The ticket to Goa from Chennai booked on yatra.com failed 2 days ago. and I had been constantly fighting with them for the past 2 days, and had got no straight answer, but thanks to ICICI Bank’s customer support that help me get the funds reversed.

Fed up with the after sale support of Yatra.com, I had called ICICI bank again yesterday, and told them the details and said that I wanted to raise a dispute against the Charge. They said that though it was not a credit card where disputes can be raised against charges, they could communicate with Yatra and get the money refunded in 24 hours.

And they did, Today afternoon, the money was reversed to my account. Thanks to ICICI bank.

About an hour ago, I went to a Travel Agent in Pondicherry, called Bonjour Bonheur Forex Pvt Ltd, a flashy looking travel office, and got my tickets booked on the same flights that I had chosen at yatra, and saved about Rs 300 as well.

I guess I will not be booking any more tickets online, and these people here have promised me to book tickets over phone, get it delivered, and collect cash at home or at my office. Why would I need yatra or any ohter site any more?

What are you looking at? A forum, a blog? Or a business website with dynamic content? You have pre defined software for all of these, and you could do without a designer.

For an induvidual, a blog is the best website that he could have. I have got ravisblog.com and ravi.ms(where I dont write at all, I use it pruely for email) and a few other blogs. I write a lot of bullshit, and all those writings go on these blogs. Webaholics.co.in is one of them. Well, there are places where you get free hosted forums, blogs and joomla sites, where you could get your site hosted for free, and just get a domain and point it there. Thats the easy way of doing it. But you have no control of the blog that you have with them, and if they for any reason which they dont normally disclose block your blog, all your work is wasted. So, I always recommend that you host them somewhere, where you have full control over your files, and can do any customizations and modifications that you need.

Get a web hosting with cpanel. Dont go for any high end hosting plans like the ones offered by hostgator, you could do better with them only if you have numerous blogs to host, that consume a lot of resources. You could go for some small 5 or 10 gb plans that supports a good number of add on domains, and can host your domains in there, which comes with a cpanel with fantastico, from which you can install anything you need for a website. A blog, a forum, other content management systems, and a whole array of other software which you can enjoy playing with.

And, it is alway sbetter to have everything on your own domain name and on your own web host that is different from the IPs of the free providers for better search engine rankings.

I have been chasing free web articles these days that I can post on my multi user blogs, and make sure that they dont look like splogs. Splogging or Spam Blogging is an activity when you use someone else’s RSS feed to fill up your blog without really working on it, and in exchange, to make the original owner of the article happy, you just give him a link back. But that is always troublesome. Google can always spank you for doing that. The best way to do this is by getting your articles from a good free articles website.

People can submit articles in these websites with their links and get link backs, and when bloggers posts these articles, naturlly the number of links for anyone who submits a quality article increases.

Checkout howto.fm, that provides various articles in different subjects that people can use. The categories are also wide that writers who wish to have link backs can post their articles easily. I was searching the website for Linux Red Hat The Secure Shell SSH and a lot of other pages, and I must say that this site has a big pile of good quality contents.

If you ever had Thoughts&Things about making money from adsense or adbrite is that easy, it is not. Welcome to the bitter truth. You will be paid a few cents for every click and a cent for every thousand impressions. You can expect to make a dollar a day if you have about a hundred thousand page views per day, and if a 100 of them click you should make about 10 dollars. So there is no legitimate way of making money from these means, unless you force your visitors to click on the links

For example, you could run a blog, and just below the title , you could place an ad unit which would naturally show relevant text ads to the title, and if you make sure that you blend the unit into your template, they will all look like links on your post, and if people click on that, you willd make money, and when they leave, it would show up as bounce rates in your urchin or google analytics account. And if the site to which you redirect your readers to appear more good, they will subscribe to their rss, and you will loose your visitors.

So how to direct traffic to your site. You can do it the nidokidos way. Build up a huge mailing list, fill the tops and bottoms of the mails with subscribe links to the group, and fill it with images that link to your website, and watermark all images with your domain name, and when you send out just one mail, it will reach hundreds of thousands of people, and a few thousands of those people will forward those mails to people in their own mailing list, and the mails will keep on moving around, and every time a visitor clicks on that image, he will be taken to your site, or even if he doesnt manage to click, he will see the link on the image and try to visit the site. That way you will get a lot of visitors, and even if they dont click on the ads of your site, you will get paid for the impressions.

How to manage the traffic? Well, get a woodcrest server that will be able to handle the database load and manage the traffic without any effort and make sure that the site doesnt go down or beocme slow so that the users get the best out of it, and you make the most money out of it.