Hiring a writer
It’s been a while since I updated any of my sites, even though I have managed to buy a new domain or two! Silly Boy!
So, as I don’t have the time to write content I’ve decided to re-invest some of the income from one of my site and hire a content writer. Something I haven’t undertaken without a load of thought….
Don’t worry though because all of the content here will continue to be written by me, but for some of my more content orientated sites I’ve hired a chap called James who I found over at Digital Point Forums. I originally hired him back about a month ago to write an article that I was stuck with and now have given him a list of 11 articles that I would like completed.
As most of my sites are targeted at a UK audience I struggled long and hard to find a quality UK based writer, but hopefully the searching has paid off. I’m expecting some good content shortly and I’ll let you know how it pans out.
I think that finding a good content writer is like finding a good paid posting company, you’ve really got to do your homework and start small. Don’t rush in and order a load of articles/posts/whatever - start with the smallest possible order and gauge quality - you can always go back and order more if it works out, whereas if it doesn’t your stuck having spent a fair wedge of cash!
Big Decisions
When is a chef not a chef?
Sounds like a joke doesn’t it? Well it isn’t…. I’m thinking about all of the poor suckers students that are still slogging away on the two year hospitality and catering course that I finished early a while back.
During the course you are lead to believe that most commercial kitchens now a days will have you spending hours preparing vegetables, meats, fish and sauces that a happy customer will come in and devour with great delight, leaving the restaurant satisfied and begging for a return reservation.
The reality of the situation is completely different however. I’ve now worked in a cross section of kitchens from 2* restaurants to country pubs and I’ve come to the firm conclusion that unless you, as a diner, are prepared to pay a considerable sum of money for the experience you are basically going to be served either microwaved /deep fried, processed crap.
Working in the industry has really opened my eyes and I can now count on one hand the number of eateries within a 30 mile radius that I will now allow my family to eat at. It’s a sad situation when you realise that your local kebab house or pizza parlour has higher standards and serves more fresh food than your local pub (REALLY!).
Therefore, with a few exceptions I will answer the question “When is a chef not a chef?” with a simple answer “When they don’t work for a rosetted restaurant!”. That may seem a little harsh, but to be honest it’s true - the rest are basically microwave technicians… In the last two places that I’ve worked both poached eggs and popadoms have both been “cooked” in a microwave!
So how do you find a decent place to eat? For UK diners, check out the AA Food and Drink Guide.
So, you may ask yourself, why is this post entitled Big Decisions? Well, basically, because I’ve pretty much made the decision to leave the Hostility Hospitality industry and return to the IT industry.
The change isn’t going to be instant as I really need to consider exactly what I’m going to do and how I’m going to achieve this, but I’m currently considering following the Microsoft MCTS program to become an ASP.NET web developer.
I also promise to try and update my blog more often, but us microwave technicians are worked hard! No really, an average of 55+ hours a week deep frying and microwaving can take it’s toll!
Web Design for Normal People
For the last few weeks any spare time I’ve had for my online businesses has been focused on redeveloping my best earning website.
I had two new designs in mind and finally chose a nice web 2.0 stylee theme over a simpler more dumbed down theme. I then spent about 30 hours customising the theme, blending ads, adding widgets and features and was almost ready to go with the migration when a friend popped over and I thought I would see what she thought about the new design.
Now she is what I would call a normal person, not a webmaster, techno-geek or even an internet power user. She uses the internet for email, MSN messenger and regular surfing and when she saw the new design she was horrified!
“What’s that all about then?” was the first thing she said! Followed quickly by “God, I wouldn’t know where to start!” I then flipped the theme to the unmodified alternate theme and her reaction was one of surprise and glee - “Wow! That looks easy - Home, Chat, Forum, Links- it’s all there with big pictures - I could use this site”
She couldn’t actually believe that it was the same site, just with a different look. Now she is my target audience (not her personally but she fits the demographic of the site) and this user feedback shocked me, so I asked a few more “normal people” - showing them the two designs and every single one of them picked the simpler, clunky theme….. 30 hours of my time wasted!
Moral of this story - Test and get user feedback! This could have been worse had I gone live with the new pretty template, but I’ve got the feeling now that once I spend another 30-odd hours modifying my second choice theme it will be the best thing I ever did.
Get to know your userbase and don’t be afraid to ask for opinions. You might just save yourself some time and effort!
Mobile Blogging???
After a quick bit of research I can’t seem to find a reliable method of blogging with a local WordPress install via a mobile phone browser….
As I’m (still) working stupid hours it would be great to be able to blog in my breaks - can anyone point me in the right direction for a plugin that will allow me to post from my phone????
Another day off… Quality time with the family
After another blur of shifts and what seems like weeks of neglect of my poor little websites I got a day to relax - so we went nuts!
I was up at about 10 to help Nickys’ brother, Peter, prepare his cashflow forecast for his financial adviser to get a mortgage to buy his office building, a few hours of spreadsheet heaven 
Then my sister popped around for lunch and when she left we decided to pop out and pick up Nickys last pay packet from her last job. So we loaded the kids into the car and trundled off to (probably) Wales’ best restaurant to bid a final farewell our ex-coworkers.
To celebrate our freedom (and holiday pay!) we then thought that it would be a tad unfair on the kids if we simply went home, so we decided, as the weather was good, to take them off to the local farm/zoo. We had a great time feeding all of the animals - I got all three of the kids to feed the ponies grain from their hands - I’ve got to remember that my new phone has a camera!!!!!!
After a quick trip the the supermarket we invaded grandmas’ house and as it was getting late we decided we couldn’t be bothered to cook so as a final treat of the day we all invaded the local Harvester restaurant - I’m looking at restaurants in a totally different light lately - it was an open kitchen and I swear I didn’t take my eyes off the action for a moment!
Anyway the kids are in bed, so its time, after this very quick post to make myself a nice cup of tea and get there myself too!
And on the Seventh Day he rested…
Well not quite been building worlds but today has been all about chilling out.
I spent a few hours earlier reorganising an old WP site, removing old posts, categories and rebranding the site as something new.
It’s starting off as a dumping ground for anything I find remotely funny and Im not marketing it at all at the moment (apart from a few stumbleupons!) so we’ll see how that goes.
I’m also feeling like Im really neglecting my sites with the work demands at the moment, and AdSense income is down about 20% on last month so far - not sure if it’s because Im not as involved as I was or not, but it can’t help.
I’ve also had a long time advertiser cancel some private ads today and this upset me more than the 20% drop from adsense even though its a relatively small amount by comparison - I suppose it just feels more personal.
Back to work tomorrow, but they are interviewing for a new head chef so fingers crossed and I might be out of the kitchen soon and back to a normal life…
A bad week at the office…
Well, things at work have been really, really hectic which is why there have been no posts in the last few days, but Im going to try and make up for it today as I’m scheduled to work about 70+ hours this week and this is my only day off 
Monday started just like any normal day, until I got a phone call asking me if I could work the kitchen and not the bar from open to close, not a problem I thought - they boss is probably ill and Monday is usually a quiet day and a few extra hours = few extra £££. But on getting to work I found a nice selection of executive cars in the carpark (hours before opening).
People inside added to the suspense with the hushed whisperings, the locksmith changing locks, etc… and the managers absent from the fray. Apparently they are taking a holiday.
Since this, I’ve been asked to just run the kitchen, I’ve only 6 months kitchen experience at a very junior level and all of a sudden Im running a crew, ordering, working 12 hour days.
On one hand it’s a good thing as we want to run our own pub and no doubt the experience is great, but on the other hand - I will end up earning about the same for a 70 hour week in the kitchen as I would for a 40 hour week behind the bar (with tips!) and Im not seeing Nicky and the kids at all.
Every time I’ve brought the matter up with the acting (assistant) manager Im told nothing can be done until the situation is rectified and this could continue for the next 2-3 months - which is not going to happen at all as far as I am concerned.
Contractually I don’t even have to give notice to quit for the next week under the terms of my contract but I don’t want to walk out, but on the other hand I’ve been there 3-4 weeks now and quite frankly they are taking the piss!
Happy Mothers Day!
Happy Mothers Day!
Especially to my own, Nicky and the hundred or so mothers I will probably be cooking for today
Search Results banned from Search Results
A question posted on the Google Webmaster Help Group seems to have caught Googles attention.
Is there any official Google statement regarding that search result on
one’s own site ought to be disallowed from indexing (e.g. via
robots.txt)?
It’s a trick many spammers use, after all, and sometimes, it happens
inadvertently. And it creates a lot of redundancy in search results.
Sites like YouTube do it to:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Awww.youtube.com%…
Googles Vanessa Fox replied fairly quickly stating that “typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index.”
Following this reply, YouTube added Disallow: /results to their robots.txt, thereby effectively removing the offending pages from the search engines (eventually!) and Google have updated their webmaster guidelines to include:
Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
However this new “rule” is interpreted it is bound to have a massive impact on many different types of sites - price comparison sites, shopping portals, dating sites etc…. and pretty much any site that pumps out dynamic search pages.
Paid Forum Posting & Blog Reviews
Whilst it may seem that I’m stalking Matt Coddington from NetBusinessBlog, I assure you that I’m not! It’s just that out of all of the authors on my RSS reader, his are the first posts that I read and I’ve had a few of his posts (here and here) flagged for a while as I wanted to give my $0.02 on the subject.
As you should know by now, I’ve got a fairly new cooking forum and a very hectic life, so to kick start things I decided to pay a company to help me build up some conversation on the site. I did this for a few reasons:
- To help me give the illusion of activity. No-one wants to post in a forum that has virtually no content, or where all/most of the content is by the site owner.
- To generate spider food. i.e. to give the search engine bots something to chew on and to add to their index to bring new visitors to your site.
- To give me a certain peace of mind. Because of my hectic schedule and knowing that I couldn’t post as much as I wanted, paid posting allowed me to relax a little knowing that there is/was some posting is going on.
Now I’ll admit that things didn’t go to plan straight away, in fact I seemed to get the exact opposite result to Matt!
The ordered posts were delivered within a few hours! It was like a military force invading Cooking Forum! They came in stealthily as a team, registered, hit their target and left quickly and quietly in the dead of night, never to return!
The second company that I tried, struggled with the “quality” part of the brief. Replies like “lol” to a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe were common - I mean how the hell can you find a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe funny???
However the third and final company, might have actually changed my mind, the posters actually seem to know or research a bit about the subject (Isn’t hard though) and are delivering their posts on time, reasonably and with the required quality.
Whilst I do appreciate that once I stop paying said company, these posters are going to vanish into the night, but if things continue well then I will probably continue with their services until I have enough regular posters to make their disappearance less noticable.
On to Paid Blog postings now, and whilst I really couldn’t charge more than 99p for a review on this blog, I have ordered a paid review from someone else. I’ve done this more as a test to see, if any, what traffic/technorati/other differences it can make, but it is interesting to note that Wordpress.com have effectively banned users from posting paid reviews on their hosted blogs. But I’ll have to update you on this when the review is live.
One final note, almost akin to paid blog reviews (IMHO) is blog reviews in exchange for a link - I’m tempted as there are several prominent bloggers offering this right now and I think given the time I might be reviewing a few fellow bloggers shortly.
Apologies for the lack of updates lately - it’s just been busy!
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