I have numerous little websites scattered around sometimes with just half a dozen or so pages of content on them. I sometimes set them up, add the content and then simply forget about them for months on end.
Doing my checks on some of these sites last night I found 3 of them were offline and just had an easyspace landing page on them. I quickly logged in to my account at easyspace to find all 3 no longer had hosting despite never receiving any warnings that any were close to expiring.
I don’t know how long the sites have been offline but noticed one of them which was previously top 5 in google for a number of phrases was no longer there.
I quickly added them to my reseller hosting account at CS New media, changed the nameservers and loaded them up.
Don’t know yet what damage has been done by them being offline, and hope the rankings come straight back.
It is a lesson to keep an eye on things a bit more often and I may even consider using some kind of monitoring system.

For the past few weeks I have been working on a new venues directory
It is a dynamic database driven site with a self submission system which allows the conference agents at each venue to add their own details.
The beauty of this type of system is that the conference agents know the details of the venue and which details they want to submit, meaning they are effectively building the content of the site without me having to do all the data entry.
The key to this is having an idiot proof self submission system with boxes clearly laid out where you want people to add particular details and a nice clear demo page showing them what happens after they add their information.

Been a hell of a few weeks. First my little boy started acting all lethargic and generaly not being himself, 4 or 5 days later we found out why, spots all over him
It all comes back from our coach trip to Funky Monkeys in Warwick as we now know that one of the children on the coach had Chicken Pox.
Since then the whole playgroup has had it, some of the kids worse than others. Luckily T wasn’t that bad, but we had to keep him off playgropup for the week.
This bought us up to half term, so I then had them both under my feet all day (loved it really )
Last day of the holiday L went to stop at grannies and came back that night pale as a ghost and complaining of feeling sick. The next morning she wasn’t much better and stayed in her pyjamas most of the day.
Sunday morning we were greeted by a scream, rushed in to her room to find her with her pyjama top pulled up to reveal her tummy covered in spots – Chicken Pox again. She has been at home ever since, the spots are barely any better and it looks like she is off school now until Monday at the earliest.

She is back to her boisterous self now, but the spots still haven’t started scabbing over so we will keep her off until next week now.
It just means I’ve got little done in the past fortnight and whenever the phone rings they are always screaming in the background.
The joys of working from home

A little game I have been playing for the past 3 or 4 years has been using Adwords for fun.
I first started back in the days when I entered the various search engine optimisation competitions and have been doing it ever since.
I normally keep an eye on news stories, announcements etc. and then create a little satirical landing page and a number of Adwords ads targeting the news story.
One of my better campaigns was when the London Olympics logo was announced. I set 4 or 5 pages up and then set 4 or 5 rotating adwords ads.
I left it running for the 2 weeks whilst all the talk about it was on, and in that time my add was displayed over 1.4 million times.
I have run similar ads for SEO competitions, The Queens Christmas Speech, Blair’s resignation, many other announcements, and my most recent for Peter Hain.
I never make anything out of this and probably spent in excess of £300 in 2007 but it is fun