Written by Neil Galloway
These red jellyfish looked awesome. Each tank had a nice blue backlight which really let you see the detail on them. This was taken at the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park.
November 2007 Archives - Page 5
Nov
26
Nov
27
Written by Neil Galloway
This was a vibrant green snake sitting behind glass at the Vancouver Aquarium. The lighting was pretty dim so I had to put on my 50mm 1.8 lens and jack up the ISO on my camera.
Nov
27
Written by Neil Galloway
This is kind of neat. A Google map of all the NHL hockey rinks. They are all flagged on the map and then the site has included links below for information about attending a game there.
Check out Rinktour.com. It is interesting to see the distribution of them. Definitely a large concentration in the east.
I recently attended a game in Anaheim, California. It was the first time I had ever seen a game outside of my home province of Alberta. It was interesting to watch two different teams play and see the atmosphere. I definitely recommend it if you are on holidays to add it into your plans.
Nov
28
Written by Neil Galloway
I forgot to write an article about it, but on November 19th, Thoughts From My Life turned 1! That's right, a year has gone by with me blathering about whatever on this site.
It all started with my article on Insurance Policies and then I just kept rolling after that.
What turned out to be my most popular articles (and largest Adsense earners) have been these four articles.
- Collecting Air Miles and Their Value
- Collecting Aeroplan Points and Their Value
- Aeroplan Versus Air Miles - Comparing Them
- Best Nintendo DS Homebrew
Overall, I feel it has been a success. My original intent was to use this site as a tool to learn more web programming, have a diary for whatever I was working on or just thinking about at the time, and have it make enough money to pay for itself. The blog now earns over $40/month in passive income and an extra $50/month in sponsored posts that I write. Not bad, considering my costs are $15/year for the domain and $5/month for the web hosting.
What Articles Have Been Published?
It has been an interesting year so far. I tried a number of techniques to get traffic to my site and it has settled into a little over 100 uniques a day. I thought I would write about whatever I was thinking about or trying to figure out and see where the articles take me. I thought it would be an even distribution, but it has been fairly one sided.
Year to date, here are the categories on my site and the number of articles in each one after the course of the year.
| Category | # Articles | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Blogging | 117 | 23.8% |
| Sponsored | 110 | 22.4% |
| Photography | 86 | 17.5% |
| General | 51 | 10.4% |
| Travel | 49 | 10.0% |
| Computers | 25 | 5.1% |
| Finance | 22 | 4.5% |
| NintendoDS | 18 | 3.7% |
| Investing | 14 | 2.8% |
It is interesting that Finance was one of my smallest categories, yet it gave me over 90% of my passive blog income.
What Has Changed?
Well, I wrote my own website code. I am a software engineer and to help keep my interest up in this project I decided to write my own code. It has been a good experience and I learned some PHP out of it. It definitely hindered me in a number of areas as a lot of my time was spent coding and not writing.
I have learned a ton about blogging. My best article describing it is 9 Blogging Lessons I Learned From John Chow. His site was the first one I started reading back in November of 2006 when I started mine. I have followed a lot of the techniques he has done, but have to admit I have grown out of reading his blog a bit. I still go back, but this has taken its own direction for me.
Goals For Year 2
I want to take Thoughts From My Life to a much higher traffic level and revenue level. Goals for this year are:
Add frequent commenters section to the layout of my pages.
It will include a link back to their site without the nofollow tag on it. Just payback for writing comments and help to encourage more comments.
Add a recent articles section to the layout.
I'm hoping to catch all the search engine visitors and get them to stay longer by exposing them to more article links.
Add a recent comments section to the layout.
Help the readers stay up with what people are saying without having to navigate to articles.
Get involved more with other blogs.
Consistent reading helps with creativity and I have received traffic from other blogs because of it.
Write more articles for the more active areas.
I have not written an Aeroplan article in a long time. It might be time to expand that area and try to capture more search engine traffic.
Develop more SEO into my posts and site.
I will constantly refine my site for search engine optimization ideas. Researching keywords when writing a post is also important.
Here's to another year!
Nov
28
Written by Neil Galloway
The boat had plenty of people for a day on the water. Everyone was standing on one side to tip the boat a bit. It helps build up a rolling wave behind the boat for someone to surf in. I had to break out my 10-20mm wide angle Sigma lens to try and capture most of the scene.
Nov
29
Nov
29
Written by Neil Galloway
My wife and I have just booked our first trip every to New York City using Aeroplan points. We leave in March of 2008 and are staying there for a few nights.
I am quite happy with our deal as well. We used our Aeroplan points and received a very good return on them. I am really picky when I use my travel rewards like Aeroplan and Air Miles because I want to get the most money out of them as possible. I have already written articles about the value of an air mile and the value of an Aeroplan point.
Anyhow, I normally value an Aeroplan point around 1.6 cents each. Our flights to New York are giving me 1.96 cents each. That seems like a small difference, but it is 22% more value than I usually expect.
How Do I Calculate the Value Aeroplan Points?
It is a simple formula. Take the raw dollar amount of money you save by using Aeroplan points and divide it by the number of points you used. Make sure to take into account the taxes you will pay using Aeroplan and if you have an added cost because of the flight schedule.
The cheapest flight we could find from Calgary, Canada to New York City (any airport) for our dates was $624/person including taxes. For two tickets to New York using Aeroplan, it was 50,000 Aeroplan points and around $270 in taxes. This means the cost savings were $1,248 (2 tickets) minus the $270 in taxes with Aeroplan for $978 in savings. $978 divided by the 50,000 Aeroplan miles is 1.96 cents/mile.
Usually my decision to use Aeroplan is based off of the 1.6 cents/mile cutoff. If it is not at least that amount, I will just pay the full ticket price myself and save the Aeroplan points for later, but if it 1.6 or greater, then I will use them.
Travel Is A Good Aeroplan Use
You can use your Aeroplan miles for a lot of other things, but sometimes they are not really giving you much value back. With the increase in tickets costs relative to the increase in points needed to travel, Aeroplan points have really become more valuable for traveling.
What About A Hotel In New York
We ended up booking in at Hotel 31. We have had relatives stay there and give it a good recommendation. Around $116 a night for a room with a shared bath. It is walking distance to Time Square as well so we cannot complain.
Nov
30
Written by Neil Galloway
I added another component to my side menu bar. A Recent Articles section just under my RSS feed icon. It shows the most recent 5 postings.
Why Did I Add Recent Articles?
It is a bit of an experiment really. I enjoy going to other blogs via link to a specific page that I am interested in. It bypasses their homepage however and a recent articles section on every page lets me get a quick overview of what they are writing about right now.
Most of my traffic is coming from search engine results so the first page a visitor comes to is not my home page. I thought this would be another way to expose them to my current articles and maybe get them to stick around longer. I will keep an eye out for my page views per visit to see what happens.
What Else Can You Do To Encourage Longer Visit Times?
I have only really done two things in the past to encourage surfers to stick around.
Use Internal Links
And use a lot of them. I have been bad at this, but any article where I have used them has been fairly successful at keeping them around. If you have a related post that adds to an article, link to it. It is simple to do really. If the individual wants more information or is just hanging around then you will get another page view out of it.
Related Articles
At the end of each of my article's landing page I have a section called Related Articles. Basically, I used a database query function that acts like a simple search engine to find matches in my articles. I post the 5 most closely related articles and hopefully they find something that suits what they are looking for. If you want to know more about it, I wrote an article on how I did it called Add Related Posts Links.
Nov
30
Written by Neil Galloway
One last spin around Tie Lake in British Columbia. I had the ISO setting on my camera at 1600 and the shutter speed as fast as I could get it to try and get him. Still a bit blurry, but I like the shot nonetheless.