Monday, October 29, 2007

Lots Of News

Well, can't believe October is almost done, this means I've been self employed now for 16 months, and to be honest - it's flown, I'm enjoying this life too much, as hard as it is sometimes trying to keep everything ticking over. I have to say I've enjoyed every minute of it, you'd never get me back in an office now. So what have I been up to recently? Well, there's a lot of change afoot, so I'll bore you a bit with all the stuff going on.

The biggest news is that we're about to buy a house. We've been renting in Tenby since March, but now we've decided we're going to settle a few miles down the coast in Saundersfoot. If you remember, that's where we were originally going to move to back in March, but had to change at the last minute. The place we're buying is on the hill above the harbour.

It's a bungalow with lots of potential, a really cottagey feel and big back garden which will keep both the cats, Elis and Mrs Dio occupied. We're expecting to complete in the next few weeks, and be in before Christmas. In the meantime I'm going to be doing a shed load of work to tart the place up before we move in. That'll be fun and games, but I'm actually looking forward to the break.

On the work front, there's been lots of bitty stuff that doesn't really sound impressive, but none the less has taken up a lot of my time. There's only been one new site to shout about. It came from a drunken night recently when my parents visited. My father and I stayed up late polishing off a bottle of whiskey and trawling eBay looking at the price of Fender Stratocasters. He's a big guitar fan, he's been playing live to pubs across South Wales for decades, but recently packed it in.

Anyway, we were looking at what was up for auction and I spotted the price that some of the vintage Fender Stratocasters were selling for, and instantly saw a website opportunity. So, with out further a-do I set about creating Vintage Strats - another BANS site. I've still got some loose ends at the site that need attending too, but that's about it.

Along the way I got to play with CaRP, a RSS to HTML converter that I've looked at in the past but never ventured into. The MagpieRSS I normally used is getting a bit dated and isn't as featured as CaRP, so I wanted to try it out. It took a while for me to get my head around, but in the end I got there, and now it's powering the Stratocaster News, Stratocaster pictures and Videos pages.

The other bitty stuff has involved lots of content, fiddling with international ad-serving via the latest version of openads and making my first ever video blog for Playing Bingo (yes it's cheesy, I know...) And speaking of Playing Bingo, I spent a couple of days in London at the end of September at the 2nd Annual Online Bingo Summit. It was a good break and provided a large amount of content for the site.

I also completely redesigned my Chav Test site to make it a lot simpler. I have to do this to a couple of older sites I've made and forgot about, to try and unlock their potential now that they've aged a bit and I'm a bit more savvy about how to make them work for me beyond Google's AdSense programme. All in all, at the moment I could clone three of me, and they'd all be gainfully employed 24 hours a day. Busy times, lots of fun, lots to do...

Posted by Dio Bach at 11:20

1 Comments:

Gareth Morlais said...: Congrats on the Saundersfoot bungalow Dave. Fantastic news.
Great to see a BANS site with such useful content - news, pics and vids. That new RSS system you're using looks interesting.
Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help promote any of your sites.
Best wishes,
Gareth
www.watchstar.co.uk; 10:06 AM