BIZ-BANANA.COM

I've been unable to update B-B for quite a while (see the Anatomy of a website article) but if nothing else it’s made me realise that time-sensitive information quickly loses any impact it might have had when it passes its “sell-by date”.

Or in our case its “READ by date” I’d like to show you what I mean:

Before I made a few amendments to our home page, it mentioned one our reports on
Virtual Assistants.

It was hot off the presses then and sported a nifty little sticker which declared it was

And it was new – in 2001! – so it had to go; not the report, just the sticker. If it’s NEW! to you and you think it might be of interest, here it is again.

That same year, I was promoting a book called Make Your Site Sell! 2002 and I offered my visitors a free download of extracts from the book to give my readers a chance to see what it was all about. Hundreds did and lots of you went on to buy the book, but I just wish they hadn’t tacked on the 2002 at the end because in 2004 anyone seeing it now will think it’s old hat – which it most definitely IS NOT. Unluckily for me, I had the download offer plastered on every page of the site!

I finally relegated it to my Free Downloads page last week or you can download it here

And here is my own review of the FULL retail version of the book.

At that time the MYSS! 2002 download was the only one.

At the last count there were NINE FREE E-books on the Free Downloads page!.

There are bound to be more examples of out-of-date information before I can eradicate them completely. In the meantime please feel free to drop me a line about any obvious examples you might come across.

E-mails to: John@biz-banana.com

Spyware
back to headlines

In 2001 (is it really that long ago?) I posted an article on this page about a new menace called Scumware and how it threatened to sweep the Internet entitled Take that, scum!

Well, now, three years later, it has all come to pass, as they say in biblical terms, so much so there is now a healthy industry dedicated to eradicating the pesky stuff.

SPYWARE as they call it now is slowly strangling the Net in much the same way as SPAM but it is so much more insidious in that you probably won’t even know when you have it on your computer. First thing you’ll probably know about it is when your machine starts to act “funny” (like mine did) and you boot your computer only to find that the your familiar starting page has changed to something completely different.

Even worse, as it did in my case, I couldn’t change it back again because these malicious people had their own devious ways of preventing me from reversing the process. I was “lucky” in that my “new” page was only about a new search engine (which was probably complete rubbish - not that I ever used the thing, nor was every likely to - after my privacy was invaded.) but some people haven’t been so “fortunate”.

I’ve since heard of a few cases of people having their pages replaced by full page ads for pornography and some even changing their dial-up connections to a premium rate service and were only made aware of it when their staggering bills came staggering in!

What I eventually did (a bit of a knee-jerk reaction I’m afraid) was to re-format my hard drive and start again from scratch, re-installing Windows (I use a PC) and all my back-up files. I’ve worked with computers for nearly twenty years (both at home and at work, before I retired) so it was only a temporary inconvenience to me, but I shudder to think what someone new to computers and the Internet would need to do to fix things.

Now I’ve gone to the opposite extreme and I now have several programs installed that at least let me know what’s going on inside my machine. Of course there’s also my Anti-Virus, my Firewall and my new Trojan Killer!

Paranoid? Me?

Seriously, if you want any more information about Spyware just type in the word in Yahoo! or any of the other Search Engines.

Anatomy of a website
back to headlines

I still find it hard to accept that is page has not been updated for more than a year; the time before that was in 2001!

Now it’s 2004 and the latest version of B-B, the hyphenated version, has been reincarnated once again from the ashes, due solely to my good friend Caroline Tresman who has acted as caretaker (and host) of this site.

In 1996 I took early retirement to look after my wife and in between times I had a go at writing a novel (unsuccessfully). Then I wasted quite a lot of money trying to find ways of supplementing my income and it took quite a long time before the penny dropped and I finally realised that all those get-rich-quick schemes – envelope stuffing, chain letters, “Make a Million before Xmas!” for only £35!, etc were just so much pie in the sky.

In 1999 I “found” the Internet and started the site in September. I had really big plans for Bizbanana (as it was originally called) because I reckoned I had found my niche in life.

In October, an ad for a book called Make Your Site Sell! caught my attention and subsequently purchased it online, which turned out to be, definitely, one of my better decisions.

I had built the site from scratch with only a rudimentary knowledge of HTML gleaned from a book from my local library. All in, including the time taken learning the HTML I’d guess it took roughly three months before the site went “live”.

What a waste!!

I wasn’t sure what direction the site would take, only that I was pretty sure that it was do-able. Then I read the MYSS! book and realised I’d been doing it all wrong!

Up to then I’d been quite chuffed if my site stats showed ANY visitors a day and in that first month it reached a peak of five unique visitors in one day!

Clearly, I’d never be successful at that rate so I swallowed my pride and, in words of the song, I decided it was time to “rip it up and start again”. Thankfully, there were only a few pages then so it didn’t take much for the new “improved” version to be up and running.

Fast-forward a few weeks and now I’m getting dozens and dozens of unique visitors EVERY DAY. Not only that, I got listed fairly quickly in some of the Search Engines (hence the traffic) and for a short time the site was listed at number one in Excite.co.uk for “Home Business Ideas”. Of course, a bit like Top of the Pops, I suppose, it could only go down again but at least I’d had my “Number One!”

After that success I figured it was a “no-brainer” to join the SiteSell.com affiliate program which I did in November. Now flip to late December and thanks to my recommendation of MYSS! I’m due some commission for two sales of the book. Now, at about £11 for the book, it throws me about two or three quid. Hardly a king’s ransom but for someone in for the long haul (like me) I could see the potential.

I wish I could draw a veil over what happened next because even now I find it extremely difficult to write these next few paragraphs, but they do have a significant bearing on the evolution of B-B.

On New Year’s Day 2000 my wife of thirty years, Helen, was rushed into hospital with a collapsed lung (it had also happened before, about a year earlier) and she died a few days later.

For the next couple of months I busied myself working on website-related things, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I certainly put all my efforts into the thing but I guess I must have overdone things, which is putting it mildly, because I had a stroke in early March.

No two strokes are quite the same, I’ve since found out , and the one I was "dealt" left me unable to read or write at first, not a good sign for a fledgling webmaster you have to admit.

In fact, for the first week in hospital, I couldn’t even remember the name of the website!

Thankfully, things gradually improved until about eighteen months later I reckoned it was about time I got back into harness and started “work” again. I "upgraded" Bizbanana.co.uk to Bizbanana.com, paid for a new logo, gave it a new look and decided to add some fresh new content for my visitors. By then I had about five hundred (yes that’s 500) subscribers to my newsletter and quite a few had written for information about ‘Virtual Assistants’.

Now, I’d only ever heard the term a couple of times before so I wrote back and said I’d investigate. I looked it up on Yahoo! and thought it would be an ideal subject for B-B. so I did quite a bit of research on it and wrote to a few people for some “inside info”. Most of the people I contacted were extremely helpful, particularly the one who contributed to the report.

The last report I did immediately before the stroke was about Telecom Plus. The research, the interview and the writing took about two days. The VA report, on the other hand, took nearly three months! I found it very stressful and, within myself, I knew that I could have - should have - made the report so much better, but by then I’d just about shot my bolt.

A few days later I decided that I didn’t need that kind of stress in my life anymore so I wrote to my friends on the Web (you know who you are) and said I was going to give it up for good. And that would indeed been the end of Bizbanana.com then my guardian angel arrived in the shape of Caroline Tresman of Homeworking.com who stepped in to ensure that B-B lived on, albeit in stasis.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention that I hadn't paid my fees to renew the Bizbanana.com domain name so it lapsed and was quickly snapped by someone else. At that time I couldn't have cared less, but then Caroline registered the Biz-Banana.com name on my behalf - where it's been lying there scratching itself ever since!

For the last couple years Caroline has acted as caretaker of BIZ-Banana.com, as it is now, and even hosts it for free. We’ve never met in person or even, for that matter, spoken on the telephone but I consider her a true friend in the best sense of the word. Sorry to embarrass you CT but it’s something I just had to say.

Just before Christmas I wrote to her and asked if I could please have my Biz-Banana back and she immediately agreed. So now, four years on, B-B (namely me) is ready to start all over again.

When Caroline offered to keep B-B from dying completely, she said that it was because the site contained some useful information and that it would be a pity if that information was lost forever. Yes, like Caroline, I think the site has a lot to offer, now and in the future, and although much the earlier content was written quite a while ago most of it is just as relevant today.

Here’s a good example: The BBC showed a couple of “Scam Buster” programs recently; things I’d been alerting my visitors to the website and subscribers to my newsletter for years.

That apart, you might think I’m daft to be starting over but my motivation really quite simple: Despite the temporary setbacks over the last four years I STILL have the same ambitions I nurtured in 1999 when I started the site. To find out the details of our “Mission Statement” you only have to go to the About Us and the Home pages to get a good idea of what B-B is all about

Finally, I’d like to apologise for taking so long to tell what’s turned out to be my life story so-far, but I sincerely hope you’ll come back again, hopefully many times, and perhaps tell me about YOUR dreams of homeworking and escaping the rat race.

Write to me at John@biz-banana.com