Moving Around, Literary

I have been moving around, and moving out, in the past few weeks.

First of all I have finally switched gyms, almost four weeks ago already. From Fit For Free, the dump I used to go, I now became a member of the luxury Plaza Sportiva, really nearby from where I’m residing. Being a member of Plaza Sportiva comes with tons of advantages; it’s nearby (I already mentioned that, didn’t I?), it has Fitlinxx, it’s nearby (didn’t I say that before?), you can actually take a shower without having to pay for it, and for those who like it, they have Saunas and Turkish Steam Baths as well, and finally it’s really nearby (hmmm…). NEARBY aye!!! So, I start bringing Mauro to school, then bring Dante to pre-school, and only 5 minutes later I find myself enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee before I start my daily workout.

During the first week, I had a consult with a PT (Personal Trainer), and we determined quarterly goals and three different routines; chest and shoulders, back and arms, and lower body (legs ‘n stuff).

The three months goals we’ve determined are:

  • Reduce body fat percentage from 16.4% to 15%
  • Gain strength with 10Kg lifting weights (Bench Press 70Kg)
  • Extend Chin-Up repetitions to 5 x 10 with a wide grip (Currently only able to do 3 x 10 with a front grip)
EnGenius M35
EnGenius M35

Reducing the body fat percentage will most probably be the easiest of all, also because the basketball season has begun, and I have been practicing twice a week over the past three weeks. It’s been really great to be back on the court, especially after the groin surgery that kept me on the bleachers for almost whole the previous season. I have to admit though, that my body starts to act up a bit, and that I’m considering to cut one of my weekly fitness sessions, probably the one on Fridays. However, as long as I can walk, just the thought makes me feels like I’m cheating.

And there’s been more moving around, as September 1st I received the key to my new office. Good news for my competition, as I have been painting, thus not working on regular stuff, for a little bit over two weeks. Everything is done, and I have to say that the place, sizing approximately 28 m2/300 square feet, looks really nice and clean. Extra locks have been added to the outside door too, and this week the alarm system will be installed as well – rest me to move over my valuable hardware.

Best story of the year, I am using the same Internet connection like the one I have at home -> my neighbors’ unprotected WiFi Router. KIDDING of course. Hey, what were you thinking, I am not THAT cheap! Anyway, after doing some proper research I’ve bought myself a new EnGenius M35, a multifunctional Access Point that gives me enough range to save me the additional costs from setting up a new connection. This alone will save me about €500/year. I’m considering to get myself another one of these suckers which I can set-up as a Repeater, that way I can have – hands down – the best possible WiFi signal I can get over there.

My former in-house office is now turning into an indoor playground for our spoiled kids. Sometimes I wish I was one of them, looking at all the toys kids have these days, not even talking about the game consoles. Fwiw, we have the XBOX 360 and the Nintendo Wii (thanks to Greg who drew my business card out of a hat at CAP Barcelona a couple of years ago), but they are both collecting dust, as fortunately, Mauro is still unaware of what they actually are. He’s just one happy kid with his second hand Mac he got when he was only three, so I wait telling him what consoles are until we can actually play NBA Live together.

In-House Office
My Former In-House Office

The bright reader has noticed I haven’t been able to do much business wise the past few weeks, however, I managed to do the regular things. There’s one thing that has been bugging me, and that is my site DepositPoker.co.uk. No matter what I try, I can’t get Google to give me any respect and have it indexed. It’s really frustrating, and I even posted about a possible Google penalty at PAL. Even Michael Martinez from SEO Theory chimed in, and I have followed some of the suggestions he advised taking. Hopefully, I can tell you good news about the site in my next post!

I know I promised to write a comprehensive guide on how to implement a new and better-converting design into an existing site with decent amounts of traffic, but you have to take a rain check for it for the time being. It is highly exceptional that I write, and usually, at this time of the day, I don’t feel like going in depth too much. At some point, however, the day will come…

Today I’ve spent some time chatting with Jan Teilhof aka “Newjabber”. He’s a fellow affiliate, forum member, and even a semi-professional poker player, but most of all a proud father and a nice fellow to chat with. He gave me some great advice, which I will most definitely give a try, and if right probably will save me several hundreds of dollars every month. On my turn, by random occasion, I helped him discovering a malfunctioning affiliate link. On the other hand, he also left me with a dilemma, as he showed me one of his niche sites… ah, I should rather keep my mouth shut as I just came up with a marvelous idea, which I will have to talk to Jan about first. In each case, he should profit from my idea, or I will leave it alone because I am definitely not that kind of guy.

It’s almost midnight, so I’m calling it a day now. Not sure when the next post will be… I guess when the time is right. See ya then!

One Reply to “Moving Around, Literary”

  1. I was going to suggest to add the site to WMT, reading your forum post and see that you already did that. There’s nothing specific that stands out: your robots.txt checks out (I would personally turn on compression for the site as a whole, and not use sitemap.xml.gz), ip address not blacklisted (via robtex), whois record looks good, HTML seems clean, etc…

    A bunch of remarks: even though I had no problems finding other sites that are hosted on the same ip address (there are about 135), you could try switching hosts to see if it will make any difference. Also the PHR site is still indexed, one of the pages has a cache date of Jul26 (very long ago) – the 301 itself looks clean (no chained redirects).

    Have you tried fetching the page as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools? Is Gbot actively spidering the site? Check your server logs directly.

    If all else fails, you should submit a re-inclusion request. Explain that you recently acquired the domain and do not have any relationship with its previous owner. Is PHR registered in WMT? I would do this and submit a change of address, informing G that its content can now be found at DP. Basically, show G that you’re completely whitehat.

    Somebody in the forum made a comment about your link profile being very narrow. Agree with that and want to add that your internal links don’t seem much better. The repetition seems a bit much, be careful not to trigger an over-optimization penalty. I would try to use more in-content links, and trim the sitewides a bit.

    Good luck, let me know how it goes!

    -N

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