Personal Blog of Carl Pei

- Do you know what it feels like to be spit on your face and have trash shoved down your throat?

No, I don’t. I don’t.

I like the way Josh presents the content of his blog posts by first outlining the topics. This is very organized and easy to read, so I’ll try it out too!

Topics

• AdSense Smart Pricing
• Accepted to ReviewMe
• April Google PageRank Update

AdSense Smart Pricing

My earnings per click on the AdSense network has steadily been decreasing, now at an average of 4 cents per click. I think this has to do with smartpricing. Smart pricing occurs when the clicks do not convert well for the advertiser. This is understandable to me because most of the visitors on my sites are young, without much money to spend. To counter this, I’ve found a list of sites to paste in the Competitive Ad Filter in AdSense, and this will hopefully take me out of being smartpriced in a few weeks. If I get a higher pay per click in two weeks, I’ll share the list here.

Despite smart pricing, I hit a new high on AdSense several days ago at $29.1, but in recent days, the earnings are cooling off.

Accepted to ReviewMe

The Digg frontpage attracted a lot of backlinks and gave a boost to my Technorati and Alexa rankings, making me eligible for ReviewMe. I tried submitting this site to ReviewMe, but it said that it was already in the database. It was not. After an email to their staff, they fixed this manually.

ReviewMe recommended that a review on this site should cost $60, but I have manually set it to a low $40 for the first reviewees. Feel free to get a review, as I will raise the prices soon.

April Google Page Rank Update

There has been a lot of discussion over when the next Google PR update is coming. While some say that Google is changing their algorithm so much there will not be time for a PR update this month, others mean that they’ve already seen changes to their sites. I, for one, hope to see the Page Rank changes ASAP.

Accepted is a 2006 teen movie that received notoriously negative reviews. Although these poor ratings could seem justified on the at first, the movie has a deeper underlying message often ignored by the reviewers.

What is it about?

Accepted is the story of a high school senior, Bartleby Gaines, who was rejected from every college he applied to. Desperate to make his conservative parents happy, he creates a fake college and accepts himself. His college, dubbed South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.) is complete with facilities and even a website. Little did he know that his website was fully functional and accepted all applicants. Soon enough, he finds a large crowd of people lined up outside his college, all accepted and there with their tuition fees. These people are of all walks of life, mostly social misfits that have lead lives of rejection.

The ending shall not be revealed. If you are interested, watch the movie.

I can agree with critics saying that this movie promotes laziness and underachievement, but there is a great underlying message often ignored. (more…)

Yesterday I got Dugg big time. It started with me using Stumble Upon to stumble my own article, Six Funny Life Lessons. A while later, I noticed via the real time hit tracker HitTail that I was getting serious traffic from Stumble Upon, and after a while from SU’s Humor Buzz. From there on, someone Dugg the article which then started to gain momentum around 10 hours later.

Soon enough I hit the Digg front page. Upon hitting it, the server went down immediately. The server had to be restarted two times and port 80 had to be closed for me to install WP-Cache. If you plan on getting Dugg, install WP-Cache. After installation, CPU usage remained at around a constant 15% with 70 requests per second.

Aftermath

- As of now, the article has had 2,137 Diggs and 7,285 Stumbles.

- Noticed that my FeedBurner subscription has rose to 563 people from 10. How shall I entertain all of you?

- Technorati rank of this blog has risen from 200,000+ to around 70,000.

- It was featured on the front page of del.icio.us.

- A bitter comment was received from a guy who thought I had stolen his post when visiting his blog, while in fact I visited it in a Google search to check whether the content was unique or not. Check it out below.

Comment:
I wonder where you got this post? I noticed you visited esofthub’s web finds. You should at least give credit. I doubt you will publish this comment.

Don’t live a life of doubt.
(more…)

Today when I wake up and login to MSN the first thing that happens is that my friend writes me, “Look what this Chinese guy has done!” I thought it would be interesting to check out what the hell was going on so I followed the link to Aftonbladet, a large socialist owned newspaper that also happens to be one of Sweden’s most popular news portals.

While many people obsessively whine about the lack of professionalism at Aftonbladet, saying they often post unconfirmed, offbeat or made-up news, all to gain attention and earn money, I haven’t. I always thought that bitching about Aftonbladet was a fad, and as I hate to be a sheep, I refused. Until today.

So I check out their website, and on the front page I read about the Virginia Tech shootings. Only this was different from what all other news sources published, with their heading being “A Chinese goes on rampage and kills 32 people.” Nowhere in the entire article does it say that the gunman is Chinese, except for the very end where it reads, “Several witnesses described the gunman as a 25 year old Asian man.” The notion Asian encompasses Chinese, but vice versa is false.

And then I visit CNN.com and read what really happened.

The reasoning used by the authors & editors Annsofie Näslund (I’ve helped you format your name properly from AnnSofie - either dash or lose the capital letter), Magnus Sundholm and Malin Beeck is poor beyond comprehension. They will fail in life. At any rate, this blog post will be indexed soon and and when their future employers search their names on Google, they will find this and the quality work their names stand for.

As of now, the article has already been edited. “The Chinese” now instead says “the man”. But this doesn’t mean that my critique isn’t justified. How such a poor article could end up on the front page of one of Sweden’s most popular websites really goes to show the standards of Aftonbladet. So there, I’ve jumped the bandwagon bitching about Aftonbladet.