Skip to main content

What can I say?

Yesterday Google Analytics was slow off the mark in producing the previous day's results and the blogging moment passed.

The results are really unexceptional at the moment - a bit down on pre update levels but no obvious key word issues - just continuing turmoil. But it looks as if that is par for the course when you look at the chart for the most stable keyword on Rankpulse which happens to be 'texas' there is still a very active scene for places 4-10 while 1-3 sail above it all.

Our recent Paypal incident bares a little comment.

They changed their terms and conditions after they were taken over and required Merchants to sign up to the new terms. But when we tried to comply it didn't work so we wrote it off as another scam and left it at that. Next thing we hear is from a customer whose payment is turned down. Fixed the problem pretty quickly on the Paypal site although the relevant link was not very prominent or supported by any additional text. Still don't know how long our Paypal account was off the air or how much other business we lost.

Part of the problem is that there have been so many phishing attempts with Paypal that you look twice at any communication from them. Otherwise their service works well and we are not looking for an alternative.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.