New Project

Guess what: I've registered a new domain: www.bagnirimini.com

Usurai.it

The domain usurai.it is now active.

New project: Usurai.it

Strange enough the domain usurai.it hasn't been registered by anybody, so I did it.

Pizza a Domicilio, removed again from Google (3)

I can't figure it out, look at here:
Google has removed pizza-a-domicilio.it from its index again! And still Google Webmaster Tools are not correct:

The only thing I can do now is to raise the daily budget on Google Adwords to 10 €.

PB: Traffic Record!

Yesterday (August 8th 2007) has been the day with the most traffic ever on Prezzi Benzina: 9975 page views.

Prezzi Benzina Traffic - August 2007

Prezzi Benzina Traffic - August 8th, 2007

Pizza a Domicilio, back again into Google index

After only twelve days it seems that buying mister-pizza.it has been useful.
Google is currently indexing Pizza a Domicilio in the first pages again.

This means that it's the perfect time to lower the maximum cpc from 0.03€ to 0.02€ on Google Adwords. Anyway I'll keep the maximum daily budget at 5.00€.

Pizza a Domicilio buys Mister Pizza

One way to increase the Page Rank of a web site is to buy an old website which has a good page rank and it's on sell.
Then by using an HTTP 301 redirect, all the traffic will be forwared to the website you want to rank better. Then, shortly after Google has recognized the change, it will pass the PR of the old website to the new one.

This is why today I bought www.mister-pizza.it. It has a PR of 2 and I payed about 400€. Not really what I call a bargain, but I hope it will be worth it.

At the time of writing the redirecting has just started to work. Let's see how long it will take before we see any change in the page rank.

Pizza a Domicilio, removed again from Google index?

I have no words, it seems that Google is making fun of me.
After two days of traffic (when I wrote "back into Google index"), now there isn't anymore.

But what really makes me upset is the fact that even Google seems not to be aware of this.
Using "Webmaster Tools", section "Query stats" this is the supposed keyword average positioning of the last seven days:

But this is not true. Actually the first occurrence of "Pizza a Domicilio", displaying 100 results per page, is on the last one, the eight. This means that the true positioning is after the 700th.

Taking a train from Padova to Cornuda

The path is the same as the Cornuda-Padova, but this time top speed has been 113 km/h, 11 km/h less than a month ago.
Why? Because Trenitalia decided that since railtracks were too hot, train had to go slower.
If you have Google Earth, here's the kml file

Pizza a Domicilio, back into Google index?

It took almost two months, but after having been penalized by Google, now Pizza a Domicilio is back in the first result page, as you can see from Google Analytics, visits are growing.

on Google.it:

• pizza a domicilio: 8th position
• pizza domicilio: 8th position
  

while on Google.com:

• pizza a domicilio: 2nd position
• pizza domicilio: 13th position
  

To Lignano and back

This weekend I went with my friends to a camping in Lignano. During the travel I used my GPS logger to keep track of all the gas stations. I only had to add two of them:

• 11025 IP, via Lignano Sud, Latisana
• 11026 ESSO, via Lignano Sud, Latisana

To the sea-side and back

This Sunday I went with my friend Nicola to Jesolo and during the travel I took a picture of all of the gas stations. Most of them were already inserted, so I just needed to update their prices, anyway I still had to add three of them:

• 10974 AGIP, SP Treviso Mare, Roncade
  
• 10975 AGIP, via Guglielmo Marconi, Musile di Piave
  
• 10976 ESSO, via Guglielmo Marconi, Musile di Piave

Taking a train from Padova to Bassano

As I've already done from Cornuda to Padova on Taking a train from Cornuda to Padova, I took a GPS log of the railway travel from Padova to Bassano del Grappa. This way you may understand better how the Italian railway works.

This is the speed plot of an old diesel Train, maximum speed 108 km/h. WOW!

If you have Google Earth you may want to plot this kml file at high resolution.

Taking a train from Cornuda to Padova

This is the GPS track log from Cornuda to Padova to by train.

This is the speed plot of an old diesel Train, maximum speed 124 km/h. WOW!

If you have Google Earth you may want to plot this kml file at high resolution.

PAD, let's remove some links

I was reading that Google does not like a website when its link popularity raise to quickly. This make sense, but I could have never thought that Google could actually penalize a website for doing this.
For this reason I've just removed all the link to www.pizza-a-domicilio.it from http://gallery.prezzibenzina.it and from http://poi.prezzibenzina.it.

While doing this I realized that in some sections of the gallery everybody could add comments to the pictures, thus leaving the door open to comment spam bots. In fact after disabling this option, I had to remove over 10 thousand of spam comments (which didn't take long since I have direct access to the database).

Server Crash

And here I am, at the Venice airport, almost ready to flight to the USA and what happens?

Eighteen hours before the flight the server crashes and then trying to fix it, my system administrator changed the IP addresses of all of my domains. He said it would have been transparent. Too bad that Murphy's law doesn't know the meaning of being transparent.

Two things happened. First PAD doesn't use the main DNS, so if there is a change in the IP address, I have to modify them manually. Second, the old IP addresses have been re-assigned to somebody else, so that until the DNS changes propagates, the websites are unreachable.

At the moment only www.pizza-a-domicilio.it changes haven't been propagated. If you try to open it you get the following message:

:19638/webhost/rollout">-->

All the other domains are up and running.

PLM, adding some content

I guess I have been to busy lately, and what happened is that I completely forgot to remove the parking page and to add some content to the site www.prolocomaser.it. So I decided to upload there the panoramic pictures I've taken of the city of Maser.

PAD, mass mailing (partial) result

Now it's time to analyze the results!

Of 3655 emails, 291 bounced back (8.0%), mostly for unknown user and mail-quota exceed.

17 people (4.6%) instead answerd me provinding information about Pizza shop I wasn't aware of, while 11 people (3.0%) replyed with "REMOVE ME" as subject, probably because they weren't interested.

Phplist tracking is saying that the message has been read 2039 times by 1156 people (31.6%)
Anyway only 214 people (5.9%, according to Google Analytics) reached the home page www.pizza-a-domicilio.it so far.

PAD: Mass mailing

I had over 3650 people who signed up to Prezzi Benzina newsletter, so I wanted to take the opportunity to let them know of my new project Pizza a Domicilio.
I downloaded and installed phplist, one of the best open source mailing list tools available around.
One of the best features it has, is the ability to personalize each mail.

PAD, small improvements

Since there arent' so many people helping me in inserting the home-delivery pizza shops in the database, I had to realize some improvements:

• I added also some takeway pizza shops, but the user who wants to see them on the map must express his willing by clicking on a check box.
• the address that the user has entered in the search box is displayed on the map through this icon: .
• the zoom is chosen so that at least three pizza shops are visible at the same time.

For realizing the last feature I've used the GMap API function GLatLngBounds.extend(). Here's a snippet:

var bounds = new GLatLngBounds();
bounds.extend(new GLatLng(41.895466, 12.482323)); // searched address
bounds.extend(new GLatLng(41.882694, 12.520852)); // first pizza shop
bounds.extend(new GLatLng(41.921056, 12.457294)); // second pizza shop
bounds.extend(new GLatLng(41.874163, 12.443047)); // third pizza shop
map.setCenter(bounds.getCenter(), map.getBoundsZoomLevel(bounds));