How to Find Free Death Records

Did you know...

Many states provide you with death records for FREE online via indexes and archives? For example, Vermont indexes all their death records that are more than 5 years old - entirely online!

I didn't know any of this stuff, and when I was doing my own genealogy and ancestry research I paid a pretty penny to learn about my heritage. Check out www.findfreedeathrecords.com to learn about the nuances before you decide to pay for any death certificates. Even if your state isn't one of those with a free archive, chances are you can get certificates from the state for much less than what the online sites are offering.

Cheers!

Browser Compatibility, Printablefakecash v2.1 Up!

Just relaunched a new version of printablefakecash, with some tweaks to the banner ads. No more banners in the middle of the page, I think, so yay!

Now if I could only figure out the format for this blog. For whatever reason, whenever I make a post with an image, I can't make indents or spacing between paragraphs. No, I don't intend on writing huge run-on posts, but I've yet to figure out a workaround. Pretty annoying. I'll get there one day.

For now, the site shows up on the third page of Google's search results for "Printable Fake Money." Dang. Hopefully I can find ways to make it crawl toward the top, but then again maybe not. I'm still getting decent hits from the eHow article, for now.

Now to work on phase II for the site: subscription-based content.

Last day of July! eHow earnings will most likely topple $80 today!

Justhost Review

Our apartment just got a lot furrier! On Saturday, we adopted a 5 year old domestic short-hair cat named Alex, and, as you can see, he's already making himself right at home.

Printablefakecash has brought in $1.74 since it's launch last Thursday. Today and yesterday brought in exactly $0.00, so

I'll average it out to $1.75/wk, or $84.00/year if I can manage to maintain any sort of stability. The hosting & domain alone cost $56.00/year at Justhost.com. Even if just I break even, I'll call it a win as an incredibly valuable learning experience.

Justhost is an ok hosting and domain service. I have a hard time fully endorsing them as their checkout process seemed intentionally confusing and misleading. They throw a lot of small money figures at you, $3.99/month for this and $0.50/month for that, but what they purposely don't say is that you'll be charged for a full two years of service. Suddenly what I expected to be a small credit card bill turned into a sizeable chunk.

I've tried Godaddy before and, quite simply, they're not as cheap. Justhost offers domain & hosting, with unlimited bandwidth for somewhere around $5/month. I didn't find a service that offered a more competitive rate, so in the end I went with them.

I haven't had to use their customer support, or anything like that yet, so it'd be hard to give them a full review. But so far they've provided exactly what I expected for a decent rate.

My July wrapup is coming up in the next couple of days, so stay tuned!

Fruits of Labour

Printablefakecash made $0.64 on it's first day of launch! That's a great sign, considering it's somewhat embarassingly amateur state right now.

I noticed some of the Adsense banners were displaying right, flat in the middle of the page. This was on a Mac using an old version of Safari, so hopefully it's limited to that. If anyone's reading this, would you kindly check out the site and tell me if it looks like it's formatted correctly on your computer?

Adsense is a weird beast, very hard to understand so far. I have been hashing out a few things, but I am far, far from understanding it. As far as I can tell, you have *no* control over where Google parks the ads on your site, all you control are the sizes of the ads. Weird...right?

I'm probably just doing something wrong. Also, my website shows up as "enter company name here" when I do a search for it. Uhh...? That may have been a first draft I uploaded days ago, but why hasn't the Google crawler updated my snippet? Errg.

PrintableFakeCash is Live!

Yesterday, a hobbled, disfigured website emerged from my labors. Today, he stands proud and complete! Okay, not exactly bursting at the seams with content, but nevertheless, http://www.printablefakecash.com/ is now somewhat justified to have that domain name.

I spent a bit today working on content to upload to it. That was ... not easy. Abiding by all laws regulating the reproduction of bank notes, I spent a lot of time distorting the dollar bills, watermarking them, and formatting them into easy-to-cut worksheets (obviously destroying all originals at the end). The end product looks simple, the work was anything but.

Still, now I have enough content to justify linking the eHow article to the website. What's that really mean? Well, no more shunting out my hard-earned traffickers to fill the lines of somebody else's pockets. Instead, they will *hopefully* be directed toward content that I own 100%. Now, I've done all the meta tags, keywords, and SEO optimizing that a man can do without reading a book on it. The next big challenge will be trying to get my poor little website to crawl up the food chain in Google's search results.

That...might be the most complicated part of all. Maybe time to hit the library...