But for what? I have not submitted any post from this blog for maybe more than a year.

What I think happened is that someone submitted my post on Socialelves (my opinion on a pay per Digg site) to Digg which might have pissed off some Diggers and they then buried the story

I have not contacted Digg yet because I don’t think that would be of any use. Once a site’s stories gets buried a number of times it gets banned automatically.

Its sad that a site can get banned on Digg because of someone else. Its time someone bought Digg from Mr.Kevin Rose or made a better Digg!

Has your site ever been banned on Digg? Have you got it unbanned?

Update: just contacted Digg Team and waiting for reply.

Update 2: Just got a reply from Digg Team. As expected they are not going to unban this site

Thanks for taking the time to contact us at Digg.com regarding your website.

As you know, Digg is a community-driven website – our community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam.

From our FAQ (www.digg.com/faq):

Does Digg differentiate between spam and spamming?
Spam is very subjective. Many times, the spammer honestly doesn’t think they are spammers, so we generally leave that up to the Digg community to decide with the report/bury feature. We may delete users who blatantly and consistently submit obvious spam. Additionally, comment spam is against our TOS and will result in an account ban or deletion, depending on the severity. Submission spamming is different because it may be quality content but the submitter is “spamming” every story from their blog/site. While we welcome users to submit their own content, overdoing it often incites the users to mark the user as a spammer, the site as a spam site, and otherwise decent content as blogspam. We recommend considering this before you engage in this activity. Remember, if domains are consistently buried and reported as spam, the site may be banned.

Because unblocking your domain would not be in line with the best interests of the larger Digg community, we will not reverse this decision.

For more information, please see http://digg.com/faq and http://digg.com/tos

Thank you,

-Digg Support

Browser:  Google Chrome (current favorite browser. Previous favorite was FireFox)

Operating System (OS): Windows 7 (current favorite OS. Previous favorite was Windows XP. I disliked Windows Vista)

Anti-Virus: Avira AntiVir Personal (good free AntiVirus)

Anti-Spyware: Spybot – Search & Destroy

Music Player: Winamp

Video Player : VLC media player

Image Editor:  Adobe Photoshop

Instant Messenger: Yahoo! Messenger (I dont really use IMs these days. Skype is good too, I stopped using it after they stopped skypecasts)

FTP: FileZilla (previous favorite was SmartFTP)

Tweak: TuneUp Utilities (I use it to speedup Wmdows and Internet)

Twitter Desktop Client: TweetDeck (these days I tweet directly from Twitter)

File Compresser: WinRAR

Junk remover: SmartBuster (I use it to quickly remove temporary files and other junk files from Windows)

Blog: WordPress

Torrents: uTorrent

PHP: EasyPHP (I use it to test beta/RC versions of WordPress as well as its plugins and themes)

FLV Player: FLV Player

Dear Text Link Ads Team,

I will stop using Text Link Ads at the beginning of next month (November
1st) due to the recent PageRank drop I faced by selling text links on my
blog (www.johntp.com).

My blog had a PageRank 6 and now its dropped to 4.

I will be uninstalling the Text Link Ads plugin next month (November 1st).

Regards,
JohnTP

and they replied back that they had refunded all the advertisers, meaning the advertisers had almost one month of FREE advertising on my blog!

John,

You can go ahead and remove the script now, I had to refund all of the
advertisers.

I send them a mail asking why they had refunded the advertisers

Dear Text Link Ads Team,

Why were all the advertisers refunded? I said that I was going to remove TLA only next month, and I deserve the $170 since the text links were on my blog for 25 days and I had no intention of removing them until next month! All I wanted was to let TLA team know that I was removing the TLA plugin next month and therefore prevent the advertisers from paying for next month.

Regards,

JohnTP

and here’s their response

John,

I have to refund the clients if you want the ads removed. This includes the last 30 days the ad has been live. I cannot refund him AND pay you. We would be out of business. Since you wanted them cancelled we are then breaking the contract with this advertiser and therefore we have to refund the advertiser.

I replied back stressing that I never wanted my text link ads removed this month and that I wanted my money back

Dear Text Link Ads Team,

I did not want the TLA ads removed this month, only next month. I had let you know clearly that I was going to remove TLA only next month, check my first mail to you:

Dear Text Link Ads Team,

I will stop using Text Link Ads at the beginning of next month (November
1st) due to the recent PageRank drop I faced by selling text links on my
blog ( www.johntp.com).

My blog had a PageRank 6 and now its dropped to 4.

I will be uninstalling the Text Link Ads plugin next month (November 1st).

Regards,
JohnTP

I let you know early so you can prevent the advertisers from renewing their ads for next month. But now you refunded the advertisers and they get almost 1 month of advertising FREE on my blog??

I don’t mind giving the advertisers their links for the rest of this month, but I deserve the $170!

TLA team has not replied back to my last email so far and I feel that they did not refund the advertisers and took the money themselves!

I have always liked the TLA team and their service and have always recommended Text Link Ads to my readers and friends, but I regret doing it now and will never recommend it to anyone unless TLA pays me my money.

I want to thank all the subscribers for reading my blog, and if you are not a subscriber yet please make sure to grab the RSS feed.

Besides breaking the 2000 mark, another happy news for me is that JohnTP.com is going to be 2 years old next month making me a 2 year old blogger too!

Btw, I updated the blog’s color scheme to blue/white as most of the commenters had suggested it here. Hope you liked it.

I worked on the new design for a few days and finished with it yesterday and also tested it on Firefox, Opera, IE 6 and 7. Everything looks fine so far but I still have a few things to do like optimizing the CSS, removal of useless plugins and some other things to decrease page load time.

Long time readers may remember that I had a previous design with the header like the new one. New readers can see a preview of the old theme’s header below (screenshot was taken while reviewing CrazyEgg):

Instead of placing popular posts from the Blogging and Tweaks category separately on the header, I have the displayed a few of the overall popular posts from the blog and then linked to the Top Posts Page to save space.

You may also have noticed that the new theme is brown in color (I usually make my themes in blue color).

Some of the changes made in the new design

• Switched to 2 column for neater look
• moved money makers to the header
• removed Top Commentators plugin as I had lost a few advertisers in the past because of it (a better way is to link to good posts from the Top Commentator’s blog once a week so that they get a bit of traffic too along with the link)
• removed MyAvatars plugin as it was making single post pages load slowly (especially those with many comments)
• placed my pic near the logo and linked it to the about page so that new readers can easily find more info about the author
• put up some space on header to post my current activities and anything that is too short to make a post for (kinda like Twitter)

Please check out the new design and tell me what you think about it. If you spot any errors, please let me know that as well.

But I am sure the video quality would have got even worser if I had uploaded it to YouTube instead of blip.tv. You can watch the video below:

Also I heard that the iPhone has only a 2 megapixel camera, if that is true I am not sure if I want to buy it as I want to take good quality images and videos.

I did a research for a few days to find out the best mobile phone that can fulfill my needs. What I basically needed was a good camera and a music player, the Nokia N73 Music Edition with its 3.2 megapixel camera looked like the perfect choice for me.

I purchased Nokia N73 music edition yesterday using this blogs earnings and have been testing out its camera and music player ever since. The mobile phone offers good sound quality and I liked the camera too except that at low light conditions, the image and video quality is often low.

Here is a picture of my car taken with the 3.2 megapixel camera of my new Nokia N73 Music Edition

I have resized and reduced the quality of the above image so that it does not slow this page down. You can view the original image here.

I find the Nokia N73 camera producing better results in the morning when there is sufficient light. To get better image quality at night, I tried setting ‘Night’ as the scene mode (the flash is in the automatic setting) but I did not see any improvements.

I may start a Flickr account now to store some of the images I take with my new phone and may even display the latest images from my Flickr account on this blog’s sidebar or footer for readers to see

Read the Nokia N73 Music Edition review on my hardware review blog.

On May 2007, this blog had 159,304 unique visitors and 252,305 pageviews according to Google Analytics.

What about this blog’s earnings? Through my highest earner, AdSense, I earned $1,218.75. Close to what John Chow earned through AdSense – $1,246.50

The other ad programs that did well for me last month were TribalFusion and Kontera. Vizu Answers did not get me much polls last month so earnings from it was lower than usual. Also AuctionAds got me an unexpected $15, which I ran only for a few days to see how it works.

If you are new to making money through blogs, check out my guide for new bloggers to make money online.

On March 29th, I created a robots.txt file for this site and a few days later I started noticing an increase in my web site traffic.

Web Site Traffic for March 29th

Web Site Traffic for March 29th was 4,724 pageviews from 2,651 unique visitors, according to Google Analytics.

Now since robots.txt will take time to take effect, maybe upto 14 days, let us check the web site traffic on April 13th.

Web Site Traffic for April 13th

Web Site Traffic for April 13th was 5,520 pageviews from 3,513 unique visitors. That is an increase of almost 1000 unique traffic.

Note: I made a few modifications to my robots.txt file after April 14th and my web site traffic kept increasing.

Web Site Traffic after 1 month of using Robots.txt file

Web Site Traffic on April 29th was 8,439 pageviews from 5,324 unique visitors. That is an increase of almost 3000 unique traffic!

Web Site Traffic for April 2007

Web Site Traffic summary for April 2007

Through the above graph you can see how my search traffic (mainly from Google) kept increasing.

My Thoughts

Though robots.txt helped me to increase traffic, I am sure that is not the only reason. I blogged more frequently too.

I wish to increase my web site traffic further by 6000-7000 unique traffic per day by next month. And yes…my earnings doubled

If you wish to improve your traffic, read my tips on how to increase Blog Traffic.

Has your traffic increased after creating a robots.txt file for your web site?

Advertise on JohnTP.com

This PageRank 6 site has around 5500 unique traffic and nearly 8500 pageviews per day. If you wish to advertise your site or product here, contact me.

I offer 3 options to advertisers -Header Spot, Sidebar Spot and Text Links.

Header Spot

The Header spot which is located on the header towards the right of the logo and below menu, is the best spot on this site where your product or web site can get high visibility. The banners on this spot should be 728 x 90 pixel size.

The banners will be rotated. I allow around 3 advertisers for this spot. David Culpepper from Pureblogging already bought one slot on the Header spot.

Sidebar Spot

The sidebar spot which is located on the sidebar, is the second best spot after the header spot. Your ad will be placed above the fold to get high visibility for your product or web site. Graphics on this spot must be 125 x 125 pixel size.

Text Links

Buy a text link on my site and get traffic and a valuable PageRank 6 backlink. The links will be sitewide and placed above the fold on the sidebar to get high visibility for your product or web site.

I can also review your product and web site.

Note: I offer discounts to advertisers who wish to advertise on my site for long periods.

Check my Advertise page for more info. If you are interested please contact me.

So here goes…

1. What have you learned so far from your readers?

   I have learned a lot of things from my readers during the past 1 year that this blog has been running. Infact one of the reasons I started this blog is to share knowledge and to learn from my readers. That is why I love comments.

   One of the most important things I have learned from my readers is that what matters most to them is not the blog design or ranking but the content. They will keep returning back to your blog if you provide the information they need.

2. If someone would offer to pay a course (or more) for you, what would that course be?

   I think I would like to take the Six Figure Blogging course by Probloggers Darren Rowse and Andy Wibbels.

3. Are you satisfied with what you’ve achieved this year, in general?

   I have achieved a few things this year that I have always wanted to, like getting a new PC, getting my blog to be one of the Top 100 favorited blogs, being accepted by 9rules, getting 5000+ unique traffic, a good design for my blog, etc. So yes, I am satisfied with what I have achieved this year

4. Has Blogging changed your life or personality in any way?

   Ever since I started Blogging, the time I spend infront of my PC has increased a lot. I don’t even get to spend much time with my friends these days as they will be busy when I am free and vice versa.

5. If you had the opportunity to meet one person that you like the most in the world, who would that person be?

   There are a lot of people I would like to meet. The person I would like to meet the most is Shivaranjan, my long time online friend. He found me through this blog and as a reader he had mailed me a few times for help and that is how we became close friends.

   Shivaranjan has helped me a lot, especially when it comes to Hardwares. He has a good knowledge on Computer hardware and you can read his blog if you are interested on the topic.

I tag all my readers to play this game on their blogs.

Rules:

1. If you choose to play this game, you will have to pass it on to 5 other people, although everyone is free to participate.
2. The questions you are passing on can be any questions you like but you should not change the 5th question.
3. If, you don’t like a question you are being asked (except no.5) or you can’t answer a question, you are then free to change that question with your own.

Note: I will link to all the bloggers who participate in this game, so don’t forget to link to this post on your ’5 Question Interview’ post so that I know you are playing. Let the game begin!