From My Perspective – Official DateHookup Blog

You ever wonder why people cancel their accounts on dating sites?  Well, I don’t!  I get to read this stuff everyday.  On DateHookup, when someone cancels their account, I ask them why they are canceling. Below are the reasons people gave.  This is from one day’s worth of cancelations.  This includes the people that liked the site, hated the site, and everything in-between.

WARNING: This is completely un-edited and un-censored.  Sometimes people say some highly offensive things so if you are easily offended you should not read this.
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http://googleadmanager.blogspot.com/2010/02/next-generation-of-google-ad-manager.html?utm_source=gam&utm_medium=et&utm_campaign=gam_upgrade_to_dfp

Hmm, is this why it never seemed like Google ever updated Google Ad Manager?  I swear they forgot completely about that product, but it seems they were planning on replacing it with this new product.  I have not seen the UI yet but something tells me it’s going to look exactly like GAM but with a new logo.  But I won’t judge it until I see it.  I really hope they made improvements.  The reporting system on GAM is terrible to say the least.  And the share features are dumb.  If they fix those, and the new API lets me download reports automatically that would be pretty cool.  I wish they would integrate payments via credit card, or provide the option for a very small fee.  That way I would not need to invoice clients every month, or risk that they won’t pay me.  Does this new system really have better algorithms than GAM?  Will it really increase monetization by getting ads from more networks?  I don’t know, hopefully.

(crosses fingers hoping this isn’t just GAM with a new name)

(also hoping they somehow sped up the whole thing so my pages don’t load so damn slow anymore.  Adding Google Ad Manager code to DateHookup probably made my pages load literally 10 times slower, especially on IE, which has the slowest javascript engine in the world.)

Seriously is there a more frustrating game than MW2?  I don’t think I’ve ever yelled at my TV as much as I do when I play this game.  Allow me to rant for a minute here…

Okay, first off, I bought this game the first day it came out and played pretty much every day for 2 months straight.  I pretty much retired from video games years ago after I started my business (believe me, once you are running a business video games just don’t hold your interest anymore), so yes I am rusty.  And it’s true, I never really played console games once I bought a computer when I was 16.  Give me a mouse and keyboard and I can wreck fools all day on a FPS game, but the Xbox controller?  Forget about it.  HOW THE HELL DO PEOPLE AIM USING THIS STUPID THING?!?  Seriously it’s impossible.  It’s so damn sensitive the slightest movement of your thumb will move your cross hair by over a foot.  That’s not good when you’re aiming at someone 30+ feet away.  And I have the sensitivity to like 3 or something out of 10.
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The best thing about a website is it’s on 24/7.  That means you can make money in your sleep, in the shower, when you are on vacation, etc.  It’s extremely awesome.  But it also means it’s on 24/7.  That means your site can fail at any time for any number of reasons, leaving you permanently on edge, waiting for that dreaded text message alert saying your site is down.  Such is the life of a webmaster.

One of my servers’ network cards decided it had had enough of this life and promptly died, leaving me scratching my head as to why my site went down.  I mean who would think the network card would fail right?  I spent an hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong, why can’t I connect to this server!?!?!!  Then eventually I noticed the little green light next to the network card was blinking.  I am not sure what that means other than it ain’t working, so I switched to the secondary network card and viola, fixed. 

I had bought a couple of new servers and was configuring them this week, and wouldn’t you know it, one of them has already had a hardware failure.  What the hell, 2 failures in one week?  I hadn’t had a hardware failure in the previous 7 years, so suffice it to say I am a bit paranoid at the moment.  My plan is to make sure for every process I have at least 2 servers that can handle the job, so if one fails I will be able to move the process to another server.  As soon as this new server actually works I might be able to implement this plan.  Yeah I know it’s probably not the ideal way to set up redundancy, but it should work pretty well.  Networks and servers are not my strong suit, plus my cabinet is a bit cramped and I am not going to be moving it to a new rack any time soon (what a pain that would be, I shudder to think about it..), so no super fancy load balancing or replication for me right now.  I just figure that would be one more thing that could fail anyway.

Do you hate servers as much as me?  Someday they will just work, everything will have 10 backups built in, nothing will ever fail.  Ahh, that would be the life.  I eagerly await that day.

So I went ahead and filed for a trademark on DateHookup.  You know, it wasn’t as much of a pain as I thought it might be.  I went to LegalZoom.com to take care of it.  I just had to fill out some simple forms, pay like $169 (plus the fee to file the trademark with the government) and they handled the rest.  Super easy.

It’s actually a good thing I went with them.  Because it turns out a trademark is a very precise thing.  There are some specific things you must do if you want your application to be approved.  One is to have the little (TM) next to your mark somewhere on your site.  I had to go back and forth with customer support.  Eventually we got it all figured out.  They were very helpful, no automated customer service bots.  Actual people (I know, amazing isn’t it?).

So is it all done?  Nope.  It could take over 18 months for the government to get around to approving or rejecting your application.  I am confident of its approval, I have been using the mark since 2002 and there were no  real conflicting marks to deal with.  The main reason I did this was so advertisers on Google AdWords could no longer use my name in their ads, thus bolding the text on their ad and leading users to their crappy websites instead of mine.  Fortunately, Google does not require the trademark to be approved.  You can submit the filing number to Google and that will take care of it.  Now if you type ‘datehookup’ in Google you won’t see the term ‘datehookup’ in any ads.  Their click-thru-rates will drop and most likely the ads will be dropped by Google, or at any rate my users won’t be fooled into clicking on them.

If you own an online business, I highly recommend filing for a trademark.  It’s pretty easy.  You can have your attorney do it if you have one, but that will cost you a lot.  I would just use LegalZoom.

File a trademark application:
http://www.legalzoom.com/trademarks/trademarks-overview.html

File a trademark complaint with Google:
https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint

Another Valentine’s Day, another surge in traffic for DateHookup.com.  Or is it?  I can never really tell what months are up and what months are down with my traffic.  Every year has been different.  The reason is I always make changes.  Last year I made some changes that really increased traffic to the site, right around Valentine’s Day.  Was it solely my changes or was the season part of the reason for the increase? 

I am crossing my fingers, hoping there will be a nice increase in traffic over the next couple of months.  January was higher than December, but it wasn’t much higher.  I was hoping for more.  So far I am not really seeing much of a change leading up to V-Day.  I made some changes again too that are definitely going to raise traffic, at least in the short term.  I like to really confuse myself so I never know what the hell is going on.  So again, I probably won’t be able to tell if the season leads to more traffic or not.  Hopefully it will lead to a crapload of traffic and I will know once and for all.  I mean Valentine’s Day, online dating, come on those are pretty related.  People should be looking to meet someone, which should mean more traffic to dating sites.

Come on people!!! Come to DH!!!