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Damn ... I don't know what's wrong with me. I should be all fired up and ready to work but instead I'm wandering around the office like a lost sheep.

For some reason, today is beginning to look like being one of those very unproductive days when I just can't stay focused on anything. Of course I could blame it on my keyboard ... my new keyboard that is. The one I've just changed to after deciding that it really was time to ditch my old faithful Microsoft keyboard.

It wasn't that the old keyboard had stopped working because it hadn't ... but it was rather grubby and was almost certainly a health hazard. And it might have become a bit noisy too. In our new place my office is right across the hallway from our bedroom and at 1.15 this morning Steve was complaining that the noise of my typing was interrupting his sleep.

So it was time for the old keyboard to go and be replaced by one of those ergonomic keyboards where the keys are slanted rather than being straight across the board. I've had it for quite a while but never used it until now ... and I can tell you that it is taking some getting used to.

At least it's clean and quiet ... but it doesn't seem to be able to spell all that well.

Over WordPress updates?
WordPress has really overdone the update thing in the last couple of weeks don't you think? And trotting out an update that completely broke quite a few plugins certainly didn't impress a lot of people.

I have to say that the danger of breakages happening after an automatic update was one that Steve and I saw coming right from the first mention of adding automatic updates to the WordPress core. We decided that it was an unacceptable risk for any serious business so we disabled the automatic updates feature and now allow plenty of time between the announcement of an update and actually updating our clients' sites.

It might be a little tedious but our sites don't disappear just because the latest core update didn't like one small plugin. So if you got caught with in that auto update mess then perhaps turning off that feature is solution for you too.

What are your costs of doing business.
A few days ago an interesting chart appeared over on the Moz website. It compared the cost of reaching 1000 people across a variety of channels and I would love to show it to one of our clients.

A few months ago when they were getting ready to launch their online shop my partner mentioned paid Facebook advertising to her and the instant response was a very belligerent "I'm not paying for that." It took a great deal of self-control for my partner not to tell her that she was being rather foolish.

And of course since then Facebook has cut back on the unpaid reach of businesses and is making it plain that businesses should be prepared to pay for the privilege of getting their message out via Facebook.

So while she wasn't prepared to pay to advertise on Facebook she was prepared to pay for advertising on the radio, television and even some newspaper advertising. If only she had seen the chart from Moz ... it plainly shows that Facebook advertising is the cheapest way to reach one thousand people.

If the chart is right then you could be paying as little as 25 cents to reach a thousand people on Facebook while you could be paying as much as $32.00 per thousand to reach people via the newspaper.

So what is it costing you to reach a 1000 people and are you prepared to pay to get good, solid, converting traffic? Don't be like my client and make up your mind without doing any testing because you could be pinning your hopes on something that is going to cost you plenty but deliver very little.

And the silliness continues
Over the years various governments have tried a variety of things to stop under-age people looking at porn sites ... mostly because parents are just too slack to control what their kids look at on the Net.

None of them have worked but now the UK government is going to try and succeed where others have failed by forcing the owners of adult websites to require people to provide proof that they are over the age of 18.

Of course one way the government thinks that can be done is by requiring surfers to provide their credit card details ... and I expect that might extend to debit card details too. So how many people under the age of 18 have debit cards?

And so the silliness continues.