I’m getting pretty happy with my halloween site halloween-australia.com.

It’s moved up the organic listings at Google, and is now high on page one for “halloween australia” and “halloween events australia“, which was my objective.

People are finding it, and submitting listings for halloween events this year. Some really cool events at the Australian Museum, Manhatten Bar and Nepean River cruises so far.

So I beefed it up again tonight.
Previously, the events search page just had the search fields, and if you hit “Search” without putting in a suburb, it listed the suburbs for you as links. That way you could see if your suburb, or one nearby, had any events.

But it wasn’t easily showing some of the recent cool stuff. So I added a little teaser, showing the last 5 events added, as soon as you land on the page. That will also help SEO, as the content on the page will be frequently changing. Made the suburb an active link, to make it user friendly, and reduce clicks.

And improved the formatting and colours of the event listings.

Wonder if there’s any chance of getting to position one by the end of the month.

Wonder if it will translate into some earnings, from affiliate costume sales, and adsense.

Cross fingers.

Unhappily discovered the amazingly common bug with the iPhone and third-party applications.

It had been relatively cool until now. Useful when I couldn’t find the soccer field on Saturday morning, great for my Tetris addiction, trendy SMS conversation display, and such fun to play with, finding new applications to install.

Then on Sunday I installed a bunch of apps I was really looking forwards to. Shazam, to identify music, IM to instant message, and Mbox, to receive my faxes on my iPhone. Plus Sydney traffic reports. Really useful stuff.

Suddenly the majority of third-party applications failed. They would open for a second, and automatically close.

There are two noticeable threads about this disgustingly common problem:
the high profile Chris Pirillo blog
and the Apple support thread iPhone problems.

Possible causes include the latest version of iTunes (I’m on 7.1.1.11), the version of iPhone (I’m now on 2.0.2), interrupting a synch (I swear I didn’t), having multiple iTunes accounts (I’ve only had the one).

Others suggested DRM problems, or applications with customisable settings on the iPhone (eg Facebook, Mbox). So I deleted those applications.

Still no luck. Would have been reaaallly useful to see the traffic reports this morning, after a garbage truck turned over on the Harbour Bridge. After 30 minutes to go 3 blocks, I got off the bus and walked to Neutral Bay. Beat my bus, plus the one before it.

If my iPhone apps were working, I could have learnt Italian, instant messaged people at work. But no, the best I could do was login to hotmail and send an old-fashioned email.

A lot of very unhappy people on the Apple thread. Combined with the lack of video camera on the iPhone, it really turns it into a common object.

I am not recommending iPhones to my family. Wish I hadn’t tied myself to a 2 year contract now. It really stinks.