I am not sure if it is the weather or work, but I have just not been posting enough here.  Sure I mentioned back in June that I was going to be offline for a bit, but a month is way too long.  So here I am.

Not a whole to talk about, I noticed that there was a HUGE pickup of paid submissions to BluenoserLinks recently.  Must be a rumor of a TBPR update in the near future.  I must say that I like it.  I was getting worried that I would have to put some more work into the site, but I guess that people just want to get in there for the update.  I find it strange that they wait so long.  I usually do all of my link grabbing right after the update.  There are two good reasons for this (you should take this time to grab a piece of paper and pen)

1. The links get cheaper.  I am not talking about the links on the pages that just jumped in price, but the new sites.  The sites that people are talking about NOW, or just recently.  Google is fast but they are not that fast.  If you see a site that everyone is talking about, but didn’t get a good jump this time around, buy up some long term links.  They are going to be bigger in the next update.
2. I don’t think that there is much point trying to get links in the last couple of days.  I doubt that Google uses its most recent information for the update, probably a couple of weeks old.  And the older the links and the older the pages the better.  So go out there and buy some links now, and have them there months for the next update.

Well I guess those two points weren’t really earth shattering, but I think that there are a lot of people out there that browse the forums, find out that a PR update is on the way and then try to buy as many links as they can.  For a better idea, always try to get links.  Work on getting a link a day minimum for your site.  That coupled with really good content that people will WANT to link to will get you farther then buying up links at the last minute.

I have been playing poker for a while there and have always picked up the second SuperSystem every time I went into Chapters.  However I had a good poker weekend last weekend so I decided to use my winnings and buy the $50 book.  I must say so far I am impressed.  I have read a couple poker books with tips and tricks but this is much better.  It tells you what you should do and then tells you why.  I was getting sick of people saying, “okay you can play these hands in this position, these in that etc…”.  Also it is written by a number of people, ones that are the best at a specific type or style of poker.

Right now I am bedtime reading the Jennifer Harman section on Limit Poker, as this is the type that I like playing online.  It is very good, she doesn’t spend a lot of time on the beginner stuff which is good since I am pretty much past beginner now. 

One thing that I notice is missing from this book, and every other poker book that I have read, is that there is limited information on tells.  They are always telling you to watch for tells and try to read the players but they never tell you specific things to look for.  There must be a book out there for this, but all of the general poker books that I have read so far are no good.  If I find one I will let you know.

Well even engineers need a vacation.  I am going to be going away for a week starting the 26th.  Unlike the last time I left I am going to leave someone in charge of my sites.

So this leads me into the TIP OF THE WEEK:

Always keep track of your sites.  I know that sometimes it can get overwhelming when you have too many, but be sure to at the very least visit them once a week.  There was a time not that long ago that I left for vacation and made sure that I had no contact with the outside world.  And guess what happened….a major crack was found in both phpBB and PHP-NUKE.  This led to 5 of my sites being defaced, nothing lost but defaced, which meant that any of the traffic that I was getting from SEs and returning guests were being welcomed with a front page that said something along the lines of, “this site has been owned by…”.

To make things worse this happened at the beginning of the vacation so there was a 10 day period that they were defaced in this manner.  My traffic took a HUGE hit, I lost a lot of great contributors at the time and a lot of cred.

I had to work double as hard to get the great contributors back, even resorting to bribing a couple with free stuff.  It was around this time that I felt it was time to limit the sites that I had running for the time being.  I also relaized that if I was going to leave civilization for any amount of time I am going to be sure that there is someone else around that I trust to look over things.