Store of the Day Index

I created an index to the store of the day program. I created the Store of the Day as an effort to fund open community calendars (eg, Salt Lake or Denver Color).

Rather than putting a ton of ads on the calendar, I can have automatic links to the Store of the Day. A store of the day feature also lets me have an active rss feed for the directory.

This system does not give me enough money to hire a minimum wage clerk to maintain a calendar, but it pays for hosting. Lets see, there's currently 469 stores in the Store of the Day rotation. The system shows 324,567 page views on this feature since 2004.

At current ad rates, one is lucky to make a dollar per thousand page views. Since these are ultra targetted ads, I am probably making $5 per thousand page views.

An extra index for the feed might increase the traffic.

Sadly, this is the closest I've come to creating a working profit center for a web site.

Photos from America's Past

The Denver Post has a delightful selection of photos from 1939-1949

Crocs with No Socks

Trying to reduce my carbon footprint, I've taken to wearing Crocs with no socks.

The nice thing about Crocs shoes is that they are waterproof and washable. I wash my Crocs in the garden with a hose.

This saves the wear and tear and socks and reduces the number of washing loads by a tiny fraction.

The down side to washing Crocs in the native plant garden is that the Pussytoes now have a wicked case of athletes' foot.

Crocs are made in Boulder. The only real complaint with Crocs is that they don't have wide shoes, so I bought a size too large.

Crocs currently has a stackable coupon: Take 10% off at Crocs.com with code CROSLITE10 now thru end of day Wednesday and nonstackable: Take 20% off at Crocs.com with code SUMMERLUV20 now thru end of day Wednesday.

Twitter Users

NOTE to Twitter users: If you would like a link in the Community Color directories, but don't want the hassle of joining the site, simply follow either of the accounts CommunityColor or yintercept. If there is a relevant website in your profile, I will follow it.

As for the accounts: CommunityColor has updates to the CommunityColor program. yintercept is filled with philosophical musings and Libertarian style rants about national and international politics.

I am only interested in listing local sites:

The goal of Community Color directories is to help promote local web development. These directories are interested in sites from the Mountain West (Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Missoula, Mt)

When a person joins me, I look at their location. If they are from one of the communities served, I then add the link in their profile. I also add links from any of the sites recent posts ... if they are of interest to the community.

Note: I also follow my Twitter DMs. So you can DM me a link. If it is related to the communities served, I will list the site.

If you want a link in the directory, but don't want the hassles of joining the site, just follow me ... yintercept.

Fire Suppression Mishap

My webhost shows the following message:

On Saturday, February 20 2010, at approximately 2:20 p.m. MST during an annual fire system inspection of our data center the fire suppression system was inadvertently triggered and discharged into the data center environment. The discharge of the fire system has affected the hardware and operations of our servers. Not all servers have been affected by the discharge. We are working to restore servers and services as quickly as possible. Due to the nature of this interruption we will be experiencing extended outages.

The Community Color web sites were sparodic during the weekend and went completely dead Sunday night. Hopefully, they will come back to life soon.

IRS Fraud Site

Hmmm, this is odd. While updating my list of tax related web sites, I stumbled on a site called "irs-fraud.com" which invites people to blow the whistle on tax cheats.

Domain Tools tells me that the site is located in the Antigua Tower in Panama, Panama.

That a tax-fraud reporting site is located in an internaional tax haven is itself quite telling.

You can report tax fraud simply by filling out an IRS form. The IRS site says you need to ship the form to Fresno, Ca.

Hmmm, Fresno is about as bad as any third world nation when it comes to online fraud. I decided not to list this site.

I've actually come across quite a few tax related sites with no address and that use a proxy server to protect the site's owners. I would never give my identity to such a site.

Poster Stores

My Stats show the community color web sites pulled in twelve hundred bucks in the fourth quarter of 09. It is up from the previous year. The sites make about the tenth of what I would need to make one minimum wage job.

I did a great deal of work during the year replacing failing online merchants with new merchants.

I decided to concentrate on merchants offering widgets. A widget is a program that updates automatically with current inventory.

For example, I've been working on All Posters stores. I like the AllPosters.com program because the widgets add some content (pictures) with the possibility of making revenue. The Poster Store for Moab shows images of arches ... a visually pleasing subject.

The revenue has been scant. I've earned $15.00 for 1000 clickthrus so far. It takes about 100,000 page views to get 1000 clicks. So far, I've yet to find a niche on the Internet that is not marginal.