One strange, at least to me, aspect of China is the concept of shopping districts, as I call them. I’m not talking about areas with loads of stores and malls here, but areas which have loads of stores and malls for one kind of product.
For instance, the other day the old lady and I went to an area for glasses (spectacles if you will). A thirty minute subway journey and we arrived somewhere along the east third ring road, and a mass of opticians shops.
There were two massive buildings full of glasses shops as well as all the stores on the street. I guess it’s good for the consumer, who has lots of choice, but it must make it harder on the shops, who have to compete with thousands of competitors literally right next door.
Opticians aren’t the only sector that does this, I’ve seen computer stuff, lighting, bikes and pretty much anything you can name doing the same thing.
We spent a grueling two hour there and didn’t buy anything in the end!
Tags: shopping
Phew. I’ve just spent a good little while updating my droplist. Seems like there’s been more than the usual adjustments with Entrecard and Adgitize widgets lately. Surprisingly more Adgitize adjustments than EC for some reason. Possibly due to their outage last month, though the number of advertisers seems to have recovered from then.
If you would like your blog to be added to the list, please leave me a message after here, or any other post. I also include Blogspot and other blocked (from China) blogs now, though they’re in separate clickboxes.
I’m pretty easy on who I add, but the blog needs to be updated fairly frequently and must not be a load of sponsored posts (and I’m a member of just about all the sponsored posts sites, so I can recognize them when I see them!).
This list opens each blog in full! I’m not a supporter of so called ‘Ghost drops’.
Yes, it’s that time again. As always, you can see more on my Lethargic Friday blog.
Tags: Lethargic Friday
I have Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox on my computer for browsing. I’ve used Opera for years, and as far as I’m concerned it’s been constantly a leader in the browsing field, if under appreciated. Many of the so called ‘innovations’ that Firefox (FF) has, Opera actually came out with years ago.
Anyway, I use Opera for my main browsing, and FF for blogs, and for the odd occasion when a webpage is so badly coded that it won’t work on Opera. I have Chrome, well, just because I guess.
My PC isn’t the newest either, in fact it’s definitely time to think about getting a new Mboard/CPU/Ram for it, so it’s not the fastest computer on the block.
So what’s the point of this rambling? Well, I’ve decided to abandon using FF as my main browser for dropping EC and Adgitize, it’s simply too slow. When I click on my droplist to open nine or ten blogs, I can complete two in the same time FF does one. FF also hogs a ton of memory too.
Of course, what FF does have that Opera doesn’t is the Entrecard widget. I tend to use that to advertise on a site. EC, are you listening? Time to create a widget for Opera! Yeah, fat chance.
If you’ve never used the Opera browser, I recommend going to Opera.com and checking it out. (No, this isn’t a sponsored post!).
China is famous for its tea, and rightly so. You can do tea until it’s coming
out of your ears in this country, but if you want a decent cup of coffee, it can be another story entirely.
There are Starbucks here and there of course, though these are still relatively limited outside of the big cities. In smaller cities there’s a Starbucks wannabe called SPR coffee, which isn’t bad. Don’t expect the variety of blends and milks that you get in the west though, the market here isn’t up to that standard yet.
Apart from these two chains, a good coffee is hard to find. And it’s all bloody expensive (relative to the prices here), especially if you want something like a latte, which is my usual choice.
There’s a local chain that is common in most cities, called UBC in English (the Chinese name is totally different), and it is both expensive and horrible. However, it pretty much serves latte the way you’ll get it in most Chinese coffee shops/restaurants.
Basically you’ll get a small cup (not a mug) of some generic brand of plain coffee, maybe with extra milk if you’re lucky, with an enormous pile of whipped fake cream on top, from one of those cans. It’s utterly vile.
For a basic coffee I tend to default to McDonalds, which has coffee that can be decent one day, and foul the next. At least it’s not too expensive, and you can get refills!
Tags: China, coffee, coffee in China
It’s not been the best month for me, either blog wise or otherwise.
As I mentioned previously, Project Wonderful changed their system at the beginning of the month, so each ad spot is now four ad spots, for different regions. This seems to have hit my income from PW hard. As I predicted, four ad spots means that adverts that were once bidding against each other for one space, now tend to be spread over the four regions, which reduces their ‘competition’.
Of course, it could just be a slack period. Whatever it is though, it cut my income in half for Feb, though in the last week or so it seems to be recovering slightly. We’ll see.
One thing that hasn’t helped as well, and I didn’t think about, is when you place an ad now, you have to either select an area, or bid four times, for complete coverage, which means your bidding costs more. Mmm.
This was also the first month that my Adgitize payment didn’t cover the full cost of advertising with them. It was only about 60cents short mind you, so still a good deal!
On the plus side, I sold quite a few of my ebooks this month, so that was nice.
Here are my top droppers on Entrecard for Feb, at least as shown on the dashboard. My thanks to everyone who pops by and reads/comments.
Cooking Japanese Style 30
The Way I See It 30
Guitarbench.com 30
Laane Loves 30
Online Social Networking 29
Laane on the World 29
Grampys World 29
Vanessa 28
Greetje greets You 28
Fledgling Blogger 27
My CMFad network ad finished on the 26th and, as I said I would, here are the figures from it, FYI.
The ad cost USD10 for a month, and the results, according to CMFad’s own statistics are:
Chinaren’s Blog
Pageviews: 207,877; CPM: $0.05 Clicks: 259; CPC: $0.04
…which doesn’t seem too bad to me. Then again, I’m no real expert in SEO and so on, so maybe someone else could give their opinion.
In any case, I’ve certainly seen my ad on the CMF spots quite a lot whilst doing my blog rounds, so I’m fairly pleased with the exposure. Times are a little hard atm, so I won’t be running another just yet, though I do still have a CMF Spike now and then.
As mentioned, the above stats are from CMFs dashboard, and to be fair they were taken one day before the advert finished, as I wasn’t sure if they’d still be visible once done. It’s always interesting to see the various stat applications and compare them.
However, I’ve decided that you can’t trust them fully.
As an example, I pop onto sites such as Alexa and Compete, and what I see doesn’t match what I see on my sites. They also tend to contradict each other! One has to wonder how much attention you should pay to these things.
I also use various stat sites that use embedded code in my pages, and even they differ. Sigh. This blog uses the Wordpress platform, and the stats on the Dashboard show the following numbers for EC, AD and CMF. Mind you, I think it’s only for the last week:
# adgitize.com – 1,294 Visits
# entrecard.com – 771 Visits
# cmfads.com – 485 Visits
This seems to match what various other traffic indicators show in general. Yet this last week most of my other traffic stat sites show more coming from Entrecard than Adgitize, which seems to have slumped a bit over the last five days or so.
So basically… who knows what to believe???
My monthly roundup tomorrow.
Tags: adgitize, CMFad, Entrecard, statistics
I can’t believe it’s Friday already! I have to go to work next week. The humanity of it all!!
Anyway, today’s pics are actually taken from my old blog, not because I’m running out, but I thought I’d recycle some you probably didn’t see when my blog was new.
A fruit tragedy…
This is probably not very politically correct or something…
Post on my Blog of Lies tomorrow. I’ll be back here on Monday.
Tags: Lethargic Friday
I was going through my old blog, and found a couple of entries I thought I’d repost here, mainly because they were very early posts, so most people won’t have seen them, but also ‘cos I’m a bit lazy. 
>>>
As well as the crazyness and frustration, you find in China, there’s a lot of wonderful places to go and sites to see.
For example, several years ago I went to Lu Shan (a famous tourist spot in China). I went in winter though, which is bloody cold. However, the mountain, which is apparently beautiful in summer, also had some wonderful winter sights…
Here’s one of me in Haerbin, which is a large city in the north, and bloody cold in winter too. It houses a huge ice world every year. The building I’m standing on is all made of ice…
Here’s one I had to walk up 8,000 steps to take!
All photos property of Chinaren. Please ask permission first if you would like to re-post.
Edit: Sorry, comments closed on this post due to spam.
Tags: China, photos of China, Sights in China
It’s time for another of my intermittent Blog of the Weeks, where I feature a blog that I consider to be well written, presented and enjoyable to read.
This week I’m going to put forward the interestingly named We Work For Cheese blog, written by Mike and the non-male Nicky.
WWfC features fairly random topics, but they’re well written and enjoyable to read, something that’s rarer than it should be.
Anyway, check out WWfC!
Chinaren’s Blog of the Week.
Tags: Blog of the Week
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