Archives for May 2008

Wow, what a great day.  MIL kept the girls last night and I stayed out until 1 at my mom’s watching One Tree Hill DVDs again.  Scott worked last night so I slept in with him until after 11!  I got up and did some cleaning around here.  The girls got home around 1:30 or so.

After Scott left for work, Heather, the girls and I went shopping for the girls some shoes and a few outfits.  We also stopped at a Mexican restaurant to eat.  After all that the girls were asking to quit walking and head home.  We ended up at my mom’s for them to play and I watched some more OTH before heading home a few minutes ago.

I’m taking my Sunday School class to IHOP in the morning to celebrate the graduates since tomorrow is their recognition at church.  So…I have no lesson to study for tonight.  Probably going to spend a few minutes straightening up a few more things and Internet for awhile longer before trying to make it to bed before 1:30 again.  Surely can’t sleep in until 11 tomorrow.

Here’s a few cell phone shots from today…

Taking a break at the mall

Heather snaps a shot of us all primping at the table

Motherhood in action, as Heather said…one on my lap, one asking questions, and packing a to go box.

“Shorty”

As predicted, May was a great month for my OTH site. Best month ever…and worst in some ways.
This month we had the season finale which brought record numbers to the site. We hit a high of 54,000 page views in one day. Our average page views per day was 23,000. We had a total of 740,000 page views for the month. Since the finale aired and everything has calmed down, we’re back to averaging 15,000 a day. All numbers I’m not complaining about. It definitely should pick up once filming begins again June 18 and spoilers start rolling in.
The month was tough though as each Monday night after the show aired, we hit CPU quota limits and the site went down for hours at a time. We simply outgrew our shared hosting plan this month. Last Friday we had complaints about emails going out that made the host shut down our mail program which shut down the whole site. With the holiday weekend, no one was around to turn it back on. That led me to move to another type of shared plan server except it’s supposed to automatically grow as needed over at mosso.com. I’m still considering moving to a dedicated server but the costs are much higher than I ever planned to spend.
The move to the new server was not as smooth as I would have liked. Some of my plugins messed up and they had to move my database server. Also had some issues with other people in the cloud causing down time. It hasn’t been smooth sailing since then although it has leveled out the past few days.
Search engines have been nice to us this month, especially since the finale. We were actually number 2 for a time with the keyword “one tree hill”. We’ve gotten ranked for season 6 keywords since the finale and have been visited by a lot of SEO type sites.
The big stand out this month though were the new contacts we received directly from reps. It was great to be recognized as a standing OTH site and fun to give away free stuff to our readers. I get so many nice emails and comments thanking us for the site and great info. To be able to get a little pat on the back and also give back to the readers has been great.
As for numbers for the month…

BlogHer: $810
Adsense: $360
Kontera $40
Linkshare: $45
Amazon: $3 (a lot more has been earned from here b/c people are pre-ordering season 5 DVD set but I won’t see any of that until they ship)

For a total $1258. My hope was $1200 and am very happy to have met that.

The summer will probably prove to be a little slow since the season doesn’t start again until September 1 but I’m hoping between the spoilers, possible interviews, possible visits to Wilmington, we’ll have enough good stuff to keep ’em comin’.

So of course I want a Wii fit now…but look at this video of this guy doing it. Now THAT will be some good blog entertainment.

Well, welcome us to the Wii world. We got a Wii a little while ago. We should be worn out when we use it. Waiting for it to get wired. Will be back after we officially are Wii-ed.