Bad Day at the Office
Wed, 11 January, 2006 – 10:21 pm
Time for a rant, it's been a while 
The day started off today with a friend telling me his Google adsense account had been suspended for invalid clicks. I know for certain that he's innocent in this so we've done some research and found a few others that had their accounts reinstated so fingers crossed he can prove to them that he's done nothing wrong and get his account back. There's a few $$ in there, it's not something you want to lose for doing nothing wrong but making Google money. It's a very thin line I think, that's easy to cross. I reminded myself of the Program Policies just to ensure that I wasn't crossing that line. I've amended a couple of things today just to be on the safe side. I also checked over the Inside Adsense Blog as they are constantly talking about how people are earning thousands of dollars on their network. Bizarrely enough they do not have one single post about what to do in the event of an account suspension. Instead you have to go out searching for information on the web because Google don't seem to answer this question on their Adsense help site! (And suddenly I hear my account being switched off as we speak!). I did find a couple of stories on forums and also a very good site which seems quite resourceful regardless of if you've been banned or not at I Am Banned.com.
The postman then came today with a nice big box for Dave and I. We'd both ordered new keyboards off Amazon on Monday. He just wanted a basic USB one whereas I decided to sort myself out with a Wireless Ergonomic/Natural Keyboard, as I prefer them because they're more comfortable. I opted for the only one I could find the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pro set which includes a mouse. I already have the mouse but I couldn't buy the keyboard separately so I figured I'll find a use for the other mouse at some point (so far I've lent it to Dave so it's not gathering dust!). However after an hour of using it I suddenly looked down and realised it has a US layout (The @ above the 2, the £ sign missing etc.). Incase you're wondering I touch type so I don't actually look at the keys hence why I didn't realise at first. So I thought, okay it's using a UK locale so that's fine, where's everything then. I found all the keys except the backslash. Then I realised I kinda need this a lot of PHP programming! I have looked and pressed every combination of keys but I can't find it! Trouble is because it's a US keyboard there is 1 key missing because it's not usually needed ie. the hash/tilde key. On the US layout the tilde is in the top left and the hash replaced the £ sign. So I've emailed Amazon and asked them if they can replace it with a UK keyboard, alternatively where's the backslash except for in the character map! The keyboard is now sitting on the floor and I'm back to typing directly on the laptop 
And to top the day off (yes it wasn't really a bad day but it felt worse than it sounds) I discovered my osCommerce Templates site has been dropped out of Google again, all bar the front page. From one point of view it's good because it meant I could quickly go in and change some filenames from underscores to hyphens (more on that later) and set up the redirects just incase, but it means my visitors have dropped down again to literally a few a day. I'm hoping it's only a temporary glitch and I know I'm not the only one who's had it happen to them and I've seen sites go back in afterwards so I guess I just have to be patient.
On the upside however the Tribal Tattoos site seems to have been indexed into MSN UK search and our visitors have doubled over the past week to 230+ per day which I'm very happy about. We have double the visitors from MSN compared to Google which is not the usual ratio so once Google wakes up I'm hoping the visitors will hit into the thousands! But that's just hoping
The AdSense policies is an interesting read. I know of at least one site out there that has stepped well over the fine line, encouraging people to click the ads many more times than just once per visit.
My Apple keyboard has a rather odd layout aswell. It has a £ sign – that's above the '3' as usual. The @ is above the '2' key so that takes a bit of getting used to – and of course when I go to the laptop I need to get used to the @ being where it usually is. The 'hash' just isn't marked on the Apple keyboard at all – infact I forget where this is on a regular basis. Just had a bit or trouble finding it now but it's alt + 3 = #
By Sam on Thu, 12 January, 2006
Oh so thats supposed to happen with the @ key then? I figured it was a US layout and I could change it somewhere, as thats how the US have theirs as Sarah Said.
By Matt on Mon, 16 January, 2006
Still no reply from Amazon. They replied last Wednesday saying that they would reply within 2 days and I've heard nothing further. I replied to their email on Friday and completed their online form again today (that thing is hard to find!).
Next option will be to hunt down their telephone number. I want my keyboard!!!
By Sarah on Tue, 17 January, 2006
Just an update, the adsense account that was suspended has just been reinstated. So it can work
By Sarah on Wed, 18 January, 2006