Boxing Day - Problems Almost Over

Christmas day was another one of those days. I logged on to my computer and got lots of warnings saying that my computer had the worm.win32.netsky and by coincidence I don't think; 2 new icons had appeared on my desk top for spyware scans. My IE kept on opening and trying to take me to spyware removal sites - another big coincidence!

Logic told me that the computer didn't have the worm and that in fact it was a scam. I've almost finished an article about the fraud and will post it here during the next few days.

I've almost sorted out my server dilemma. I've signed up elsewhere and should be able to start moving my membership sites tomorrow. It will be a relief to get them back up and running again, I've lost a lot of time during the last few weeks due to the server problems. Thank goodness I did back ups of the sites else I would have had a lot more work to do than just moving them. I'm just leary of the actual moving, my technical abilities are not all that. I suppose that I could pay somebody to sort them out for me but there wouldn't be any challenge in not doing it myself.

Was surprised to see some articles submitted to BB Articles on Christmas day and quite a lot today. Not surprised to have to decline several, a shame because most of them were good articles if only the site guidelines hadn't been ignored. It's the time of year for holiday destination articles. I really enjoy reading them and hopefully I will have plenty of fresh articles to add to Articles Abroad once it's back online again.

I tentatively joined the new website advertising wonder Pay Per Play a couple of weeks ago. I think that it could make money and plenty of it if you have a high amount of traffic. My only reservation is that the noise from the 5 second adverts might drive visitors away. I browse with the sound turned down so it won't bother me.

The Negative & The Positive

The Negative
Calamity seems to be following me this month. My server for the new membership sites Eprofits Centre and Articles Abroad took over a week to get back up and running. The sites were extremely slow to load and when I tried to send out newsletters to apologise for the sites being down I found that all of the cron jobs were missing and I had to set them all up again. There was also regular patches of downtime.

If you have read my earlier posts you'll know that cron jobs and I don't get on so it was no surprise that I set them up wrong. Each site has over a dozen so lots of mistakes to be made. I got the Articles Abroad cron jobs sorted but 3 of the Eprofits cron jobs weren't right and emails were being sent to my inbox every 10 or 15 minutes. I was limited for time and just deleted the emails twice a day until I had time to figure out what I'd done wrong.

The time came yesterday. I tried to log on to Eprofits and found that the site had been suspended with no warning and no explanation. I could only think that either a scammer had latched on to another of my sites, or the cron job emails going into my site inbox were considered as spamming, though I wasn't letting them build up.

Another possibility was that several days before my monthly fees were due to come out of my account I got an email saying that my payment was overdue and my account would be terminated if I didn't pay. It was the second month running that I'd had that warning email and when I complained I was told that it was just a reminder. Reminders don't tell you that you are late paying, nor do they make threats.

A few hours later Articles Abroad was suspended, as there were no problems with the cron jobs that couldn't have been the reason. My 2 new ventures down twice in one month and just as they were starting to gain momentum. The server support could only say "The server just is not acting right. There are still some bugs we are fixing."

The other problem that I have with them is that it is an hosting reseller account and I haven't been able to log into my hosting cpanel since they got back up and crawling again. Fortunately it is a new account with no customers, but what I have at the moment is one site up and running out of 3 but that site is totally useless because I can't set up accounts for new customers.

So I am paying for a service that I'm not getting. 3 of my sites are not doing anything and as I extensively advertised them the suspended pages won't be doing my credibility much good. Of course I am now in the process of looking for a new server. I got back ups of the sites, but I've never moved a site from one server to another so I'm a bit apprehensive about moving even though I know that I must.

The Positive
During the down time I was able to spend more time working on my older sites. I haven't done much with them since setting up the article directory so it was long overdue.

I've also been messing around with various scripts and software and found a neat little script that builds Youtube sites with content that automatically updates. I built 3 mini sites, the last one taking all of 5 minutes. You can see that site at www.bb-articles.com/spicegirls I think it's rather neat and have a few ideas on how I can use the mini sites to aid my business.

More positive is that BB Articles Alexa ranking is now 285,386 and still rising। A massive improvement in a relatively short time. Some really good writers are now becoming regular submitters so I can only see a good future for BB Articles.

Merry Christmas

I'll be glad when December is over!

December started out really positively. I converted my newsletter into a downloadable pdf file - almost a magazine. My new sites were gaining momentum and getting new members, BB Articles and my other sites going great then crash!

My server for the membership sites went down on the 6th and over a week later is still not up and running despite promises. Then I found out that one of my other sites on another server had been suspended because some git had latched on to it and scammed others. Over 20,000 hits in a couple of days must have made it worthwhile for the scammer. I absolutely hate the thought that people have been scammed using my webspace and hope that the scammers get caught.

Lots of other little things have been going wrong so I just hope that Santa brings a nice surprise to make up for it all then 2008 watch out!

A Great Weekend & A New Business

I spent the weekend visiting my grandchildren Harrison and Isabella and had a great time. They have moved to a new 4 bedroomed house about 30 miles away. The 4th bedroom is for me when I go to stay, but 2 year old Isabella decided in the early hours that she was sleeping in there too. It was lovely waking up in the morning seeing her smiling face on the pillow next to me.

Harrison decided to give me a belated birthday party and chose a My Little Pony Cake. His gift to me was a set of 3 small spades for my ex overgrown garden. What he doesn't know is that the overgrown garden that he knows has been landscaped recently. He is going to grow up believing that his spades have worked miracles!

I have a week off work and am using that for the business. On Monday I set up a new site using memberspeed software at http://eprofitscentre.com. There are other similar membership sites but I will try my best to make it different. I set this site up because I wanted to use and test all of the software's features before developing a new JV in January with a totally different idea to what I've been doing so far. All of my new membership sites will have article directories and all will have lots of features for members to use.

With eprofitscentre.com I'm setting up my first internet affiliate programme. It looks quite easy to set up and use with this software but they could be famous last words!

BB Articles has now got an Alexa ranking of 410,990 and still rising. I'm really pleased with it's progress and the steadily rising traffic. The search strings show a healthy amount of people searching for article directories and various information - some of them are hilarious!

A Busy Autumn

It's been far too long since I updated this blog and a lot has been happening. At the beginning of this month BB Articles was given a Google page rank of 2. I thought that was quite good for a 4 month old site.

Traffic has been continuously rising and already the November figures up to present are higher than all of Octobers traffic figures. Search strings for anything to do with article directories are starting to heavily feature, which is probably a result of the rank.

Unfortunately I am declining more articles than ever. It isn't a matter of me changing the guidelines. The only guideline that I have changed is that I no longer accept articles with gambling links. It's more a matter of me being more thorough in sticking to them myself when approving articles. Many article submitters do not read guidelines, or if they do they ignore them. The guidelines are there to set standards and maintain a high quality which benefits authors as well as myself.

This week I set up a new niche travel article directory/membership site at www.articlesabroad.com Using memberspeed software. At least I can start as I mean to go on with quality articles.