Ill keep this short and sweet.

Adsense: $216.00

Intergi:  $218.56

Total:  $434.56

Just though that Ill give a quick update on my life at Uni. So far exam wise I have had 3 exams with an average of around 70% which I am quite happy with and 2 bits of coursework with an average of around 80%. The main thing that I cannot wait for now is the Easter break which is in 2 weeks and will last an entire month and ill only have 1 bit of coursework to do and I have almost already finished it so ill probably be doing a lot of work on all of my websites, trying to improve where possible.

One of my mates at Huddersfield Uni is studying Game Design and he has not had a single exam so far so has only had coursework and even that coursework sounds like fun because he has to do research into games like Half life 1 and World of Warcraft etc. I was really tempted to study Game design at uni but I would have probably gone to America because there are more game companies over there than over here in England. I would have probably gone to http://www.iadtvegas.com/ because I have heard good things about it.

So to summarise I am quite happy on my course “Chemical Engineering with Management”, and even though there are other courses out there that might have been more fun and less work, I would still stay on my course.

I have been looking for a good CPM ad network for SpudMud and I stumbled across Intergi over at Talk arcades. The main thing that caught my attention was the nice and high CPM of around $2.00 - $3.00 for some ads which is a lot more than my current eCPM of $0.60 - $1.00 from Adsense. So I have just submitted my application to them and lets hope that I get accepted so I can post some further feedback later on.

 EDIT  21/01/2007

Got accepted into the program and have placed the ads codes on my SpudMud. Did have a few small problems at first but they support was very good and fixed all issues fast.

EDIT 31/01/2007

I am almost speechless about how good Intergi’s CPM is, making $231.97 in 8 days is simply amazing for me, way better than I ever expected and as you can see this doesn’t include the revenue from Adsense which accounts for over half of the impressions and that averaged around $3-$8 a day. The only problem with them that I see is the Net45 payment method so I have to wait for the 15th march before I get paid but they do pay by PayPal which is great.

I have been waiting for this moment for quite some time now and now it is here, the Christmas holidays… I ahve been waiting for this holiday for quite some time because my University don’t have half term like Sixth Form/High School so we only have 2 breaks, Christmas and Easter. The only bonus is that they are both a month long so that’s quite nice apart from that fact that when I return Ill probably have forgotten everything that I have learnt that semester and get chucked straight into exams. But who cares, its a whole month off

Ok I better stop with the boring bit to do with my life and get back onto what this blog is about. Over Christmas I am hoping to get some work done with the new design of SpudMud , I have already gotton a designer to do me a new design and now that that is finnished and coded (by me) I am slowely brining it to life. You can have a look at how the development is going over at beta.spudmud.com. I have still got a lot of work to do i.e. finishing off the games, video and pictures sections as well as trying to make all of the code valid (not sure why I want it to be XHTML valid but I just do).

I better write a bit about the designer now that you have seen the great job he did with the design. I found Ed’s site over at the DP forums and immediately contacted him to ask for a quote after seeing his great portfolio. The quote he gave my shocked me at first, it just seemed to low (I wont mention any values), but I shouldn’t complain should I. His work was done in about 1 and a half weeks which I was quite happy with considering it was 5 pages fully custom designed. He was great at communicating and always kept me updated. The thing that I was really amazed about was the way he could understand what I wanted because as you probably can see from this blog, I am not the best at getting things across.

I am hoping to get the new design up and running by Christmas but I think that that’s very unlikely because I’m simply too lazy at the moment due to Uni taking everything out of me and I have coursework and exams to revise for.

I have decided to move all of my sites from my current UK VPS at a2b2.com to a US VPS over in New York (reasons explained later on).

I decided to do this for many reasons, the main one being that I needed my VPS to be fully managed because I have very limited experience managing Linux servers so would rather  have a more experienced company do it that are there 24/7 and not 16/7 like I am (yes I really do get that much sleep). I moved from London to New York because I realised that most of my visitors come from the US/Canada and only a minority from the UK/Europe so decided to get a east coast provider to satisfy both demographics.

It was quite hard to choose a good provider but finally I went with Zone.net as my provider because I liked the look of their site as well as the great chat I had with one of their sales reps. I went with the VM400 plan because it has room for growth for all of my sites as well as the occasional spike in traffic (from heavygames etc).

I still highly recommend a2b2 as a provider but in my opinion they are more of a mid-class host and I wanted the mid to high class provider. I’m sure there are some people out there that wont agree with this statement but that life for you.

Ill diffidently post a review in a few months time to keep everyone updated.

^^This is an affiliate link so if you do sign up then I make a bit of money