Life, the Universe and the Internet

My ramblings about making a living on the internet and life in general

Archive for May, 2007

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Contracting, Three Days In

Published May 23rd, 2007 in Contract Working | No Comments »

Well I am now three days into the contract and just about starting to adjust to the huge change in routine. I am now driving for three hours a day as it’s a 90 minute trip each way, so I am up at 7:00 am and getting home about 7:30. It’s pretty tiring but it is also limiting the time I have to spend on my websites. By the time I get home, spend an hour playing with my daughter, have food etc it is nine o’clock before I can even make a start. So I am doing the bare minimum to keeps things afloat, and I will hopefully catch up on weekends.

There are some good points though (apart from the income that is). The way that the company is writing their system is very different to what I am used to, so that is a good learning experience. When I have it all clear in my head, I am sure I can make some posts here on the subject. But for now, I feel my bed calling, I forgot how bad I was at mornings.

A Big Change In My Daily Routine

Published May 21st, 2007 in Contract Working | No Comments »

Today I am starting a new eight week contract as an ASP.Net developer, so for the first time in many months I will be working a normal five day a week, eight hour a day routine. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, on the one hand I am not happy to be back working to a routine as I really like my freedom in terms of when I start and finish work, and have to travel to work again is not appealing.

But at the same time, it will be nice to work with people again and be part of a busy organization and at the end of the day it is only eight weeks. Plus of course it will be a regular income for a while.

I don’t really know yet how much it will affect the blog, on the one hand I will have less time to write posts, but on the other hand I am also expecting to learn some new things, so I will finally be able to make some useful programming posts again instead of just waffling all the time. :)

Whogets.com An Apology From Me

Published May 17th, 2007 in ReviewMe Review | No Comments »

It appears that I owe whogets.com an apology, I recently commented that they cancelled the payment for the review I did of their website. They have been in touch and informed me that they did not cancel the review so it must have been an error on the part of reviewme.

So I am using this post to formally apologise to whogets.com and take back the statement. I will get in touch with reviewme and find out why they cancelled payment of the review.

How To Put a Value on a Website

Published May 16th, 2007 in Making Money | 3 Comments »

I am considering trying to sell one of my websites as a whole package including domains, content, source code etc. At the moment I am not going to say which site it is as I am still undecided but it is a well established domain.

However the problem is that I have absolutely no idea how to value it. I have seen some sites that say you should simply take the monthly income and times it twelve to get the value. But surely there must be more factors than that to be taken into account. What about the value of the unique content, what about the value of incoming links, number of pages indexed by google etc.

The concept of just taking money earned to put a value on it, seems way to simplistic for me, so I think I will look if there are any companies out there that can assist with putting a real value on a site before I decide whether to sell or not.

But then of course there is the next big question, how on earth do you go about finding a buyer, where is the best place to advertise to ensure you get the right sort of interested parties and the right price.

If any readers have experience in this area, feel free to comment, any feedback or advice is more than welcome.

WhoGets.com Site Review Follow Up

Published May 15th, 2007 in ReviewMe Review | 6 Comments »

Last week I did a review for the Review-Me service of a website called whogets.com. Now I believe I did an honest and constructive review of the site and I certainly spent more time on it than the small fee deserved of my time but I always believe in doing a thorough job or not doing it at all.

Now it is true that while I stated the website itself looked fine, I did question they’re whole sweepstake model and considered it flawed. Well it turns out that they did not approve of my comments and cancelled payment for the review. Now in my mind if you pay for a set of reviews and cannot handle an honest opinion then you should not have asked for a review in the first place.

I am very disappointed that they cancelled payment for the review and I am also disappointed that review-me allows them too. In my mind this means one of two things of the whole service:

  1. You should only pick reviews of sights that you will praise.
  2. You should pretend to like the sites if you want to make sure you get paid.

Now I for one intend to keep my integrity and will not lie about a website, if I think there are flaws I will say so, even if it means I don’t get paid for the review.

As always any comments on this are welcome.

So I Finally Have a Page Rank

Published May 14th, 2007 in Website Promotion, Blogging | 5 Comments »

I noticed just a few days ago that Google has finally given this blog a page rank. I had guessed a page rank update was coming as they tend to be roughly quarterly. So I know have a page rank of 4, which for a first ranking I am fairly happy with. Now I know most people discount page rank as not being very important any more, but at least is seems better to say that I now have a PR 4 site instead of saying my site is unranked.

So now that I have a page rank I feel a little more qualified to ask, if anyone reading has a blog based on similar subjects to mine and would like to exchange links either in the blogroll or some other way, just let me know.

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