Month: June 2007

Google ads

Have you noticed my Google ads to the left?

The way these work is their computers look at the content on the page and try to tailor the ads to fit the content. They have really picked up on the posting about my football helmet being painted. Most of the ads for the last 2 days have been related to paint and body work.

I just find it interesting. Look at them each time you load the page and see how they change and what it seems to be picking up as being important. If you click on a post to leave a comment, then you should get a new set of ads that will be targeted to the information in that post. Or, at least, it should.

This works better on a blog that has somewhat of a running theme (which often I do talk about running). When you have a consistent topic, then it is more able to tailor ads specifically for your readers.

PayPerPost Direct

Here is an exciting opportunity for both my readers and me. This comes from the company that I signed up with last week to get paid for blogging, PayPerPost. In fact, I signed up one day and this was released the next day. I did not understand the “cool factor” until now.PPP Direct

What this feature, PayPerPost Direct, allows you to do is to contract me to write posts for you. While there are other services that help facilitate this, what sets PayPerPost Direct apart is that you only pay 10% to PayPerPost and the rest goes into my pocket. Therefore, if we agree to a $15 posting, you pay $16.50 ($15.00 + $1.50) for the post. I get the vast majority of that money, $15 and PayPerPost gets a small amount.

Other services charge as much as 100% markup. A $15 post would cost you $30!

Why would you want to go with a service like this instead of contracting with me directly? Insurance and security. You would know that you are dealing with a company that has a reputation to uphold. You may not know me, but you can know the PayPerPost company. And for me, I know them, but would not feel obligated to get to know you personally before I agreed to a transaction.

To get started simply click on the PayPerPost Direct button to the left or within this post and you will be presented with a form to fill in your information. We will negotiate a price and your requirements to see how we proceed from there. It couldn’t be much simpler.

So I get paid to blog and you get, relatively, inexpensive advertising. Of course you can also hire PayPerPost to do a larger advertising campaign for you.

Finally, a good ISP experience

I have rarely had a good ISP experience. Especially if you mention you are running anything other than Windows.

Yesterday afternoon we started having connection issues with our DSL provider, Prodigy. The way it was coming and going, it seemed more like a network problem than my personal connection to the world. But, I called them this afternoon anyway just in case it might be my modem.

The agent that took my call, Victoria, spoke a bit fast and didn’t seem to care that I was not a native Spanish speaker. If I didn’t understand something I would ask for a clarification. Like most people, she just said the same words but a bit louder. I think people don’t understand that when a foreigner does not understand a word, that saying the same word over and over does not make it clearer. You need to find a basic synonym of the word.

Well, we worked through those issues little by little. Obviously that is not what was good about the experience.

She stepped me through resetting the modem/router to the factory defaults and then we messed with some settings inside the modem and it all eventually worked out fine. In the process I had to get a new IP address assigned by the router. She asked me which version of Windows I was using. I told her I did not have a Windows machine, but I had Linux and Mac available to me. When I said that I was sitting at the Linux machine and it was the one closest to the modem, she asked me to reboot so that I could get a new IP. Most of the time I get told by other ISPs that they do not support Linux and therefore I would need to do the configuration on Windows, or they would not be able to help me. She did not mind that I was using Linux nor that I manually requested an IP address from the modem instead of rebooting.

I have even been told by a DSL provider (many years ago) that their system would not work on Linux and that I would have to cancel my service with them if I wanted to use Linux. I had been using their service for 10 months at that point with Linux, it was just that I was having problems with the modem for some strange reason. I ended up hanging up with him and figured the problem out myself.

So, Prodigy in Mexico did not seem stunned that I was running Linux and Victoria did not mind that I actually used my own brain to do what she wanted me to do. Usually you have to go through their exact set of steps or they don’t know how to proceed from there.

It is always nice to have a good customer service experience.