Well two days later, but still – Welcome back to Richy’s Random Ramblings!

Yep, I’m going to try and make at least one entry every single day of the following month to this blog: at one point, I was blogging at around 5 posts a day – but lately I’ve been “running on dry” and not had much to ramble about: but hopefully things should go a bit more smoothly this month.

What have I been doing with my time the last few days? Mainly playing Blogshares where I am currently the 110th richest player (I made a hefty amount when Bookmoz floated: the shares instantly shot up to somewhere around $27.55 each!) currently with a projected worth of $128,568 ! Wow: I wish that was real money!

I’ve currently brought all available shares in a wide range of blogs: such as the CurryBet one about the BBC Websearch system, OneFineJay (which I’ve been reading for a while but not extensively enough to put on my blogroll yet), the Leicestershire based blogs (Blatherblog, SensitiveLight and in Bookmoz’s rival site Bibliblog (which is run by Kymberlie who is number 200 in the charts at the moment). Only bad choices I think I’ve made recently are ones like Exordium where I’m currently making a loss of over $2k!

Anyway: normal service is being resumed – I’m going to preload the blog database with a few “standby” posts so if I am short of content on anyday, at least I’ll be able to get _something_ live within 4 clicks or so.

Go on, have a look at the “Blogshares Top 100 Blogs” and see who appears in position 92.

Yep, it’s Richy’s Random Ramblings showing that all 10,000 shares (I’ve done a “share split” to double the number of available shares) have been sold in my blog and that each share is currently worth $3.92. Doesn’t sound a lot, but it means my lowly little blog is worth a whopping $11,738.24 and beats other well known blogs such as “Davezilla” and “Scriptygoddess”.

Now, if my shares in blogs I don’t read such as Deirdre on the WEB, MyDimension # unDefining Reality and JNalpak.com were to make sudden rises as well (as I’ve got 1000 shares in each of them worth just $233.33), then I’ll be able to sell them and hopefully buy some of my own stock back. But since each outgoing link from my blog is currently worth a massive $257.35, then hopefully me just mentioning them here will cause them to increase in value…

However, I’ve got a very strong feeling that my share price is going to slump by around $9,000 shortly for a short period of time – so I would advise people reading this to sell their stock in my blog now!

I’ve you’ve got no idea what I’m gabbering on about, go check out Blogshares, it’s still in beta (launches on the 1st of May), but it’s a whole lot of fun (for free!) and like me you could increase your initial $500 of virtual money up to $20,246 within a week. Now, if only I had the real life money to play the real life stock exchange….

Yes, some of you may have noticed the new “sponsored link” at the top of most of the blog pages. I didn’t really want to have to increase the advertising on the site – but considering only a few people have taken up the sidebar advertising offer (500 impressions for just $1, or a minimum of 20 clicks for $0.25 per click), I’ve had to start running the premium adverts (1000 impressions for $3 or a minimum of 50 clicks at $0.50per click: but adverts are cached for 30minutes per time!).

Why the need for adverts at all? Well, whilst I’ve got plenty of disc space, it’s bandwidth that’s causing a few costs – I’m transferring around 2Gb of data per month and that’s quite a lot for a “personal site”. Combined with the other sites I host, it means that I consume too much bandwidth for most hosts and therefore I’ve got to have a dedicated server for myself and they cost lots of money

Add that to the fact that I’m having to fork out money for the prizes in the Guess That Movie competitions and I’m not getting a lot of returns via the Amazon links (just 4 purchases so far of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix amazoncom:043935806X and that’s it!), means that the blogs costing me quite a bit of cash at the moment… I don’t mind too much, but I don’t want to constantly support it out of my own pocket (along with my time).

Hopefully, the adverts will be unobtrusive and hopefully bring in a few necessary dollar pounds every month, but comments on the adverts would be appreciated (or just buy some ads yourself: they’re really cheap and you’ll get your ad seen by around 660 daily visitors: plus they has been only two purchases for the premium adverts so far, meaning that there aren’t too many sites in rotation at the moment!)

All adverts are handled by TextAds (who accept payment via PayPal) and are included in the source code of the page (so no Javascript includes are required) – go on: help support the blog by buying an advert or making a donation via Pay Pal.

Of course, if somebody makes a generous donation of around £1,000 (which will cover the web hosting for the blog for a year by my reckoning), the adverts will disappear overnight…

Well, it’s been a whole two months since I last did a blog stats post, so what are the figures looking like now?

Well, my blogging activity has gone down a bit recently: this will be my 390th post: that’s only a rise of 90 posts in two months (45 a month) which is a bit poor for me (I was averaging nearly 100 a month). But I have managed to get 586 comments posted: that’s an extra 342 comments in two months – wow!

I’ll try and include February’s details here as well as March’s: I’ve had 118,574 hits during March (5,155 per day) – this is an increase of the 92,475 hits in January (2,983 per day), but a decrease from February’s 140,998 hits (5,035 per day) – and no, I’m not quite sure of how I can have more hits in February (which only has 28 days), yet a lower daily average – Webalizer must be playing up.

These hits were made up of 12,981 visits during March (564 a day), up again from January’s 11,040 (356 a day), but down from Feb’s 15,992 (571). I suspect it could be due to the war in Iraqi that is currently on going (many many sites have experienced a downturn in visitor numbers) – so I’m not too worried about it: At least I’m “only” using 1,245,191Kb (1.18Gb) of traffic and it’s down from Feb’s record beating 1,575,503Kb (1.50Gb) usage and up from Jan’s 9,82,762Kb (0.94Gb) – of course, these figures don’t include images…
» Read more: Blogging: March Blog Stats