July 23, 2020

New age

My wife got up before me and made coffee in the coffee pot. After a while I got out of bed too, I washed my face and did other activities in the bathroom, after which I sat on the balcony. Some might even call it a terrace: 2 meters deep and 4 meters wide. It is a beautiful and large space. I'm on the seventeenth floor, the top floor, and I have a spectacular view, like from some roof-top bar in the center of the city. This is our new apartment I moved to about month ago. It’s not in the center, but in outskirts of the city. The dimensions are the same as in the old apartment; about 80 square meters. The old apartment had its advantages and disadvantages compared to this new one. The most important advantage is this balcony and the view. In the old apartment I had neither. I drank my coffee, got dressed and headed for the office. Just about half an hour by walking. This is another big advantage. I lived outside the city and it took me about an hour to get to the office: 10 minutes on foot to the train station, half an hour on the suburban train, a subway change and another 10 minutes of travel, and finally 5 minutes on foot to reach the office. An hour to get to the office and an hour to go home. The reason is simple: now, I have an hour of extra free time a day.

We are in early summer and it is quite warm outside: in the apartment I have air conditioner. So my walk to work is conditioned by the search for shade along the way I do every day. While I'm on the move, my brain works better, so in half an hour on foot I think about what I will have to do in the office, what are the plans for other days and sometimes even some reflection on politics or sports comes to my mind. Today the memories of the past days were spinning in my head; the main activity was related to the moving house itself. During that time, I bought a new apartment and sold the old one. In fact, everything had already been organized and agreed before, but it was necessary to sign contracts, pay for the purchased apartment and collect the money for what was sold. A lot of administration and bureaucracy. I had to pay two real estate agencies, the purchase tax and the notary also asked for his fee. It seemed to me that I was only filling checks and transferring money from my bank account to the accounts of other persons. Then came the physical part of the job. I had to prepare the boxes with the things to move, find someone who will move them and finally put everything in the new apartment. Since we purchased a practically furnished apartment, apart from the living room, we hardly purchased any furniture, which greatly solved the already difficult situation. In the end, everything went rather well and I am satisfied with my wife's choice. It's all his fault. It would never have occurred to me to change the house.

Sunrise from my balcony


During all this time, the webmaster's work was practically suspended, remained in a latent state. I often thought, with a certain sense of guilt, that this period of non-work was too long and that I should have done something, but I could not convince myself to start. The limited free time I could devote to work, at the end, I didn't use. The days were always full of various events and in the evening I was too tired. The most important activity I could manage was watching television. Often I simply looked at the screen without really realizing what I am seeing. For the first two weeks after I moved, I was without Internet connection, so this further affected my inactivity. The people say there is no life without WIFI.

A week ago, I finally had the connection; a real fiber. Before I had a normal ADSL. I finally woke up and started taking care of my web business. The biggest works in the apartment have been completed, so I managed to relax and started to analyze what had to be done online. First I checked how I was positioned on the search engines. I usually do this check once a month, so I can easily compare it to my previous condition and see if things get worse or better. I have been stagnant for many months. What worries me even more is that for some keywords in the placement, the main index page is not listed, but some internal pages that don't have much to do with the topic itself. In addition, I have noticed that many of my sites have been copied by other webmasters, especially the home pages.

After a long reflection, I made a plan and went into action. I concentrated on the initial pages. I completely rewrote some of them, completely changing the text. In other cases I changed some paragraphs and the simplest job was to update the remaining ones. Sometimes I just added a new paragraph to the bottom of the page, or I inserted it somewhere in the middle. So I saved myself many hours of work and such a diversified job will allow me to see what is the right path to follow in the future. I need to see some progress to get momentum for further work. Today I saw that the home page of a site dedicated to Forex is no longer present in Google's cache, but I am confident that it is an intermediate step and that it will return in a few days.