Started twittering for convert-me.com

Twitter seems best to post unit conversion news. So I created convert-me.com twitter account. Let's see if I'm able to post there regularly.

A year (almost) later

One more year passed. Having children indeed keeps one too busy for regular blogging. I'm not going to give any more promises and not going to say I'm back here. Just being in a mood to write a short post.

Ann and me have recently upgraded our conversion forum to the new version. Now it looks better indeed and has better tools to fight spam. Let's see how this change affects the life of the site.

We've also added a couple of new cooking ingredients to our cooking conversion page. Cooking conversion slowly gained its popularity and now is among the most visited conversions. I believe this is mainly because it's pretty unique and we were the first to implement it.

Back to blogging and fighting spam

Yes, I'm back to blogging today. Started with spam fighting. Got tired early with hundreds of spam comments still there. Why aren't there any way to mark all spam comments and delete them with one click instead of clicking and confirming deletion of every message one by one? Does not anyone else face the same issue with spam? I think Google should implement it.


It's been more than a year since my last post. Lots changed in my life since then. I am now a happy father of two beautiful children - a daughter and a son. I have changed my job moving to Microsoft Russia We've moved to a new apartment.

This year have been pretty hard - I not only quit blogging, I did not have time to support my hobby project Online measurements convertion. Let's see what's going to be next. Hope there will be some spare time back. :)

Listed in Live Search again

In December 2006 our units conversion site was banned and unlisted from Microsoft Live Search (also known as MSN). The reason for being unlisted remained unclear for me. Our site simply silently disappeared from all MSN search results as if there were no such site at all. I tried to contact Microsoft to clarify the issue. Unfortunately I did not get any reply.

That was when I wrote about this problem in my blog. I put a link to my blog from www.convert-me.com and got quite a lot of feedback. I was very much impressed by the support I received. People contacted Microsoft and asked to re-include the site to the index. There was no reply however, so I thought it would not give any results.

However, the miracle happened. Something silently clicked again inside Microsoft and yesterday convert-me.com started to re-appear in their search results. At the time of this writing there are only about 120 pages of our site indexed, but I hope the number of indexed pages is going to increase.

I am sure this re-inclusion would not be possible without help and support of our visitors. I very much appreciate their help!

The first week after vacation

Someone wise once said: "nobody needs rest so badly as the one who just returned from vacation". That's exactly true.

After 5 wonderful days in Prague full of beautiful sightseeing, good time with friends, and of course good meal with Czech beer, coming back to the office is really hard.

The first week in the office was fast and full of small tasks related to things that were missed while I was away. Finally I seemed to get up with everything, so this coming week should be more productive.

The number of daily visitors of Convert-me.Com dropped significantly last week. The site position in Google search results became worse. Looks like I need to investigate what is causing this. Being banned by MSN for unknown (well, unknown for me) reason, then loosing positions with Google is not very optimistic. Hope I'll manage to identify the problem and eliminate it.

Acceleration conversion added

I've just added acceleration conversion to convert-me.com. There are not too many units there, but some of them are pretty interesting. For example, I did not know there was a unit named after Galileo Galilei. I also added to the conversion car performance units: seconds to go from 0 to so many mph.

Let's see if the new conversion will be popular. So far the most popular measurements are weight, volume, length and area.

mithqal unit from Baha'i Faith

A new exotic unit has been added today to weight conversion page. It is called mithqal and it was suggested by our site visitor. The unit is mentioned in Baha'i Faith texts.

I thought this unit deserves inclusion into our conversion page and put it just below Biblical units.

Weight to Volume Conversion

That was probably one of the most popular questions on conversion forum. People wanted to know how to convert grams to milliliters, pounds to gallons, etc. It was pretty hard to explain the simple fact the conversion depends on the substance being converted, particularly on its density.

Now we finally made it. The new conversion page is called "Weight to Volume Conversion" and supports over 400 materials. The densities data was taken from SImetric.co.uk web site with a kind permission of Roger Walker.

Of course it should be noted that density of a particular material can vary greatly depending on its conditions (size of fractions, amount of admixtures, humidity, etc.). Thus weight/volume conversion which is based on an approximate density can only provide approximate results. However I believe it's still better than nothing.

By the way, any suggestion of additional substances for the new weight to volume conversion are more than welcome. Especially if you can provide the corresponding density.

Alphabetical List of Units

The list of units has been in out plans for ages. Finally it's ready and I'm excited about it. The list appeared to be very long, I was a bit surprised.

In fact a long list of units is not a convenient tool at all. We need to make a unit search badly. But having the list is still much better than nothing for those who know the unit and have no idea what kind of measure it belongs to.

Hope the search will be there too some day.

Units Conversion Gadget

I noticed Google gadgets some time ago and immediately thought about creating one for instant units conversion. I even put a note about it to my "to do" list. However at first glance the task seemed to be too difficult so I postponed it until the New Year holidays.

Finally the holidays came and I got enough time to dig into the task. I was surprised to learn that gadget creation was not at all that hard. Well, it took much time actually, but I was ready for something worse.

Finally today the conversion gadget is ready. You can see it in action on this page. This gadget can be added to Google personalized homepage, Google desktop (if you use one) and to any website or blog. Adding the gadget is as simple as clicking the button. For Google homepage and desktop that's all. For your site or blog there is one more step: copying a short code snippet and pasting it into the right place of the web page. Pretty easy, isn't it?

To add the gadget click the appropriate button:

You can read more about this units conversion gadget on www.convert-me.com.

Everyone Respects Christmas and New Year

Do you know what real loneliness is? It is when you open you mailbox and there is nothing there. Not even a SPAM.

I guess convert-me.com should have been filling lonely lately. Not only the number of daily visitors dropped 5 times, but even the spammers ceased their activity on the forum. I was even a bit anxious for them. Fortunately (well, unfortunately), the holidays are over and everything is back. Both the good guys our visitors and the bad guys spammers.

Today I had to spend about an hour cleaning up numerous post with links to adult sites from our conversion forum. There are so many adult sites around. Looks like competition in their industry is very high.

I am now considering an option of prohibiting to include any http links in the posts to any forum user who registered recently (say, less than a week ago). This should make life of spammers harder yet. Unfortunately it'll affect legitimate users too if they want to post a link to some conversion resource. I'm not sure yet whether to implement this restriction or not. Any suggestions are welcome.

Banned by Microsoft for no reason

Live Search by Microsoft (also known as MSN) has banned Convert-me.com. I learned it only when I was browsing the stats and saw the number of site visitors from MSN dropped to zero. Before the ban (e.g. in October 2006) there were up to 1,000 visitors from MSN each day.

I went ahead and checked which pages of convert-me.com were in the MSN search base. There were none. You can check it yourself with a search query "site:www.convert-me.com". The similar query for my blog site "site:sergey.gershtein.net" shows that this one is indexed. So I re-submitted convert-me.com to MSN and then checked the results in a couple of weeks. Still nothing.

That's how I learned the site had been banned. However I still have no clue why. We never sent any SPAM. We never used any illegal search optimization. We never had any illegal content. Why did Microsoft banned us?

Unfortunately all my attempts to contact Microsoft asking to re-include our site to their search results or at least let me know why they banned us were in vain. No results. Not a single reply. They seem to be too big to bother.

If you don't think convert-me.com is illegal and should be banned, you can support us by letting Microsoft know about it. I am not sure it could help, but if you can spend a couple of minutes to fill in Windows Live Feedback form telling Microsoft know what you think I'd truly appreciate it.

Your comments on the issue are very welcome.

P.S. (added later) I am very much excited to receive so many comments from you all, thank you very much for your support! I appreciate it a lot. Even if you help does not remove the ban, I am very happy there are people who like our project and who are ready to help.

News Update. On March 5th, 2007 our site re-appeared in Microsoft Live Search. I am sure this would not be possible without your support. Thank you very much!

Data Transfer Rate Conversion

I managed to get time during last weekend to develop two more conversion pages. The first one was mass flow rate conversion, it completes the flow rate theme. The second one is conversion of data transfer rate.

I have almost forgotten that I once wanted to make data transfer rate conversion. After finishing with the mass flow rate (it took me less time than I expected) I found an old "to do" list in a file and there was it -- data transfer rate. So I went ahead and created that page too, which took me much longer. I had to look for the info in the Internet, search Wikipedia, etc. I hope there are some people out there who need this new conversion page. Well, we'll see.

Looks like convert-me.com is now being developed much faster. That's good. Hope I'll be able to keep it going like this.

Flow rate conversion added

Finally I've found some time to add flow rate conversion page to Convert-Me.com site. Actually there should be at least two conversion pages for flow rate: volumetric and mass. I've started with volumetric, mass flow rate will follow soon.

The biggest problem with this conversion page was the decision which units to include. As for all composite units, there are just too many possible combinations of volume and time units, such as "cubic kilometers per year" or "pints per month". Including all of these would produce a many pages long list with little practical value.

So I decided to only take the most often used units. I'm ready though to include more units to the conversion if anyone asks me to.

How to convert foot to square foot?

This type of question is very typical on units conversion forum. People often ask how to convert linear meters to square meters, cubic yards to square yards, etc.

Related links for instant units conversion:
> length units (inch, meter, etc.)
> area units (acre, square meter, etc.)
> volume units (barrel, cubic meter, etc.)

The thing is linear something, square something and cubic something are three different measures. You can't convert between them simply because they measure different things.

Linear units (foot or meter) measure length or distance. Square units measure area. Cubic units measure capacity or volume.

Let's say you know the distance between two trees in your garden and it is 10 meters. You can't convert that to square meters because there is no such thing as "an area between the two points".

On the other hand, if you have a room that is 5 meters long and 4 meters wide, you can calculate its area. The area will be 5*4 = 20 square meters. But that's not conversion, that's a calculation, since you need to have two different length measurements to make a single area result. Similarly, to get the capacity of the room you will need three separate linear measurement: length, width and height. Knowing only one or two will not be enough. Calculations will be much more complex if your room is not rectangular.

Conversion is always direct: 12 inches always equal to 1 foot regardless of what you measure. Calculation often depends on other conditions and require extra information. A pint of water weighs 1.043 lbs, but it's only true for water. A pint of some other substance may weigh differently. Even a pint of water would not weigh the same if it were not on the Earth surface.

So the conclusion is -- many things can be calculated, but calculations can be complex and always require a lot of extra information. Conversions are simple, but only allow to convert between units that measure exactly the same things.

Are gambling ads bad or acceptable?

I do not like gambling. Do I need to disable gambling ads on my site or not? Let's assume they are completely legal.

Yesterday I received an email from a guy who wanted to place a special gambling page on my site. He wanted to have an article on gambling there with links to gambling sites. I was supposed to host that page on convert-me.com and place links to that page from other pages of the site.

After thinking about it for a while I refused the offer. A gambling page on a site that has nothing to do with gambling will probably harm search engines' rankings. Not to mention that conversion of weights and measures can be considered a good subject for school students, which makes having a gambling article not a good idea at all.

Oops. Pop-unders are partially back

Unfortunately getting rid of all pop-under ads appeared to be too costy. I took time to analyze the revenue loss after disabling the pop-unders and the result was disappointing. The revenue decreases more than twice. That's too much. I have to bring some pop-unders back.

I decided to bring back as little pop-under ads, as possible. They will not appear on the root page of the site and on all conversion pages except weight conversion. The number of pop-under ads is going to be at least 4 times less than before.

Of course, there is still a possibility for every visitor to disable all banner ads completely.

No more annoying pop-ups

Yes, I always knew pop-up windows were annoying. Even if they are pop-unders and not pop-ups (the difference is whether the new windows appears in front or below your current browser). However we've been keeping pop-under ads on convert-me.com for almost two years. There were some complains, but not too much.

Now we finally decided to get rid of these annoying ads. It's already two days as our site is free from pop-unders. Now I'm going to monitor the difference. We're definitely going to lose part of the revenue. The question is how much will we lose. We probably are going to lower number of visitors who come and immediately leave. The question is how many of those will now stay.

The effect will probably be clear in a month. I do hope it will not be extremely negative and we won't need to get pop-unders back again.

U.S. system or Imperial?

Do United States have its own measurement system (U.S. System) or is it Imperial? Imperial system was used in many countries including Great Britain before they switched to metric.

The question arise when we got a complain from Alana from Canada. She insisted the name "U.S. System" was wrong and makes of project look unprofessional. The question was not clear for me, so I went to check Wikipedia. I found the following there:

The Imperial units or the Imperial system is a collection of English units, first defined in the Weights and Measures Act of 1824, later refined (until 1959) and reduced. The units were introduced in the United Kingdom and its colonies, including Commonwealth countries (though most Commonwealth countries are now fully metricated), but excluding the then already independent United States. Systems of Imperial units are sometimes referred to as foot-pound-second, after the base units of length, mass and time.
The distinction between this imperial system and the U.S. customary units (also called standard units there) or older British/English units/systems and newer additions is often not drawn precisely. Most length units are shared among the Imperial and U.S. systems, albeit partially and temporally defined slightly differently.

So in fact it looks like the U.S. System is not quite equal to Imperial. The differences though are not always visible.

We decided to change the title to "British (Imperial) And U.S. System" to show both possible names. Hope it will make it more clear.

Thank you for your feedback, Alana.