I posted before about lifecasting. I started lifecasting over on Ustream and it was a lot of fun, but the whole reason I wanted to start lifecasting was because I heard about Justin.tv. I signed up for Justin.tv over a month ago and I finally got into the beta. Justin.tv has a much larger viewer base and I like how it is setup better than Ustream. I also decided to get an EVDO card for my laptop so I can take you all with me wherever I go! It should be a fun experience, well tune in and see what I’m up to!
As you all might remember I was a bit late on the top commentators for July, this month I’m right on time, although I still forgot to take a screenshot last night of the top commentator’s widget on the side of the page. So this morning I had to go back and count them by hand, what a great way to start my morning! This month’s commentators are almost the same as last month, it’s good to see we have a community going here! So without further ado here are August’s Top Commentators done Leo Chiang style!
Sean – He has just started a hardware review site, looks awesome so far, hopefully he can keep up with it!
Thomas De Maesschalck – this guy must like movies and he also reviews computer hardware like me.
BigMan – Another hardware site owner, see a trend? He is heading out to LA soon and enjoys watching me on Ustream.
Michael Kwan – A proud hockey fan, and owner of a brand new OCIA.net T-shirt!
David Lithman – He must be famous because he was just interviewed, he also lets us know what his ideal work day would be like.
Thanks to everyone that commented during the month of August!
How Do You Become a Top Commentator?
Comment, that’s it! All you have to do is comment on the posts here on BobBuskirk.com and the top 5 people with the most posts will be picked as that months Top Commentators. If you are a top commentator I will link back to your website / blog when I make that month’s top commentator post. So start commenting!
If you head on over to ThinkGaming you can see it has a new look. When I first switched ThinkGaming over to wordpress I used the same layout I was using for ThinkComputers, with different logos of course. This layout works very well on ThinkComputers, but I really did not like how it looked on ThinkGaming. ThinkGaming is more of a blog and ThinkComputers publishes full reviews so they are a bit different. I really did not like how the posts were looking on the layout and I felt like it needed a new look. So after looking through a bunch of wordpress themes I picked mistylook, which is also used on this blog.
Mistylook originally only has 2 columns, but as you can see on this blog and ThinkGaming I made it into a 3 column layout. ThinkGaming is different than this blog though, I moved one of the columns over to the far left of the layout. I really like this look and think it turned out well. I also made the top graphic myself. I’m no expert at Photoshop, but I think it came out alright. If anyone wants to make a better one you are more than happy to. I also added a few more features like the MyBlogLog reader community, and recent comments. I’m looking to add more features to the site so if anyone knows of any good wordpress plugins please let me know, thanks!
As I said before I have started to log my hours. The main reason for this is because I feel like I’m not getting enough work done. So what better way to see if I’m actually doing work than to log my hours. So over the past week I setup an excel sheet to log my hours (If anyone has a better method please let me know, excel is a pain!). Now this is over a 7 day period not the normal 5 day work week most of you are used to. Here is a day to day breakdown of the hours I worked.
Monday: 2 hours
Tuesday: 4 hours 15 minutes
Wednesday: 2 hours 28 minutes
Thursday: 4 hours
Friday: 4 hours
Saturday: 0 hours
Sunday: 4 hours
Total Worked: 20 hours 43 minutes
After seeing how much I worked in a 7 day work week I was very disappointed in myself. When I had a real job I worked anywhere from 30-50 hours in a 5 day work week!
Reasons For Not Working as Much
Well the main reason for not working as much is that I haven’t had a lot of motivation. That has a lot to do getting enough sleep and keeping a good schedule. I recently made a post about how being healthy helps you be productive and it really does. When you don’t get enough sleep or are not eating right it can really hurt your performance. Also I am very lazy, something I have been trying to remedy. All my life I’ve for the most part done what I need to get by, not try to do more.
Goals For This Week
This week my goal is at least 25 hours, but I do hope to do more, I just don’t want to set the goal to high and then be disappointed in myself. I have been doing a lot of right things already this week. I have been on a great schedule, eating 3 meals a day, and I’m motivated. Hopefully this week will be a good one, it already started off good with the front page Digg!
If you did not notice all of my sites including this blog were running VERY slow yesterday. The reason for this is the Samsung SyncMaster 940UX 19-inch LCD monitor review made it to the front page of Digg, so we were overcome with traffic. Now before we were able to handle a Digg just fine, but there were obvious reasons why we were slowed down so much. First the addition of ThinkCE, ThinkGaming, and this blog. They are all run on databases. Next the ThinkComputers page has been changed since the last Digg. There are a lot of database calls on the page including all of the ads, random photos from the gallery, blog listings, and the latest forum posts. After I disabled most of these things the page seemed to load a lot faster.
The page wouldn’t load for a good 2 hours I would say. That’s a lot of lost revenue! I guess I thought since last time we got a Digg there were no problems there would not be this time. Next time I go for a front page Digg I will be sure to disable the database calls and now I have the ads in cache mode so they don’t have to go to the database every time the page is loaded.
How Did it Make the Front Page?
Yes I was the person that submitted it to Digg. As I have said before I rarely submit things to Digg, mainly because most of the things we review at ThinkComputers have already been reviewed on other sites and they are not extraordinary products. The Samsung SyncMaster 940UX 19-inch LCD monitor has 1 very unique thing about it, you can hook it up to your PC via USB, without the use of a video card. This unique feature was why I submitted it to Digg.
A lot of other people thought it was very unique too. Within 30 minutes we already had 25 diggs, which was a real surprise to me. About 40 minutes after that we were on the front page. It has to be fastest Digg that I submitted to make it to the front page. Usually it takes 3-4 hours to make it. The Digg was well received too, there were not a lot of bad comments and as of right now it is at 1159 diggs. Yesterday it made the top 10 stories in technology and it is still on the Top in 24hr page at #3.
Traffic and Revenue
Because of the front page, and those 2 other listings there was a ton of traffic to the site. Yesterday we had about 31,000 unique visitors to the site and got around 50,000 page views, that’s quite a boost from our normal traffic. Of course with that much traffic our revenue increased. Here is a break down of revenue compared to our average revenue per day.
Google Adsense: $155.44 / $30 (Average)
TTZ Media: $160.50 / $30 (Average)
Contexual Ads: $175 / $17 (Average)
Tribal Fusion: $37.29 / $7 (Average)
Total: $528.23 / $84 (Average)
So making $528.23 instead of the usual $84 is a nice increase for sure! At that is only for yesterday the first day it hit Digg. The front page Digg and listings on other popular pages on the site will bring residual traffic to the site all this week and even longer. I still get a lot of hits from prior diggs. The Digg will help revenue for the next 3 days, as today I am already over my average earnings for the day.
How to Capitalize?
There are few things you want to do to capitalize on a front page digg. The first being making sure your server can handle it. Imagine if my site would have went down all day, I would have not made anywhere near close to what I made. Also people would see that it was down and not come back. You also want to have the right ads setup, this means if it is a review make sure you have a matching shopping link. Finally before you can even get a Digg you need to know that what you are submitting is unique, if it isn’t it will be removed from the front page and people will bury it as spam.
Yesterday was quite a success for me, hopefully I will be able to get another front page Digg soon!
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