We're Back Online…

Well, it appears we’re back online after being “suspended” for nearly a day. For those wondering, the problem wasn’t with my site. Instead it had something to do with the company who hosts me, which is a hosting reseller — as in they get their hosting from someone else further up the ladder and charge me a little bit more than what they’re charged in order to make some cash.

I have no idea what their problem was, but I think I might need to start looking for a new solution. I’ve yet to hear from anyone after sending support emails and leaving voicemails. That kind of customer service worries me. It’s almost the same thing that happened when my previous host decided to call it quits all of a sudden.

Thanks for bearing with me through this unexpected surprise. More info to follow if there’s anything worth reporting.

Site Issues

If you’ve tried to post a comment, or even browse the site lately, you may have noticed that things have been a bit on the flakey side — with errors 404 & 500 getting thrown left and right.

It seems as though my host may have started throttling certain aspects of my account (PHP, which WordPress runs in) for some unknown reason. I’m going to try to address this with them today to see if we can do something about it.

My apologies for the unreliability over the past couple weeks.

Three Years Today

Just a quick note, done via the magic of future posting, to let readers know the site turns three years old today. Woo hoo! Happy birthday, JMO – and me in 3 days, too!

Ad Space for Sale (Not (Not))

At the prodding of James Huff, I’m going to get bold and take a shot at selling my own ad space directly on the site.

In a nutshell, at one time there will only be a maximum of 5 ad slots filled which are randomly displayed on any page that’s browsed site wide. Since the site gets roughly 97,000 page views per month, thats a potential of nearly 19,500 ad impressions for only $10 — or fractions of a fraction of a penny. You can’t beat that price with a stick, no matter how hard you try.

[Update 5/18/07] – Well that was a huge flop… Not a single bite, so I’ve decided to abandon the whole idea. Oh well.

[Update 6/1/07] – I’ve finally gotten an inquiry, so I’ve reactivated the ad code. Two slots are tentatively taken, leaving three open. Snag yours while you can.

Mmm… Crow…

I knew this would happen! Within hours of clicking the publish button¹ in ecto, spewing forth my frustration with Text-Link-Ads across all the internets, Patrick Gavin got in touch with me about my listing problems.

While I’m not sure if it was because of the post, or if he was finally able to respond after decompressing from the Search Engine Strategies show in NYC, I can say that he was totally apologetic about not getting back to me quicker, and very sympathetic about my frustration.

It would have been very easy for him to say “whatever” and ignore me after slamming him like I did. Instead, he made my issue a priority, and passed it on to the very capable Justin Klemm, who was able to resolve the problem in short order. That’s customer service.

So here’s my big bite of crow; Sometimes, sitting on the “give me” end of things, it’s easy to forget that Web based businesses like Text-Link-Ads can consume huge portions of life for the people who run them. More often than not, it’s just a couple of individuals who keep all the balls in the air. I should have kept that in mind before wielding my mighty publish button.

While I still stand by my opinion that a customer should be acknowledged quickly if they have a problem, I can honestly appreciate that they were just too busy to help me any sooner than they did.

So now, more than ever, I’ll be recommending Text-Link-Ads as the best option for monetizing your website. Sure, it took them longer than I would have liked to get back to me. But once they did, they were total pros when it came to getting the problem solved.

1. See I am a good button clicker! [↩]

What Ever Happened to Customer Service?

Throughout my AdSense woes, I’ve touted Text-Link-Ads as the best alternative to monetizing a website. I’ve even referred a person or two to sign up as publishers and/or advertisers. I wouldn’t say I’ve been a top notch publisher for them, but then it turns out there’s really no way we’d be able to know.

Houston, We Have a Problem…

I recently discovered that my TLA listing for this site has — shall we say — issues. It has for some time. Actually, it’s totally borked. For some reason, changes I make which directly affect my available link inventory get reset at the top of the hour without fail. Once it resets, my listing says that I don’t have any links to sell, when in fact I do.

Additionally, my listing does not display under the categories I’ve chosen. In fact, it won’t appear under any category at all, nor can it be found when searching for it by any keyword I use. That’s not good. No wonder I’ve not been selling any links. No one is able to find me.

I contacted Text-Link-Ads through their online form asking for help. The next day I got a response that read “…are you hitting the ‘update’ button after you make these changes?” Now, I may not always be the sharpest tool in the shed — but I am pretty darned savvy when it comes to clicking buttons, especially those that read “Update” — so yeah, I’m sure I’ve clicked the update button. More than a time or two in fact.

Silence is Golden. Or Is It Just Tin Plated?

Being confident of my button clicking abilities, I did some legwork and gathered what I thought Patrick Gavin would need in order to resolve my problem fast, allowing us both to be back on our way to filling our pockets with TLA cash. I sent it off to him in a friendly manner, then did a little more fact finding and sent those results to him as well.

That was four very quiet days ago. Ever since his “are you so dumb you can’t even click a button?” response, I’ve heard nothing. No “we’re looking into it on our end” email. Not even a “I don’t have time to bother with your problem right now” type of reply. Nothing. Not a peep. Is that what Text-Link-Ads thinks customer support is supposed to be? Bad news for them if they do.

One Unhappy Customer Makes a Mob

My work demands I provide support to users for both my day job, as well as my WordPress themes & silly little Mac applications — even if I don’t feel like it, or think their support question is stupid. No matter how trivial, I always make a point of addressing support issues quickly, within minutes if possible. Were I to wait 4 days (or more) to respond to the needs of a user, I’d either be fired from my day job, or my online reputation would be shot to hell by word of mouth.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s a little of my own word of mouth; Text-Link-Ads is great when everything is working and Mr. Gavin is making money. I’m sure most of his clientele would give the service high marks. I probably would too if I were able to sell links and make money myself. Heck, I’d give it an even higher rating had my support issue even been acknowledged.

However, when something goes wrong, it would appear Mr. Gavin’s idea of customer service is to ignore the problem and hope it goes away. That’s bad business. I wonder if it would be the case if my site had higher traffic, or if my name was “known” in the blogosphere somehow?

Conclusions

I know what it is to be busy. I’m aware that sometimes you’re just not able to get back to someone right away. However, I’m a firm believer that if you can’t help someone right now, you should at the very least acknowledge them. That’s good customer service, even if the problem hasn’t been solved yet. That didn’t happen in this case.

So whatever the deal is at Text-Link-Ads, since I’ve been pretty much ignored after multiple friendly attempts to get their support, I’ve chosen to remove all banners and links from my site and post my experiences with their customer service — or lack of it — here. Man, am I getting grippy in my old age, or what?

So, Sonny boy, what’s been your experience with Text-Link-Ads?

[Update] – See this post where I thank Patrick for helping me if you’d like to see a more humble side of my persona.

Just Don't Call Me Steve Martin…

George writes: I download from a PC because I have an archaic dialup no bandwidth one lane dirt road network at home in a rural spot, and this PC has a 12 lane freeway. And yes I use a MAC at home, jerk.

Ouch.

I considered replying to this friendly contact form submission directly, but I thought readers might get as much a kick out of it as I did. So let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom of what it is that makes me such a jerk…

My hosting plan allows for 30 GB of bandwidth per month. The size of Yasu, compressed in gzip format, is 2.6 MB. Multiply that by the 16,000 plus downloads this month and it comes out to 41,600 MB (or 41.6 GB) of data transferred. That doesn’t even take into account bandwidth for all other site traffic. Nope, that’s Yasu all by itself. All told, I wound up roughly 14 GB in the bandwidth hole site wide because Windows users, in their rabid quest to be able to play games without paying for them, have downloaded my application without first checking to see if it was really what they were looking for. This was the result of some script kiddie also naming his little crack Yasu.

You’ve no doubt figured out that I’ve ponied up the extra cash this month in order to keep my site online. Because I don’t want to have to pay the same expense next month, I made a very sound decision to prevent all Windows users from downloading Yasu anymore. This was simply done to prevent wasted bandwidth, since there’s no such thing as free (as in beer) bandwidth.

So, about this bandwidth I’m preserving. Well, it gets paid for using proceeds from Yasu registrations — no other way. Think about that for a second… Since I’m not getting any cash from the people who are downloading my application the most (as in it doesn’t run on Windows?), wouldn’t it make sense for me to simply not allow them to download it anymore? Yeah, I thought it did too.

Okay. Let’s get back to George. He thinks I’m a jerk because I’ve inconvenienced him since he doesn’t have a fat enough pipe (umm, this would be his own bandwidth) to download 2.6 MB at home. It would appear he thinks I’m supposed to give up 45 GB to the Windows world-at-large in order to personally save him a few minutes on his rickety dial-up connection somewhere in the middle of Podunk. Hmmm. Wow, I guess that does makes me a jerk.

Well darn George, it looks like you were right after all. All I can do is say thanks for pointing out my shortcomings. Can you ever forgive my callous behavior and selfishness? I’ll have a hard time sleeping tonight if you can’t.

All kidding aside, let’s presume for a moment you were serious. Had you simply shared your plight with me, I would have been more than accommodating to work with you (just ask anyone who knows me). But since that didn’t happen, and you resorted to name calling right out of the gate, I’ll just recommend you download one of the many other applications like mine on that 12-lane-freeway PC of yours, burn it to CD (or however it is you shuttle stuff) and go to town with it on your down-on-the-farm Mac. Thanks for getting in touch.

Is Google AdSense Really Fair?

A while back, I commented about being dismissed from Google AdSense for reasons that were never explained to me, just before I was to receive my first payment from the program. Since then, I’ve tried to get myself reinstated twice, and have been denied each time without explanation — even when I asked for it.

I bring this up because I recently began inserting a digital fingerprint on all posts in my RSS feed. It’s a totally unique value that I verified was not in existence anywhere on the web before I chose it (RSS feeders — that’s what the funky combination of letters and numbers is at the end of each post – in case you were wondering). This unique value is very easy to find using search engines. Finding it on a site other than mine means that the other site has “scraped” my RSS feed from FeedBurner, making the post (or part of it) their own with the hopes of profiting by using it as search engine “keywords” in conjunction with advertising such as Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network ads on the page. The goal is to generate an ad click-thru to a site the visitor really wants which contains the keyword they were searching for. The splogger gets paid for the click without doing any work at all. Slimy, but simple — and extremely effective.

Today, I found four different sites that have scraped my content to use as their own with AdSense ads on the page. This, according to the Google AdSense Terms of Service, is a huge violation. I promptly reported the abuse with hopes the sploggers who lifted my content get their income generating plug pulled pronto. But that’s not what this post is really about.

I’ve long said that I feel the Google AdSense Team does not do a good enough job of determining legitimate sites from the sploggers and scrapers. I’m confused by the fact that my site is 100% on the up and up, I rank well in the search engines, and I provide the Mac community a good service — yet I’ve repeatedly been denied reinstatement (or an explanation of why I was even kicked out). I’m doubly confused as to why the four sites I came across today were ever allowed to join the AdSense program in the first place. It’s painfully obvious that they’re not (and never have been) legitimate in any way — yet they’re still making money using AdSense in an underhanded way. The crooks are being rewarded, while the honest man is being punished. I’m not whining, but does anyone see the point I’m trying to make here?

I don’t think this is right — so I’m going to use the forum of my own legitimate website to publicly challenge any member of the Google AdSense Team who’ll field the question: Please explain to me why I cannot be reinstated to the program, while the splogging/scraping ilk like the four sites I reported to you today are continually allowed to participate and profit?

I look forward to any response you may have, Google AdSense Team…