Kerith is an old volcano crater that has formed almost fully circular lake. You can easily walk around the crater and also reach the water at one end.
The place is near the road from Selfoss to Gulfoss, just follow the tourist buses, if coming by car. It’s best to get a decent map or guidebook, as Icelandic roads do not have that much of signs. Kerith is also part of some Golder Tour tours, check with the companies.
I made a couple of minor changes in the header yesterday. After I had added a new photo gallery, I wanted to have it on a prominent display. But the link space was constrained with the header image captions on the right. After spending a couple of hours with Photoshop, I finally was able to put the captions on the images without sacrificing readability.
Photos link is added. Do check the images out. I still have space to expand my offerings. Stay tuned.
The place looks like a Thai restaurant outside, but you are surprised as you enter to a crummy bar. Don’t be afraid, food is served and the tables are secluded from the bar.
The food is good, prices are reasonable and the service is quite fast, but quite impersonal. The only problem is the smoke, everybody seems to be smoking in the bar — some also when eating. It kills some of the taste, but not all.
Thai curries are usually an excellent choice in any Thai restaurant. Be careful with the spicyness.
Main courses €8-15.
Laugavegur 105 (in corner of Snorrabraut), Reykjavik
I just finalised deploying, configuring and editing a new phot gallery to this site. The old gallery was based on the look’n'feel of www.kallio.la — my personal site — and it was (and still is in kallio.la) a pain to add new images.
The new gallery is based on a product catalogue code that I’ve written about two years ago and it is designed very easy to use. I’ve linked it with the rest of the site toolbox and most of the editing can now be done with browser.
Do check out the gallery at www.nomadig.com/photos. Currently there are no new photos, but at least now I don’t have any excuses (except lazyness) to put them there. I may even comment some photos (any century now).
Most of bloggers that are hosting their blogs themselves, are trying to scrape some income from the net to cover the hosting and other costs. I’m not an exception. In fact, my dream (or fantasy) is that Nomadig.com would provide enough money and contacts that I could concentrate fully on being a digital nomad…
With the current ad rates, it will take ages. Maybe my grand-grand-grand-children would have some possibilities with the current set of growth.
When I started to ponder this, backed with the data in my ShortStat stats, I found out that 20-25% of visitors check the journal front page, 5% see the site front page (no ads) and additional 5% reads the blog with RSS (no ads). Some of the most frequently visited articles generate additional 3-4% each and the rest is scattered with the information pages (travel, gadgets, money).
So the blog generates roughly more than half of the traffic. No wonder, as it’s updated frequently and it seems to contain some interesting articles. But, I think that the people reading the blog, people returning to the site, do not click that much of the ads. My eye, for example, has trained itself to skip Google ads in other blogs that I read frequently. It’s safe to assume that other people active in the blogosphere have similar habits. Also the contents of the blog change so rapidly that Google is not able to match it with ads that fit the text. The content is quite mixed, too, so you can’t really have a good set of targeted ads.
But those people that find this site, especially the pages outside the blog, with Google or other search engines are more prone to click the ads, as the ads are targeted to the content of the page. The same applies, at least partially, to individual blog entries.
In order to get more money from AdSense, I need to get more visibility in search engines. Not by spamming my links everywhere, but by writing interesting content and getting people to refer to my site.
38 Threp is an exclusive shoes, clothes and accessories shop in Laugavegur, the main shopping street of Reykjavik.
The selection boasts both international and Icelandic brands. The shoes are really nice and the prices are still decent enough, at least from Finnish point of view.
The service is also exemplery, not too pushy but still responsive.
www.38threp.is, Laugavegur 49, Reykjavik, +354 561 5813, matt@islandia.is
Blue Lagoon is an epitome of Iceland: middle of nowhere, cold air, hot water and nice overall service.
The lagoon is a nature formation that has been improved a little by people. The water is really warm, some would say that it’s hot – and the temperature changes suddenly in the lagoon. The place is relaxing, but do come with company as it may be too dull just to float there all alone.
There is good changing facilities and you can rent everything you need for a dip. Conditioner is provided free of charge, you really need it for avoiding having a bad hair day.
The cafe is surprisingly inexpensive and the restaurant looked decent. All in all, very relaxing experience.
It takes about 40 minutes from Reykjavik and 20 minutes from Keflavik airport to reach Blue Lagoon. Several companies provide different excursions that include dip in Blue Lagoon. Another alternative is to rent a car.
www.bluelagoon.com, Grindavík, +354 420 8800, bluelagoon@bluelagoon.com
Ever wondered how speedy is your ShortStat stats page? Me too.
I decided to do something, as I had severe doubts that the ShortStat stats page is not implemented very optimally. With clocking, I could verify my doubts — it’s slow.
To measure yourself, follow these simple instructions:
$fs_ts = explode(' ', microtime());
<?php
$fs_ts2 = explode(' ', microtime());
$fs_sec = ($fs_ts2[1] - $fs_ts[1]) * 1000 +
intval(substr($fs_ts2[0], 2, 3)) -
intval(substr($fs_ts[0], 2, 3));
echo '<!-- Page generation: ', $fs_sec, ' ms -->';
?>
If you’d prefer to have this information on the page, place the second snippet inside body tag and add some HTML elements to show it nicely.