It appears that mydomain.com are redirecting traffic to “landing pages” stuffed with PPC advertising whilst domain registrants are waiting for their DNS to propogate.

This is wrong for so many reasons it’s not funny. For example, let’s say you’re a web developer, and putting together a site for your client. You buy the domain name, and tell your client you have done so. The client merilly types their shiny new domain name into their web browser, and as the domain hasn’t propogated yet, they are confronted with a page of ads.

Keep in mind that the content of these ads is outside of the control of both mydomain.com, and you, the person in charge of developing the site which will sit on this domain, as they are contextually served. This means that inappropriate ads may be shown, which the client may find highly offensive. It is then left up to the web developer to explain to a client who has no understanding of the DNS, what is happening.
This raises some serious questions which need addressing:

1. Why weren’t we, as domain registrants, told about these changes at mydomain?
2. What’s to stop registrars placing a few hours hold on the updating of name servers, to have their ads show for longer?
3. What’s to stop the registrars pointing the domains to a landing page if there are other problems with the DNS system
4. What’s to stop registrars choosing low trafficked domains, and randomly making them show a landing page, rather than the intended URL

This is interfering of the highest level.
If mydomain, and other registrars can’t see that this is stealing from their clients, by using a domain that has been paid for, to make money for themselves, there is something seriously wrong in the world.

Stupid Windows

Posted by stuart as windows

Stupid Windows Update!