I’ve had 2 small projects on my mind for a while now and just never got around to doing anything about them. So today I set aside some time today and did them both.

The first one is a classifieds ads site for the island I live on named Phangan Trader I don’t expect to be doing much with this, I really only really published it so that the domain will start to age.

The second one is something more interesting, it’s a public directory for Thailand and can be found at Thailand Directory and Search and I have no idea what I am going to do with it, I’ve fancied taking a crack at running a directory for a while now though so I’m sure I will work it all out.

I’m still having problems with some of my sites losing PageRank, they used to have one and now they just show ‘no PageRank information available’. It’s getting to be bloody annoying as at least one of the pages has it’s income directly tied to it’s PageRank.

As a last resort I have created sitemaps for them and submitted them to Google, we shall see what happens now. I’m not keen on using sitemaps this way, it just seems to me Google are being lazy and requiring webmasters to feed their spider.

No idea how long it will be until the next PageRank update though, it could be months.

I had forgotten that I had been given an invite to the Joost beta test program, I just remembered today so downloaded it, I thought it might make a decent replacement for TV here on the island.

No such luck though, my dodgy Internet connection isn’t up to it, far too slow, I can’t even leave it buffering and watch it later, Joost doesn’t seem to work that way.

Oh well, no other options for a new connection available here so I’ll have to live without it.

I just got back from my 90 day visa run to Myanmar (Burma to us old folks) a few days ago, it was quite a trip! I took my bike over on the ferry to Surat Thani and then did a 600km round trip to Ranong and back on the crazy Thai roads, pretty scary stuff at times!

On the way I took things easy but it took so long to make the journey that on the way back I pushed the envelope a little, had my baby sports bike cruising at 120kmph wearing just a pair of shorts and a crash hat. The resulting sun and wind burn was a bit nasty, my nose is still peeling much to Nuth’s amusement.

Crossing over to Myanmar was pretty funny, you just hop onto an old river boat and over you go, jump off, get your passport stamped and then back across to Thailand, I don’t suppose I spent more than 30 minutes out of the country!

The mountain road out of Ranong heading east is stunning though, on the way back I rode this road at midday, really cool thing to do, no traffic just long sweeping banked turns and stunning scenery, definitely the highlight of the entire trip.

My little bike is amazing, it may only be small but it has a huge heart and at 100kmph on this road it has the whole sports bike thing going on, amazingly good fun.

I also got to witness a pair of Thai frigates chasing a fishing boat on the way across to Surat Thani, this was pretty exciting to see but I lost sight of them before they caught it.