Not long after Head Rambles was launched, I signed up with Google Adsense.

It seemed like a fair way of covering expenses, and I had heard good [and bad] reports about them.

Before long, I discovered that the only way to make significant gains was to make the ads the primary function of the site, with the content running second.

I hate sites where I have to pick my way carefully around banners and Google links.  It’s irritating in the extreme and gives the strong impression that the site owner is more interested in making money than in imparting information.

After running Google Adsense for a couple of years, I have decided it just isn’t worth it.  Taking into account the irritation they cause to readers and the server overheads slowing down the site, and balancing that against the pittance that was being earned, I decided to strip them off the site as soon as the payment level was reached.

I reached that level a couple of weeks ago, and the cheque should be in the post shortly.  As soon as I hit the magic mark, I removed all traces of Google Adsense from the site.  Plugins were removed and all coding in the template was erased.  Good riddance.

What is very strange though is that I’m still earning.  Within the last two weeks or so, my earnings have continued to grow at their customary snails-pace.

I like that.

Good on ya, Google!

Life has been busy.

I recently was asked to host an existing site.

Fine, says I.  I’ll do that.  I transferred everything across and everyone was happy.

“Now,” says the client, “seeing as you have full access to the site, could you do some minor changes to the wording?”

“No problem,” says I, and then I looked at the site.

Some bright spark had produced a lovely looking site.  It’s clean, with nice images and showcases the client’s business beautifully.

But it is all images.  There is no text anywhere.  All wording is embedded in images.

I rang the client and talked him through disabling images in his browser.  I then told him to look at his site.

“Where the fuck is it?” he cried. 

“Exactly!” says I.  I then explained to him that the search engines won’t be able to see it.  The visually impaired won’t be able to use text-to-speech software, and that the damned thing rtakes an age to download.

I have been commissioned to rewrite the site to make it work.  The only problem is that it has to look exactly as it did before.

It’s a nightmare.

Is it any wonder I want to get out of this game?

In case either of you is wondering what happened to my dead PC, this is what happened.

First of all, when it died, it died spectacularly.

Not for it a bit of file corruption or a blown fuse.

For some unknown reason it totally screwed up the file allocation tables and the boot sector.  What this means is that when you fire up the PC it reports that it can’t find any disk.

The laptop in question is an Acer Aspire 7220, which has two hard drives.  I knew if one was guntered that the other should be OK.  Fortunately, all my really important data was on the second drive, so it was just a question of accessing it.

I tried running an old XP disk, to see what would happen.  It failed miserably and reported that there was no hard disk.  They are SATA disks, so they need special drivers which XP doesn’t have.

After a good piece of research, I came across a rather neat little utility – The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows or UBCD4Win.

This is a free program that you download and run, presumably on a PC that works.  What it does is create a boot disk, but gives you full scope as to what goes on that disk.  It asks for a Windows i386 folder, so I gave it my XP CD, and it was happy. 

Not only does it create a boot disk, but it includes a whole load of utilities for fixing corrupt sectors, boot files, Master Boot Records and the like.  It also contains utilities to set up a network and generally breath a little life into a machine.  The interface actually looks like a cross between XP and KDE, so it is very easy to use.

Using this disk, I was able to offload all my files onto spare storage, and to reformat the dud disk and recreate all the partitions and boot records.

With a lot of help from two very patient people – Cranky Canuck and Robert Sweetnam – I was finally able to reload the operating system, and it is now almost back to its original state.  I say ‘almost’ because it is, in practice, better, as I have removed a load of junk programmes that were dragging it down.

So Herself finally gets the Acer that she has had her eye on.