Here it is on Boxing Day, just after watching the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht race, and I’ve finally got online for the first time in days.

The main reason is that we’ve had 5 boys in the house (10,12,13,15,17) and only 3 laptops. So they were heavily being used for Runescape, Maplestory and MSN messenger by the boys, and I thought my eyes deserved a little rest. Plus having 15 people in for lunch on Christmas Eve.

I’ve just checked the stats on my Christmas site - Best Australian Christmas.. It did Very well this month, with over 10,000 unique visitors according to my host statistics, and over 40,000 impressions according to Google Adsense, which earnt nicely. And then there were the affiliate commission sales from shops mentioned on the site.

I still didn’t really capitalise on the site. I had planned a really cool function, but it was still only half complete 2 days before Christmas, which was when I last logged on. Looking at my referral sources, an amazing 7000 visits were from bookmarks or direct address, another 7000 from organic search engine results, and another 5000 from links from other sites. I have never done email marketing for this site. And my SE traffic was probably lower than it should have been, as I was only number 6 at Google for “Christmas Australia” in December, although I had been number 1 for the middle months of the year. This was probably because I didn’t update the site between August and November, so it lacked the freshness that Google likes.

Oh well. There’s just never enough time to keep all my sites up to date manually, on top of being a mum to some very feral boys, working each day, and spending time with my lovely man. I know which one is the most fun.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, all.

I was looking around for a free photo gallery to put on my Christmas site. Hoping that people would send me their photos for inclusion, so I could have a bunch of Christmas photos that would inspire people to decorate their homes. There are few things more magical than seeing a home lavishly decorated with Christmas decorations.

So I checked out the well-known Gallery2. But it needed a MySQL database. I have already used up my database allowance at my hosting account, with this blog, my Sydney Photos site, and I’ve planned the other for a separate Christmas function.

So I ended up with TinyWebGallery, an XML-based photo gallery. I’ve installed it as my Christmas Decorations Photo Gallery, but despite all the traffic to the site (currently only page 1 at Google, and page 2 at Yahoo, although it used to be #1 at both), no one has sent me any photos yet. It really just has some photos of the Christmas windows at David Jones in the city, that I took with my camera phone. So I need some more.

I had a few hiccups installing the free open-source PHP program. I installed it, and it didn’t work. Then the next day, it did come up, but admin didn’t work. Then the next day, admin did work. I still haven’t got the basic login functions working, but I can upload photos, and people can view and page through the site, so that’s enough for now. It was a big help manually deleting the cached photos from the cache folder.

Check it out.