Hi all, thanks for stopping by.

They do say we learn from our mistakes, which of course is very true, and I made one last week that has taught me to slow down….a bit…

Before I explain my mistake I would like to apologize to everyone that had left a comment on my blog last week, unfortunately my mistake has stripped them all away….. sorry. I have managed to retrieve some comments from my email inbox, but the majority have gone.

Allow me to explain…

I was having a couple of issues with my previous hosting company which resulted in my blog being slow to load. So I started using CloudFlare, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which, by changing my DNS settings, super charged my loading times around the globe.

As that hosting was coming up for renewal I started looking around at other packages and decided to go with Hostgator, who transferred all of my sites for me.

During the transfer I stopped going through CloudFlare so as to asses the resources being used and compare the new hosting with the old, before the renewal of my old hosting was due.

We’re approaching that time of year again, when we sit and reflect on the past 12 months and everything that has happened.

This time last year I was busy making plans for 2011 but they didn’t come off as I put them on hold to be by my mothers side during another health scare.

My mum had another bleed to her brain, this time leaving her with vascular dementia, and was in a bad way. Being both deaf and partially sighted communication was extremely difficult for the staff around her so I was by her side nearly all day every day for the first few months of the year.

As you can imagine the whole experience was extremely stressful and left me quite numb and unable to focus on anything constructive.

I tried keeping my blog up dated and started inviting guest posts, which really helped.

As my mums situation settled down a bit I was able to start spending less time with her so I continued with my blog hopping as best I could. Through leaving comments on other peoples blogs I was lucky enough to win a few prizes.

Way back in the early 70′s when I was about 12 or 13 my mate’s step sister was a friend of Sir Jimmy Saville, who at the time was on a mission to raise funds to build a new spinal unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

Visiting my mate’s house I would often see Jimmy there with his Jaguar sat outside and get excited at seeing “the man that’s on the telly”.

A sponsored walk was in the planning and I, with my mate and 100′s of others took part. One Sunday morning we were picked up and taken to Stoke Mandeville where the sponsored walk started and finished. I’ve no idea what I raised, probably only a few pound but I was pleased as punch at taking part.

That was my only fund raiser but Sir Jimmy went on and on for years to come and in 1983 he proudly opened the new National Spinal Injuries Centre together with Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

Little did I know that our paths would cross again and that I would reap the benefit of his fund raising activities.

Hi everyone, thanks for stopping by.

I’ve been pulling my hair our lately and have just gone through the worst ten days of my internet marketing career so thought I’d let you all know what’s been going on.

My issue started a few weeks ago during the video blog challenge when a few online friends got in touch to let me know that my blog was displaying a 500 error message.

For those who don’t know what a 500 error message is; it basically meant that I had hit the limit of my resources on my server and the server then automatically switched my blog off and displayed the 500 error message.

Obviously this isn’t good and needed looking in to straight away. So following the advice of D9 support I started de-activating my plugins and left just a few that I viewed as essential. This didn’t cure the issue but it did ease it a little.

Whilst all this was going on I created a video to show my good friend Ian Ieba how to create a signature that contains an opt-in form to place beneath our blog posts. Once I had created the video I explained to Ian about the issues I was having with hitting my resource limits and advised him to keep an eye on his limits.

Hi all, thanks for stopping by.

What a busy Bank holiday weekend I’ve had. It’s a shame the calender on my phone doesn’t show Bank Holidays, wedding anniversaries and the day my daughter goes off on her first ever holiday without the parents

I said that I would put the Top Ten Traffic results on my blog today and after a very busy weekend I’ve finally managed it……. ye-ha

You see after receiving the entries for the video challenge I just had to put some of them to use, which meant more learning, applying, correcting, applying, correcting again arggg but I got there and am I pleased, you betcha I’m pleased, so much so you can have another ye-ha

As well as watching the videos from the challenge I’ve also had the pleasure of watching the ones from Learn With Sally. As this weeks module is about creating videos, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and create a video of The Top Ten Traffic Sources for the period of the video challenge.

Hi all, thanks for stopping by.

I’ve got an idea for a bit of a challenge and want to invite you all to take part….

The challenge is to make a video and post it on your blogs. It can be of anything you feel comfortable doing and if you’ve never created a video then this is your push to do so.

We’re all able to carry out certain tasks on our PC’s so why not record yourself doing one of them?

I’m no Spielberg but I have created a few videos and how I got started was by recording myself setting up an auto reply message on Outlook Express. It’s a simple video, which is displayed lower in the post, and it has been my most popular with over 2,900 views. It was created with free software so all it cost me was my time, so there’s no excuse!

Here’s a few ideas you could start with:

Cloaking affiliate links

Adding an image to a page or blog

Creating a payment button

Creating an Image

Creating an eBook cover

Creating a Hyperlink

Branding an eBook

Hi all, thanks for visiting my blog.

I’m really excited today as I’ve just purchased Camtasia Studio and have been checking it out. I’ve previously created my videos using CamStudio Pro, which I thought was ok for the price but now that I’ve tried Camtasia I’m kinda blown away.

Having received an email from one of my readers, asking how I’d set my blog up with automated emails to thank people for commenting, I thought I would kill two birds with one stone.

So today I’ve created a video showing everyone exactly how I’ve set the emails up, which I’ve placed below.

If you’ve ever created videos you’ll know that you get those eerrr ummm moments that sound terrible when you play the videos back and those delays when the screen change seems to take forever. Well I’m still having some of those er um moments and the screen change delays are part and parcel I think. Normally if I have to many I would stop the video and start all over again getting a little more worked up with each new attempt.

Not any more!

Hi, thanks for stopping by.

I’m so excited my head is spinning with ideas, so I thought I’d write this post and ask you for your advice.

As you know I do a fair bit of blog hopping and when I find something of real value I like to pass it on to others that I think will benefit from it. One of the blogs I visit is Dawn Kays Blog and whilst there recently I saw that Dawn was offering to Transcribe an Audio Recording into a text document free of charge for one of the people that left a decent comment on her post. Meaning that people that have interviewed others can turn their recordings into original products with very little effort on their part.

Knowing that Dawn does this for a living from her First Class Transcriptions website I thought this was an excellent opportunity and knowing some people that have carried out interviews I quickly got in touch with them and pointed them in Dawns direction and didn’t give it much more thought.