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I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

Just a quick note today - I’ve just been alerted to “ClickComments” which is a small widget that enhances the experience of visitors to your blog.  You’ll see at the end of each of my posts, there’s now an area where you can click to give visual feedback on the quality of my post..

Please take the time to check this out yourself and let me know if you think it’s valuable.

What on Earth is going on with the Internet at the moment???  I went onto Alexa this morning to make sure my contact details were up-to-date, and saw there a link to AdBrite.  I figured that anything recommended so highly by Alexa must be a decent site, so I signed up.

Initially, I was looking to add an additional ad space below the existing Google ads on the left of the page, however AdBrite offers the possibility of including other ad providers (such as Google) and only displaying their own ads if they pay better.  So I signed up for this option, as I’d prefer a single ad space to be honest, selected a whole bunch of technology related categories and keywords, and left all the other settings as default.  Seems reasonable so far, doesn’t it?

To start with, I got a notice displayed telling me that it was assessing my content to find the most suitable ads for my site so I ignored it.  A few hours later, I was telling my wife about it and she asked me to show her.  You can imagine my horror to see a 120×600 pixel skyscraper ad displaying a whole host of very graphic porn images!!!

Stupidly, my first reaction was to go to AdBrite’s control panel and try and fix it - although setting “Family Friendly” made no difference (and I wasn’t prepared to wait to see if it eventually did!).  My second thought (which SHOULD have been my first) was to quickly cut the code from my page!  Of course, I then had to go back to Google and re-create the original ad which had been there in the first place….!

Still, you live and learn - I now understand very well what people mean by “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”!

I’ve grown quite attached to my website since I set this up a few months ago.  As you can imagine, I know exactly how the site should look whenever I come to my page.  How do you think I felt then, when I loaded up my site only to find the right nav-bar completely missing???  I checked everything  - I was even getting a “Done” signal in the status bar, but it clearly didn’t work any more!  I then fired up Firefox (in case this was an IE7 only bug) and found a similar looking page, although this was waiting for something from Amazon…..

Now, earlier today, I’d been using Amazon and had found that the images were loading particularly slowly.  I’ve noticed before that Amazon have had strange, unexplained outages, and that my site has been noticeably slower to load since I added a cool Amazon feature that made book images that I included into the site fly out with a full description if you moused over them.

So I figured that Amazon was potentially at the bottom of all my problems.  I started by removing the Amazon ad’s from the bottom left of the page, as these weren’t displaying at all!  This helped, but it was still VERY slow.  Next, I removed the cool “fly-out” widget and suddenly, my site is performing properly again!

Does this mean that Amazon can now ship books faster than their pages load????

It used to be the case that when commenting on a blog that had a high Google PageRank, you’d get a high quality link back to your own site which would help you rise through the Goggle rankings.  However, since people realised that they were losing their own hard-earned PageRank through allowing this, more and more people have started to use “nofollow” on their links to protect themselves.  Google even wrote an article on it on their official blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html.

Essentially, this works by adding the tag “nofollow” into all your links (i.e. <a href="http://www.johnlandells.com/" rel="nofollow">John's Tech Blog</a>) which instructs spiders that visit your site from the major search engines not to follow the links when looking for new content.  All the major blogging engines (such as Wordpress, Blogger, etc.) use this technology by default for any comments that are posted, and it’s rare that anyone goes to the trouble of disabling this functionality.  After all, why would they???

With this in mind, I found it very interesting that today I was offered a free piece of software called “Comment Sniper” (you can find it at http://www.commentsniper.com) which promotes the outdated technique of commenting on popular blogs in order to raise your PageRank.  Since it mainly targets the popular blog sites, I failed to find a single blog that wasn’t using “nofollow”.  It works in conjunction with Skype to send you SMS messages when new posts are available to comment on, so it actually costs you money in terms of Skype credit!

In my opinion, this is clearly a great example of “you get what you pay for”!