A Time of Magic

Not so long ago programs would easily run in 32K (yes, 32768 bytes!) but with every year that passes, it seems that we need ever increasing amounts of computer memory.

I’d thought that the 256MB of my previous computer would see me through a reasonable number of years but even a year after I bought the thing, it was pretty much crawling along as the graphical content of the latest websites just eats memory. Running the likes of Vista on that amount is, of course, a total nonstarter unless you have incredible amounts of patience to wait around for even the most trivial of tasks.

If you do find that your computer is running a touch slow then it’s almost certainly down to it not having enough memory for the tasks that you’re using it for. Since this is one of the cheapest upgrades that you can do, it’s well worth it to add another year or two of life to your computer

Whilst there appear to be hundreds if not thousands of different WordPress themes around these days in fact when you look at them in detail quite a lot are fairly simple variations of a single theme.

Take the SevaTeem theme that we’re using here at the moment. It looks pretty different from the theme over at Our Inns and yet the only two changes between the two are that this one uses white text instead of black and the background is different.

SevaTeem is the theme that I’m developing over at SevaTeem and which I’ve been rolling out on a few of my sites to see how it runs before I release it on an unsuspecting world

I’ve been reviewing the year on year performance of the various websites in my little stable and it looks like I might as well have spent the money on a party than spend it on promoting my sites.

For the third year in a row, the traffic on the sites that I keep an eye on has tripled year on year. That’s counting both the sites that I very actively promoted around this time last year and those that I just allowed to carry on their merry way. Even when you compare those that I spent a lot on vs those I spent next to nothing on the stats seem to tell the same story.

As an example, I put quite a bit of effort (although not much actual cash) into promoting my main blog yet I find that this one is steets ahead of it with next to no effort expended on promotion. Typically on Reuters this blog gets about 50% more readers than the main one for example.

Then, of course, there’s the google fiasco where they hammered a large number of minor league blogs for carrying sponsored posts yet ignored exactly the same practice for the big league sites who were doing exactly the same thing. As it happens, that passed me by pretty much unscathed aside from one blog written by Wendy who’s less than pleased about that to put it mildly. Still, it has me wondering about all the money I spent to get my sites submitted to various directories. Was it all wasted? To be sure those sites did see a jump in traffic starting shortly after each round of promotion but as we come into 2008 I’m seeing exactly the same jump and this time around I’ve not ran the promotion.

Ironically, one of the sites which I did spend a fair bit to promote and which seems to deserve a better following just didn’t shift at all. A comparable site to it launched in the summer is already streets ahead of it.

I suspect that you need to either spend a little money or put a lot of effort into the initial promotion but, unless you’re in the really big league, I don’t know that it’s worthwhile spending more than, say, $50 now and that only to put a new site on the map.