Saturday, December 31, 2011

Twitter 10K

My yintercept account on twitter is just 99 followers shy of the elusive 10K barrier.

When I started twitter, social media afficiandos called those with 10K plus followers a "whale."

Twitter Counter says my site ranks #39,413. That number is low because they don't update every account every day.  My guess is that there's 50,000 or more twitter users who've broken 10K.

My guess is that 100K is the new whale and I am years away from that.

BTW: I probably would have a higher count, but I am a free market radical and have a tendency to say things that are politically incorrect things ... like freedom is a good thing. Insurance is a bad thing.

Anyway, I think it would be fun to break the 10K barrier on New Years Day. Hopefully 2012 will be the year that America wakes up and restores the freedom that our nation's founder fought to establish.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

A Thousand New Links

Arizona Color just passed its first milestone ... a thousand links. My goal is to get that number up to 5000 by the Centennial.

Speaking of the Centennial, I have a business opportunity for a person or group who is interested in living an active lifestyle in Arizona.  Here is my contact form.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

A Thousand Failed Dreams

Maintaining a links page is a pain ... which is why most links lists have so many broken links.

My goal was to check each link every other year. I hope this will keep the broken links below 5%.

To do this, I placed a "check date" and have a report that lists sites by check date. If the site is still there when I check it, I bump the date. The hard part is that I have to check an eighth of the sites each quarter.

The Link Report shows how many links I add and delete each quarter. I fell a bit behind. To catch up, I checked some four thousand links this month and deleted 1000 of them. I fixed a few hundred others.

The grand total says I've deleted 8,326 links. There are 22,625 links in the directory with a grand total of 30,951. So, about 27% of the links I've added to the directory have gone dark through the years. 37% of the links added before 2007 have gone blank.

I've noticed that when I go to web sites, I usually find that from 20 to 40 percent of their links have gone bad.

In the Community Color project, i am linking to web sites for towns in the Mountain West. In my link deleting fury I discovered that government owned web sites rarely go blank. There have been a few that moved to a different URL. Big brand names and big corporations rarely go blank.

Almost all of the attrition was small businesses, family owned stores, family farms, artists, bands, nature photographers and privately owned creative efforts.

All of the little small mom-and-pop web sites that I was rooting for are failing.

The web is all about linking. If no-one links to small mom-and-pop web sites, then they will go away. The reason I built community color was of a hope that I could encourage people to link their sites together so more small web businesses could succeed.

Pulling 1000 web sites from the directory means that 1000 dreams failed and it is sad.

Arizona Centennial

Arizona will celebrate it's centennial on February 14, 2012.

I don't suppose there is any active "free marketeer" in the state who wants to do something fun for the event?

I said "free marketeer" because the activity is designed to discuss the difference between a free society and socialized one. The event costs very little and has the potential to make some money.

If there is such a person or group, they could contact me. I have a fun, fair-style activity that I've been wanting to try out ... but it takes more than one person to pull of.

If you contact me, please tell me your location in Arizona and the type of recreation activities that you like. For example, you might say: "I am from Tombstone. I like slingin' guns, rustlin' up cattle, mountain bikin', photography, etc."

Monday, December 12, 2011

Link Clean Up

The link clean up project is moving along slowly. The Community Color Link Report says that I've added 1381 links this quarter and deleted 766. On Dec 2, I was at 1200 additions and 600 deletions. So, I've added 181 links and deleted 166 in the last 9 days.

The process takes a long time. After finding a broken link, I check the whois info then do a google search to see if they moved to a different domain. I've fixed about 30 such domains.

While deleting links, I also add new links and events.

I was hoping that this clean up effort might help revive my affiliate income for the holiday season.

Sadly, I was wrong. Commission Junction says I only made $6.00 on 534 hits this month. Last month I made $7.08 on 1,542 hits. I was counting on making $200 or more in this period.

In my other accounts, someone purchased a sample of EvoraPlus. EvoraPlus makes a probiotic tooth care product that replaces the bacteria that eat enamel with teeth friendly bacteria. In contrast most tooth care products try to kill everything in one's mouth, but fail because bacteria grows quickly, eating the enamel as it grows.

My other big sale came from Vann's in Missoula.

Anyway, the online shopping season is wrapping up this week. It looks like I am on track to making $800 for the quarter. Because of the web site crash, I made only $600 in Q3. I was counting on $1000.

For a community site to work, I need to have interactive features. But, I can't think of any that wouldn't be full of spam and require constant monitoring for hate speech.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Removed Last Interactive Feature

The Community Color sites used to have several interactive features such as a forum interactive maps, ratings buttons, etc.

Every interactive feature became a target of spammers or by really nasty people who swore a lot and said terrible things about others.

So, I systematically turned off each interactive feature of the sites.

I had left the rating button on the site to test different ways of filtering out the spam. In truth, I really didn't want to have a 100% capitulation to spammers.

Keeping the rate button also reminded me that it is impossible to have an interative feature on a site without getting overloaded by disinformation and spam.

Anyway, I finally decided that it is not worth it, and am sad to announce that I turned off the last interactive feature on the sites.

Often I wish I could have a forum or an interactive feature. I can't think of any that would not automatically be abused.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Colorado Giving Day

Readers of my blog have probably figured out that I am not keen on big government, or big business. I prefer small limited government and small business where people matter to big biz.

Likewise, I am not all that  keen on big religion that seeks power and prefer to small charity to big charity.

If you've been anywhere near a Colorado based web site or media, you know that today is Colorado Giving Day. This is a day when secular charities in Colorado aggressively market their products.

I've been going through givingfirst.org to make sure the charities are listed in the Colorado Color collection of web sites. GivingFirst does not make link harvesting easy. I have to go to the individual charity pages and click on the link.

What is really cool, is that they list the financials for the charities. The financials of these charities are better than most of the "for-profit" businesses I've worked for.

Most of the sites are excessively slick and slap the visitor silly with "Colorado Giving Day" ads.

It is frightening how aggressive charities are when it comes to begging for cash.

Any, half way through the link harvest, I am starting to have a severe allergic reaction to big charity.

I hate the name "giving first." The idea is that is that you should give to charity bedore you consider yourself or your family. If we had smaller business, smaller government and smaller charity, there would be less need in our society.

The fact that Giving First only lists secular charities also irks me. Secular charity is only a tiny segment of the giving community.

I like my Community Color directories. The goal of this project is to list the web sites from all segments of the society. It has the secular charities, churches, local blogs, merchants, affiliate sites. I think I am doing a better job showing the diversity of American communities.

Perhaps I am guilty of putting business first ... but, without businesses that actually produce for society, there wouldn't be any wealth in our society for secular charities to covet.

Friday, December 02, 2011

Fixing Links Consumes Time

I spent the better part of the day manually fixing links. i just ran the link report. The link added went up 29 to 1200 and the link delete figure went up 62 to 500. The event count went up 30 links to 2214.

Even with a fast connection, fixing links is a long, dull activity.

Web Site Failure Statistics

Did I mention that I have temporary access to a fast internet connection?

One thing I want to do with this opportunity is to clean up all of the broken links in the directory. Cleaning links is a real hassle on a slow connection.  While cleaning links, I got to wondering what percent of web sites fail.

Since I include an add and delete time stamp on listings, I can piece together some idea of the fail rate of sites. So, I made a link report which shows how many sites I add each quarter and how many of them have eventually gone black. So far, it looks like about 37% of the sites added before 2005 have gone black already.

My report shows other tidbits of information:

The bottom line of the report shows that I have added 30369 web sites to the directories, and deleted 7806 bad links as of noon on 12/2/2011.

The top line of the report shows that I've added 1171 links so far this quater and have deleted 448 links.

I added a second report about events. It shows that I've added 16801 events to the directories. I automatically delete events three months after the event. I've added 2184 events to the calendar this quarter.

I will not launch into a delete-a-thon. Hopefully, I will pull out a hundred or so dead links, making the directory more useful to the two or three people who use it.