I am planning for a complete makeover in early 2007 and before I figure out what I really want .. I thought I would just start documenting blog sites out there that I really really LIKE and blog sites out there that I really really HATE .. This way, I can come back and look at them all and maybe try to come up with something really cool!

In the meantime, making this a regular section in here will help me treat this as an “impulse” posting .. that is .. if something catches my eye immediately (good or bad) I’ll just toss a screen image up in here and post my own personal comments about it.

I first would like to say that this is no way any attempt to put down any designs or designers out there … (look at all my sites in the HART-Empire Network using free templates) .. and nor do I want to become any designer’s groupie or advocate … I read somewhere that “Content is King” but I keep reading everywhere else “Image is Everything” or something like that!

I’ve been thinking of either creating my own template design or commission one free template out for the community. We’ll see!

I thought I would start off with one of the first designs out there that I LIKE …

Read the rest of this entry »

I am planning for a complete makeover in early 2007 and before I figure out what I really want .. I thought I would just start documenting blog sites out there that I really really LIKE and blog sites out there that I really really HATE .. This way, I can come back and look at them all and maybe try to come up with something really cool!

In the meantime, making this a regular section in here will help me treat this as an “impulse” posting .. that is .. if something catches my eye immediately (good or bad) I’ll just toss a screen image up in here and post my own personal comments about it.

I first would like to say that this is no way any attempt to put down any designs or designers out there … (look at all my sites in the HART-Empire Network using free templates) .. and nor do I want to become any designer’s groupie or advocate … I read somewhere that “Content is King” but I keep reading everywhere else “Image is Everything” or something like that!

I’ve been thinking of either creating my own template design or commission one free template out for the community. We’ll see!

I thought I would start off with one of the first designs out there that I HATE …
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Friday The 13th!

* in case you wanted the DVD collection … 1-800-HART’s Picks

I cleaned up my computer this morning

* and documented it here … 1-8-0-0-H-A-R-T

NOW THIS IS REALLY INTRIQUING TO ME!

* Curling season started at the end of September 2006 and I’ve started to get back into the Curling Blog by updating my Curling Events Calendar. It’s a three stage process because there are literally a gajillion curling bonspiels out there!! ;p

For instance .. there’s the Manitoba Curling Tour .. The World Curling Tour .. not to mention the other provincial curling tours and bonspiels … and then – what about the USA? or UK? and other emerging Curling Countries?

I found a wordpress template that is intriguing to me .. it’s called All Your Solutions .. where you can have a side by side blog by two authors. Author 1 on the left, Author 2 on the right. It probably would be perfect for a good husband vs wife type of wedding blog .. or friend vs friend blog .. or political blog ..

… but I was thinking of maybe having score results on the right side, and just regular blog stuff and news on the right …. what do you think? Would you use this free template too? How would you use it?

Missed it … by ~THAT~ much!

Aaargh ..

I had a great idea for a blog and domain name … so I opened my Chuga domain service .. and started to think of new domain names .. to see if they were taken.

Most of them were already registered to other people … but – one caught my eye .. yes indeed.

You see, I was surfing early this morning and came across the following URL in my travels … Baby Boomers Fastest Growing Startup Group in Canada. I thought of an idea for a blog and (what I thought) a really good domain name for the blog!

Anyway, for the domain names that were taken .. I performed a WHOIS on it – and discovered that MY IDEA THAT I HAD TODAY … was registered a while ago, on September 26, 2006!

But that’s not what caught my eye … It was the person who registered this domain that caught my eye.

Why? Because. Thanks to Domain Tools and reverse IP .. I was able to see that a bunch of blogs were registered September 26, 2006 and also, a bunch of blogs were registered much earlier than that. I found it interesting that the ones created earlier did not appear in any sidebars, and I started surfing.

It started out purely as an accidental discovery, mind you – but somehow once I got involved in my online “Whois” quest .. I felt privileged, in a weird sort of way, that since I was able to find information .. I was obligated to find out ALL the information. Not that it matters .. because it doesn’t .. but it was fun to continue 🙂

After more surfing time .. I just decided that since I only thought that there was only four good names were created (two regional, one gaming and that one business idea) .. I will use that number as a guideline, and register four more myself!

HECK! .. That was a great tool at Domain Tools!

So I was thinking … I still had at least $36 USD in my paypal account … I wasn’t going to stop guessing names and thinking of new blogs and domains until I register FOUR new sites. And yes I did – I registerer four new domains … three of them are parked for now, but I installed one blog this morning … THE FURNITURE SITE .. It’s part of my new “Shopping-Site-Series” of blogs … where MEDIEVAL SITE is also part of this series.

And Speaking Of My Network Of Blogs …

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t consider HART-Empire Network to be an official “Blog Network” (like ones in the news and blogosphere) .. but I do consider that we have a nice “Network of Blogs” together in our sidebars.

John at SyntagmaMedia wrote about a Multitude of Magazines .. I really don’t know what all the fuss is because, we’re all doing it out here – except some call them “Channels” .. or me? I call them:

* The Battling-Series of Blogs
* The LVR-Series of Blogs
* The Shopping-Site-Series of Blogs

For the immediate and Fall 2006 projects … I’m hoping for two more obvious and completge “Series of Blogs” in our sidebars

Google Adwords

Now THAT’s funny … (this entry on the InsideAdwordsBlog) ..

It’s funny, because after I recently purchased the RSS Submit software .. I had extra money in my paypal account // let me correct that statement – REMNANTS of money in my paypal account .. // I decided to start a campaign for one of my pet related blogs. Now, if you didn’t know – pet keywords pays the worse in google adsense – yet it seems that you can’t buy the same cheap ads that it pays us publishers. For instance .. last month, my average click earned me about $0.13 per click (I can’t tell you how much or how many clicks or CTR etc) .. but I figured because I’m oblivious to the way it is calculated – I just assume that’s half or less.

So, I created a campaign with a maximum click of $0.26 with a maximum $5.00 per day. I set up about 50 keyword phrases, thanks to copy/paste … and activated the campaign. Almost immediately, I was curious and logged back in my adwords account – and I was already charged $1.98. It seems that only one keyword was being clicked – at $0.26 .. but it was not really the keyword that I hope that was to be clicked. So, I went in to cancel it – and then I noticed that every other one of my 49 keyword phrases were on hold – and not activated – because I did not have enough maximum click rate setup. Google Adwords wanted me to increase all those phrases to at least $0.55.

I just stopped the campaign at $1.98 cost to me, and deleted the entire campaign. It’s not for me. And, that’s why I thought that post was funny.

And, speaking of Google

I guess you all heard the NEWS ..

Following Monday’s announcement, Google shares increased by 2.1 per cent to $429.57 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

RSS Submit

I placed the above affiliated link on my other site 62-151 Media Group (in the sidebar) and people can download the trial version for free. If they choose to purchase the registeration code, I earn a commission.

There are 3 plans currently, according to their website:

RSS Submit (affiliate link)

Submit RSS feeds to over 80 directories … Track your FeedBurner & Technorati statistics … Manage your RSS feeds

* Personal Edition $44.95 USD
The Personal License allows RSS feed submission for non-commercial purposes including personal blogs, personal projects, and personal web sites. This license includes:

Unlimited time usage of software.
All search engines activated.
Unlimited submission of up to 10 RSS feeds for non-commercial use.
Feeds may not be used for commercial or re-sale purposes.

* Professional Edition $64.95 USD
The Professional License allows RSS feed submission for commercial purposes by businesses and organizations. This license includes:

Unlimited time usage of software.
All search engines activated.
Unlimited submission of up to 30 RSS feeds for commercial use.
Feeds belonging to other businesses or clients may not be used.

* SEO Edition $94.95 USD
The SEO License allows unlimited RSS feed submission for commercial purposes by SEO businesses, corporations, and web masters. This license includes:

Unlimited time usage of software.
All search engines activated.
Unlimited number of RSS feeds may be submitted.
Submission of RSS feeds used for commercial purposes.
Submission of feeds belonging to other businesses and clients.

I’m terrible at SEO .. the concept .. and everything that is about this notion of submitting your RSS feeds. I do have a free-for-all directory listing available to anybody but, hardly anybody is adding their own sites. But, I have been submitting all the links in the directory to Google every few days. I’m not sure if it is working or helping or not helping.

In all my WordPress options, I do have more than one RSS submission URL site to ping, on every post. In my PetLvr blog, I have 5 of them .. but I think it slows down the posting times, so all the others had just the 2 (feedburner and technorati). Since google blog search now pings .. I have added their code as well.

But – then a friend signed me up on the Rzye Network .. and I’ve been looking around at posts and networks involved with blogging. Everybody is either promoting the pinging of blogs, or submitting their blogs to “sites” …

I don’t – simply because it is too time consuming for me to do that. Also, most of the time .. I find that I have to add some text description to each blog’s RSS … sometimes, it remembers my last time, and my blog might have changed!

So, back to this RSS-Submit program … I came across that page and wanted to try it out. First, I signed up to be an affiliate .. then, after my last month’s Text-Link-Ads paypal receipt .. I used the funds to just buy the SEO version.

This weekend, I finally installed the program .. took a few screen shots and will just use this post as a future reference to look back and see if it was all worthwhile, and if it made any difference.

So – here are the pictures!

A Snapshot of the HART-Empire Network SiteMeter October 8, 2006

You add your RSS Feed, and if using Feedburner, it gets that info and Technorati stuff too

So, I’ve added all my 74 RSS Feeds to the bloody program

It shows you keywords and I’m not sure about this 8217 keyword – I see a lot of that

Yah. It took 3 hours to submit all 74 RSS feeds to these built in 71 RSS Sites

I didn’t bother to add other sites manually – yet- maybe someday

Conclusion?

If one is supposed to be submitting their blogs regularly to RSS Submission sites = (are we?) = WELL THEN … this is quite easy to submit, when you just press SUBMIT ALL and sit back and let this program do it for you. I plan to run this submission every few days (after postings) and take a look again at the statistics in a month or so. I don’t think I will be doing anything out of the ordinary to generate more traffic – as work keeps me busy offline .. So, I’ll try to re-blog the outcome in the future.

If you are familiar with other RSS Submission programs, or are using this program – I would like to hear your comments and thoughts of how you think this program is working for you or has worked for you .. not that I will be asking for any refund .. I truly think that I need ~something like this .. it’s long overdue – but who knows if this is it!

Hmmmm

I will now be posting around the 10th of each month “THANK-YOU” posts, like this one, to all the advertisers of the previous month listed as at month end. That’s a permanent link in our blog, under a new category heading which I call .. “Sponsor Appreciation”. I know it’s hard out there trying to figure out where to spend your advertising dollars .. and well .. THANKS for considering HART-Empire Network.

You may advertise on this site in the form of Text Link Ads. I should note that the link in the previous sentence is an affiliate link, and if you do sign up for the first time through this link, I may earn a small commission. I should also note that if you are a new client, you can receive $100.00 worth of FREE Text Link Ads by entering “starting kit” into the promotion code at their checkout. That means you can basically spend maybe $125 worth of advertising this month – and only pay $25! (You don’t have to spend it here – don’t worry!)

But if you do want to spend it here .. I am currently offering ten (10) spots for text link ads per month, and they will appear on every page in our sidebar, under the SPONSORS section. At this moment, there are ten (10) available spots.

Our site is currently available at Text-Link-Ads at this URL ..

Please Support Our Sponsor From September 2006

This Could Be Your Site!

Thank-You future Sponsors!

I am again, along with my sites, at the mercy of downtime by my host service provider .. but this time it is all planned.

Dear Client,

As you may be aware, we had recently experienced a faulty drive on the particular server in which your site is hosted on. While this issue has already been considerably repaired, we would still like to take further measures to ensure that an issue like this does not reoccur in the future.

As a result, we will be scheduling immediate server maintenance for this server. The downtime will be kept minimal and as best we can within non-peak hours. We feel that this maintenance is required to ensure that this server runs with optimal performance and reliability.

There will be two downtimes involved with this process.

The first downtime is as follows:

DATE: October 4th
MAINTENANCE WINDOW: 11:00pm – 5:00am
DOWNTIME: 10-20 minutes
REASON: We will be installing an additional backup drive to this server to allow for the full and complete backup of the server\’s data. This is in preparation for the following night. The actual backup process will occur throughing the night and morning. The backup process will not cause downtime, however, slight performance degredation may result due to the large amount of data being copied.

The second downtime is as follows:

DATE: October 5th
MAINTENANCE WINDOW: 11:00pm – 8:00am
DOWNTIME: Approximately 7 hours. This is a rough estimate and may change.
REASON: We will be bringing this server down and replacing ALL hard drives in this server. After this, we will be reloading the OS. This will account for roughly 1 hour of this downtime. After the server has been reloaded, we will be copying the data from the backup drives back onto the server. The drive copy will account for the remainder of the downtime.

———-

Please note that absolutely no data will be lost as a result of this transfer. We are taking great care to retain 100% user data in this transfer. When maintenance is completed, your website should be precisely as it had been prior to the maintenance start. However, to ensure no site changes are lost, it is advised that you do not make changes to your website after 11:00pm on October 4th. Changes made after that time may not be present in our backup.

So … slow posting, possible downtimes .. nothing really new, eh?

Sorry for any inconveniences! (In Advance)