Supersize Me

Right, as you know, this month my free time has been dominated by the adsense dream. I will post an pucker business update, relating to the online gift shop sometime during the next couple of days but, right here, right now its adsense.

Niches - Why? I admit that I am very green to the whole adsense income scene and all I read about it is related to niches.

Why should they go hand in hand?

The method I employ with my gift shop is quite simple - more products = more site pages = more search engine saturation = more visitors = more sales......... (Actually that is missing one very important factor - price - online or off, this is the be all and end all of sales - forget things like customer satisfaction and website design - customers will put up with alot if the price is right, at least that is what I am finding)

I am wavering, forget the shop, we are not looking for sales, just adsense clicks. Surely the more pages you have, the greater the search engine saturation, the more visitors, the more adsense cliks.

My current theory is this:- Forget looking for niches - just create supersites and the niches will follow. You dont get much more niche than Jesus Christ on a piece of sheet metal !! The other big advantage of a Super Site is that it contains a whole load of internal links - with the key search terms in the links if the site is planned properly.

Of course, my theory is unproven and one downside that I believe exists is the fact that the search engines like a site to grow over time, so it may be a case of putting your super site together over a period of time, rather than the much loved create, ftp, submit and forget type AIS sites that seem to be abundant in the niche fraternity.

Well, I am going to give it a try - watch this space, but dont expect too many immediate results unless there is a sudden rush on people wanting to find out about JC's sheet metalworking skills.

Cheers,
Rich

Jesus Christ on a piece of sheet metal

LMAO!

Well, you gotta aint ya? My NPM sites have been up and running on their subdomains now for just about a week and although google is only just starting to sniff, it appears some other search engine has picked up a couple of pages.

The subdomain in question is Powerselling on Ebay and thus far I have received hits from the following three search engine keyphrases:-

picture of holy hardware on ebay
jesus christ on a piece of sheet metal
jesus sheet metal ebay

The reason being the newsfeed that features on the NPM sites. You know what made me laugh my socks off? Well, it wasnt the return - none of the clicks resulted in any adsnese revenue - its just the thought of what these people/person were searching for. Man I just love the diversity of the internet and all who use it.

OK, I gotta go - I am off to rush out a few AISers about the Good Lord and his Metalworking skills!!

Cheers,
Rich

An adsense conscience?

I have been having a little conflict of conscience over the weekend with how to progress with my adsense empire (Currently stands at three sites at present! - Daily income - single figures - usually just the one single figure 0!)

Anyhow, I am not perturbed by the lack of income, in fact I am very optimistic about how much could be made. No, the quandry is more about which direction to go in with the site building.

I have spent a fair bit of time looking into the rssg/rssgm program the last couple of days. Its a marvelous piece of work. Very clever. Way over the top of my head as to how it actually functions but I have just been looking into/thinking about how I would like it to work and how to modify the templates to create something I am happy with.

Then though, the conscience struck and I started to think do I really want to just churn out site after scraped site. I have no doubt that you could easily churn out hundreds, probably thousands of pages with the scraping technique, every day. Of course, whether the search engines would reward you for this is highly doubtful.

(Just out of interest, anyone had their adsense account put on hold for such methods? I seem to remember a post about this happening somewhere.)

Anyhow, work kind of stopped over the weekend due to my wranglings (and other commitments). Then, tonight I did a little research into how much people are bidding on certain terms with the overture tool at pixelfast. (You can find this handy tool amongst 151 SEO tools) - A few results blew me away - One inparticular being the search phrase "charity" - This is a hugely popular keyword and there are registered charities bidding very high amounts to feature in the top spot. Now, it strikes me that there is something majorly wrong when charities can spend more than your average business on promoting themselves.

I did toy with the idea of trying an adsense site for the keyphrase charity - for all of about 1 second - unfortunately my conscience defiantly would not let me go down this route!! Even if I dont agree with the way/amount of money some of these charities are blowing on self promotion.

What followed from this train of thought was that, although I have a bit of an issue with creating total scrapers, there are certain sectors that will be paying big bucks for advertising, that I dont particularly like - in fact, there are certain types of industries/advertisers that I really, really dont like. Off the top of my head, and to give you some idea, I am thinking gas companies that announce 22% price rises just as they announce record profits, petrol companies that announce record profits despite continuing to rip us off at the pumps, governments that insist on bleeding us dry with taxes (do they use adsense?). Anyhow, I am sure you get the drift and I am sure I will be able to think of many more. My first target you will have to try and guess - I will announce it when I get a site up and running.

I appreciate that this is almost definitely not the best way about making money from adsense but it is one that I am very comfortable with. I am still shying away from total scrapers, purely due to the fact that I have my doubts about their effectiveness and longevity, but I may try a few in the future (just for research you understand).

Wish me luck on my campaign,

Cheers,
Rich

How to Promote Your Adsense Sites

Ok, this is a blatent call for help.

Having posted that adsense/niche sites are not as prevalent as may be thought, I still have a problem that is bothering me and would like thoughts of any active adsensers - particularly the regular blogger on the adsense challenge.

So, I know it will work - I have the ability to crank out plenty of sites, be they total scrapers (quicker and easier to produce) or rehashed articles (may have a little more staying power, depending on the amount of arcticles out there and the changes made to the articles).

Why arent I churning out several sites a night? Well, just aint too sure of the best way of promoting them. In fact, I have been spending my evenings trying to establish a way of interling them.

What, would you say is the best way of gaining that all important search engine ranking?

Methods I know of are:-

1. The straight forward site map - Sure it gets google googling but does it get you listed?
2. Article sites - The impression I get, is like search engines, there are plenty you would like to be listed with and would feed you plenty of traffic but are not that easy to get into. And then there are plenty of sites crying out for your articles, but have little or no status in the SEO game. Plus, lets face it, writing unique articles is a pain in the bum - If I wanted to do that, I would create a unique content site!
3. Your own network of sites - This is what I have been working at. But, again, it is proving to be alot of work and if you have no web presence to start with, its going to be a long and slow process to build/establish any kind of decent network.
4. Your blog - this seems pretty straight forward - you have a blog - its got PR - you throw up a couple of links. But, you adsensers out there dont seem to be using this method. Why? Is it due to this "bad neighbour" link thing I have been reading about - on the google website, no less. Surely if this really works, all I have to do for my online store is create a high number of adsense site, on the keyword I want my legit website to rank, then add links to all my competitors and they will be penlised - abit harsh on them!
5. Free directory listings - Are they still worth anything? I listed my one established adsensor with maybe 20-30 free directories, back before xmas and it lead to about one registering back link at present - Not a great return - (It wasnt Dmoz - that might have been more worthwhile!!)

So, alot of questions, but I feel important ones that are getting in the way of my progress.

If, of course, you just throw them up, submit the sitemap to google and forget - Please just let me know and I will try the same.

Cheers,
Rich

Niche Products Are Niche

Having made the leap and actually joined up to a niche product monthly service, NPM, one of the most interesting things about the service is the forums.

Basically, having signed up, you get a pretty good impression of how many people are subscribed to the service and therefore downloading the offered products plus, and more importantly in my eyes, you get to see the type of people who are subscribing to the service.

The point of this post is to state that if you are looking into trying a little adsense marketing but, after reading a few blogs, checking a few forums, etc, get the impression that the market is flooded, think again.

Try an overture keyword report for "niche marketing" you get a pretty mediocre result of about 1694 searches in January. (Compare that with "gift idea" - 1584791 - My particular "Niche" - ;) - or maybe "Britney Spears" - 1932189 - or even "rainy day" - 7569 - ["craft rainy day" scores higher at a whopping 9969!] )

I know these are daft comparisons, but the point is, you start reading all you can about a particular subject, listening to all the people involved in that subject and you can get overwhelmed. I reckon the number of people making money out of "adsensers/niche marketing" is small. Very small. There is still alot of opportunity out there.

Going back to the NPM monthly subscription, there are a surprising number of people who have signed up who dont know the very basics about getting a website online. Never heard of php. Hell, even ftp is a new concept to alot of them. I certainly dont mean to deride these members in any way, it was only 2 years ago when I knew nothing - (some may say I still dont!) - But, just think statistics and think about what is involved in running an adsense setup. Assuming you are working on the $1/site/day theory, you gotta get 100 sites up and running, you gotta get them indexed, promoted, etc, etc.... + you gotta be patient. This is the main virtue most are missing, afaics, on the NPM forum. So, I would hazard a guess that at least 90% of the subscribers aint going to make a profit.

If any more proof is needed, think about the people you know. Friends, family. Off the top of my head, I can probably think of about 50-100 people who use the internet regularly. Out of all these, they all use search engine, they all spend a fair bit of time browsing the web, NONE of them have a blog, let alone a website. I dont personally (offline) know anyone who has set up a single website, let alone anyone who has setup 100 to start an adsense empire!

Hope this give you some hope if you are thinking of trying adsense,

Cheers,
Rich

Bu**er Me, I got page rank

Who would believe it?

Just noticed my site has a PR4 in the google tool bar........ Astonishing.

Since setting up the blog there has been no PR registered and with very few posts during November and December, it wasnt a great surprise.

What is a big surprise is to leap straight in at PR4.

Dont worry, I know full well the importance, or lack of, of the toolbar PR rankings. My Online gift shop appears to be stuck at a permanent PR5 slot, along with every other gift shop listed in DMOZ. In fact, I have found very, very few online shops that have any other PR ranking, above or below the magic 5.

Similarly with blogs - 4 seems to be pretty much the standard number. How it effects your rankings - well, I got a few thoughts regarding blogger and google rankings I want to express in a future post - maybe tomorrow night.

For the time being, I am going to head to bed revelling in the glory of my PR position, and many thanks to all of you visitors who have visited and linked in to richandzhaoyans business update. - I am off now to check the "how much is your blog worth" site - Any offers? I would pretty much settle for a bottle of whisky - but, considering the PR, it would have to be a malt now....

Cheers,
Rich

Come on Mr.B

Whats going on Gary?

You know we are all missing your regular blogs - I am in serious danger of getting alot more work done during my 9-5 job with no Burts osCommerce & More Blog posts.

I need the distraction and inspiration :)

Seriously, GET WELL SOON. I dont know whats up but if its any consolation, there is alot of illness going around at present, the wife and son are totally laid out with the flu. The son has gone through a right bad month, he had a cold/flu going back, middle of January, just got over that and went down with "hand, foot and mouth" disease - I thought that was just some kind of mad cow thing, but sure enough, blisters on his "hands, feet and mouth"!!! Anyhow, it wasnt as bad as it sounds, but no sooner had he got over that and the poor "little fella" is knocked down with another kickass cold. How the wife and him have suffered and yet I am still in the clear, God only knows - I am usually the biggest malingerer.

Anyhow, come on Gary - get your sick bed dragged over to the keyboard and let us know what is going down..... How much sick pay have you made, is the Make Content Unique site keeping you in the pennies?

Cheers,
Rich

Too many blogs to read....

How do you guys keep up with all the blogs and forums that take your interest?

Since first reading a blog regularly, that would be Gary's, through the one blog, I have found many more of interest, including tonight, finding Mattians via Sarahs. Much as I love reading up on others exploits and have no doubt that they further my online education, it doesnt half eat into the day. I guess its not so much that it has to take up my time, more that its available if I want to spend some time doing something instead of doing the something that I should be doing.... If you get my drift. - Kind of along the lines of when you are supposed to be revising for that all important exam, or pushing hard to meet a deadline at work - suddenly, the spring cleaning/vacuuming/cd rearranging/phoning distant relatives/etc, all appear more important than usual.

I am currently just using googles personal homepage to keep track of the regular blogs I read up on. Is there a better way? Using google personal homepage also adds to time wasting and does the one thing I dont want google to do, it turns it back into a portal rather than a search engine. Also, it doesnt give me any indication of when a blog post has been replied to.

Is there any better/less time consuming way of keeping track of all this stuff, without me giving up half my working day? If you have any recommendations, then please bare in mind, I am a shopkeeper, so the one main stipulation is the price, ie. FREE is good. Also, if it is software, it just needs to do what it says on the can - I dont need frills, just something that will run on win98 with the minimum setup and the least amount of fuss.

And then there are forums....... Nuff said - so many, I cant read the posts never mind reply to them. I am sadly neglecting the osC forum at present, which should be all important to an osC store owner (and its generally a good read for a little controversy!)... dotdragnet.com, unitedforums.co.uk, warriorforum.com - The list is endless, especially as I am reading/writing when I should be working.

Whats the answer?

Cheers,
Rich

MASSIVE Increase in Traffic

Ok, I have waffled on a fair bit in a reply to a previous post already this evening but have one post I want to make today.

Its been a long time since I had a good look at the stats for my main Heritage site. I know traffic is up on last year by a considerable amount but when I checked my hosting stats, I noticed that the bandwidth used wasnt up by a great deal - certainly not enough to write home about.

What could be causing this? Well, it kind of implies that the number of visitors was up by a lot but that they werent hanging around for long, ie, not using alot of bandwidth.

A quick look at the stats and the culprit was soon found - "google images" !! If I had the time I could quote the stats - believe me, they are pretty astonishing. The number one referrer to my site this month is, by far and away, google image search. I think out of the top 20 referrers this month, google images, google images uk, google images south america, google images europe, google images timbuctoo, etc, etc, etc were pretty much the only referrers present.

Why didnt I notice this before you may ask? Well, I kind of did. The situation has been growing. I could see it coming last November but what with the xmas rush and that, it had escapde my notice up until now.

Is it good or bad? Hmmm... Pass, ask me another! On the one hand, I have always maintained that bandwidth is cheap. Very cheap compared with the other costs of running an online shop. So if bandwidth is cheap and it means people see the Heritage site, no matter for how short a period, and they have come from a totally free link, well.... , if I get one sale out of 10000 visitors, then that is one I wouldnt have had without the great google images.

On the other hand, when you see just how slow your site is running at particular times of the day and you know that half of your visitors probably cant even speak English, dont know where the UK is, have absolutely no intention of buying a gift and are simply looking for a photo of a schitszu puppy the same colour as their own, you have to start questioning how far you are prepared to go for untargetted traffic.

I know I could ban the google image bot from the site - should I? I get the feeling, if I was to post this on either my webhosts forum or the osCommerce forum, the overwhelming response would be ban it. Personally, I am still thinking, but at present, the only down side I see is the speed of the site and this should change when I upgrade the hosting to a semi-dedicated solution - something I will have to do before next xmas either way. The plus side - Well, how much is it worth to have something like 3-4000 people seeing your sites name in a day? May not be worth much if they are from South America, but for the fairly high percentage from the UK, it may just trigger something in them around the festive season when they are looking for gifts and stumble on the site for a second time through a more targetted link.

As ever, let me know what you think. Just please dont tell me to put adsense on the site - I am already far too tempted :) - Talking of which, I believe I recently read a post on someones blog that indicated they were trying to use google images as a source of adsense traffic - might be worth a little more thought for the adsensers amongst us!

Cheers,
Rich

Where did everyone go?

Yikes,

What a flat 24 hours. We took the sum total of zero orders on the internet lastnight. First time in months that this has happened. Took a couple of orders today during the day, both on the internet and by phone but they have all been exceptionally low value. And this after an excpetionally good start to 2006 - we have already banked as much in February as we did last year, so I was hoping to at least double the months turnover.

I sincerelely hope that this is just a minor blip and not a taste of things to come.

Adsense let me down too, I didnt even make my usual 10-20 cents!!!

Plus, there have been no posts to any of the blogs I regularly visit.

Man its quiet out there in cyberspace.

I guess everyone was enjoying a romantic night out (or in!) with their Valentine last night. :) - I had to settle for a rather unromantic meal at pizza hut with the darling wife and the little lad! Ah well, its the wedding anniversary at the end of the month, maybe we will be able to persuade someone to babysit then.

Cheers,
Rich

The Power of your Blog

During a brief interlude today, I did a little research into the search engine saturation of the blogs I tend to keep track of. The tool I use it Marketleap. I used it a lot when I was getting my online store established to compare how I was doing with the competition and how the search engine optimisation was going.

Today, I did a search on a few of the blogs that are listed here, under "blogs I read". The results were pretty impressive and when compared to my one genuine adsenser, were all the more impressive. Basically, I should be getting far more visitors to this blog, from the search engines, than to my adsense site. Obviously, if I want to get ahead in the adsense world this is something that I need to address.

Is it worth adding adsense to this blog? Going by the most experienced online marketer that I trust, no is the answer. The reasons I can think of would be that, firstly, the search engine results for this site would be pretty random - not likely aimed at any particular market as the posts are mere ramblings on any particular subject. The second reason may be that as soon as someone clicks through to this blog, they are immediately aware its a blog and therefore highly likely to simply click the "back" button on their browser, knowing it wasnt what they were looking for.

There are a couple of things that are buzzing around my mind at present from this little search engine saturation discovery. Firstly, had I have set up my adsense site as a cms and posted to it hand written articles at the rate I am doing to this blog (ie, pretty infrequently) it would probably be doing better than it is at present? Secondly, is it worth while using a cms (or otherwise) as a way to blog and therefore slightly disguise your blog as an information type site - basically, just getting away from the instantly recognisable blog stylee.

I dont currently have any way of checking the visitor stats on this blog but would be very interested to hear on the number of unique visitors any of you other bloggers get per day and any thoughts you have about monetizing your blogs. Before dismissing it, check out marketleap and put your blogs search engine saturation up against that of one of your big money earner sites - let me know how they compare.

Cheers,
Rich

Duplicate Content

I am currently looking into altering the content of the plr articles supplied to me via my NPM monthly subscription.

Why? Well, from what I have read, duplicate content is a bad thing as far as SEO is concerned. The rumours are that once your site is deemed to have duplicate content it is likely to be marked down badly by the search engines. One theory was that if two sites had the same content the one with the higher PR would be claimed to be the original creator and the one with the lower PR would be penalised. Obviously the search engines dont want "duplicate sites" being created so they have to look out for duplicate content and the ultimate threat the search engines have over webmasters is totally barring the site from the rankings.

The problem I have is what exactly do the search engines class as duplicate content. Is it simply the visible text of a webpage or is it the html that produces the page - or template if a cms/site generator is used? To change a template is no great shakes - but is it necessary?

If it is just visible text they are looking at then how do they compare the text from different pages/sites? Would changing a few words in the text convince them that the plr articles are different or would they actually compare paragraph lengths/word counts or some other kind of pattern to complicate the issue further?

Just how far do we need to go to create unique articles?

Alot of questions, I know. My thoughts so far (and its purely speculation):-

The site template. I cant see how they can penalise this too much. The number of people using stock versions of popular cms/bloggin/e-commerce software, who genuinely are creating unique content, just with the same tools, would suffer for no reason. My guess on templates is that the search engines would have a list of what they consider "black hat" site generators and they would be on the look out for any website template created by a "known" site scraping/generating piece of software - so if you are using one, it would be wise to change the template quite dramatically.

Visible Text - This one I have thought long and hard about for a the last few days. My conspiracory side tells me that they should be able to look for patterns in the text, so changing a few words wouldnt work. They may be looking at the number and length of paragraphs, number of identical words in a page, identical sentences, etc, etc, etc. However, what about sites that are genuinely quoting from other sites. Again, it seems a little harsh for the search engines to do anything too extreme if you have chosen to reproduce my ramblings (with my permission) on a page in your website when it is entirely relevant to your context. There must be an allowance for this surely.

I am beginnig to wonder if I am being a little too paranoid. I certainly havent found any hard and fast evidence from anyone as to how it all works.

So, I throw the floor open to you more experienced site creators. What do you reckon? What do you aim for when "copying" a little content? What lengths and how much effort do you put in to try and make the content your own?

Finally, while we are on this subject - what are the consequences? I presume, if you are found to be guilty as charged of ripping content (even if it is a plr article), your site will be banished from the search engines for ever and ever, amen. But, what, if any are the further reaching problems? I read recently that someones IP was banned - I cant see how this can work if you are using shared hosting, without a dedicated IP - Does this mean that all the sites on the shared hosting will be dumped into oblivion - thats pretty harsh.

OK, so many questions and so few answers. Just really trying to get some thoughts in order but if you can enlighten me at all it would be much appreciated and, if during the course of this years AIS attempts I actually find any hard and fast answers, I will be sure to report back.

Cheers,
Rich

Ok,

So, I want to get in to some adsense earnings. Dont need mega bucks, enough to cover my bad habits would be a good start. (Maybe a tenner a day to cover the booze and fags!)

The story so far.....

I have signed up to NPM and have gained alot of ideas, a good few PLR articles and a couple of ready to go adsense sites.

I have a beautiful masterplan of creating a network of sites. As stated, I would love a series of similar sites, built up around stock, modified and hand written - However, and here comes the crunch, I have a dayjob. Not just a run of the mill dayjob - I am self employed!!! Time is very, very limited and the whole "Hand Written" idea, just aint going to work - more to the point, I know if I spent the time working on my internet store, I would get a whole load more back than if I spend my time writing up a load of genuine content for a glorified adsenser.

So, why dont I just do that anyways - work on the internet store at night? Well, you gotta get a break. Plus, this verge of black/white hat marketing is allways going to be blurred and just because I would never consider using black hat techniques on my business site, doesnt mean that I want to be left behind on any white hat marketing methods that will work. Point in case, the whole article submission thing at present seems to be a good way of generating traffic for both black and white hatters - I havent used it for my internet store as yet, but I can see that it would work. Its all about SEO and anyone who says that SEO is no longer important is full of sh*te. Offer me the top ranking position for the likes of Denby Pottery and I will bite your arm off.

So, whats the quandry?

Well, I want to create some adsense earnings. Pure and simple. Forget affiliates or ebooks for the time being. I want money for nothing and a geniuine adsenser is what I am after. I have been following a couple of blogs since last year aimed at the $100/day theory. They seem to have had a mixed success.

On the one hand, Dans AIS Challenge seems to be working well but with a vast majority of the income coming from one site - which has involved a little "extra" promotion. Plus, reading Dans posts, he seems to have a few compunctions about using totally scraped sites.

Then again, on the $1 A Day site, there seems to be absolutely no morals/worries about using scraper sites to generate adsense income and seems to be doing equally well out of it. Maybe with the income coming a little more "across the board".

If anyone has got this far and would like to comment then I would love to hear what your views are on scraper sites - do they work, do you consider them black hat, would you use software such as rssg to "throw" the sites up or would you modify them in an attempt to make them appear genuine? Comments from the above bloggers would be very welcome.

What road should I follow? Hand built and hand written articles? Modified articles or out and out scrapers? I just get the feeling I need sites and lots of them. Is this wrong? Will quality allways outwheigh quantity?

Go on, give us your thoughts,
Cheers,
Rich

The AIS update......

Well, not surprisingly, not too much to report once again in way of creation and certainly not in earnings.

The reasons - its all still going on behind the scenes. I have set up one of the NPM sites - uploaded it to its own domain but totally as stock - the reason being just to use as a yardstick really - I would like to know myself exactly how much "duplicate content" affects search engine rankings. How much does adding unique headers/footers/middlers affect things if certain paragraphs remain duplicated? How beneficial is it to host a site on its own domain rather than on a subdomain? Would a hand made mega-site, covering many different niches, created using a cms and with totally unique content rake in untold adsense riches? Would it be worth the effort?

I may only be making about $2/month with my only "listed" adsenser but I still cannot resist the lure of a steady AIS.

Just to clarify my aims for the year are to spend at least the first 6 months getting a small network of adsensers up and running and then to see what works and what doesnt - 6 months down the line, I will review how much traffic each site is receiving and then consider alternative ways of generating income from them.

The aim for February - Sort out a multi-domain/reseller hosting account (many thanks for the recommendations in the previous post) - Launch the full 6 NPM adsensers (when available), as is, on subdomains. - Launch my Super Hand Made Site - although it will be in its early stages, content wise. - Also, time permitting, I would like to launch the 6 NPM sites on their own domains with "modified" content.

Heh, heh - Sounds good eh? Very professional gameplan. Unfortunately the day job, the wife and the 2 year old may well interfere with all my plans for world domination - Still, thats life.

Cheers,
Rich

Chemo's shopping cart project sinking?

Well, no doubt I am a little behind the times but a couple of days ago, I caught up with reading a few blogs, one of them being Chemos. I was pretty dissapointed to read his latest post and from what I read into it, the demise of his shopping cart project.

As an osCommerce user and sponser, I am very grateful for the contributions made by Bobby to the osC contributions and forums. There are still many times now that I refer to his forum posts. I was also lucky enough to spend a short time one evening with him on IM - "Get with me on IM" was the prompt, at which point I had to quickly download IM and put myself through an instant crash course on how to use it.... The following 30 minutes proved to me beyond any shadow of a doubt just how switched on the guy is and how bl**dy fast he works. He found the cause of a problem I had within minutes that would have taken me weeks or months to have figured out myself (if at all).

To lose such an asset to the osC project was, in my opinion, unforgiveable. I appreciate that it was primarily a personal problem between Bobby and the osC team and that Bobby could also be very, very straight talking when it came to posting on the forums - however, in my experience, he was never anything but helpful and very polite too. Again, having read most of the posts that became controversial, it seemed to me that the people that were getting rubbed up the wrong way were generally just hacked off that their work was being criticised, even if it justified.

Having read Bobbys latest post, I can understand entirely his reasons for wanting/needing to get back to more financially rewarding work but I was pretty surprised to hear that he is hoping to return to the osC fold. OK, maybe it should not be such a surprise, as he knows the osC code inside out and obviously takes a lot of pleasure in improving the code spreading his knowledge on the forums, but, it would be a pretty big, if welcome, surprise if the osC team (Harold in particular) allow him back into the fold. There was an awful lot of dirty washing aired at the time of departure by both sides.

Of course, I would love to see him back at osC as I would equally have liked to see his own shopping cart project come to fruition. Either way, I hope it works out well for him and I hope people will stay off his back. It never ceases to amaze me how the users of osC and also the few that have been posting at Bobbys project forum seem to demand action and results from someone that they are not paying!! (This demand seems to be aimed at pretty much anyone who is giving of their free time on any forum - mystifies me totally)