Freelancer's Office » My Websites http://www.freelancersoffice.com freelancersoffice.com Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:38:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Rebuilding http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/08/30/rebuilding/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/08/30/rebuilding/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:24:32 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://www.freelancersoffice.com/?p=526 I’ve had a long series of ups and downs, as anyone that has watched my websites has likely noticed. It has been a nasty battle with depression that has, for far too long, caused me to experience failure after failure in trying to get my work back up to the level that it was in [...]]]> I’ve had a long series of ups and downs, as anyone that has watched my websites has likely noticed. It has been a nasty battle with depression that has, for far too long, caused me to experience failure after failure in trying to get my work back up to the level that it was in early 2008.

A lot of the time I had not even realized what I was feeling was depression, I just had no desire to really do anything more than I needed to do in any given day and pushed people away from me. Dark parts of my mind whispered that they hated me, that no one wanted to be around me, and in my depression I had no way to fight back – particularly when I am in a continual battle to not hide away from everyone and live my life inside my house. Yes, I hide it fairly well, but I am only a few panic attacks shy of being a shut-in. I steadfastly refuse to let myself become one, however, so even if it is just sitting on my porch to sip a cup of tea I make myself step outside when I find myself thinking that I could just live my life inside.

This inclination toward hermitage makes it very easy for me to listen when the voices say no one likes me, and that makes it rather hard to battle depression that leaves me feeling miserable and like my time would be better spent laying in bed than working. What is bad is that despite the fact that I knew that I was having issues with depression, have been battling it for years, I had not actually realized just how much it is affecting my work until I realized that I had not yet got my work back on track. I have been working, and making money at it, but when I step back and look at just how much I am making, it is just a bit over what the cost of my websites are. I am making enough that my sites are not costing me anything out of my own pocket (which is good since I can’t pay hosting companies with lint), but my sites are far from supporting me.

Part of that is my fault. No, it is entirely my fault. I let depression and feelings of low self-worth affect my ability to work. I allowed hackers to attack one of my websites when I was at the bottom of a depression and they left it in complete ruin. And yes, I do mean complete ruin. It was this website, which I am fairly certain has been blocked by a lot of search engines thanks to some bastard that hacked it and left some very vulgar and sexually explicit trash all over the site. I had not known anything was wrong with my own site until I hauled myself far enough above the depression clouds to start trying to work and realized that Google had banned the site from its advertising program.

My initial impulse was to ask them to reinstate the site, which I had torn down entirely and rebuilt from scratch, but then I decided that I should wait until I had rebuilt it some. And then the depression crept back in and I was left, once again, neglecting to get things done for I don’t know how long.

I am through with that. Or at least I am in a good enough mood today that I am telling myself I am through with it. I want to rebuild my sites, get them back up and moving along how they are supposed to be, and get back to working at a level that I am not only keeping my business from failing, but it is starting to turn enough of a profit to allow me to meet my bills once again.

So, I am going to start with a few websites that I have been managing to keep afloat, then expand outward from those once they are running smoothly. It is going to be a long slow rebuild, but I am determined that I am no longer going to allow depression to affect my work.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/08/30/rebuilding/feed/ 0 Out of the work day and into the Blender http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/08/26/out-of-the-work-day-and-into-the-blender/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/08/26/out-of-the-work-day-and-into-the-blender/#comments Sat, 27 Aug 2011 02:06:45 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://www.freelancersoffice.com/?p=520 Blender 3D that is. For those who do not know, Blender 3D is a program made for creating 3D models. You are likely most familiar with the concept if you play SIMS, since The Sims is made up of little figures that are manipulated as 3D figures. Blender 3D is the kind of program that [...]]]> Blender 3D that is. For those who do not know, Blender 3D is a program made for creating 3D models. You are likely most familiar with the concept if you play SIMS, since The Sims is made up of little figures that are manipulated as 3D figures. Blender 3D is the kind of program that makes the stuff in games like The Sims. It is also an exceptionally powerful film making program for the creation of 3D films.

See…

I worked with Blender long ago, over 5 years ago at least, and am back into relearning it and expanding on what I had learned back when I first tried it out. I want to take some of the short stories I have but never got around to getting published, polish them up a bit, and try my hand at turning them into short 3D films.

It is going to take me a while to get to that level of skill, but I am fairly excited to see what I can do and it meshes perfectly into my original love of wanting to get into making movies. At the very least, I can make up all of the characters from my Heir to Magic world and start getting them loaded up onto that website. That is my first goal.

For now, Blender 3D is a very good fun toy for me to dangle at the end of the work day with a promise that once my work is all done I can play in Blender.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/08/26/out-of-the-work-day-and-into-the-blender/feed/ 0 Must Freelance mean Free? – part 3 http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/06/08/must-freelance-mean-free-part-3/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/06/08/must-freelance-mean-free-part-3/#comments Wed, 08 Jun 2011 23:30:01 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://www.freelancersoffice.com/?p=404 In this post: I will be sharing what I can find about what the average site visitor seems to think of each type of revenue generation and which ones I find more or less obnoxious when I visit websites and blogs.

 

In 2008, Burst Media did some research into The Perils of Ad Clutter and [...]]]> In this post: I will be sharing what I can find about what the average site visitor seems to think of each type of revenue generation and which ones I find more or less obnoxious when I visit websites and blogs.

 

In 2008, Burst Media did some research into The Perils of Ad Clutter and how website visitors view a website that is cluttered by advertising. Their survey included over 4,000 web users who responded both to their Internet experience and their perception of advertisers.

It should be noted that the Burst Media definition of “Ad Clutter” is the presence of so much advertising on a webpage that it degrades the experience of visitors.

Two things that became immediately apparent and really, I do not think, required a study were:

  • Website visitors do not like ad clutter and will leave a website they feel is cluttered with advertising
  • Ad clutter can have a negative impact on a consumers’ perception of a product or service

For the freelance writer this means that care must be exercised on what kind of advertising is used on their site, and how it is used. In the Burst Media study it was determined that men were less likely (27.5%) than women (32.1%) to leave a website they considered to be cluttered with advertising. So if your primary audience is men, you can likely get away with a cluttered website as long as it has the information they want buried somewhere in the advertisements. If your audience is composed of mostly women, however, they are going to want less advertising and more quality content. This trend tended to increased with the age of the respondents up to age 55-64, when after 65 the abandonment dropped back down to the high 20% range for both men and women. In all age groups for both men and women the lowest number was for men aged 35-44, and even then 24% said they abandoned a website if it was too cluttered by advertising. The lowest number for women was the 65 and older age range, where 27.3% said they would abandon a website they felt was too cluttered by ads.

The concern for advertisers is in the response that potential customers have to seeing their product or service on a website that the visitor perceives as being cluttered with advertising. In the Burst Media research it was found that 52.4% of the respondents had less favorable opinions of a product or service after they had seen it on an ad cluttered website. That is a disaster for advertisers who could potentially be harmed by their own advertising. And again, women were more likely than men to voice an unfavorable opinion after having seen an advertisement on a page they perceived to be cluttered.

For those who maintain a website, this means they need to look carefully at what advertising they present to their visitors. I have left news sites that had too much advertising for me to easily read the article I wanted to read – and I am not talking about a single man operation blog, I am talking about a major newspaper (think L.A. Times, NY Times, etc – it was a major newspaper website that was over-cluttered by advertising.)

When I visit a website, I have learned to zone out certain areas as being advertising heavy. I tend to ignore the upper right section of a web page, where banner ads are most often displayed. I also ignore the area directly above content and any interruption in the content. I will also ignore most of the items shown on the side (left or right) of a website. These are all common places for advertising to be placed.

This automatic skip has brought on a new style of advertising that is still finding its place in online advertising. In Content Ads. These are going to require a post all their own, so… next up in this series – In Content Advertising…

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/06/08/must-freelance-mean-free-part-3/feed/ 0 The Writing Office http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/04/20/the-writing-office/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/04/20/the-writing-office/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:12:23 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://blog.freelancersoffice.com/?p=369 Since i am at ground zero in a full website rebuild here at Freelancer’s Office, I have focused for a bit on getting my other office website The Writing Office up to be relaunched and ready for members on May 1, 2011.

The Writing Office is a community style website for writers to find information [...]]]> Since i am at ground zero in a full website rebuild here at Freelancer’s Office, I have focused for a bit on getting my other office website The Writing Office up to be relaunched and ready for members on May 1, 2011.

The Writing Office is a community style website for writers to find information and resources they need in their writing and features a forum where members can talk with one another about writing issues. I have some writing prompts for helping with those looking for a little inspiration and am adding links to resources for writers as well as creating some content that will be published at The Writing Office.

Stop in over at The Writing Office and see what you think of the site, and come by after May 1st to join up and share in the discussions and writing.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2011/04/20/the-writing-office/feed/ 0 Clig Tracking of traffic http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2010/03/17/clig-tracking-of-traffic/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2010/03/17/clig-tracking-of-traffic/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:06:23 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://blog.freelancersoffice.com/?p=281 I have this little deal called WP To Twitter installed on several of my WordPress blogs, including this one. This allows me to send an update of new posts to Twitter when I post a new post on my blog.

I had not thought much about this little plugin and what it was doing, content [...]]]> I have this little deal called WP To Twitter installed on several of my WordPress blogs, including this one. This allows me to send an update of new posts to Twitter when I post a new post on my blog.

I had not thought much about this little plugin and what it was doing, content to just let it take care of one of far too many things I have to do in a day. Then today I got a error note that told me it had to post my last post with the full URL rather than the shortened Cli.gs redirection URL. I went to investigate and make sure that the API key was working right on the Clig site. This lead me to investigating a bit more of what the site is and I discovered that it has a map feature that shows me where visitors are from.

This picture shows an example of a map from Cligs that shows how many visitors I got for a recent post to one of my quilting sites. Selected is Norway, showing “2 visitors from Norway”. Each of the countries you have got a visitor from shows up in red on the map, so my post had visitors from the United States, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom and Norway as of the time I am posting this.

I know I am probably very slow on discovering this feature, but I still think it is a kewl aspect if Cli.gs that I had not noticed before and is worth sharing with others interested in discovering what their traffic patterns are.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2010/03/17/clig-tracking-of-traffic/feed/ 0 AdsSpy sees you… and it knows where you sell advertising http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/22/adsspy-sees-you-and-it-knows-where-you-sell-advertising/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/22/adsspy-sees-you-and-it-knows-where-you-sell-advertising/#comments Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:51:25 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://blog.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/22/adsspy-sees-you-and-it-knows-where-you-sell-advertising/ I was working on my websites and noticed the SEO Quake icon that I have in the bottom of my browser window, it has been a long time since I ran through the sites with SEO Quake, and I was curious about how one of the sites I am working on is doing, so I [...]]]> I was working on my websites and noticed the SEO Quake icon that I have in the bottom of my browser window, it has been a long time since I ran through the sites with SEO Quake, and I was curious about how one of the sites I am working on is doing, so I engaged the program. I found it interesting to see a link for AdsSpy appear above the AdSense advertisement at the top of the page indicating how many other sites run advertisements for that AdSense ID. Now, you know me, I’m the one that runs a site dedicated to protecting privacy online, so my first thought was to wonder just what information shows up about the sites. More than I like, that’s for sure.

The SEO Quake team blog has a listing that shows what the report from AdsSpy looks like in their post New handy service – AdsSpy.com. From that screen cap you can see that AdsSpy provides the AdSense ID and a list of all domain names that are running that AdSense ID number.

Now, their explanation for what makes this a handy thing is:

How does it help?

1. Identify MFA-networks, and ban them in your adwords account.
2. Uncover the secrets of successful webmasters, and learn some tips and tricks based on years of practical experience.
3. Check your own site and see if there is only your adsense code or you’ve been hacked.
4. You can find stolen content or wordpress themes.

But let’s take a closer look at that. I can see being able to identify MFA-networks (don’t feel bad if you didn’t catch that one, I had to go visit Wikipedia to find out MFA means Made For AdSense). What I have to wonder is are the MFA-Networks identified because of the number of sites they have, or the fact that the sites are all duplicate content sites? I run 20+ websites and 30+ blogs, many have AdSense in one form or another on them. Is someone going to look at my stats and tag me as being shut out of the sites that can show their ads simply because I have X number of sites listed as having my AdSense ID on them? Or are they going to look at the sites and see that I have a site on travel, a site on Alaskan cooking, a site on being a family caregiver, a site for fantasy writers, a site for my novel in progress, and so on and that all of them are unique sites with unique content showing differing AdSense advertising?

It may seem like I am being overly worried about one advertiser deciding to lock me out, but I know that advertisers work in mass marketing. A single person might run AdWords for 200 different companies, one of those may target say travel. Now, if that person visits my travel blog and sees I have X number of sites running my AdSense code, and they decide to block me assuming that I have X number of sites that would show travel ads.  That cheats me out of having any of their other 199 advertisers ads appearing on my sites.  It also cheats them, because I only have one site that shows advertising on travel, unless they are targeting travel to Alaska, then I have four sites on Alaska and one travel site. I’ve lost out on 200 possible ads for my sites, and the advertiser has blocked me because of a misconception.  What if they had another advertiser that wants to target family caregivers?  Or one that wants to target people that want to travel to Alaska?

That’s not fair to either of us. I don’t run AdWords, but I am willing to bet that Google has a method already for AdWords users to see how often their ads show up on specific AdSense IDs, so I see no reason why AdsSpy needs to show the pages that AdSense appears on. I have a reason why I don’t like that, however, and will get to that in a few minutes.

First, lets look at reason two for why AdsSpy is recommended:

“2. Uncover the secrets of successful webmasters….” Okay, this one sounds good to me, but I would have to see more than I have about AdsSpy to know just how it works, unless the secret is seeing how many sites they run ads on. Even then, how can you know how much they are making from the sites that they have AdSense on? I know nothing about how you are supposed to uncover these secrets, so I’ll move on to reason three…

“3. Check your own site and see if there is only your AdSense code or you’ve been hacked.” Yes! This is a very useful one, I’ve seen a lot of complaints before about people that have cracked into sites and inserted their own AdSense code into a popular website to filter off revenue.  Unfortunately I can not assert just how well this works, since I have little experience with AdsSpy at the moment, but it does sound like a good feature to me. I don’t, however, see how it helps to find out if one site has been cracked to see all the sites that are running the AdSense code.   Needs more investigation, so lets move on and see what that fourth reason was again -

“4. You can find stolen content or wordpress themes” I’m not sure about finding stolen content, do scrappers steal the AdSense code as well? I would assume that anyone that steals a WordPress theme is going to change the code in the AdSense so they get the revenue, not the person they stole it from, but who knows. It sounds like a good deal, so I’ll not get too into analyzing it when I don’t have all the facts.

Now, how about the reason why I shy away from AdsSpy? Privacy. I’m not so sure I like having someone going around scrapping my AdSense code off all the sites where I have it and sharing all my sites in an easy to cross-reference link. I have a site dedicated to stopping Identity Theft and while I have AdSense ads on it, I do not have my personal information on it. I *DO* have my personal information on other sites that I have, and in my opinion it leads to a breech of my personal information to link those sites together – particularly when I pay for a subscription to WhoIs Guard to have my identity hidden on my identity protection site. They are, in effect, making my paying for WhoIs Guard all but useless. Yes, I understand that if I was really concerned about it I would not run AdSense on the site, however, I have to have some way to be able to afford to keep the site going, so I use AdSense and other advertising means to try and offset the cost. AdsSpy is spying on my ads and telling anyone that wants to pay $5 to find out who it is that runs the site. And with that information the person can look up my address on my other sites using WhoIs, thereby placing my identity at risk. A risk I had not even known was there until, on a whim this afternoon, I enabled SEO Quake to see what the Page Rank of one of my sites is.

And that is not the only site I prefer not to have my personal information tracked through to. I have one that discusses my religious beliefs, something that is very personal and private. What I want to believe is between me and God, not between me, God and whoever wants to pay AdSpy $5 to show them who that AdSense code belongs to. I set that site behind WhoIs Guard for a reason, to separate my work (advertising) from my spiritual beliefs. Now my payment for WhoIs Guard is useless because AdsSpy has infiltrated my AdSense code and linked my site to my other sites so people can locate all of my sites. That is a breech of my personal information and my security.

I can think of a lot of other reasons why I dislike the notion of AdsSpy, but I can also see where it is a useful tool, I just think that it needs a bit more work before it is going to be the tool it has the potential to be, and I think that it should have some kind of safeguards in place for people like me, that have multiple sites and want to have their personal information kept off of some of those sites.  Maybe they could have it cross reference WhoIs Guard and see if the site has a guard on it, removing those with WhoIs Guard from the list of sites that are linked to.  They can keep the number of sites, but I think they should not display every one of them, particularly the ones that have been set behind WhoIs Guard.

I also think that I need to look more into the service, and I’ll let you all know when I get a chance to what I think of it, for now, I am going to hold back my final opinion on AdsSpy since it is still in Beta. We all know that stuff in Beta is far from the finished product, it has bugs that will need to be worked out and details to be ironed and maybe a few goodies that will be added.

Right now, you know you want to, go on, go see what my sites are. AdsSpy has found 4 of them so far.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/22/adsspy-sees-you-and-it-knows-where-you-sell-advertising/feed/ 0 Computer based workspace http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/07/113/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/07/113/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:32:18 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://blog.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/07/113/ It’s been rather hectic for me, but I think I finally have things sorted out and have started setting things up where I can actually keep the sites that I have to update on a regular basis updated – such as this one!

I just spent all night working on building myself a desktop area [...]]]> It’s been rather hectic for me, but I think I finally have things sorted out and have started setting things up where I can actually keep the sites that I have to update on a regular basis updated – such as this one!

I just spent all night working on building myself a desktop area that lets me organize my work and link to the sites that I have to work on. So now I can update all of my websites and blogs and everything with ease. It has been a lot of hard work, but I think it will be worth the effort.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/08/07/113/feed/ 0 Working on my book http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/07/10/working-on-my-book/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/07/10/working-on-my-book/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:02:04 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://blog.freelancersoffice.com/2008/07/10/working-on-my-book/ I’ve dove back into working on my novel, <a href=”http://www.heirtomagic.com”>Heir to Magic</a>, getting it put into <a href=”http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html”>yWriter</a> and starting back into recreating the outline – which I lost in one of the many office moves.  ::sigh::

I’m in the process of organizing each chapter on 5×8 index cards and writing down the basic descriptive [...]]]> I’ve dove back into working on my novel, <a href=”http://www.heirtomagic.com”>Heir to Magic</a>, getting it put into <a href=”http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html”>yWriter</a> and starting back into recreating the outline – which I lost in one of the many office moves.  ::sigh::

I’m in the process of organizing each chapter on 5×8 index cards and writing down the basic descriptive for each of the scenes in the chapters, that way I can flip through them and remind myself at a glance what was covered in each of the chapters.  I have also printed out the whole thing as it is so far – 55,000 + words and still lots of plot thread to cover.

I want to multitask today on working on that and getting my website for the novel updated with a new program I found that I like – <a href=”http://www.icyphoenix.com”>Icy Phoenix</a>.   It will let me create everything I think I have been wanting to include on that website, including a forum for people to talk about my writing.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/07/10/working-on-my-book/feed/ 0 Finally able to get more work done and sites crash on me http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/05/15/finally-able-to-get-more-work-done-and-sites-crash-on-me/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/05/15/finally-able-to-get-more-work-done-and-sites-crash-on-me/#comments Thu, 15 May 2008 18:18:02 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://blog.freelancersoffice.com/2008/05/15/finally-able-to-get-more-work-done-and-sites-crash-on-me/ I was sick most of this past week, kept meaning to get more done, but never even managed to get onto AOL Instant Messenger to talk to my friends.  Now that I am starting to feel better, I am working to get caught up on the work that I had missed out on all week.   [...]]]> I was sick most of this past week, kept meaning to get more done, but never even managed to get onto AOL Instant Messenger to talk to my friends.  Now that I am starting to feel better, I am working to get caught up on the work that I had missed out on all week.   At least that is what I want to be doing, but some of the websites I want to work on are not working at the moment, and I’m feeling too exhausted to fight getting them all to work right.

]]> http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/05/15/finally-able-to-get-more-work-done-and-sites-crash-on-me/feed/ 0 Revamping site in a major way http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/03/04/revamping-site-in-a-major-way/ http://www.freelancersoffice.com/2008/03/04/revamping-site-in-a-major-way/#comments Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:32:16 +0000 FreelancersOffice.com http://freelancersoffice.com/2008/03/04/revamping-site-in-a-major-way/ Okay, you knew that I was revving up for this, so no saying you are surprised.  I have decided that this site needs to have a massive overhaul, not the least of which is for me to be able to be in control of the advertising here.  I am sick and tired of seeing things [...]]]> Okay, you knew that I was revving up for this, so no saying you are surprised.  I have decided that this site needs to have a massive overhaul, not the least of which is for me to be able to be in control of the advertising here.  I am sick and tired of seeing things that have nothing at all to do with freelance writing work (seriously, what does a rant about drug rehab in Alaska have to do with freelancing?) so I have ditched the AdSense stuff and everything similar to it from the site and will be instead selecting the advertising that shows up here by hand.

This new approach to advertisements might take the form of advertising in the sidebar areas, it might be advertisements actually within these posts in my blog.  Rest assured that it will be here because it is something that I have a reasonable confidence freelance writers will have an interest in it.

I will draw up a specific agreement deal and post the link in the sidebar when I have it posted, something that will explain my approach to advertising, for now just know that my decision to ditch advertising sources that I can not control is born from my desire to make this the best site I am capable of creating.  If it is not a site that I am proud to be associated with, then what is the reason for dedicating time to it?

So, site gets revamped and when it resurfaces from under all the dust I think you will find it to be at least worth taking a look over to see if it is living up to your expectations – if not, then drop me a line and I’ll take your comments under serious advisement.

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