Now I'm going to bring it down a notch, and get somewhat serious. A friend of mine asked me the other day how did I go about selecting a web host. In the very early days, before I knew what wordpress was, I hosted SwollenPickles.com with a local hosting company. My first host was found via "word of mouth", and, not knowing anything about hosting at the time, that is all I went on. No research, no shopping around, and clearly I exercised no common sense! I got locked into a 12 month contract and it didn't take me long to figure out I could get a similar, if not better, service and still pay far less.

I finally settled on HostGator, after looking into a few of the higher profile hosting companies. Since I've been with them I've had no problems whatsoever, and there support has been excellent. The shopping around was a bit of a pain in the a$$, and it was a little difficult to compare plans as it was often a case of not being able to compare apples with apples. Since then, I've found out that there are sites, like http://www.webhostingchoice.com that can make the research phase a lot easier. If I'd known that three years ago, I might have saved myself quite a bit of money!

My advice, if you are looking to move from blogger to your own hosted blog, shop around. Don't just take the first hosting deal that comes along, ask questions, and get the opinions of a wide range of people. Hope that helps.

This has been a sponsored post.

Today's pet hate is tossers that walk around with their Bluetooth headset in place, talking on their mobile phones for all the world to hear. Like I really want to hear what someone elses lunch plans are, or how the painter was supposed to turn up at 11am but didn't get there until 4pm.

There should be a new law put into place so that anyone that is talking using a bluetooth headset in public is sentenced to jail time, or being publically stoned with tomatoes.

That's it. Rant over. Resume normal programming.

Firstly, I have one of those old school iPod minis. It a 6GB beast that, in comparison to the Nano's and newer iPods, isn't all that "mini". The thing is, I like it, and it still works a treat, so I can't really justify upgrading it. The only issue I have is that the battery's charge life doesn't seem to be as long as it once was. Today's crappy poll is, what should I do with my iPod situation? Put up with it as it is? Buy a new iPod from Apple? Or acquire an ipod battery (if that's possible in this case)?

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I've decided to go back to my humble beginnings, dredge through the historical Swollen Pickles archives, and take a look at how it all began. I thought I'd take a look at the first five posts published on SwollenPickles.com. A trip down memory lane if you like. Looking back at the first five, I have to say, quality wise, the content was crap. Quantity wise, it was also crap. Then again, perhaps not a lot has changed...

Initially I set up this site just to see if I could actually do it. I wanted to experiment with a website, play around with little bits of code, modify things here and there. I suppose that will go some way to explaining the forgettable first post:

Please be advised that I have cut the red wire. I’m sure I’ll get this working eventually.

I followed up the first post with an artists impression of the Bean Bag Boy:

in his natural habitat he is most comfortable in track suit pants, with his laptop resting on his legs to keep them warm in winter.

Then there was the "serious" album review of the Killswitch Engage album End of Heartache. I don't really post album reviews here any more, I generally stick them over on Digital Burn.

Post number 4 was on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie:

...who wasn’t inspired to strap a washing basket to their back and kick ass with their home made nunchuckas after seeing this movie?

Post number 5 focused on my then obsession with the Channel Nine 'gap filler' program, Shock Docs. It introduced me to terms such as "amputee admirers", "chubby chasers" and "primordial dwarves".

In summary, my first five posts were rubbish, and on that basis I'm a little surprised that Swollen Pickles has lasted so long. Perhaps this is true of most first time "bloggers".

So now I put the challenge to you, what were your first five posts like? What were they about? How have things changed?

Firstly, I need to thank Meg from Dipping into the Blogpond for sticking with her top 100 Australian blogs index. Any time I need an ego boost, I head over to her list to see where Swollen Pickles sits in the list. Currently this blog is sitting at number 20, which I'm more than happy about!

Another blog I work on has also cracked the top 100. Motordude the car news blog is sitting pretty at number 59, which is pretty cool considering it's only a couple of months old. Incidentally, if you're an Aussie male, you may want to check out this story summarising recent research that has found Australian women find ute owners "hot".

Meg has also been quite supportive of Swollen Pickles, and has linked to me on more than one occasion. The last time she gave me a nice write up on the whole Meg White sex tape saga.

So, in summary, thanks Meg!

There have been a couple of other things that have caught my attention in the last week or two, so here's a quick summary.

Andrew Boyd received his first 'troll' comment, so congratulations go out to Andrew!

Andy Beard airs his beef with the Google Monster and presents it far more eloquently than I did!

This one dates back to August, but I only stumbled across it this week... The Wrong Advices highlighted The 20 Most Bizarre Science Experiments Of All Time. A lot of old school Ripley's Believe it or not? style stuff there!

Thomas Sinfield, who has popped into Swollen Pickles before, put a question to his readers, should he spend $100 on buying an ebay affiliate store script? Me, I'm not so sure, if it were my money I'd put it toward an Xbox360 and spend a little time searching SitePoint or something to find out how to create a similar script myself. The concept does sound worthy of investigation though.

In other news, WidgetBucks seems to be performing well for those people that have decided to give it a try. The CPC people are reporting seems to vary a little bit, but I'd suggest that most people seem to average between $0.30-$0.40 per click. I've decided to give a pink ad spot a try on my music site to see how that goes!

That's all for today.

I like totally joined myspace the other day. Awesome. I achieved my first goal within one hour. That was to make Ja'mie from Summer Heights High my friend. I'm so grateful that she accepted me, even though I am fugly and kind of a random (her words, not mine).

I've decided to set a new myspace goal. The goal is to have the highest number of friends that have 'pickles' in their name. I already have one friend called pickles and another called cucumber, so things are going really well. I hope to have an army of pickles in no time at all!

So this is a shot out to all the random pickles on myspace, join me on the super swollen pickles myspace page so that we may take over the world!

This is totally unrelated, but I had this paid link opportunity today, and have no idea what the word means. Does anyone know what gund is?

September looks like it's going to obliterate all swollenpickles.com monthly traffic records. The first 11 days of September have seen 10,235 unique visits, blowing right past the previous record of 8,783 in August 2007. At the current rate, I'll pass the 15,000 unique visits for the month goal within the next few days.

Why the sudden traffic deluge?

Well, I have to put it down the "stumble effect". Based on what I'm seeing via analytics, four of my recent posts have been somewhat stumble worthy, these posts, in order of popularity, are:

• Rollin with Saget: It seems a dirty Bob Saget is a popular Bob Saget.
• Old School Advertising Full of Innuendo: Old ads are almost always funny.
• Turning up the heat on the bandwidth thief: Maybe this one is due to the two Rhinos "do'in" it?
• How I stopped a bandwidth thief: Perhaps this post is genuinely useful for some people?

How long this "stumble effect" lasts remains to be seen. I'd probably expect it to taper off soon. One thing I have noticed is that the influx of stumble traffic has had no positive (or negative) effect on my Adsense earnings. They are currently quite similar to last months figures.

In summary, the stumble traffic is obviously fantastic for boosting visitor count, and by association Alexa rank, but it does not appear that effective in increasing Adsense revenue. Whether my experience here, translates to other blogs, I'm not sure, but I would be interested in hearing from others on this.

In other news, Swollen Pickles has just hit myspace. Currently Tom is my only friend. Wanna be my friend?