Please Check my Config for XMR

Have you tried using XMRminer here as well to see whether that helps increase your hashrate?

As for ports, looks like a typo in the documentation, but it's fine to use any of the ports, vardiff will auto adjust up or down to a difficulty level relevant for your hardware.

XMR has quite a high difficulty to mine nowadays, so smaller pools like this one can take over a month to find blocks (last one was found 11th November here).  So you really need to be in it for the long haul.

Thanks Ben, I'll give XMRminer a try later. Happy to be in for the long haul - I have seen the blocks/payment history.

Do you know of a simple man's guide to how mining works? I see blocks, hashes, difficulty etc, but I don't really understand.

Google is your best friend really, there is no way around it. But to really simplify things

blocks = make up the block chain, each block consists of transactions on the network, blocks are added to the blockchain by miners when they find a block

reward = is the coin miners get as a reward for finding / adding a block to the blockchain

hash = consider this as your mining speed, the higher your hash the more computing power you use to solve crypto puzzles that are required for finding a block

difficulty = this is the difficulty of the cryptopuzzle, the higher the difficulty the more hash power is needed to solve it. There is also variable difficulty for us on a pool like this, where we are given only parts of the puzzle to solve depending on our hash power. The lower the hashpower, the easier the parts of the entire puzzle are given to us by the pool to solve. The reward you eventually get is then relative to the difficulty of the shares (pieces of the puzzle) you solved.