Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
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 […]
I’m not sure how reliable these pregnancy tests are, but it looks like I’m going to be a daddy! What with the news yesterday that our mortgage request has been approved and now the likelyhood of Mami and I becoming parents next year, it’s been quite a weekend! Sure, it could be a false alarm, but the test result is clear to see: If you haven’t already subscribed to this […]
Okay, so I was just about to write something intelligent when out of the corner of my eye I noticed three near-naked men on TV, eating yakiniku (Korean barbeque) and rubbing each other with the smoke from the BBQ. Of course, this kind of activity is quite normal for Japanese TV, and it doesn’t get much better than this… literally. Sadly, or maybe fortunately, I was too slow to get […]