More google sites & Widgets

Cooking with Madeira just got a fairly major hack around since I was trying to find out what I could do with Google sites.

The answer, it appears, is quite a lot. For example I'm probably going to start moving a few sites I built through free hosters onto Google sites - its easier to manage analytics, add Adsense and since all the ecommerce is third party anyway it's not a problem to integrate it.

The only thing I would say is that we will be building a few custom widgets - its range of eBay ones is not that good and mainly US only, which is not ideal.

I am currently waiting on Squidoo to publish user figures and royalties for this month. This should be the first month where infolinks are included, so its make or break time regarding whether I am going to turn them off, and possible migrate my content.

Google Analytics and new videos

Well, apart from updating the Google sites I'm setting up, I'm trying out the Analytics tool on my websites to see how well it works. It's easy to add to the google sites, as you'd expect, but I did end up doing a bit of a hack on the template for this blog to get the validation code in.

I haven't worked out how to integrate it with lenses yet, but if it runs for a few days it should give me a lot more detail on my visitors. Hopefully it will also provide information in enough detail to work out the best settings for trafficseeker. Best of all, of course, it's free!

Also, for anyone who hasn't seen them I've uploaded rough cuts of my Bournemouth Airshow and Eastbourne videos to redgage:

• Bournemouth
• Eastbourne

When I get decent editing software I will clean the clips up a bit more - Bournemouth for the sunlight and compression issue and Eastbourne because it was my first time with the camera.

Cooking with madeira - a google site

I spent a bit of time yesterday evening trying out Google sites. Here's my first:
Cooking with Madeira

There are advantages and disadvantages with it
The good:
- Free
- Pretty easy to use
- Monitisaton is easy, as Google ads are integrated

The bad:
- Its tricky to get started
- There are limits to where you can move pages once you have created them.
- Most of its power is in widgets, but these can run oddly.

There were also some odd integration issues with Amazon that I ended up going to the HTML to resolve. (The one with the Amazon Carousel was never fixed).

Overall I'm not too upset with the site, and will probably leave it up. I might even add more recipes as I find them, although I haven't yet settled on a format for the site.

Now I just need to find a madeira seller to link from it!

A quick note

Shetoldme has worked quite well. After putting a few links up on it and leaving them, the Adsense ads do actually appear to be being clicked on (a rarity!). I've added a few more articles this morning.

Don't be put off by the girly banner - most of my clicks and votes have been on heavy engineering, steam trains and warplanes, so it takes a real range of content. It's also my referral link so if you want to join or join through here, I'd be grateful.

Real life is gettin in the way right now (sick relatives, selling a house, moving a business, all the little things...) so my updates may be erratic. Sorry.

A quick update

Despite sunburn, I've added a few of my images and a rough cut of some of the video clips to Redgage:

• Video - a rough selection of clips
• Photos

Once I get my video editing software working, there should be something a bit better coming up.

I'm also currently adding my content to SheToldMe. Its an indexing site like redgage and if you have a Google adsense account you can link it directly to your content to get the ad revenue. This is a bit of a test, just to see if it works.