ilovecode

There has been talk around the blogosphere about what will happen to your sites if you should kick the bucket. If you died today, would someone know how to manage your sites, or even access them? What if you have adsense, will they know how to manage those or even where your payments go?

If I died today, I feel pretty confident that things would be handled as I have a business partner who knows how to get to everything. But, it would probably be a good idea to keep a running document with all of my sites, usernames and passwords, and specific directions on how to access them and add it to my backup.

Do you have any precautionary measures you use?

As someone with great respect for John McCain, I was extremely disappointed to learn about some of the details in his proposed legislation Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act. While I believe his intentions are good, those good intentions gets lost in the details.

From News.com:

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

Basically what the legislation says is that as bloggers, we can be held responsible for the comments that are left on our blogs. I’d be curious to se some example of types of comments that a blogger could be liable for.

According to BBC, Gartner believes that blogging will peak next year. Call me crazy, but I’m not sure I agree with that. There are alot of factors that would need to be considered. I think perhaps the number of people blogging might level off, but I think the number of blogs and the number of businesses that blog will increase. Frequent bloggers are starting to create several blogs for various topics they want to discuss rather than keeping the one blog that covers their work, home life, and everything in between.

I’ve never thought of blogging as a fad, I think it is just another option to get your message out. I really don’t see it going anywhere. I think you will have a lot of people try it out and then not continue because it just doesn’t work for them, but for those of us who enjoy blogging, it is here to stay.

Back in May, I decided I would throw up some adsense ads and just see what happened. Now, i haven’t made very much from this particular site, but i think by May of next year, it will have earned enough to at least pay for a year of hosting. That’s really not too bad considering I haven’t tried to advertise the blog more and I have been blogging less lately than I used to.

Just recently though, a new player entered the field. Now playing in right-field: BlogKits!. Here is the deal: They proclaim that you will be able to earn more by using their ads than using adsense. The site even gives user a calculator that should estimate how much your blog would make based on your daily readers. ilovecode is at about 600-700 uniques a day so I choose the 300-1000 option. This was my result:

If only that were true. So I tried it out with another blog that I run ads on that has less readers, and the result was more accurate. I’ve decided I will try this service out. I’ll write a better review of it later after i’ve set it up and use it for at least a couple of weeks. It’s nice that there is something targetted to those of us who aren’t professional bloggers.

Well, I finally have Internet and phone access here in Belgium. It took about 6 weeks but something finally went right! Anyone care to throw me a Interet homecoming party? I’ll bring the beer (and the beer is quite good here!).

It has been hell without the Internet and my shakes are just now starting to subside. It’s one thing if it’s a self-imposed exile from online-land, but when you just CAN’T be online and you don’t know how to get there, it is maddening. I know you will think I’m crazy but it is easier to go without sex for a long period of time than the Internet. And I unfortunately know that from experience! Hmmm… maybe I can write an article.

I’m happy to be back and have a ton of work to do now. For any of you who need my phone number just let me know. I signed up for Vonage before I moved so I have a US-based phone number. For those international folk I do have a Belgium line too. All but one of my clients are based in the US so that is why I needed a US number too!

All of my household items just arrived this week too so now I have my Internet and my Music. I haven’t heard any new music in a while so if anyone has any recommendations please shoot them my way.

To my biking friends: I’m looking to buy a bike here in belgium. I’m debatig between a road bike and a mountain bike and don’t want to spend more than 200 Euro at the moment. Can you make any recommendations please?

Now.. time to catch up on my blog reading!