2005 September · Dominic Foster

Website Hosting - Dreamhost Sale

September 30, 2005 on 8:24 pm | In Blogging, Etc... | No Comments

If you are thinking of buying some shared Web Hosting, then I suggest you check out DreamHost because they are currently having a Massive Birthday Sale.

Use the DreamHost promo code “888″ and you can get the following for $10 per month with 80% discount for the first year:

4800 MB of disk storage - which increases by 40MB each week!
120 GB Monthly Bandwidth - which increases by 1GB each week!
600 email addresses
1 Free domain registration
UNLIMITED DOMAINS HOSTED!

There is also a whole bunch of other stuff which is too much to mention here.

One problem though! This offer is only available for the first 888 takers. So if you are considering it you may want to get there now and check that they offer everything that you require for your hosting.

Sorry guys…

September 26, 2005 on 10:38 pm | In Etc... | 1 Comment

… for the lack of content over the last few days. This is due to a content drive for some other sites I am working on!

I’m also getting to grips with a piece of useful open-source software called phpAdsNew which is used to manage advertising campaigns for websites. I’ll post some of my findings on this in the coming days/weeks. It really looks pretty cool.

If however you are looking for something interesting to read right now, I can highly recommend Yaro’s post about How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit - it is very informative.

PS. Yaro - Thanks for the info about phpAdsNew!

GoDaddy Again

September 15, 2005 on 8:38 pm | In Etc... | 2 Comments

The other day I posted about how I thought that GoDaddy.com sent me an email with a special offer promo code for purchasing domain names at a reduced price not long after purchasing a domain name. As I stated in that post, I wanted a promo code because I was about to purchase a domain name - but had to use one that I found on the internet.

Sure enough, I have just received an email from GoDaddy with a promo code to purchase domain names for $1.99!

Oh well - good job I have some domain names that I thought I would buy if I ever got a good offer.

Is there a special name for this kind of marketing? I guess it works since I’m about to go and get me a couple of domain names.

An AdSense Funny

September 9, 2005 on 12:06 pm | In AdSense | No Comments

One thing I really like to do as soon as I publish a new Blog Post is to quickly click on the Post link so that the whole post appears on one page. The enjoyment I get out of this is to see what adverts AdSense serves up for the content of the Blog Post.

Yesterdays post about The Hypomanic Entrepreneurs was a classic. As soon as I loaded it in it’s own page, there were ads for depression - and get this - an ad for Dog Eating Disorders.

The Hypomanic Entrepreneurs

September 8, 2005 on 8:35 pm | In Etc... | No Comments

Changethis.com have just released a new bunch of their manifestos today. I pay the occasional visit to ChangeThis because it is where I first came across the Bootstrappers Bible.

One of the manifestos that has been released is called The Hypomanic American because it mentions Jim Clark who I recently read about in The New New Thing as well as Bill Gross and the whole 1990’s dot com boom.

In the manifesto - which is a PDF document - John D. Gartner hypothesizes that ‘American entrepreneurs are largely hypomanic’. Hypomania is a mild form of bipolar disorder in which the person displays mildly yet persistent manic behaviors talking too much, spending money wildly, etc. Hmm… Jim Clark?!?

He says -

When asked, “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?” 91 percent of Americans said yes, as compared to 28 percent of British and 8 percent of Japanese respondents.

Are you an entrepreneur? Are you planning on becoming an entrepreneur? Are you American??? Will you invest in one of my ideas when you make heaps of money? Please?

GoDaddy

September 8, 2005 on 8:04 pm | In Etc... | No Comments

I buy my domain names from GoDaddy.com - in fact I bought one three days ago. The last time I bought one was in June, and shortly after I received an email about a special offer on .com domains for existing customers.

When I bought my most recent one the other day, I found the email but the promo code had run out. Even though it is easy enough to find a valid GoDaddy promo code, I was dissapointed because I could have saved more with the one that was emailed to me.

Now I noticed that I have just received another special offer email from GoDaddy offering a 10% discount on .com domains.

And this got me thinking as to whether GoDaddy send out a special offer just after you purchase a product. I’d be keen to find out if anyone else has experienced this. If so, would it be worth purchasing a single domain and waiting for the ’special offer’ before buying any more - As long as you were planning on buying more than 1 that is.

Who’s There?

September 7, 2005 on 11:09 pm | In Books, Seth Godin | No Comments

Seth Godin’s new ebook - Who’s There? - is available for free download from here.

Seth says about Who’s There? :

Who’s There is not an ebook about how to write better or how to follow the traditional conventions about formatting and building a blog. It’s not designed to sell you one service instead of another, either.

Instead, I divide the blog world into three groups and turn my attention to one. And in particular, I try to sell you hard on how building a blog asset can have a spectacular impact on you, your career, your organization and your ideas.

It is free until further notice - so don’t hang around!

Day 31 - The End

September 1, 2005 on 8:45 pm | In 31 Days to a Better Blog, Blogging | 1 Comment

Well it’s the end of my 31 Days to a Better Blog project.

It seems like ages sinces I started taking a serious look at my Blogging practice after Darren Rowse anounced that he would be spending the whole of August posting tips on How to Make Your Blog Better.

And now what? I think that I have learned a whole heap about a topic I knew practically nothing about 31 days ago. Now I think I’m going to re-assess my Blogging Purpose and really get into it.

I think that the thing I have enjoyed the most is the just writing the posts - as my day job is Software Development - I think that Blogging has provided something which I don’t get from my career. Not to mention what I have learned about marketing my Blog - Before the start of August, I think I was only getting a handful of visitors each day. I honestly think that the web-crawler-bots were my biggest fans! Now I’m getting an average of 175 visitors and 610 page hits per day. For the month of August I’ve had a total of 5441 vistors.

So stay tuned and we’ll see what develops!

And thanks for visiting.

favicon.ico - Typo

September 1, 2005 on 8:18 pm | In 31 Days to a Better Blog, Blogging | 13 Comments

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had the good fortune to attend a talk by Betsy Akoi on The Power of Blogging.

One of the things she said that could inadvertently increase traffic to your Blog by accidentally spelling something wrong.

Yaro Starak recently Blogged about how he is sometimes Obsessing With Traffic Logs and I am not ashamed to admit that I am often obsessed with my Traffic Logs. I just find it so fascinating to see which countries my visitors are coming from (oh the joy when New Zealand fell to the 3rd highest traffic - most of it mine!), Which Web Sites they are linking from, and the Search Queries which people are typing into the Search Engines.

Something that I noticed after Betsy’s talk, was that a few people end up here after typing ‘faveicon.ico’ - well 9 to be exact - and it had never occurred that I had mispelt faveicon.ico.

So I though that posting this might be of interest to some people - perhaps you should check if a similar thing has happened to you.

Also, you will notice that I have spelt favicon.ico correctly for this post. I’m waiting to see whether faveicon.ico or favicon.ico generates the most traffic!