I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to keep this blog updated. It’s ironic because at this time of year (Christmas and New Year), people are supposed to have extended amounts of free time. For me, as a foreigner working for a newspaper in Thailand, it’s been the complete opposite.

Those of you who work from home will be horrified to learn that, yes, I worked all day Christmas Day in my office. I will also be at work the morning of New Year’s Eve and the afternoon of New Year’s Day. Am I to expect double time? Triple time? Nope. I am not being paid anything other than my usual salary and I’m working my fingers to the bone.

I enjoy my job thoroughly, but am giving some serious thought to the idea of taking some time off once my contract runs out. I sincerely doubt I will ever go through with working from home entirely, but the temptation is there.

What’s most important for me at this stage in my life is that I enjoy what I am doing, both in and out of work. For this reason alone, I have cut back on a lot of my freelance and part-time work. I’ve been turning down or passing over paid gigs because when I hit 25 last month, I realized that all I did was work.

Since I cut back on my workload, things have been great. I have more time for my girlfriend, for promoting parties, DJing and just enjoying the time I have. I could stay at home all the time and work myself to death. Sure, I’d make tons of money, but I’d miss out on so much more.

However, with age comes responsibility. I am taking the first steps to buying a house. If I have a mortgage, things will have to change and I will have to focus on work a little more.

I feel like I’m at a crossroads at the moment. Have you ever found yourself in this situation, caught between adulthood and childhood, responsibility and freedom?

Tags: Blogger rant by Angel
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I don’t like being opted into anything – be it mailing lists, updates, newsletters, promotional offers – without being explicitly told beforehand. If I want to sign up for something then it should be through my own actions. Receiving an email the first time you leave a comment on a blog is a minor annoyance, but I draw the line at being signed up for the comments on a post automatically.

It happens on about half of the blogs I leave comments on. It doesn’t happen on all of them, so I rarely look to see if there check-box is selected that would subscribe me to the entry. Please, bloggers, set your comments up so that people only subscribe to an entry through their own actions. It’s annoying to log into your email account and find dozens of emails, one each for the latest comment left in an entry you ended up signed up for.

Sometimes I want to receive updates by email, but those are the times when I will check the box myself. Otherwise, it’s as good as spamming your readers, especially on posts that attract a lot of comments.

Tags: Blogger rant by Angel
3 Comments »

Everybody wants to get ahead in this game, but you can’t get something for nothing. You can’t just spend $20 and expect the world to come to you. There are people making an absolute killing selling packages on the Internet that offer the world but, in actuality, deliver very little.

You may have seen them on webmaster forums.

Get 1,000 back links for $5

Sounds great doesn’t it? The deal is that you pay a sum of money, usually between $5 and about $50, and you get a number of blog posts, with links, on blogs across a blog network. The selling point of such packages is that the blogs have a respectable Page Rank and are on multiple IPs blah blah blah.

So what’s the catch?

The catch is that the Page Rank these blogs may have does not trickle down to the links you put in your post. You have the option to delay the postings, but the most interesting feature is the ability to spin one article into a number of unique articles. What you actually end up with, though, is dozens of articles that are absolute gibberish on blogs made up of hundreds of articles that are absolute gibberish; they have no value to you, search engines, or the Internet in general.

I can tell you these packages are a waste of you money because I bought one out of curiosity. I spent $5 for the sake of an experiment. Firstly, few, if any, of the blogs in these networks are indexed by Google. This means that your links are worth nothing. The blogs are mostly not listed on Technorati too.

For my $5 I got 50 blog posts spun from one post that I wrote myself. It included three links, but these are of no value because the blogs are dead weight. My Technorati rating stayed the same and nothing changed in Google. I didn’t use this blog for the experiment, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I may as well have bought a pack of Pringles and got some satisfaction that way, ‘cos these services fail to deliver big time.

Don’t use them.

Don’t take my word for it; have a look at one of the blogs in such networks and tell me it has any value to anybody. The real kicker is that these blogs are on dropped domains, which are domains that have expired and not been continued by their owners for one reason or another. While the PR may hold up in the future, the chances are slim, and buying the links now will really not help you in any way. Remember: If a girl calls you “sweety” on the Internet, it’s because she’s after something. People are making thousands of dollars selling posts on blogs like this. Let’s put an end to it. Spread the word.

Tags: Blogger rant by Angel
4 Comments »