The World According to Tim Skipper

What’s happened to Google Adsense earnings?

I run Google Adsense on all of my non-eCommerce web sites. It’s been a nice little earner with fairly consistent monthly results over the past couple of years.

Last month, Google changed Adsense so that the clickable area was restricted to just the ad title and url lines, instead of the whole ad block.

It’s devastated my earnings, which for November were down by a factor of 10 over September & October, despite increased impressions. Has anyone else seen this since the change? It won’t be long I’m sure before people start to abandon Adsense because of it. What knock-on effect will this have on Adwords prices I wonder?

Tags: Google Adsense, Google Adwords

So David Yu thinks the BMW E30 M3 is not worthy of its iconic status.

Some say; he’s been driving too many Ferraris, and that his web site is rubbish. All I know is, the E30 M3 is every bit as good as it’s reputation suggests.

I think David just drove a dud. Mine certainly never understeered – not a bit, and whilst it’s not the most powerful of cars (especially if you knock about in two Ferraris and a Corvette for fun), but the S14 engine in the E30 M3 is a peach. I loved mine.

You can read all about my BMW E30 M3 throughout this blog. Check out Auto-Journals too, it’s a good read, despite what some people think.

Also why not spend a few minutes admiring David’s skill as a driver (hehe, sorry David).

Tags: auto-journals

I was reminded this morning, whilst browsing the Microsoft MSDN site looking for MSDN Subscription info, just how important it is to tell the customer what it is they want to know as clearly and as simply as possible.

I was reminded of this, because Microsoft was doing a very poor job of it. I wanted to know what the current MSDN Subscription packages are and a comparison table of what they contain. It must have taken me 15 minutes of clicking before I eventually found the page I was looking for. That’s insane!

Microsoft can get away with this poor customer experience because of their sheer size and industry position. But for the rest of us with commercial web sites who do not enjoy being a household name, the clarity of key product information is an important aspect which should not be overlooked.

If you’ve not captured visitors’ attention within 30 seconds, you’re done for. So make sure the key selling points of your product or service are not hidden 15 layers deep off of some obscure page.

Clarity = conversions!

Tags: Microsoft, MSDN

I found a really useful article on Private Parking Companies and how you should not pay their usually outrageous demands for money. If you’ve had an invoice, probably with Penalty Charge Notice written on it, from such a company for allegedly parking somewhere you shouldn’t have, then you need to read this article from Pepipoo before you do anything else!

Private Parking Companies – A Guide To An Effective Defence

Pepipoo is a great resource for the victim du jour – uk motorists.

Tags: Parking Fines, PCN, Pepipoo

I’ve been aware that my Sony VAIO TZ series laptop tends to thrash it’s hard drive a lot, even when it’s seemingly doing nothing. Since this has got to be adversely affecting the battery life – currently an excellent 6 hours in Power Save mode – I decided to investigate it further.

The resource monitor tool was showing me that Vista was hammering away at a file named C:\System Volume Information\{<guid style value>}

A bit of Googleing later revealed this to be the Volume Shadow Service (VSS). Basically it creates System Restore points at critical times (such as when installing programs or Windows Updates), but also runs on a scheduled basis.

If you’re good at keeping backups, then you can safely disable this feature and stop all the thrashing. Go to Computers -> Properties -> System Protection and un-check your drive(s).

It seems to have done the trick nicely.

Tags: Disk Thrashing, Sony VAIO, Windows Vista