Okay, I'm going to vent here. I was all excited when I looked at my web traffic over the weekend. Traffic was up. I was receiving hits from all the places I wanted. Google search results, links I had in posted articles on Ezine, and StumbleUpon stumbles. You know how much money I made....? Zero. That's write, absolutely nothing!

I know, I know. My number of hits is dreadfully low anyways, but I had $5 days before with less hits than this. I was just expecting some sort of activity on the income front.

I was deflated. It still proves the point that you always hear the traffic doesn't always result in ad clicks. John Chow writes about this on his December recap article as well. Google traffic was far better than Digg traffic for him, even though there was a lot less of them. They were far more likely to click on the ads.

My Traffic From This Weekend

As you can see by Friday that I had 7 first time visitors which is above the norm for me, but the weekend turned out awesome. Ezine decided to finally publish a couple of my articles and there they were.

I am still going to focus on generating traffic though. More articles, more submissions, and that will be my formula for now. I am still happy with my ad placements. I wanted to try some of the other advertising methods John Chow is using, but they are for higher traffic sites only.

Anyhow, until next time...

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I added Technorati to my website yesterday. Why? Because I saw it on John Chow's site. I didn't know anything about it beforehand, but it looks interesting.

Basically, it is a website providing bloggers and blog readers tools to find and rank sites. I signed up for a basic account and they had some code I could add to my page to add a search field to my site (I already had this so I didn't use it) and add some links to information they gather.

Some of the other cool features is a link to see what blogs link to my website and my overall Technorati ranking (I'm in the 700,000's right now). They offer a whole bunch of other services I didn't really read into to provide information and promotion of your site. I'm not going to worry about that for now since I still need to write more content.

If you are looking for blogs though, check them out. You can search by a number of different categories and just look up information like "who has the most popular blog" or whatever. You might find something that fits your tastes.

I'm wondering how this will affect revenue in the future though. Hopefully I will get some more promotion out of it and a few more hits. Only way to tell is to keep an eye on my web tracker.

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I kept noticing John Chow had a FeedBurner logo on his website and he was receiving ad revenue from them. So I decided to check them out.

I signed up yesterday and just did the basics that they walk you through. The account is free, so I would encourage you to try them out.

Basically, they are a webtracker and RSS feed site that handles some extra little details for you. There official line is this:

• FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web...

Web tracking involves tracking who visits your site and all the statistical information surrounding it. A must if you want to get a grasp of how traffic is coming to you site and from where.

If you don't know what RSS is about, I wrote an article awhile back when I added it to my site. I already had an RSS feed, but when I signed up they encourage you to not let people access it (i.e. they should go through them). Then I gave them my link to my rss feed and they created a page with all my info on it.

They also gave me the code to insert into my page to create a link to them (see the RSS Feed) link on the side that goes to my information. All-in-all there site looks pretty slick. Within two clicks I had my feed embedded in my Google homepage. You can do the same with Yahoo and such.

My goals are two fold. I'm hoping this will get my website out a bit more and make it easier to find and secondly, FeedBurner does have an ad network. If I can get myself some more ad revenue down the road with these people it will definitely help out.

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It has been depressing in terms of revenue this past week. I had a flurry of activity last weekend and it dropped off like a rock. Why? Probably because I didn't do any more article submissions to Ezine or StumbleUpon. I am still focused on righting a good base of articles. I will submit them to sites after that. Interesting to see that my Google traffic is sure a steady. I get over 5 visitors a day from just that.

Check out my traffic results below. Here is the graph. You can see that Sunday and Monday started out with a bang. It coincided with a lot of my articles being published on Ezine a few days earlier. Plus I seemed to be showing up in aeroplan and airmiles search results more often. The red line is hits, the green line is unique visitors and the blue is returning visitors. I use green as my most important metric right now. Trying to get more people to check out my site.

Here are the stats that were used to create the graph.

What did this result in for revenue. $1.53. That's right. A buck and a half. Pretty puny. The thing is, I'm okay with that right now. Good content is still my focus. I'm happy with the ad placements and generating traffic is still the goal. Check out my Adsense report here.

For those of you who are interested, here is a graph of the past month. You will note at the very beginning I didn't even have a tracker so the results are 0. Pay attention to the green line which represent unique visitors coming to my site. The spikes all coincide with link backs that were published in that time period as well. One was on johnchow.com, others were submissions to ezinearticles.com, and some were StumbleUpon submissions.

Look for more submissions this week.

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I was certified for scuba diving a few years ago and it turned out to be one of the best things I have done for my traveling. I'm not going to go off on how awesome it is and how many dives I have done (because I haven't done many) so don't worry. This article is more about how it adds to your traveling and how to go about getting certified.

When traveling, there are so many opportunities to go diving (and for reasonable prices) that it is almost foolish to not be certified. It always gives you the opportunity to see a bit more when you are somewhere. Especially if you end up in one of those resort locations for a bit of time. You can throw in a few dives on those days when you just don't feel like laying on the beach or sweating on some day hike somewhere.

I was certified through PADI which is one of the recognized bodies around the world and will let you dive basically anywhere. I have used my diving in Thailand, at Kande Beach in Malawi, and on the island of Zanzibar. I have had many other opportunities as well, but didn't have the time (Galapagos Islands, Cuba, and Vietnam).

How Does Certification Work with PADI

My cousin first gave me the idea before I left on my trip to South East Asia in 2004. Basically it comprises of 2 components which cost around $300 Canadian altogether or $150 each.

1. Class Room Instruction/Pool Dives
2. 4 Open Water Dives

Class Room Instruction involves reading the textbook, doing quizzes, and practicing the techniques in a pool. You cover the basics of how it works, what the safety concerns are, how the PADI program works for certification (a sales pitch basically), and you get a good feel how to operate the gear within a safe pool environment.

The 4 open water dives are four seperate dives on open water. Open water means a lake, river, or ocean. You can do more than one dive a day as well so it doesn't have to take long.

When you have completed both portions, you will receive a nice little PADI Open Water card in the mail that you can take with you whenever.

How Long Does It Take?

I did mine over the course of 6 weeks. I went 2 days a week for 3 hours each time. You can do it in a weekend too.

Can the Components Be Done Seperately?

Yes. This is what I did. I live in about the driest most boring place in terms of scuba diving activity. Plus the open water dives sites were either man-made lakes within the city I live in or freezing cold mountain lakes in the Rockies.

I did all my course and pool work here and then I planned my holiday. When you are at a place that has a PADI certified shop you can do your 4 open water dives there. This was awesome. The dives were instructional, but I still got to see a lot of neat fish and coral. The cost can be cheaper, but in my case it was about the same.

Remember to take all your documentation with you though. You will want your log book and PADI cards with you.

What If I Don't Dive For Awhile?

This will vary, depending on where you go. Some places will make you take a refresher (for money of course) if you haven't dived within the last 6 months. My last trip in Africa, they didn't even check my log book. Just asked me some questions and went over a few things so it didn't even matter.

In Calgary, some dive shops will even let you drop in and do your own thing in their pool for $5 and sign your log book that you have had a refresher, so if you are worried at all before you leave, just do a refresher. Personally I wouldn't worry about it though. The refresher won't cost you much anyways and you might even get a scenic dive out of it on your holiday.

Diving Locations I Know About

Koh Tao, Thailand

• This is a little island in the Gulf of Thailand. Know for cheap diving and cheap everything, it caters to those who are there for it. There isn't much else you can do while you are there to tell you the truth. I spent a week there and had a great time. Lots of fish, coral, reef sharks, turtles, and my cousin saw a Whale Shark. Dive Point was the shop I used. Check them out. This link is for their main site which says Koh Samui, but they are on all 3 islands I think. They have the biggest boat and amount of equipment for Koh Tao. They were quite friendly too.

Kande Beach, Malawi

• My first lake dive was on Lake Malawi. Had lots of neat little fish and there is even an old jeep that was had been sunk off an island. There are cyclids in this lake and I even saw a mother fish who would let all 30-40 of her babies swim into her mouth when you got too close. The dive shop was called Aquanuts and all the people were super friendly.

Zanzibar, Tanzania

• This was a fantastic place. It was at Nungwi on Zanzibar. The dive shop was called "Spanish Dancer" or something like that. It was on the north-west corner of the island. The beaches are awesome and the water nice and clear. I took a boat over to the north-east corner of the island and did a couple dives off of here. Monster sized sea turtles and dolphins were jumping out of the water when we were up top. Definitely lots to see. The snorkeling just off the beach was even fantastic. Check it out when you are there. The dive shop I used was right on the beach and they were all quite friendly. I found a link here that talks about it.

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I'm sick of having to try and find a site every time I want to get the ip address of my computer. I log in with Remote Desktop Connection quite often or I post a large file to one of my computers at home and want to serve it from there. Unfortunately, I am behind a router and so I always have to log in to it to see my IP address.

I always used other sites and I figured I would just write my own little page to do the same thing. So here it is. This will tell you your exposed address to the internet.

What Is My IP Page

Source

There is basically nothing to this. Your browser passes information to the server and php has a quick and easy way to get it out. If you want the code I use, here it is.

print "This script has detected that your ip address is:
";
$ipaddress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
print "$ipaddress";


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I found this interesting page in my Google Webmaster Tools page. It shows searches where my pages show up in the results. This explains some of my traffic recently.

The biggest thing with Google is knowing how you stack up in search results. You never really know. Ideally, everyone wants to be in the #1 or #2 slot on the front page of a Google search result, but that isn't possible without a good Page Rank and some money to spend on advertising.

As you can see, RDC through routers and Air Miles are definitely my most common items. It's funny. This site was about developing a website and making money, yet I write a couple articles about this stuff and it gives me more activity. I see my Nikon reviews are also in there.

This is a good way to keep an eye on how Google search results stack up for me.

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I was encouraged by a friend and coworker of mine in September of 2006 to start exercising more. I wasn't really out of shape. I wasn't overweight, played volleyball regularly, and didn't feel restricted in what I could do. I was more interesting in achieving that "toned" look and just feel more healthy and energetic.

I basically copied what he did for the first while. He had hired a personal trainer for 1 day to show him the basics and set up a routine for him. Was worth every penny according to him.

Two days a week I do strength training and the other two days are on the treadmill. My goal is to shed a few pounds, gain some strength, and just have a better physique.

My routine has changed a bit over time and I have fallen off the band wagon a few times as well. But all in all, I have developed a comfortable feel with the gym and don't feel initimidated with what I want to do. I like trying out new exercises and seeing what other people do.

Outside of Lifting Weights and Running

The biggest thing I learned was how much a proper diet, drinking water, and getting enough sleep mattered. These are key and you can improve your overrall health magnitudes if you could get control over these areas by themselves.

Watch what you eat. I know the expression is old and lame, but its true. Limit your soda, chips, ice cream, sugars, and etc. I'm not going to get into it a lot, we all know what is reasonable. Don't be excessive, but don't try and go cold turkey either.

Aim for more protein in your diet and to eat more frequently but in smaller quantities. I will snack every couple hours and have smaller meals at lunch and dinner.

Drink lots of water. You'll find it curbs your appettite too. Helps your body regulate itself and has a million other health benefits.

Sleep. Get a good routine going. Once you've lifted weights for a couple weeks, you'll find there is nothing like missing sleep one night to show in your exercise results.

My Routine

Here is the routine I follow for the most part. I have access to a small gym at work with treadmills, exercise bikes, a rack of dumbbells, an exercise ball, and one of the multi station weight lifting machines. I think you could ideally get away with a pair of adjustable dumbbells, treadmill, and exercise ball at home to do 90% of these excercises.

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My wife purchased a Polar F4 heart rate monitor as a gift for me over a year ago and it has been an excellent workout tool. I'm not the most frequent exercising person, but I have used it enough to get benefits out of it. Plus, I like cool gadgets and this falls into the category.

Basically it is a plastic strap that goes around your torso (just under your chest) and transmits a heart rate signal to a watch that you wear on your arm. The watch then shows you your heart rate at any given time.

The watch also features basic software to calculate statistics for you. You punch in your weight, heigh, and gender when you first use it and it will roughly estimate calories burned, what your peak heart rate is, and other information. It also keeps historical information about past workouts for up to 60 workouts I believe.

Gauge Your Cardio Performance

For myself, it allowed me to gauge my cardio performance. I try to maintain 160 beats/minute when I'm running. It helps keep me working out at a good rate. It also keeps track of how long I have been in my peak zone (this is over 126 beats/minute). So when I work out, I make sure to exercise in the peak zone for at least 30 minutes and keep my heart rate near 160 by adjusting the difficulty on the treadmill. It helps me to see how my body is improving as I need to bump the speed of the treadmill over time to maintain the 160 beats/minute.

Keep Your Heart Rate at a Training Level

It also has allowed me to try and maintain heart rate during weight training. I won't let my heart rate drop below a certain point when resting after a set before I start another set. I didn't realize how tired you can be when you keep a tight reign on your rests between sets.

See Difficulty of Other Exercises

I also found it interesting to watch my heart rate during other cardio activities like cycling and rowing. It was very hard for me to even get above 130 beats/minute on a bicycle for half an hour because my legs were just not strong enough. It definitely gives you targets to maintain to make sure you are getting something out of your workout.

Compatibility

A side bonus I found out after I started using the Polar heart rate monitor was that it is compatible with a lot of exercise equipment. I noticed my heart rate showing up on the main displays of the treadmills and bicycles at work. Then you don't have to worry about look at your watch if you don't want to.

Conclusion

This has been an excellent addition to my exercise program. Mainly because it gives me more insight into how my body is doing and how to keep it pushed to a level that will improve my body. And secondly, it is just a neat gadget to make your workout less boring. I would definitely recommend it for anyone that hits the gym.

By the way, the F4 Polar says it is a "women specific" heart rate monitor, but I have found it works perfectly fine for me. It still asks you your gender when you configure the watch to do calculations as well.

Any wireless heart monitor will do the trick though.

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They're back! AGLOCO is the same company as AllAdvantage (company that went under in the dot com bust). Basically, you install their "Viewbar" and it will display ads while you surf. They get paid for the ads and you get a cut of the profits.

Join my AGLOCO network!

There are two methods of making money.

1. Cash payments and discounts on products purchased through their ads.
2. Shares are apparently going to be given out.

It works off referrals, kind of like a multi-level marketing organization does. I'm going to try it out and see how it works. Even if I don't refer anybody, I'm interested to see how much money I get back from my surfing time. They claim an average user could get $5 to $15 a month from it. I don't know how much of that is actual cash, but I'll try it out for awhile.

I'm not really into pushing products and that kind of stuff, but I did put this entry on my blog and that is as far as I will go. It doesn't cost me any more time or commitment.

The Viewbar isn't even out yet (still in beta testing), but they are taking signups right now. When the Viewbar is ready you will get an email and then you can download and install it. Apparently it is easy to just turn the thing off as well.

I'm not going to push it, but if you want to give it a try, please use this link so I can get a referral out of it.

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