Alan's Blog

Cutty Sark and Google AdSense update

A few more months on, and I'm still getting some nice little earnings from my Greenwich Guide site, where I'm using Google AdSense. With the exception of one month only, visitors have clicked on enough ads there to generate sufficient revenue (US$100) for Google to pay me regularly each month. In fact, the next month earned a little more than usual, so the shortfall that one month was more than made up for, and I average over $100 a month for the full period.

In May the Cutty Sark was badly damaged by fire. Since my site appears high up in Google searches for the ship, on 21 May I received over 10,000 hits on the site, when the normal average is around 500 hits. The site traffic went back to roughly normal again after a few days, but the larger number of visitors meant more clicks than usual, so I gained to some small degree from the tragedy. In case you are wondering I've already donated the extra to the Cutty Sark fire appeal.

London Power Cuts

Yesterday evening, at about 6.20pm, much of London was plunged into chaos by power cuts. We had a little taster of the problems experienced a couple of weeks ago by people in eastern America and Canada. The blackout only lasted about fifteen minutes in my case, and power was restored within half an hour to all areas.

It came during the evening rush, and hundreds of thousands were trapped on trains, 250,000 underground. Some passengers spent more than an hour stuck on their trains. Although power was restored to the tube system within 30 minutes, it was not possible to switch the electricity back on because people were still in the tunnels after being evacuated from their stalled trains.

It is too early to say what went wrong, but it appears that transformers failed at three south London substations. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has called the blackout 'a disgrace' and has called for a public enquiry.