I made the mistake today, of trying to get 300 drops through Entrecard. Its something I’ve done before, manually going through the pages by hand. Today, I thought I’d give it a go via the entrecard bar I wrote about last week (or was it this week… I don’t know any more!). I hit all in my inbox (in the morning), then I started on the most popular ones on EC, then for some reason, I can only say came about from food poisoning, I decided to hit the newest blogs on EC. If you can call them blogs.

No, Perez wasn’t one of them, but I needed a “Worst blog ever” cap and thats what came up when I googled for it… go figure. However, any of the ones I came across today under the newest tag on EC could beat it hands down.

Some played music so loud, I screamed (of course, I had my ear phones in). I though music was soooo myspace and frowned upon by regular bloggers…. Some had no content and were obviously spam blogs (splogs) while others were in some cryptic language that probably only make sense to its owner. I even came across a blog that stated that for those in the asian part of the world, tomorrow was going to be 08.08.08, as if the rest of the world was skipping tomorrow…. I only came across one or two that were truly unique and worth the visit.

It amazes me the crap people are passing off as blogs today. Saddens me a little too. Oh well, I guess I should change my ECbar setting back to most expensive and hit those instead….. after all, you get what you pay for…

If you’re like me you’re always finding ways to improve click-thru-rates on your websites. Whether its to advertisers, friends or other pages on your site, your ultimate goal as a webmaster is to get people to click right? After all, what good would a page be if people didn’t click on it? They might visit once. See the static, never changing, non-interactive content on your site and say “forgitaboutit!” The exact opposite of what you want them to do.

And tricks, tips and scams abound that claim to be able to help improve click thru and retention rates right? Well, I think I found one of the ultimate tools in a webmasters arsenal. The SiteSpect Difference aims to teach you how to use behavior tracking and “multivariate testing” to increase the “loyality” of your visitors. I’ve read through most of this white paper so far, and while some of it goes way, way over my head, most of it is simple stuff that as webmasters we should be doing anyways.

Chances are you know where your visitors are clicking already, and chances are even better that its not really where you think they should be clicking. This paper helps you make changes to your site that will change that. Check it out, its free and who knows, it might help improve your clicks!

Some of you (ok, the one person other than my mother) who visits the site regularly, may have noticed that it had been rather slow and sluggish to respond. The load times were dismal, the lightbox script for looking at photos didn’t work correctly, and things were just, well, bad.

I’m happy to say thats been corrected (for the most part).

The site is now running wp 2.6 (w00t!), the plugins have been upgraded to the latest and greatest (which fixed the wpg2 problems with lightbox) and I disabled Firestats, which I think were causing most of the problems anyways.

If you notice anything wrong, let me know….. I’d like to fix it.

300 “drops” seems to be the magic number per day. I came across a post on the EntreCard forums mentioning that one of the users had hit the upper limit of 300. I was curious to know if there was in fact a limit (it seems a little silly to have a limit when you can only drop your card once per day on a blog) and I also wanted the extra credits to buy spots on as many of the lower wait blogs as I could.

So, between work, posting and some other stuff today, I attempted to hit the number. And I did. And it wasn’t easy. I’d hit the most recent and least wait pages often and click on most of the cards and go through to their sites. I’d drop my card and I’d look and check out the quality of the blog. While I’m happy to have hit the 300 limit for the day, I don’t know I’ll make the effort, as I hit a lot of crap sites. I’ve also come to feel like a blogging minority in the fact that a) I do not speak broken English, b) I am not Pinoy or otherwise asian and c) my layout is somewhat different from the vast majority of blogs out there.

Granted, dropping this many cards should push a good bit of traffic my way…

So I did it. I ordered the last HP book from amazon last week, it will be at my house on Saturday. I’ve had several discussions with my siblings about how I think it will end and whether or not I think dumbledore is alive, harry will dye and if snape is truly evil (which I think he may turn out to be…).

Unlike my sister and her children though, I elected not to spend my time at barnes and noble for the release. I figure I have better things to do (sleep) and I can wait 12 hours for the book to come via the post. I will read the book (I’m rereading all 6 of the previous ones now), and I’ll probably like it. Does it matter to me who lives and who dies, not really, though I think it would suck for harry to make it this far and die.