New eBookstore and Aussie Hosting

Hands up those of you who knew I wrote sustainable living eBooks?  Not many I reckon, and I believe I know why.

Because it wasn’t very visible on the blog or the web for that matter.  It wasn’t search friendly or easy to find via google either.

Well to fix that, I created a subdomain of this blog called shop.greeningofgavin.com, that looks pretty much the same as this blog except that it is cut down a bit to improve e-commerce functionality.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been busy in the back-end tweaking (not twerking) the site to improve the look and feel and to list the eBooks that I’ve written over the last three years.  The new Shop @ Greening of Gavin is powered by Woocommerce if anyone is interested, which I am now quite proficient in due to working daily on our workshop store.

I have also been researching other environmentally friendly products that I use to see if I can source and ship them potential customers.  I will see how it pans out, but for now you can buy and download the sustainable living eBooks.

Also in the last week I moved all my hosting back to Australia (was in Salt Lake City, Utah) due to a massive DDOS attack that company was having for over 3 weeks.  It was also the main reason I haven’t written much because the site was very unstable and it was difficult to gain admin access or even take a backup.

So now my blog is located in a Data Centre here in Melbourne, Australia, hosted by VentraIP.  We have had a good experience with this IT service with Little Green Workshops for over a year, with about 2 minutes downtime which I think is acceptable.  This is one of the reasons I moved hosts (as well as the DDOS attack).

Another reason was that I could offset my carbon emissions for the electricity consumed by the servers in the Data Centre.  I paid for certified carbon offsets for this blog, Shop @ Greening of Gavin and Little Green Cheese which makes me feel a lot better.  Even though all the power I consume here at home is either Solar or GreenPower which powers all my IT infrastructure here, my old hosting was not so green.  Now it is!

So it’s been all fun and games here on the blog and not a heck of writing getting done.  Now that I have a stable blog, the words will begin to flow.  I’m even thinking about writing a few more eBooks and finish off that gardening one I’ve been threatening to torture you with 😉

Current ideas are simple irrigation and water harvesting, gardening, a second cheese making book volume, composting and worm farming to name a few.

To help get the creative juices flowing, what topics would you like to see me cover in the next series of books.  Let me know via comment and I will add them to my brainstorming list!  Any ideas graciously accepted.

So until I get some more words on the page, checkout my new eBookstore to see what topics I’ve already written about.