Beads-Bali Just about to go live…
Posted on October 7, 2006
It’s five in the evening here in Bali and while I might have been out at the beach or walking the dog or drinking a nice glass of wine, instead I’m at home, at the desk, putting beads-bali.com through its paces.
My favorite part of the process was inserting a picture of our (my wife’s and my) new puppy, Jolie, to draw attention to free shipping. Ah, which reminds me: Shipping is now free!!
Please note picture at left.
I can see the ocean from my window — a small crack of it anyway now dominated by a ridiculous wood house.
Having said that, I’ll most likely have some wine later… and why not?
As has been often the case in the past, the problem has not been the content or even getting it all online.
- I use Dreamweaver for the page designs and CSS…. a sometimes completely maddening program and yet worked well enough today.
- Navicat to interface with mysql (an indispensable graphical front end to the unprettiest database on the planet).
- Photoshop for the piccies.
For anyone who’s interested, the site is hosted at Westhost — a seemingly friendly and straight-forward bunch of people… if they prove otherwise, I’ll update this note.
I would have hosted with IQUEST but I’ve had nothing but hassle, problem and errors for the past couple of months and as they haven’t been able to remove their collective heads from their collective butts, I decided to start fresh with this one domain so while I’m spending the money on click advertising with the all might Google and Yahoo — not to mention the ridiculously complicated and low value for money express submit thingie at Yahoo — I didn’t want to do all that without being one hundred percent sure the site was running properly.
All in all, as easy as 1-2-3 — start to finish, the site was up and running in about two hours. Not bad at all.
And then, of course, the real slowdown begins: getting listed in the search engines and putting these products in front of people who’re looking for them.
Why does it have to be so hard?
A sitemap for Google, a sitemap for Yahoo. Pay for this. Pay for that. Logins, passwords, little picture thingies to make sure you’re not a robot… truly, the lunatics are not only on the path; they’re running the asylum.
It actually takes me longer jumping through all these stupid hoops for no damn good reason than it does for me to put up a brand spanking new website/wholesale operation.
Why is it that I can buy a car more quickly than I can get my site listed. And why do they insist on treating us like we’re out to steal military secrets? Makes no sense.
Anyway, just about all I can do now is sit back and try to be patient as I wait for the search engines to come and visit. And, if I’m really, really, really lucky, someone might send me an email.
Sean
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I’m married…
Posted on June 18, 2006
I’m married… short note to follow!
» Filed Under About Me, General | 1 Comment
Here and Now — Aurange
Posted on June 6, 2006
Here’s today’s installment in the Aurange (click here to visit the band website).
This is Here and Now… sweet and soulful, guitar only, nice and raw piece. Totally original. The most listened to and downloaded from the band website.
I like the lyrics… so I pulled ‘em of the website — keep reading the whole post to see ‘em:
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Check out Rob Martin’s music — Aurange
Posted on June 1, 2006
Rob’s a musician now. Not full time and not because he’s trying to get rich and famous or naked and famous (everybody wants to be naked and famous, I think).
You can listen and / or download his stuff here or head over to his website, Aurange . Read more
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Monday Morning
Posted on May 15, 2006
Monday morning at Indonesia Export and we’re still working on getting one of the offices painted right… still looks less than perfect to me.
The weekend was a breeze — hot and sunny. Didn’t do much except to sit around and wait for Mount Merapi to blow its top.
Got a call on Sunday evening — a friend of Athina’s heard a large bang and thought maybe there’d been another terrorist attack so we spent a few hours checking online and watching the news but as far as we can tell, nothing much happened. Most likely a neighbor overdosing on Spermamax.
33 days to go and I’ll be married… so excited about it.
Technorati Tags: sean hynes, indonesia export, life in bali, bali belly, bali blog
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Bali, Pornography & Public Morality
Posted on March 7, 2006
I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about the proposed new pornography laws in Indonesia and, yes, I find a great deal of it disquieting.
At the office, this topic has featured in five or six different lunchtime conversations and everyone does have an opinion.
Last week, we went as far as to get ourselves a copy of the bill and I had it translated. Interesting reading to say the least.
But why the broohaha? It’s a law. Indonesia doesn’t enforce them anyway. Pornography’s against the law (meaning the hardcore stuff) but you can get it pretty much anywhere. Read more
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Never tried an mp3 file before
Posted on March 1, 2006
… so what the hey… let’s see if we can get Frank to say a few words, eh.
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Indonesia Export, Blogs, SEO, Google, Yahoo and Headaches
Posted on March 1, 2006
It’s 11:34 in the morning (lunch is on the way) and I’m having yet another headache over search engine optimisation. A bog, a minefield & a money pit all rolled into one or is it the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma (also known as piddle, misery & enema).
So, let me lay it out:
I have a real company (”real” meaning bricks & mortar), Indonesia Export that’s out here the past ten years producing and exporting handicrafts out of Bali.
We’ve been online since 1995:
Domain Name: INDONESIAEXPORT.COM Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://domainhelp.tucows.com
Name Server: NS.FORSITE.NET
Name Server: NS1.FORSITE.NET
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 17-oct-2005
Creation Date: 23-dec-1995
Expiration Date: 22-dec-2006
Which makes us about the same age as Yahoo.
Back in the day, when Yahoo was still toddling along, they had maybe 5 sites in their Indonesia directory, we were one and we knew at least one of the Yahoo folks by first name. How funny is that? At that point, google had yet to become a verb, Suharto was the undisputed king of the hill and democracy was something other people had.
So? So times (and regimes) change. Nothing wrong with that. Competition grows. That’s cool. Competition is healthy.
But how come our website totally dropped out of the Search Engines. Doh. That really irritates me.
I did a search for indonesiaexport on google the other day and found “indonesianexport”[dot]com and indonesiaexport[dot]net (I’m not making that into a real URL just in case it ups their search results).
Turned out that seven of the top ten results were other people who’d used indonesiaexport in their meta tags (damn, thought they didn’t work anymore), page titles, etc. Also, some of those people are out-and-out rip off merchants — meaning, they’ve taken text from indonesiaexport.com or taken images or both. That’s what happens when you search our company name.
If you search for the products themselves (the stuff we’ve been selling for ten years), it’s even worse: we’re way down the page behind a bunch of johnny-come-latelys… frustrating.
So, a while back, couple of years ago I think, we switched over to Overture and AdWords so that we could pay our way ahead of the pack. Boy, did that get expensive real quick. I remember we took a huge shafting around the time of the SARS virus on advertising masks — we sell balinese and indonesian carved wooden masks (one of our best selling products) and we had positioned ourselves in first or second place with the adwords… next thing we know, a couple of days have gone by and our bill from google was like two thousand bucks.
At first, we thought, “excellent!” — here we go with 500 container orders of masks. But, nope, turns out that people had been searching for “surgical” masks and, I think it was, “N51″ masks and our ad was still coming out top of the page… I call this the idiot click. A person searches for something, the results come in and that person clicks the first one or two links just because they’re there. Like an idiot. I don’t do that.
Ok, you live and learn. You change your account settings, etc. so that doesn’t happen and you move on. And you pay your money. Then you get into a clicking war. Followed by a price war. And you decide that, neat as it is, to use AdWords and Overture to position yourself, it also makes sense to have the website fall into the results pages naturally (so to speak). And, if you knew that you were all over a certain search term, you might not pay for results on that particular term. Cost-effective.
I went back to my old html hunting grounds (ya know: guru gathering) to see how best to optimise the site… obviously, if these other dudes were regularly saturating Google & Yahoo with their websites, so could I.
But here’s the dealio: they cheat. They’re blogging, and page redirecting, URL rewriting, robot.txt validating and blah,blah, blah. And it’s just not possible for me to wade through the info, run the company and keep my temper at the same time. So, in the end, most likely, I’ll have to hire a guy who’ll do it full time… and he’ll cheat. I’ll join the cheaters. Because, from what I’ve read and seen so far, the only way for an honest online business to be found is to be dishonest. It’s not even ironic. It’s pathetic.
Hmmn. I feel much better now. Thank you for sharing.
Technorati Tags: indonesia+export, indonesiaexport, bali, search+engine, seo, bali+belly, bali, bali business
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Going to Jail in Bali — doesn’t seem like such a bad thing really…
Posted on February 28, 2006
Ok, you can pretty much ignore the title but an interesting thing…
Yesterday, over lunch with the chaps of Indonesia Export, going over the weekend activities, it turned out that Antonia went to mass at Kerobokan jail (most recently featured worldwide with stories on the Bali Nine, Schappelle Corby and all the other distinguished Australian ambassadors of goodwill currently serving time or getting shot on Bali). Read more
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Summary of my Crash in Bali
Posted on February 23, 2006
December 24th, 2004Bali, around 3:00 in the morning: I rode my motorbike at high speed into a ricefield. A few minutes later, I pick myself up, grab a taxi and head over to Bali International Medical Clinic. The clinic is a popular place for ex-pats and tourists in Bali, if you can describe a clinic as “popular”; however you describe it, BIMC is a hell of lot less scary than Sanglah Public Hospital.
Next, I lose consciousness.
My friend Steve is called. He shoots over to BIMC (I think) and then, the BIMC staff send me to Sanglah Public Hospital — this is the medical equivalent of being rushed at high speed from the best frying pan in a good modern restaurant to a tenament block (American for housing estate) fire in the bad part of town… Read more
» Filed Under Motorbike Crash | 1 Comment