On the way to my first million: Domain Parking

I have been thinking about monetizing my old blog domains explicitknowledge.de and uselessknowledge.de quite a while and this weekend I came to the conclusion that I should give it a try.

It was a piece of cake to set up an account with sedo, a domain parking provider. I suppose at least 90% of the domain parking sites I recently visited (and immediately clicked away) were powered by sedo (hopefully the visitors of my two sites will click the ads instead).

Anyway, it’s a win-win-situation for me. I didn’t want to pay for webspace anymore so my old hosting provider exclusively watched over my two domains for the last year. I liked them that much that I rather paid 6 € a year than giving them away.

Now I might even earn money and eventually someone will offer me a helluva lot of money and in that case I will reconsider giving them away. So, dear future buyers please voice your offers!

Back to the basics

Hello there!

I haven’t been writing anything for a long time. Basically, the reason is that I am incredibly lazy. Still, there is a bit more to it. I am in my last year at school and I actually have to spend a little time doing school work. Further on, there is my unsatisfiable desire to get around, get to know new people and discover ancient long-forgotten cultures (for example, my last hitchhike took me to the Bavarians). Not to mention that I commit a lot of my spare time to the two exchange organisations AFS and YFU.

However, I have been getting increasingly unsatisfied with my English skills and especially my ability to express myself. So I thought it was an exellent idea to resurrect this old blog of mine bearing in mind that there are the A-level exams (Abitur) looming ahead.

I haven’t made up my mind what’s going to be the main topic for this new blogging area. I am sure I will be sharing various stories with you my dear readers. I still have some untold stories about my last hitchhiking trips in my repertoire and I constantly experiment with my ubuntu distribution. Let’s just see what inspires me …

How to explain Ubuntu

I found a great metaphor which explains Ubuntu and the open source idea in an easy way and very comprehensible. I won’t tell spoil anything – look it up yourself ;-)

By the way I am deeply impressed by the newest Ubuntu release. It’s just amazing. Try it out. Definitely!

Learning English again

My abroad year is over, so I decided to focus on some other thing now: Learning English. As I wrote, I’m in an English Advanced course at school and to make thinks even more interesting I signed up for a preparation course for the CAE Certificate at an evening school.
I got two reasons signing up. Firstly, I did the FCE certificate this year in April (or was it March?) and at school they now offer a preparation course for it. I already did it, so why shouldn’t I try the next one?

Secondly, I love my English Advanced course, but it is not as demanding as I had hoped for.

Lot of reasons to write on this blog how my learning is going on. When I read the first posts I wrote about two years ago I can gladly tell, that I improved a hell of a lot. Now it’s time to continue writing more frequently to brush up my writing skills and maybe I should start again reading a few English books.

The world’s as miserable as before, but I continue to blog

I have been a few weeks now back in Germany and I recently thought about school which is going to start in about exactly … 4 days. Oh hell! I am going to have Mathematics and English as Leistungskurs (I always tried to translate this word in various languages during various discussions, but I always failed … maybe I should look into a dictionary right now. Okay, the dictionary itself is not sure which word is to use) and I thought about my skills in both subjects.

I know that my English skill is not as good as a year ago, so I decided I ought to restart blogging more frequently. Won’t hurt anyway and as long as I’ll just gab about some bullshit every now and then I don’t waste too much time for it. Especially my vocabulary degraded like hell. So don’t wonder when I’ll try to use some exquisite vocabulary ;-)

In the end I care anyway less about English than I do about maths. I should have started to learn the stuff I missed a few weeks ago. I didn’t of course.

So school is about to start….but I finish here my entry, because the compile process of sauerbraten finished and I’ll try it out now. Have fun out there, my non-existent readers!

One year blogging

One year ago I started this blog. And I have to correct myself: I started blogging ways earlier, it’s just that this blog celebrates it’s first anual birthday.

Some kind of resolution wanted? Okay, I’ll give it a try. Although the idea came a bit later (i just registered the blog to test wordpress.com) I though I could use this blog to use and improve my English. And have fun doing it. That’s all.

I  fullfilled my aim. Absolutely. Although I can’t really say if it’s all just the blog – I read I lot of books too (to be exactly I kind a read nearly only English books) and I spoke English at the beginning in Latvia. So somehow it works all together but I think the blog was a milestone.

Did I had fun? Yeah. It’s especially obvious looking at my ultra long posts. I just started writing and couldn’t stop anymore.

What else? I would have enjoyed a few more comments, but as this isn’t an A-blog (rather ranking D to F) I can’t expect there too much. I didn’t want to push the traffic anyway.

General resolution: I’m happy.

And a short general prediction: It will stay pretty much the same.

New Year’s pledges

I achieved last years pledges pretty well, though I couldn’t manage to buy a Macintosh laptop …

So that’s the first pledge for the coming year too. I should think about some more, but I still got some time (in my time zone it’s only 8 o’ clock). Maybe I will come up with some more, maybe not …

Anyway, a happy new year to all of you!

More settings for multiple blog user needed!

I am surfing around wordpress blogs as I used to do all the time. Now, there is just one thing different: I have two language parts. Lavtian blogs and English blogs (Sometimes German blogs too), as I have my Latvian and my English blog.

My problem is, that I want to commentate in both languages. Bad thing about it is,  that (as long as I am logged in) the settings allow just a link to my Latvian or this blog.

I would like to comment to blogs with a link to my blogs in the adequate language. I hope that is possible. WordPress often listens to user wishes, so I’ll just tell them!

WTF? – Spam blogs steal content to generate traffic

I was looking through technorati and spotted some strange links there. Some site linking to my blog – but with my own content. Same titles, and an excerpt of my posts with a “link to the orignal article” at the end.

I had a closer look at the site – kdblogs.com which pretends to be a free blogging service – and spotted a helluva lot more subdomain spam pages with over 5000 subdomains (just this domain, there are many more), each one pulling in one or different feeds related to some topic (topic == subdomain).

Furtheron there are a few links distributed all over these spam pages linking to various blogspot blogs which in the end leads to phentermine and similar annoying shit. Some advertisements in between too.

Don’t now what I can do about it, but I’m really pissed off. I remember the case that some site did the same, pretending to collect a blogging archive from german blogs and in the end it was somehow shot down by protesting bloggers.

Latvian’s blogger meeting

Hello there! I can call me a real blogger now, I have been to a blogger meeting. A few days ago I happened to read this post and immediately decided I should pay them a visit.

Yesterday was the meeting in the Albert Hotel Star Lounge in Riga (great view over Riga from up there). I was a bit late because I didn’t found the place at first. Luckily the organisator could help me and I came around too.

I kind of was the last one I think, about 20 people where already there (and proved a stereotype: all male and the age average would have been somewhere in  the early twenties), chatting, talking communicating in reallife, without comments, ping-backs and all that stuff (there were still a lot of laptops and damn much high class cameras). I clearly was the youngest and the only foreigner too.

Topics were broad ranged: From podcasting over flickr and blog traffic to ‘Big Brother’ Google… I hadn’t imagined I would understand so freaking much, incredible. I was a bit silent though, I should have tried to talk a bit more. Talking is not so difficult anymore, it’s just unbelievable wrong.

Altogether I’m very happy I happened to be there and I’m curious about the podcast (is it going to be a podcast (everyone had to record a statement about himself, blogging and reading other blogs or something like that)?) and about pictures, pictures! I didn’t got everyone’s name and blog due to the fact  that I was late. Hey, I know you made pictures!

I only pity myself that I paid too much for the cab, I won’t ever take one standing in front of a hotel, there they are just waiting to rob tourists.