with apologies to Clement Moore.

twas january 1st
and all through the house
not a creature was stirring
not even a mouse

the kids were still snuggled
asleep in their beds
late nights and much walking
had addled their heads

we olds were enjoying
a morning of peace
the dogs werent yet barking
no-one on the streets

we pondered again
how our plans went awry
for a hot spicy midnight
under fireworked sky

the odds had seemed good
that the kids would be dozy
near midnight, allowing us
time to get cosy

but alas, they’re now teens
with parties to go to
one under the bridge
another the zoo

we couldnt enjoy
the bottle of moet
we had to stay sober
til all were home safely

one came home quickly
1 am’s not too bad
but as expected a call came
could we get a lift home dad?

and they were all starving
mcdonalds was full
new years resolution broken
to eat healthy food

we tucked in to hotdogs
as 2am beckoned
not quite what the plan was
their dad and i reckoned

but january 1
has a night of its own
we claimed it as our night
and partied at home.

My favourite Christmas present this year was from my youngest son.

He likes to make things (especially if it doesn’t cost anything). And also leaves things to the last minute. So on Christmas Eve afternoon he was running around, trying to find a blank CD at home. He didn’t say what for. I didn’t suspect anything.

I couldn’t find one, so he disappeared back into his room, and played with his laptop a bit more. Stayed up late.

On Christmas Day (after finally getting out of bed at 09:30!)  he showed me what he’d made.

A powerpoint presentation set to music, of lots of loving, kissing pictures. Mostly free pictures with watermarks that he’d downloaded from Google, they were soppy pictures like Minnie and Mickey mouse kissing.

At one point the music got out of sync, so he improvised on the spot, republished it without sound, and played the music direct from his iTunes account. Very resourceful.

But I couldn’t get over the fact that he had done for fun, what they had been paying me to do at work last week, synchronising sound (and voiceovers) to powerpoint presentations.

(Yes, his copy is legal. I bought him the student version of Office for his Mac, as thats what they use at school).

We should subcontract to him – its much better than waiting for the local papershop to give him the paper-run, after 2 years of  being on the waiting list and then seeing them advertise the next street  (Cumberland  Newspapers – you are sooo disorganised!).

I went into his room yesterday (you have to be brave), and he was there on his laptop, with two other laptops next to him. “I fix things”  he said. Although the fan problems on the Lenovo were beyond him, and the battery problems on the Thinkpad. But he happily wiped them, to use them as backups.

Scott, you’ve got a great future ahead of you in IT.

Shameless plug alert.

Just wanted to publicise the fact that I have a Christmas Events page, where people can list their public events such as Christmas Tree Lighting, Carols by Candlelight, Christmas Markets, Church services, etc.

You can search by event type and suburb, so if you’re looking for your closest carols by candlelight, feel welcome to drop in.

The ideal website would be one you could create and leave, letting it chug along earning money, not having to go back and update it.

Unfortunately, those sites are pretty mythical.

Even if you take the lazy man’s approach to earning money online,  building websites with affiliate links on them (so that someone else has to fulfil the sales), they still need maintenance.

I have an Online Shopping site that basically lists online shops in Australia.

A lot of the links (apart from shops that I have used and trust), come from two of the main affiliate companies in Australia. I’ll only name my favourite – www.clixgalore.com.au.

This weekend I spent around 4 hours doing spring cleaning, individually going through each link on My Online Shops, double checking that the online shop it linked to, still existed.  I’ve still only done a quarter of the sites, so there are many more hours ahead of me.I was surprised and annoyed at how many shops I had to delete from my directory.

I deleted around 40 shops. About half of those, simply  no longer existed. I assume the global financial crisis hit them badly, and they went out of business. “Factors outside our control” seemed to be the usual excuse. If the URL even still worked.

But around 20 were shops that no longer were listed at the original affiliate company. Many no longer offered an affiliate link, but a surprisingly large number had transferred their affiliate management to good old clixgalore.

Whilst checking the links, I could imagine that the slow speed of the other affiliate company was a factor.  Many times I clicked on a link, and it took ages for the affiliate company to redirect to the online shop. Definitely a deterrent to sales. I had absolutely no sales during November for the slow affiliate company, and a large number for clixgalore.

Apart from maintaining the existing links from the slow affiliate company (simply because they do still have a few good shops there), I will no longer waste my time adding new shops from their lists. On the surface, it seems that their servers aren’t coping, that they sign up shop that can’t last through a downturn, and they send so many emails, that it’s not worth reading them. And so I miss out on the important emails that would have told me which shops or promotions were no longer active.

Long live clixgalore!

I have a problem.

I want to rebuild my Halloween site, but I think I’ve left it too late for this year.

It’s currently just a hand-built site, which means it’s lightweight, runs quickly, and is really well optimised for SEO.

So good that its currently on page 1 at Google for halloween australia, halloween events, halloween costumes australia, and more.

It’s even translating into sales – I have links to affiliate companies on the site, and have referred a dozen sales for costumes and party goods in the last two weeks. So I really don’t want to mess things up.

But I wanted to make it more of a community.  Its pretty basic – you can’t upload PDFs of fliers, or have fancy fonts to advertise the halloween event. It needs more easy interaction.

Currently I have to manually approve all halloween events, to avoid spam. But if I make it better, people will be able to see straight away what their event looks like, and customise it on the spot.

I have a new Drupal version of the site ready on my laptop. I just have to upload it, and re-enter all the halloween events that people have already added. And there are more growing, every day.

If I do301 permanent redirects, so that people clicking on old indexed pages are automatically redirected to the new pages, that would fix things in the short term. But every seo forum I read, the experts admit that redirect are eventually followed by a drop in listings. It’s never smooth.

Do I want to risk my good rankings this close to halloween? Or do I upgrade the site to make it easier to use.

A conundrum.