a blog of Taras Filatov

Taras: - The birds shit all over my car here in Wales.
Johan: - It is a sign. You’ll get a lot of money.
Taras: - Yeah, it is a good sign. Maybe I should keep this shit.

it’s winter in Kharkov:

Our company DesignForWeb is happy to announce the internet promotion and SEO pack created for businesses who are keen to get a targeted flow of buying visitors from search engines.

Meanwhile I congratulate all webmasters with another Google PR update. For me this means an increase in monthly income so this is good news.

Last Saturday I’ve been to Belgorod, which is a city quite close to Kharkov (2 hours drive), the only thing it is in Russia. We’ve been visiting my friend with whom we have studied in Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics.

Belgorod is quite an interesting city, it’s quite small as for me, I’ve associated it with Southampton, but it is growing and the roads and city lights are in perfect order compared with my city Kharkov, where the situation with this stuff is very bad.

I think that Kharkiv - Belgorod is a very prospective region from the economic point of view due to the geographical situation of these cities placing them in a trade route between Russia and Europe (through Ukraine). There are also plans (and $1.5bn investments) to build an international airport in two years between our cities. It is therefore would be a good investment to buy property within both cities’ limits and also along the motorway (which is also a route to Moscow and from Russia to Crimea).

At the photo: nice toilets in Belgorod (good idea with the head suspender :))

We’ve been fishing last Saturday with my friend Roman. It’s third time we went fishing with the spinning and first time outside the city. I was lucky enough to catch a small pike!

This is my proud spinning rod, “Ugly stick”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCHo0ar_2mE

a brilliant motivational speech by Steve Jobs

Stanford, 2005 (sent by Vladimir)

There are people who register domain names similar in some way to existent domains or well known brand in order to get traffic from users who type the URL with a mistake

I’m happy to announce one of my websites had become well known as such a traffic interceptor has been created for it

People here http://www.idnforums.com/forums/552-looking-for-russian-idn-with-traffic.html discuss that услуги.net brings a lot of hits every day and it’s probably because of typos of the people targeting www.uslugi.net which is my Ukrainian business directory (uslugi means “services” in Russian). Indeed some people try to type the URL in Russian which results in taking them to some crazy URL (xn--c1akhxjc.net in my case). Some witty dudes take advantage of it. I think the same thing applies in every country with non-Latin alphabet. I’m personally not fond of cybersquatting despite this can bring some real money.

BTW I plan to issue an English version for this business directory so that people from other countries can find info about companies in Ukrainian market. Hope to be able to add automated translation into English for all ads however this promises to be non-trivial task as Google haven’t issued any official API for its translator service yet.

I meet friends who show me their new offices, how they have developed while I’ve been doing PhD in UK. However when I ask them who do you work with, they tell me - this guy who worked with you earlier does this for us, and that guy you had given us the contact does that. Either our world is a small village or I’m very good in finding proper people for certain IT jobs.

I’m very unsatisfied with the speed of my thinking over last couple of years. The only solution I have to make my brain work as it used to is sport. I really believe in saying “the healthy mind lives in a healthy body”. I’m therefore going to take in sports quite seriously and see if it works for me.

The other thing I want to deal with is my inability to be active the whole day and switch off during the night. It’s really annoying. Mostly caused by two years of office slavery, I suppose. The solution I have for this is to make every day action packed. My Nokia N95 to do list should be always full and I’m going to try and do more work and stuff every day. I feel it is mine, having to deal with, say, 7 projects simultaneously. This is a way it should be.

I have arrived to Ukraine yesterday and to my home town Kharkov today to find it was a right decision to go to Ukraine The food is fantastically tasty and cheap; a lot of beautiful girls on the streets; the political life is exciting - the video of our idiotic city mayor had reached top10 in the world yesterday on youTube. There are elections tomorrow (oops, today) by the way and I’m going to go and vote in the morning. Moreover, my mother makes home-made absinthe with marijuana. Nice.

Don’t feel much like drinking or partying, will probably start working from Monday. It’s great to be free anyway.

BTW I’m looking for e-commerce, web design, programming and SEO projects preferably of medium/big size, we can deal with anything, please give me a shout if you know someone.