Category: Blog News (Page 4 of 4)

I am currently at the number one position on Yahoo and Bing for the phrase ‘leading conservative blog,’ and at the number three position on Google.

They are results I am happy with, given it takes a long time to build blog traffic, and Qohel has only been running for about six months.

I am still only just making enough in advertising revenue to cover my hosting costs. But that’s cool.

But over the last week I have noticed something interesting.

Google ads always display correctly for traffic coming from Google or Yahoo. But two out of three times, do not display correctly for traffic coming from Bing.

Is that error, co-incidence, or is Google being clever?

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days.

It has been really busy at my real job – I run a computer store, but more importantly, my sister Amanda has been seriously ill again.

She has been in hospital since Friday evening. She needs constant supervision. The local hospital is small (the island only has a population of about 4500 people) and they do not have the staff to provide that level of care. Kathy and I have been with her from 7.30 in the morning till nine each night.

Amanda was taken to Adelaide at noon today by the Flying Doctor. We hope to get to Adelaide next weekend to visit, and if she is well enough, to bring her home.

Please pray for her.

All day Saturday and Sunday, so no posts, probably, on either of those days.

Keep the faith!

It’s not much of a mystery in cosmic in terms, but I am still a little puzzled about why the Google advertising on this site is so consistently about eco-friendly plastic bags or solving the climate crisis – both things in which my intelligent and thoughtful readers are unlikely to be interested. Or at least, not interested in a positive, ‘Gee, I could do with some of those’ way.

But every little helps to cover costs, so by all means, click away!

Whew!

Everything transferred over quickly and easily.

The new layout needs some tidying up. I will do this over  the next few days.

If you notice any bugs or have any suggestions, let me know. Comment, or email me (address is on the profile page).

Posting back to normal this afternoon.

Qohel has been experiencing growing traffic. We are not yet up with Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair, but we are within sight of becoming Australia’s leading independent conservative blog.

Thank you!

Over the next day or so (Monday in Australia) we will be moving to a new server, and making some changes to our site layout to make it easier to read.

The transfer should be painless. But it probably won’t be. There may be few new posts, and older posts, pictures and files may get lost for a while.

The whole process should only take a couple of hours. I hope.

Last night over 200 spam comments were sent to my post Another Rau Row. That’s a record for this blog.

They were mostly advertising online gambling, but some offered cheap online prescription drugs.

They all came from this IP address: 83.233.30.32

Any suggestions?

So posting will be a bit light. My apologies. Two months worth of accounts, phone calls, emails and clients to get my head around. I should be better organised tomorrow.

OK, I am giving in on the need to register to comment. I have thought and written about this before, and would still prefer to restrict comments to registered subscribers.

However, I object to having to register with every new site I want to use, and enough people have told me this requirement has stopped them from commenting, that I am willing to experiment for a while.

If having open comments works – ie, more comments, and sensible comments, I will leave it open.

I have had some requests to remove the registration requirement for would be commentors. The options for comments are:

No comments. I don’t like this idea, because in general the blogs that work best are the ones which develop a sense of community. Allowing readers to comment is an effective way of building this community.

Unbridled comments. Not possible, because in the end it is my website and I am responsible for what appears on it. Also there needs to be a way to guard against spam.

Moderated comments. In this system comments don’t appear until I have had a chance to read and approve them first. The problem with this is that I have a real world job that takes me away from the computer for extended periods. Blog comments work best when they appear immediately, and sometimes I might not be able to approve comments for several hours or even days.

Comments for registered users only. This guards against spam, and enables registered users to post comments immediately. I can still remove offensive or otherwise innappropriate comments, and if necesary ban a particular user. The registration process is quick and easy – you just need to put in your email address, a user name and password, and that’s it.

I understand the frustration of needing to register, but it seems to me this is the best way of allowing readers to comment, to have their comments appear immediately, and yet for me to have the minimal control necessary to prevent abuse.

I know there are some issues with text formatting. We are trying to get these sorted out. Thankyou for being patient.