Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
When I first came to Japan, I was told that Kentucky Fried Chicken, or simply ‘Kentucky’ as it’s known in Japan, is a Christmas tradition. I was told that people flock to KFC for their annual Christmas Eve dinner. I didn’t really take it seriously until I saw people lining up for three blocks one Christmas Eve, just to get their dose of chicken! Although it exists, turkey isn’t common […]
I was just looking around at the Japanese videos on youtube.com, and came across the following ‘English lesson’. I know we talk about using role-play to teach English, and how chants are a good way to remember phrases, but come on! This is just silly! I must confess that I’ve never seen anything quite like this on Japanese TV, but I guess it must exist. Maybe I’m not up early […]
For the month of November, 88% of visitors to my Writing Wizard website use Internet Explorer, while only 7% use Mozilla Firefox. How does this affect my approach to web design? Well, although I check my sites in Firefox, if they don’t work correctly, I honestly don’t care! Tech-heads and Firefox fanboys will rave about tabbed browsing, rss web feeds, security and extensions. And yes, Firefox offers loads of extensions […]
Update: When I got Windows Vista, I switched again. Now I’m using Windows Mail (Dec. 2nd, 2007). The last few weeks had seen my spam-count sky rocket. I think the extra exposure I gave my sites with some pretty heavy advertising campaigns must have pulled in as many spammers as honest visitors. I guess I’d been averaging about 60 spam emails a day and ‘delete’ had become the most overused […]
During the last couple of weeks, I’ve broken the golden rule of teaching English to children by speaking Japanese! Heaven help me! I’ve started each lesson with a few minutes of chit-chat with the kids and I’m really enjoying it! I just ask them what they’ve been doing lately and they are really forthcoming in telling me their news. I learned that one of them has just had a baby […]
Imagine you have to commute home every night by train. The train is packed so you can’t sit down and you’ve already read the day’s newspaper. You forgot to bring a book and the batteries are dead in your walkman. It’s dark outside so you can’t stare out the windows and you’ve read the same advertising board a thousand times. What are you going to do? Study English, that’s what! […]
Earlier this year I started on ESL-Kids.com, a website that offers printable flashcards and worksheets for teachers like me – ESL teachers on the front lines everyday, faced with an army of children and only a few ABC cards to defend ourselves with. It was a slow start, but recently I’ve given ESL Kids a facelift, added a lot of new flashcard sets and made a worksheet generator. Just today […]
I’ve been using Google Adwords to advertise my websites for over a year now, but I’ve kept my advertising budget as low as possible. However, I’ve been experimenting this month with different sized advertising budgets to see what effect it has on the number of visitors to my sites, and how much I earn through Google Adsense. What I’ve noticed is that if I spend more on advertising, I make […]