I confess. I never was fond of the domain name "LinksAlive.com." The name was chosen for me.
The business plan I wanted to execute was to build Community centered sites. These sites would feed a larger site that had a general purpose theme. I wanted to concentrate on the community sites. The person who was working on the commercial site chose the name.
The goal of my project is to explore the ways in which different communities are connect. After my initial partnership broke up, I bought the domain name iRivers.com. I like to call the domain Internet Rivers.
I love the name because we are all connected by rivers.
I am currently in the process of moving all the content from LinksAlive.com to iRivers.com. I will hold a Bido auction for the name linksalive.com. There are thousands of links to this site and it currently gets several thousand hits a day. I hope it sells.
Friday, February 01, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Reblogging Photos
The Community Color project suffers from a distinct lack of back links. So, I decided to start blogs on Tumblr.
I will reblog the images from ProtoPhoto along with other interesting photos found on Tumbr. I created three tumblr blogs which are:
I will reblog the images from ProtoPhoto along with other interesting photos found on Tumbr. I created three tumblr blogs which are:
- Utah Color will show images from the Beehive State.
- Arizona Color will show images from the Grand Canyon State.
- Community Color will show general images with an emphasis on Colorado and Wyoming.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Chirstmas Was a Bust
Income wise, Christmas 2012 was a total bust. The total income was $6.47.
October and November were pathetic as well.
Of course such was to be expected. Google removed me from their index because I (gasp) ask people who add sites to my directory to pay a listing fee.
I started charging the listing fee because it is pain to maintain local directories.
I am still getting several thousand visitors a day ... but they are all looking for local brick and mortar stores. So no commissions there.
Since the Community Color sites no longer make enough to pay hosting fees, I need to figure out what to do with them.
IMHO, they provide a community service by providing listings for the small local sites that no one else will list.
On the bright side. I now no longer have to worry about the effects of the fiscal cliff. I won't have to pay taxes because I have no income.
October and November were pathetic as well.
Of course such was to be expected. Google removed me from their index because I (gasp) ask people who add sites to my directory to pay a listing fee.
I started charging the listing fee because it is pain to maintain local directories.
I am still getting several thousand visitors a day ... but they are all looking for local brick and mortar stores. So no commissions there.
Since the Community Color sites no longer make enough to pay hosting fees, I need to figure out what to do with them.
IMHO, they provide a community service by providing listings for the small local sites that no one else will list.
On the bright side. I now no longer have to worry about the effects of the fiscal cliff. I won't have to pay taxes because I have no income.
Friday, December 21, 2012
Linking is Fundamental
The World Wide Web is written in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language).
The defining characteristic of HTML is the hyperlink. The HyperLink is what differentiates the web from other forms of writing.
For that matter, the links to and from a web site matter almost as much as the content. There are massive new fields in which people study the topology of the hyperlink.
For example, Social Media is all about people linking with other people.
In many ways, linking is more important than content. Twitter is a program that uses 140 character posts and is primarily about linking.
Needless to say, there is an economic component to linking.
Good links on popular sites makes your site popular.
Google is a massive fortune 100 company that has made billions selling paid links.
Google is the dominant search engine. In October, Google announced that they will punish anyone who buys paid links.
I repeat. Google is a company that makes billions selling paid links. In October, Google announced that they will punish any company that engages in business with a competitor.
The hypocrisy aside. Google's direct attack on engaging in link development is attack on the fundamentals of the Internet.
Anyway, I was developing a collection of community directories under the brand "Community Color." It costs about $150 to host the collection of sites. To help offset the cost, I asked people who submit to the directory to pay a listing fee of $12.00.
Needless to say, after Google's announcement that they will punish anyone who does business with competitor, and the directories are now effectively insolvent.
I had started building community directories in 1999. I started up north with a collection of directories I gave away (Missoula.ws is the only site left from the original experiment.) The idea behind the project was that linking is fundamental and that, for small independent web sites to survive they have to engage in active link development.
The best place to start is the local community.
If people do not link with each other, then large evil companies like Google will dominate and we will lose the independent web.
The defining characteristic of HTML is the hyperlink. The HyperLink is what differentiates the web from other forms of writing.
For that matter, the links to and from a web site matter almost as much as the content. There are massive new fields in which people study the topology of the hyperlink.
For example, Social Media is all about people linking with other people.
In many ways, linking is more important than content. Twitter is a program that uses 140 character posts and is primarily about linking.
Needless to say, there is an economic component to linking.
Good links on popular sites makes your site popular.
Google is a massive fortune 100 company that has made billions selling paid links.
Google is the dominant search engine. In October, Google announced that they will punish anyone who buys paid links.
I repeat. Google is a company that makes billions selling paid links. In October, Google announced that they will punish any company that engages in business with a competitor.
The hypocrisy aside. Google's direct attack on engaging in link development is attack on the fundamentals of the Internet.
Anyway, I was developing a collection of community directories under the brand "Community Color." It costs about $150 to host the collection of sites. To help offset the cost, I asked people who submit to the directory to pay a listing fee of $12.00.
Needless to say, after Google's announcement that they will punish anyone who does business with competitor, and the directories are now effectively insolvent.
I had started building community directories in 1999. I started up north with a collection of directories I gave away (Missoula.ws is the only site left from the original experiment.) The idea behind the project was that linking is fundamental and that, for small independent web sites to survive they have to engage in active link development.
The best place to start is the local community.
If people do not link with each other, then large evil companies like Google will dominate and we will lose the independent web.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Disavow Tool
Google is on the warpath against small independently owned web sites engaged in link development. Google's current attack is against web developers that charge for service (gasp). In Google's view, everyone except them should work for free. Google's News Release states:
What a bunch of hypocrites! About half the links on a Google search are "paid links." Essentially, Google is using its monopoly status to penalize websites for using competitors. If you do business with small local sites, Google will use its incredible weight in the market to kick you down. Of course, this is not new. Google has always been the thugs of the Internet.
Anyway, in the early days of the Internet, I became worried that the net would be dominated by just a few highly funded sites; so, I started creating local web directories. Maintaining the directories is time consuming and expensive; so I decided to request a listing fee to cover the cost of listing sites. The listing fee is currently $12. I usually get one or two listing fees a month. My hosting fee and web access costs are about $100/month.
My goal is to list web sites local to a given town or county. I actually look through each site to see if I can find a local address or reasons to list it in the directory. This takes about fifteen minutes for each listing in the site.
My goal is to make the most complete human edited directory for given communities. I troll the web to look for sites and list any site I can find related to a town.
Unfortunately, since I do the unspeakable and ask for a listing fee on my Add Link page, listing in the directory has become problematic for the sites I listed. Google requires that these sites disavow all links from sites like mine.
Anyway, I created a form that allows web owners to request link removal. Simply enter your domain name. If I have links to that domain, the program will give you the option of adding tracking to the link or a complete link removal. Adding tracking will put any clicks to your site through a redirect that blocks webcrawlers. You can also request full link removal.
Personally, it wrenches my heart knowing that Google is now penalizing web sites because I went through the effort to add them to my directory. But, lets face it, Google has always been the bully of the Internet, quick to kick down private efforts to enhance the value of the Internet.
We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes
What a bunch of hypocrites! About half the links on a Google search are "paid links." Essentially, Google is using its monopoly status to penalize websites for using competitors. If you do business with small local sites, Google will use its incredible weight in the market to kick you down. Of course, this is not new. Google has always been the thugs of the Internet.
Anyway, in the early days of the Internet, I became worried that the net would be dominated by just a few highly funded sites; so, I started creating local web directories. Maintaining the directories is time consuming and expensive; so I decided to request a listing fee to cover the cost of listing sites. The listing fee is currently $12. I usually get one or two listing fees a month. My hosting fee and web access costs are about $100/month.
My goal is to list web sites local to a given town or county. I actually look through each site to see if I can find a local address or reasons to list it in the directory. This takes about fifteen minutes for each listing in the site.
My goal is to make the most complete human edited directory for given communities. I troll the web to look for sites and list any site I can find related to a town.
Unfortunately, since I do the unspeakable and ask for a listing fee on my Add Link page, listing in the directory has become problematic for the sites I listed. Google requires that these sites disavow all links from sites like mine.
Anyway, I created a form that allows web owners to request link removal. Simply enter your domain name. If I have links to that domain, the program will give you the option of adding tracking to the link or a complete link removal. Adding tracking will put any clicks to your site through a redirect that blocks webcrawlers. You can also request full link removal.
Personally, it wrenches my heart knowing that Google is now penalizing web sites because I went through the effort to add them to my directory. But, lets face it, Google has always been the bully of the Internet, quick to kick down private efforts to enhance the value of the Internet.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Link Development
This is disappointing. The site ChefMoz.org bit the dust. The epitaph for the site reads: "Thank you for visiting ChefMoz.org. For more than 10 years, ChefMoz was
the largest international online directory of restaurants and reviews,
covering more than 300,000 restaurants in 142 countries."
A lot of people threw effort into that project hoping to improve local restaurant selection. Now, it is gone, Vanished. Poof!
There is, of course, little money to be made in local link development which consumes substantial time and resources.
I've been worried about the fate of all small and pop web sites. I figured the best bet for helping the community would be to create a link directory for small local web sites. For the last ten years, I've been maintaining link directories for towns in the Mountain West. I currently call the project Community Color.
The sites cost me $150 a month and are time consuming; My goal is to list all the local sites I can find. It usually takes me about 15 minutes to review and add a site. The goal is to list local sites, I have to search through reams of submission requests to determine which ones actually are local.
I was doing it for free. I started asking for profit sites to pay a listing fee of (gasp) $10. I raised the fee to $12 in September in celebration of QE3.
Unfortunately, last month Google declared war on small firms engaged in independent web development. Google and Bing are now penalizing web sites that attempt to engage in link development.
I started this link development project well before Google became the ringmaster of the Internet. Personally, I think the main problem with the internet is that there is not enough people actively engaged in link development.
It makes me sick that Google is now directly engaged in trying to destroy the last remaining small independent sites.
Anyway, i am currently working on a tool to streamline the removal of links from the Community Color sites. I hope to have it up in the next few days.
A lot of people threw effort into that project hoping to improve local restaurant selection. Now, it is gone, Vanished. Poof!
There is, of course, little money to be made in local link development which consumes substantial time and resources.
I've been worried about the fate of all small and pop web sites. I figured the best bet for helping the community would be to create a link directory for small local web sites. For the last ten years, I've been maintaining link directories for towns in the Mountain West. I currently call the project Community Color.
The sites cost me $150 a month and are time consuming; My goal is to list all the local sites I can find. It usually takes me about 15 minutes to review and add a site. The goal is to list local sites, I have to search through reams of submission requests to determine which ones actually are local.
I was doing it for free. I started asking for profit sites to pay a listing fee of (gasp) $10. I raised the fee to $12 in September in celebration of QE3.
Unfortunately, last month Google declared war on small firms engaged in independent web development. Google and Bing are now penalizing web sites that attempt to engage in link development.
I started this link development project well before Google became the ringmaster of the Internet. Personally, I think the main problem with the internet is that there is not enough people actively engaged in link development.
It makes me sick that Google is now directly engaged in trying to destroy the last remaining small independent sites.
Anyway, i am currently working on a tool to streamline the removal of links from the Community Color sites. I hope to have it up in the next few days.
Friday, November 02, 2012
Formatted Option List
Darn. Formatted drop down lists only work in FireFox.
The category lists in the Community Color sites had become somewhat unwieldy; So I decided to add some formatting to the HTML <select> form element. I list the categories in a hierarchical structure with the first level bold and subcategories indented. </select>The three forms below show the category structure for Grand Junction, Denver and Ogden. Click on the select list. It shows you the full hierarchical page structure. Select a page a press the "View Category" button and you go to that page.
People are not used to using the <select> lists for navigation, but the navigation is so tight and quick I think I will add it to all my sites.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Relief, Responsibility and Funky Food
Hurricane Sandy reminds us of the need to have emergency food on hand. Utah prides itself on being a leader in the Food Storage Industry. Apparently, Utah preparedness shops are having a mini boom as people follow the hurricane and clean up.
I like the buckets of freeze dried food as they stay dry in adverse conditions and are easy to move about.
The one problem with dedicated food storage is that even freeze dried food ages. The bucket might have a 25 year shelf life, but you want to have it rotated out of your food storage shed well before reaching that expiration.
So, I thought I would end my blatant sales pitch for preparedness supplies with the actual worthwhile suggestion that anyone with old buckets of unexpired food storage to donate the food to your local church, foodbank or relief agency.
Times are tough and that funky food you've been storing could be put to good use by families in need in your community or by people made homeless by the storm.
I like the buckets of freeze dried food as they stay dry in adverse conditions and are easy to move about.
The one problem with dedicated food storage is that even freeze dried food ages. The bucket might have a 25 year shelf life, but you want to have it rotated out of your food storage shed well before reaching that expiration.
So, I thought I would end my blatant sales pitch for preparedness supplies with the actual worthwhile suggestion that anyone with old buckets of unexpired food storage to donate the food to your local church, foodbank or relief agency.
Times are tough and that funky food you've been storing could be put to good use by families in need in your community or by people made homeless by the storm.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Post Event Web Site
One of the odd things about the Internet is that event based web sites often get more traffic after the completion of the event than before the event.
I know, this the exact opposite of what web developers and event promoters want. As a promoter, I want a great deal of traffic the week before the event. What happens in cyberspace is that is that all the reviews, youtube videos and tweets related to an event flood in after the event is complete.
A smart webmaster or event promoter should plan in advance for the post event traffic. It is wise to have a post event publishing plan set well in advance of the event. Immediately, after the completion of the event, it is wise to thank participants and quickly post any recaps, scores and photos of the event.
You might want to link to reviews of the event. Linking to post event reviews builds web traffic to the next event.
Many people today use electronic calendars. While the event is on a person's mind, they will add it to their calendar even if the event is a year in advance. Having your event in a calendar followed and maintained by your users is the absolute most effective advertising in the universe.
A good post-event web site will have information about upcoming events or action items for the people who missed the event.
If you are hosting an annual event, it is wise to have the date of the next year's event up online immediately after the completion of this year's event.
A final note on events. Always include the year of the event. Search engines have a nasty habit of caching information. If you just have the date and month of an event on your page, the search engines might cache this information and your patrons just might get confusing information about your next event.
I know, this the exact opposite of what web developers and event promoters want. As a promoter, I want a great deal of traffic the week before the event. What happens in cyberspace is that is that all the reviews, youtube videos and tweets related to an event flood in after the event is complete.
A smart webmaster or event promoter should plan in advance for the post event traffic. It is wise to have a post event publishing plan set well in advance of the event. Immediately, after the completion of the event, it is wise to thank participants and quickly post any recaps, scores and photos of the event.
You might want to link to reviews of the event. Linking to post event reviews builds web traffic to the next event.
Many people today use electronic calendars. While the event is on a person's mind, they will add it to their calendar even if the event is a year in advance. Having your event in a calendar followed and maintained by your users is the absolute most effective advertising in the universe.
A good post-event web site will have information about upcoming events or action items for the people who missed the event.
If you are hosting an annual event, it is wise to have the date of the next year's event up online immediately after the completion of this year's event.
A final note on events. Always include the year of the event. Search engines have a nasty habit of caching information. If you just have the date and month of an event on your page, the search engines might cache this information and your patrons just might get confusing information about your next event.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Halloween Links
It's that time of year when all the ghosts start coming out of the attics.
I just updated the Salt Lake Halloween and Denver Halloween pages. I was surprised to find that many of the haunted houses are already up and running. The Halloween season seems to start earlier and earlier each year.
I suspect that the Internet is part of the cause of the trend. There is generally a lag between when you make a website and it appears in the search engine. So, if you want your web site to show up on search engines, you need to have it up and running several months before Halloween and you need to aggressively seek links to the site in September.
Shipping is the big problem for online costume shops. Online costume sales peak ten days before the holiday. To get those sales, your advertising has to be in full swing at the beginning of October.
The result is that what was once a single day event has prolonged into a long Halloween season.
Anyway, I cleaned up my Halloween links. After doing so, I checked the sites link report. The report shows that I've deleted 10,000 broken links to date. The report says I current display about 24,000 links and have deleted 10,000 of the links. About 30% of the sites I've added to the directory through the years have gone dark. That's sad.
I just updated the Salt Lake Halloween and Denver Halloween pages. I was surprised to find that many of the haunted houses are already up and running. The Halloween season seems to start earlier and earlier each year.
I suspect that the Internet is part of the cause of the trend. There is generally a lag between when you make a website and it appears in the search engine. So, if you want your web site to show up on search engines, you need to have it up and running several months before Halloween and you need to aggressively seek links to the site in September.
Shipping is the big problem for online costume shops. Online costume sales peak ten days before the holiday. To get those sales, your advertising has to be in full swing at the beginning of October.
The result is that what was once a single day event has prolonged into a long Halloween season.
Anyway, I cleaned up my Halloween links. After doing so, I checked the sites link report. The report shows that I've deleted 10,000 broken links to date. The report says I current display about 24,000 links and have deleted 10,000 of the links. About 30% of the sites I've added to the directory through the years have gone dark. That's sad.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Pubcon Anyone?
I was just looking at the web site for pubcon (This is a social media conference taking place in Las Vegas in October.)
The event looks like it will be a hoot. So, I need to figure out how to justify going to the event.
Well, I just happen to have a super fun social media business model in my back pocket. The business model is for a social networking sport.
It is a casual sport designed specifically for people who love social networking and media. People would meet periodically, like once a week (or once a month) play a fun game and meet new people while building web traffic for their business or blog.
Okay, the sport is called Juggleball. It works as follows: Everyone in the game is assigned a pair of numbered balls. If you get the number 1234, then you have the balls 1234 and -1234. People meet at a location then play a fun game that involves tossing the balls about and running. (The game lends itself to people of all activity levels.).
At the end of the game people leave with a different set of balls.
Each game will have a host. The host will record the balls at the beginning and end of each game. So, you might enter the game with balls 1234 and -1234 and end the game with two different balls: perhaps 765 and -456.
If the game catches on, the balls will start making an interesting social network map.
Needless to say, the first people who play the game will get in at a founding level. After we get a couple hundred players involved, I will form the International Juggleball Association. The people who get in at a ground level will be playing a founding role in the organization.
Participation in the game costs very little. I would have to make enough money to pay for a hotel in Las Vegas (I like the Days Inn), the balls and for the gas to drive to Las Vegas. I need to make about $300. If I could find 10 people interested in joining a social networking game at the ground level, I would want to charge about $30 to play the game.
Anyway, if you are going to Pubcon and would like to have a founding role in a new social networking game, or if you ever wanted to own your own professional sports team, please contact me. Give me your name and phone number.
PS: I really love the badlands of Utah. If you want to visit the National Parks of Southern Utah (camp in the desert) in the days before Pubcon, I would be happy to meet you at any number of locations in Utah.
The event looks like it will be a hoot. So, I need to figure out how to justify going to the event.
Well, I just happen to have a super fun social media business model in my back pocket. The business model is for a social networking sport.
It is a casual sport designed specifically for people who love social networking and media. People would meet periodically, like once a week (or once a month) play a fun game and meet new people while building web traffic for their business or blog.
Okay, the sport is called Juggleball. It works as follows: Everyone in the game is assigned a pair of numbered balls. If you get the number 1234, then you have the balls 1234 and -1234. People meet at a location then play a fun game that involves tossing the balls about and running. (The game lends itself to people of all activity levels.).
At the end of the game people leave with a different set of balls.
Each game will have a host. The host will record the balls at the beginning and end of each game. So, you might enter the game with balls 1234 and -1234 and end the game with two different balls: perhaps 765 and -456.
If the game catches on, the balls will start making an interesting social network map.
Needless to say, the first people who play the game will get in at a founding level. After we get a couple hundred players involved, I will form the International Juggleball Association. The people who get in at a ground level will be playing a founding role in the organization.
Participation in the game costs very little. I would have to make enough money to pay for a hotel in Las Vegas (I like the Days Inn), the balls and for the gas to drive to Las Vegas. I need to make about $300. If I could find 10 people interested in joining a social networking game at the ground level, I would want to charge about $30 to play the game.
Anyway, if you are going to Pubcon and would like to have a founding role in a new social networking game, or if you ever wanted to own your own professional sports team, please contact me. Give me your name and phone number.
PS: I really love the badlands of Utah. If you want to visit the National Parks of Southern Utah (camp in the desert) in the days before Pubcon, I would be happy to meet you at any number of locations in Utah.
Saturday, September 08, 2012
Domains for Sale HeberCity.biz and LinksAlive.com
I am taking a final stab at auctioning off HeberCity.biz on eBay. I moved the contents of the site to wasatch.utahcolor.com.
I also decided to like LinksAlive.com on Bido.com. If this domain sells, I will move the contents to a different domain.
I also decided to like LinksAlive.com on Bido.com. If this domain sells, I will move the contents to a different domain.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Casual Exercise
Americans don't get enough exercise. When we do exercise, we have completely over the top expectations of our actions.
All of the popular team sports were designed to over-emphasize competition. The field of individual sports is dominated by absurdly long endurance sports like Iron Man Triathlons, multiday relays, etc..
The non-profit community hosts wonderful fundraising events that draw thousands of people once a year for a fun run in the park. But a 5K walk once a year is not enough.
There is an massive market in the United States at the moment for a new casual sport that takes place on a regular basis that helps keep people fit.
Imagine yourself starting a business where you met with fun people once a week, to engage in a physical activity. The cost of the sport was modest, and there was a money making component built into the sport so people needing a little extra cash could make a little extra cash?
Owning a reaction business opens up the opportunity to travel. If you owned a for profit "sports team" you can deduct travel expenses when you go to play games at the destination of your choice.
Anyway, if a group of people got together and did ___________ they just might be able to crack the lucrative recreation sports market.
I emphasize the cost of starting a ____________ sports team is negligible. The first people who are brave and respond might make some big bucks for taking a change.
If you contact me (giving me your location, name an phone number) I will give you info about the sport.
NOTE: I live in Utah. I will be traveling to Spokane in early August.
All of the popular team sports were designed to over-emphasize competition. The field of individual sports is dominated by absurdly long endurance sports like Iron Man Triathlons, multiday relays, etc..
The non-profit community hosts wonderful fundraising events that draw thousands of people once a year for a fun run in the park. But a 5K walk once a year is not enough.
There is an massive market in the United States at the moment for a new casual sport that takes place on a regular basis that helps keep people fit.
Imagine yourself starting a business where you met with fun people once a week, to engage in a physical activity. The cost of the sport was modest, and there was a money making component built into the sport so people needing a little extra cash could make a little extra cash?
Owning a reaction business opens up the opportunity to travel. If you owned a for profit "sports team" you can deduct travel expenses when you go to play games at the destination of your choice.
Anyway, if a group of people got together and did ___________ they just might be able to crack the lucrative recreation sports market.
I emphasize the cost of starting a ____________ sports team is negligible. The first people who are brave and respond might make some big bucks for taking a change.
If you contact me (giving me your location, name an phone number) I will give you info about the sport.
NOTE: I live in Utah. I will be traveling to Spokane in early August.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
We Need A Business Revolution
I read a blog post from a Ron Paul Supporter who appeared to be disheartened.
I confess. Although my sympathies lie with the free market message of Ron Paul, I was not an active voice for the candidate during his run for the presidency.
The reason is that I did not support Paul was because I realized that we cannot restore America through politics.
The American experiment was one with a limited government and unlimited people.
Sadly, our educational establishment fails to give students the tools they need to achieve their potential as a free people. Modern education teaches people they are entitled slaves and not free people.
To restore America, we need a business movement that helps people rediscover their potential as a free people.
The easiest way to accomplish this goal is in recreation.
Currently, the world of sports and recreation is dominated by the state or crony capitalists.
Look at high school sports and the NCAA: Most of the teams are owned by state entities and play in government owned arenas.
In professional sports, we see that most professional teams have exclusive contracts with local governments. They play incoliseums arenas which receive varying degrees of state funding.
State run sports is both static and exclusive.
Everyone needs to engage in exercise and recreation.
If we wish to fight the leviathan, the area of sports and recreation is prime playing field.
People who are disillusioned with politics could take to the playing field and excel.
Step back a moment and imagine yourself as the coach or owner of a professional sports team that you ran a couple weekends a year?
Would you enjoy owning a professional sports team?
Would you enjoy traveling to towns (of your choice) to meet and play with other people?
Would you enjoy having the name "Founding Member of ________" written after your name?
Would you like to engage in an activity that is all but guaranteed to feed ten of thousands of hits to your web site or blog?
Would you like to make a YouTube video that received hundreds of thousand of free links?
Would you like to engage in an activity that will put your name in the local newspaper or that will raise funds for the causes you find important?
Would you like to engage in an activity that raises awareness of the values of the free market and a free society?
Would you like to play a founding role in a company that requires little capital but has an unlimited potential?
Would you like to tell your grand children that you made a difference?
Anyway, I will free franchise to the first people contact me . Please give me your phone number and tell me where you are. I will contact you with more information on this chance of a lifetime.
I happen to live in Utah (I am not LDS). I will be traveling to Washington State in August.
NOTE: The sport is actually a game in which we create a social networking market. The game is physical discussion about the way markets work. The game involves simple physical activity and relay races.
I confess. Although my sympathies lie with the free market message of Ron Paul, I was not an active voice for the candidate during his run for the presidency.
The reason is that I did not support Paul was because I realized that we cannot restore America through politics.
The American experiment was one with a limited government and unlimited people.
Sadly, our educational establishment fails to give students the tools they need to achieve their potential as a free people. Modern education teaches people they are entitled slaves and not free people.
To restore America, we need a business movement that helps people rediscover their potential as a free people.
The easiest way to accomplish this goal is in recreation.
Currently, the world of sports and recreation is dominated by the state or crony capitalists.
Look at high school sports and the NCAA: Most of the teams are owned by state entities and play in government owned arenas.
In professional sports, we see that most professional teams have exclusive contracts with local governments. They play in
State run sports is both static and exclusive.
Everyone needs to engage in exercise and recreation.
If we wish to fight the leviathan, the area of sports and recreation is prime playing field.
People who are disillusioned with politics could take to the playing field and excel.
Step back a moment and imagine yourself as the coach or owner of a professional sports team that you ran a couple weekends a year?
Would you enjoy owning a professional sports team?
Would you enjoy traveling to towns (of your choice) to meet and play with other people?
Would you enjoy having the name "Founding Member of ________" written after your name?
Would you like to engage in an activity that is all but guaranteed to feed ten of thousands of hits to your web site or blog?
Would you like to make a YouTube video that received hundreds of thousand of free links?
Would you like to engage in an activity that will put your name in the local newspaper or that will raise funds for the causes you find important?
Would you like to engage in an activity that raises awareness of the values of the free market and a free society?
Would you like to play a founding role in a company that requires little capital but has an unlimited potential?
Would you like to tell your grand children that you made a difference?
Anyway, I will free franchise to the first people contact me . Please give me your phone number and tell me where you are. I will contact you with more information on this chance of a lifetime.
I happen to live in Utah (I am not LDS). I will be traveling to Washington State in August.
NOTE: The sport is actually a game in which we create a social networking market. The game is physical discussion about the way markets work. The game involves simple physical activity and relay races.
Monday, July 02, 2012
Index of Indices
Dang. Revenue for Q2 was even worse than Q1. This was due largely to several advertisers going bankrupt. I am now in a desperate search for new advertisers.
I want to increase the exposure to the events in the calendar. I added a column to the master index that shows community events. The page Recreation Index is an index to the directory page titled "Recreation." It shows both the links and events on that page.
If I make a big effort to be consistent in categorizing the events, this feature will become useful for it will show the total number of links and events by state.
Unfortunately, I have some systematic inconsistencies. Specifically, when a directory becomes large, I start splitting it into subdirectories. If there's only one running club in town, I list the club in Recreation. If there are several, I create a subdirectory called Running. The result is that I list the Grand Juinction Rim Marathon in the "recreation" category and the Salt Lake Marathon in the "running" category. This means the master index fails to provide a comprehensive list of running events in a state.
As I play with the new program, I figure out a way to overcome that problem.
To get my revenue numbers back in the black, I probably need to show more shopping events and auctions..
I want to increase the exposure to the events in the calendar. I added a column to the master index that shows community events. The page Recreation Index is an index to the directory page titled "Recreation." It shows both the links and events on that page.
If I make a big effort to be consistent in categorizing the events, this feature will become useful for it will show the total number of links and events by state.
Unfortunately, I have some systematic inconsistencies. Specifically, when a directory becomes large, I start splitting it into subdirectories. If there's only one running club in town, I list the club in Recreation. If there are several, I create a subdirectory called Running. The result is that I list the Grand Juinction Rim Marathon in the "recreation" category and the Salt Lake Marathon in the "running" category. This means the master index fails to provide a comprehensive list of running events in a state.
As I play with the new program, I figure out a way to overcome that problem.
To get my revenue numbers back in the black, I probably need to show more shopping events and auctions..
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Rating Engine Change
The goal of the rating system in the Community Color sites is to help the best sites surface to the top.
The site had a rating engine and the rating engine would improve the profile of sites in the directory. Sadly, the engine was inundated with spam ratings.
I recently revived the rate engine. To rate a site, you must login.
If you log in, you will see a rate button next to each link. If you are not logged in, the program will show a rate link for any site receiving positive rates. Essentially, if you give a positive rating to a site, the directories will automatically give a second link to that site.
If you give a bad rating to a site, it might remove the second link.
My hope is that this rate engine will help give an extra boost to the best sites.
The site had a rating engine and the rating engine would improve the profile of sites in the directory. Sadly, the engine was inundated with spam ratings.
I recently revived the rate engine. To rate a site, you must login.
If you log in, you will see a rate button next to each link. If you are not logged in, the program will show a rate link for any site receiving positive rates. Essentially, if you give a positive rating to a site, the directories will automatically give a second link to that site.
If you give a bad rating to a site, it might remove the second link.
My hope is that this rate engine will help give an extra boost to the best sites.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
In Page Popup
I created my first inpage (css/div) popup! If you look at the Salt Lake Calendar, you will notice that the box for June 16, 2012 says that there are 8 items for the day. If you click the words "click here to view" the page will dim the calendar and display the eight items in the center of the page.
Clicking anywhere restores the main page.
The code for an in page pop up is a bear. Regular popups are easier, but the in page variety is slightly better for end user navigation.
Having added my first in page popup, I will probably add more.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
An Invitation to the Great Northwest
I've been staring at maps of the Northwest.
Would anyone in Washington State, Idaho, Western Montana, Oregon, Northern Nevada or Utah be interested in engaging in a recreational activity that will cost you about $20 and has the potential of making you some money.
The activity involves social networking and recreation. You will have to sell a product, but that's the way the market works.
I am interested in people who own or who want to own a small business (franchise). This activity can work with any existing business. It would be great for people who want to have a booth at the farmer's market, or for other small businesses looking for clever ways to expand their market.
So, anyway, the idea is that you will own a business that organizes games and sells the product I provide for the game. You will need to get a sales tax ID and pay taxes on sales.
If this idea sounds interesting, please contact me. Here is my contact form.
So, why am I looking at the Northwest?
Well, My niece is getting married in Washington State on August 3rd.
I live in Utah. (no, I am not LDS). Anway, I was thinking of driving up either I25 or US93 to Missoula then take I90 into Washington.
I happen to have a long lost relative in Oregon to visit. On the way back I would drop into central Oregon. I could drop as far south as Nevada on the way back.
BTW, I also have a wonderful presentation on free market health care reform called "The Medical Savings and Loan."
If you knew of a group interested in free market health care reform in Idaho, Western Montana, Washington, Oregon or Utah, I have a great presentation that argues that insurance (group funding of individual consumption) is the problem and that we need to restore a system of self-funded care.
The MS&L and this game are related but different activities.
If you contact me, we will need to arrange an activity that meshes up with my niece's wedding on August 3rd in Northwest Washington State ... either before or after the big event.
Would anyone in Washington State, Idaho, Western Montana, Oregon, Northern Nevada or Utah be interested in engaging in a recreational activity that will cost you about $20 and has the potential of making you some money.
The activity involves social networking and recreation. You will have to sell a product, but that's the way the market works.
I am interested in people who own or who want to own a small business (franchise). This activity can work with any existing business. It would be great for people who want to have a booth at the farmer's market, or for other small businesses looking for clever ways to expand their market.
So, anyway, the idea is that you will own a business that organizes games and sells the product I provide for the game. You will need to get a sales tax ID and pay taxes on sales.
If this idea sounds interesting, please contact me. Here is my contact form.
So, why am I looking at the Northwest?
Well, My niece is getting married in Washington State on August 3rd.
I live in Utah. (no, I am not LDS). Anway, I was thinking of driving up either I25 or US93 to Missoula then take I90 into Washington.
I happen to have a long lost relative in Oregon to visit. On the way back I would drop into central Oregon. I could drop as far south as Nevada on the way back.
BTW, I also have a wonderful presentation on free market health care reform called "The Medical Savings and Loan."
If you knew of a group interested in free market health care reform in Idaho, Western Montana, Washington, Oregon or Utah, I have a great presentation that argues that insurance (group funding of individual consumption) is the problem and that we need to restore a system of self-funded care.
The MS&L and this game are related but different activities.
If you contact me, we will need to arrange an activity that meshes up with my niece's wedding on August 3rd in Northwest Washington State ... either before or after the big event.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The Rating Game
I turned the Community Color Rating Engine Back On.
Originally, I worked with some people who were adamantly opposed to login screens. So the rating engine accepted anonymous reviews. This was a big mistake! Spambots kept flooding the system with fake reviews.
I tried manually reading and removing the spam and finally capitulated by turning the engine off.
I really miss the rating system. The ratings program helped direct traffic to the best sites.
The Internet works on positive feedback. If you link the the best sites, they surface to the top.
I designed the rating system so that, when you give a site a positive rate, it gets an extra link!
If you went through the directories and gave good rates to the top sites, they would get more traffic.
As I no longer have a prohibition against requiring a login, I am turning the ratings engine back on for registered users. I will delete the reviews for any user that is clearly spamming the system.
Your Community Color User ID and password works for all sites in the Community Color family. I would really appreciate folks trolling through the Community Color Sites and rate the best local sites. Right now I have directories for communities in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and more.
A rating will stay active for 600 days (sites and businesses change every year or so).
The Ratings by Community Report shows a summary of recent ratings by community. It is super small right now because I just turned the rating engine back on.
PS: I will rate a bunch of sites under the user name kevind and yintercept just to test to make sure everything is working. While I am testing, I might accidentally break the screen, because I am engaged in the time honored tradition of cowboy programming. Yep, I program in production because I am one person with no financial resources.
Originally, I worked with some people who were adamantly opposed to login screens. So the rating engine accepted anonymous reviews. This was a big mistake! Spambots kept flooding the system with fake reviews.
I tried manually reading and removing the spam and finally capitulated by turning the engine off.
I really miss the rating system. The ratings program helped direct traffic to the best sites.
The Internet works on positive feedback. If you link the the best sites, they surface to the top.
I designed the rating system so that, when you give a site a positive rate, it gets an extra link!
If you went through the directories and gave good rates to the top sites, they would get more traffic.
As I no longer have a prohibition against requiring a login, I am turning the ratings engine back on for registered users. I will delete the reviews for any user that is clearly spamming the system.
Your Community Color User ID and password works for all sites in the Community Color family. I would really appreciate folks trolling through the Community Color Sites and rate the best local sites. Right now I have directories for communities in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and more.
A rating will stay active for 600 days (sites and businesses change every year or so).
The Ratings by Community Report shows a summary of recent ratings by community. It is super small right now because I just turned the rating engine back on.
PS: I will rate a bunch of sites under the user name kevind and yintercept just to test to make sure everything is working. While I am testing, I might accidentally break the screen, because I am engaged in the time honored tradition of cowboy programming. Yep, I program in production because I am one person with no financial resources.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Link Ratings
The Community Color sites have an unfortunate history of being attacked by spammers.
The sites featured a link rating and comment section that was being hit hard by spammers. As I was working on a different project. I turned the feature off.
The spam bots finally subsided, and I decided to add the rating buttons back on the site. This time, the site only accepts ratings from registered users.
I found it impossible to separate the spam from the info; so I deleted all of the ratings and comments from anonymous sources.
There is now a rate button next to each link in the directories. If you are registered and logged in, you can leave a rate. To prevent spam, I can delete ratings by user id or by IP address. The iFrame below shows the rate screen for the link rating page for this blog. If you are logged into gjct.com you will see the rate button. If not you will see a summary of ratings. I put in one test rating.
I admit, the primary reason for the rating page is that it gives each web site an extra link.
The sites featured a link rating and comment section that was being hit hard by spammers. As I was working on a different project. I turned the feature off.
The spam bots finally subsided, and I decided to add the rating buttons back on the site. This time, the site only accepts ratings from registered users.
I found it impossible to separate the spam from the info; so I deleted all of the ratings and comments from anonymous sources.
There is now a rate button next to each link in the directories. If you are registered and logged in, you can leave a rate. To prevent spam, I can delete ratings by user id or by IP address. The iFrame below shows the rate screen for the link rating page for this blog. If you are logged into gjct.com you will see the rate button. If not you will see a summary of ratings. I put in one test rating.
I admit, the primary reason for the rating page is that it gives each web site an extra link.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
To Sweeten the Deal
It is so beautiful outside. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a summer opportunity that let you make a little cash while playing a social networking game out in the sun?
Wouldn't it be fun to be the boss instead of just a working stiff?
Wouldn't it be fun to own a business that involves the possibility of travel?
Did you know, if you owned a business that required you to travel, you get to deduct your traveling expenses? So, lets say you had a business that required that you travel to San Diego for a weekend to play a game on the beach,
Imagine an opportunity in which you organized games, sold a product to the people playing the game and kept most of money from the sales (minus the cost of the products and whatever the venue charges to reserve the playing field.)
Do you enjoy social networking. Wouldn't it be fun to have a business geared to social networking and recreation?
As this is a social networking game, I will sweeten the pot by giving the first people who respond a free web site and I will show you how to run your own web site (HTML, PHP, and all)
I am in Utah, but travel alot. To contact me, use This Contact Form. Leave your name, age (The first people should be over 18) telephone number and place you live. If you are traveling through Utah, please tell me when you are traveling. I will then call you and give you more detail.
Wouldn't it be fun to be the boss instead of just a working stiff?
Wouldn't it be fun to own a business that involves the possibility of travel?
Did you know, if you owned a business that required you to travel, you get to deduct your traveling expenses? So, lets say you had a business that required that you travel to San Diego for a weekend to play a game on the beach,
Imagine an opportunity in which you organized games, sold a product to the people playing the game and kept most of money from the sales (minus the cost of the products and whatever the venue charges to reserve the playing field.)
Do you enjoy social networking. Wouldn't it be fun to have a business geared to social networking and recreation?
As this is a social networking game, I will sweeten the pot by giving the first people who respond a free web site and I will show you how to run your own web site (HTML, PHP, and all)
I am in Utah, but travel alot. To contact me, use This Contact Form. Leave your name, age (The first people should be over 18) telephone number and place you live. If you are traveling through Utah, please tell me when you are traveling. I will then call you and give you more detail.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Summer Job Opportunity
They say the summer job market is weak.
If someone in Utah, Colorado, Idaho or is passing through Utah this summer is looking for an opportunity, I just happen to have an opportunity that would be ideal for an enterprising young college student.
The opportunity is open for both men and women.
The opportunity involves social networking and recreation. Essentially, you would be the owner/coach of a sports team.
I emphasize "opportunity." By opportunity, I mean that you will be starting your own business. It is a business that a person could carry on through school.
You will actually be inventing this opportunity. So, I don't know how much you will make ... if anything.
The opportunity involves being outdoor and playing a game.
The opportunity involves minimal investments. For example, you will be outdoors and will need sunscreen. a water bottle, etc.. You will need to get a Tax ID and will need to buy stuff for your business.
If anyone wants to take a risk and start a business for their summer job, please contact me. Leave your name, age and phone number.
If someone in Utah, Colorado, Idaho or is passing through Utah this summer is looking for an opportunity, I just happen to have an opportunity that would be ideal for an enterprising young college student.
The opportunity is open for both men and women.
The opportunity involves social networking and recreation. Essentially, you would be the owner/coach of a sports team.
I emphasize "opportunity." By opportunity, I mean that you will be starting your own business. It is a business that a person could carry on through school.
You will actually be inventing this opportunity. So, I don't know how much you will make ... if anything.
The opportunity involves being outdoor and playing a game.
The opportunity involves minimal investments. For example, you will be outdoors and will need sunscreen. a water bottle, etc.. You will need to get a Tax ID and will need to buy stuff for your business.
If anyone wants to take a risk and start a business for their summer job, please contact me. Leave your name, age and phone number.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Converting to HTML5
I am starting the long, slow process of converting all of the Community Color sites to HTML 5.
It appears that HTML 5 is cleaner and more user friendly than HTML 4 and XHTML. Perhaps I will become enthusiastic about HTML programming again.
I started with Mobile Sites.
It appears that HTML 5 is cleaner and more user friendly than HTML 4 and XHTML. Perhaps I will become enthusiastic about HTML programming again.
I started with Mobile Sites.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Anyone Up for a Game?
Do you like being active?
Do you like social networking?
Do you like the free market?
Would you like to make money playing games on the weekend? (or on the weekdays).
Do you like coaching or want to be a coach? (a life coach)?
Are you in the following states or planning a vacation to the following states this summer: Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, SoCal or Nevada?
To recap, if you would like to participate in a social networking sport and will be within a few hundred miles of Salt Lake this summer; please contact me, and I will get you set up. The game is pro-free market.
MODEL ONE: If you are planning a trip to Moab or Park City, and would like to play a fun game for a few hours, then go home owning a sports franchise that has unlimited potential, then you would be a great candidate.
MODEL TWO: If you own a business and would like to add a side product with unlimited potential. The product would give you a lot of free advertising and would draw people to your business at neglible cost ... and you happen to be planning a visit to Grand Junction, then contact me.
MODEL THREE: A person would like to make money at an activity booth at a Farmers' Market, Fair or community festival.
MODEL FOUR: A college student who would like to make some money playing games on the weekend, during Spring Break or during the summer.
The opportunity involves social networking and recreation (a physical outdoor activity with other people). Running is a physical activity with little interaction. This is a physical activity with substantial interaction.
Do you like social networking?
Do you like the free market?
Would you like to make money playing games on the weekend? (or on the weekdays).
Do you like coaching or want to be a coach? (a life coach)?
Are you in the following states or planning a vacation to the following states this summer: Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, SoCal or Nevada?
To recap, if you would like to participate in a social networking sport and will be within a few hundred miles of Salt Lake this summer; please contact me, and I will get you set up. The game is pro-free market.
MODEL ONE: If you are planning a trip to Moab or Park City, and would like to play a fun game for a few hours, then go home owning a sports franchise that has unlimited potential, then you would be a great candidate.
MODEL TWO: If you own a business and would like to add a side product with unlimited potential. The product would give you a lot of free advertising and would draw people to your business at neglible cost ... and you happen to be planning a visit to Grand Junction, then contact me.
MODEL THREE: A person would like to make money at an activity booth at a Farmers' Market, Fair or community festival.
MODEL FOUR: A college student who would like to make some money playing games on the weekend, during Spring Break or during the summer.
The opportunity involves social networking and recreation (a physical outdoor activity with other people). Running is a physical activity with little interaction. This is a physical activity with substantial interaction.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Miche Shells
I am tired of the world where I buy cheap stuff that I will either toss out or hoard. So, I am interested in finding things that have resell value. So, I spend time trolling eBay to see what people actually are buying.
Interestingly, I discovered that there is a robust after market for Miche Shells. Miche Bag of Salt Lake makes hand bags with interchangeable shells. This way you can match your shell to your wardrobe.
As people's wardrobes change, they will want to change shells, making for an interesting little after market. The online price for the shells seem to run from $25 to $50. Used shells seem to be going for $12 to $25 on ebay. Hmm, I would have done better investing in Miche Bag Shells than in the stock market.
It will be interesting to see if Miche creates a sustainable market, or if they oversaturate the market. Anyway, I will be keeping an eye out for used shells when I visit garage sales this summer.
Interestingly, I discovered that there is a robust after market for Miche Shells. Miche Bag of Salt Lake makes hand bags with interchangeable shells. This way you can match your shell to your wardrobe.
As people's wardrobes change, they will want to change shells, making for an interesting little after market. The online price for the shells seem to run from $25 to $50. Used shells seem to be going for $12 to $25 on ebay. Hmm, I would have done better investing in Miche Bag Shells than in the stock market.
It will be interesting to see if Miche creates a sustainable market, or if they oversaturate the market. Anyway, I will be keeping an eye out for used shells when I visit garage sales this summer.
Saturday, April 07, 2012
Anyone Up for a Game?
I get the feeling that people are hungry for something new.
They want something that is active, that isn't mean.
This morning, I discovered a whole slew of web sites about a sport called Pickleball. Pickleball is a cross between badminton and tennis. The game uses paddles and slow balls; so the game is not as fast as tennis, but involves more strategy.
Because the game values strategy over speed, people of all ages can play the game. In the videos I viewed, people appeared to be having fun.
Because more people can play, pickleball can become part of a more dynamic community than football, basketball or other traditional team sports.
This sport was created in the 1960s. I remember coming across it a long time ago. Wouldn't it be fun to be part of the group that created a new sport?
Way back in the 1980s, I invented a game called juggleball. Juggleball turns the entire concept of a team sport on its head. Most team sports are about vanquishing the opposition team.
The most interesting part of juggling is learning how to toss balls with others. In a toss, both people have a ball and toss it in the air at the same time. Hopefully, the other person will catch it.
You don't have to know how to juggle to play juggleball, you just have to be able to coordinate a toss with another person.
Basically, the sport involves juggle relays. In the sport, you would run with a ball to a base. Coordinate a toss then run to another base. Whoever is best at coordinating tosses with others wins.
In juggleball, people compete to see who is best at cooperating.
I live in a place where people are notoriously close-minded (Utah). In the thirty years since I came up with the idea, I've never been able to find anyone interested in actually living life.
I hope to hit the road this summer. If anyone is interested in taking a leading role in inventing a new social networking sport ... they can contact me.
They want something that is active, that isn't mean.
This morning, I discovered a whole slew of web sites about a sport called Pickleball. Pickleball is a cross between badminton and tennis. The game uses paddles and slow balls; so the game is not as fast as tennis, but involves more strategy.
Because the game values strategy over speed, people of all ages can play the game. In the videos I viewed, people appeared to be having fun.
Because more people can play, pickleball can become part of a more dynamic community than football, basketball or other traditional team sports.
This sport was created in the 1960s. I remember coming across it a long time ago. Wouldn't it be fun to be part of the group that created a new sport?
Way back in the 1980s, I invented a game called juggleball. Juggleball turns the entire concept of a team sport on its head. Most team sports are about vanquishing the opposition team.
The most interesting part of juggling is learning how to toss balls with others. In a toss, both people have a ball and toss it in the air at the same time. Hopefully, the other person will catch it.
You don't have to know how to juggle to play juggleball, you just have to be able to coordinate a toss with another person.
Basically, the sport involves juggle relays. In the sport, you would run with a ball to a base. Coordinate a toss then run to another base. Whoever is best at coordinating tosses with others wins.
In juggleball, people compete to see who is best at cooperating.
I live in a place where people are notoriously close-minded (Utah). In the thirty years since I came up with the idea, I've never been able to find anyone interested in actually living life.
I hope to hit the road this summer. If anyone is interested in taking a leading role in inventing a new social networking sport ... they can contact me.
Monday, April 02, 2012
Income Dropped Again
I tally up the income for the Community Color sites on the first day of the quarter. It appears to have dropped again.
My revenue report shows I have 658 active advertisers, but made only $569.21. The directories cost about $200 a month or $600 to host; The sites are now officially operating in the red.
Due to hardware errors at my web host, I suffered a solid three weeks of down time in September and lost pretty much all of the inbound links to the sites.
On the plus side, the traffic is finally starting to recover ... however, I fear advertising rates for the site has dropped to the point that the marketing plan is no longer feasible for the site.
The sites started with several interactive features. I've systematically turned off all interactive features because the inevitably became full of spam and ugly-speak. I might take a stab at new features ... but realize that my time is better spent on other projects.
My revenue report shows I have 658 active advertisers, but made only $569.21. The directories cost about $200 a month or $600 to host; The sites are now officially operating in the red.
Due to hardware errors at my web host, I suffered a solid three weeks of down time in September and lost pretty much all of the inbound links to the sites.
On the plus side, the traffic is finally starting to recover ... however, I fear advertising rates for the site has dropped to the point that the marketing plan is no longer feasible for the site.
The sites started with several interactive features. I've systematically turned off all interactive features because the inevitably became full of spam and ugly-speak. I might take a stab at new features ... but realize that my time is better spent on other projects.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Ten Million Hits
Every counter gets big with time. Today's big news is that the hit counter on the Community Directories is likely to cross the ten million page view mark some time today. (NOTE, I've lost some of the hit counter data through the years).
Revenuewise, to provide a single minimum wage job, the directory would need about ten million hits per year, not per decade.
To celebrate 10,000,000 page views, I decided to take a peek at the data the site collected: The Link Report says the directory has 23,328 active links, I've deleted 8,866 links. Ten million divided by (23,328+8866) is 310.6 page views per link.
In the first quarter of 2012, I've added 1042 links and deleted 512 dead links. My guess is there's another thousand broken links in the directory.
I track hits on a small subset of the links. The average for the link hit counters is 93.4. The hits per link is, of course, a matter of time. Those added in 2002 average 700 hits. Those added in 2011 have had only a dozen or so hits.
The most important visitor to my site is the Googlebot and other webcrawlers.
There are other pages on the site. The Site of the Day reviews have received several million page views. The calendars and mobile versions of the site have received a steady stream of hits.
So, while few people visit the site, the program does a public good having the googlebot index local community oriented sites. It would be nice if people linked to their community directory. The directories give exposure to small local businesses and organizations that tend to be overshadowed in our world of big business and big government.
Revenuewise, to provide a single minimum wage job, the directory would need about ten million hits per year, not per decade.
To celebrate 10,000,000 page views, I decided to take a peek at the data the site collected: The Link Report says the directory has 23,328 active links, I've deleted 8,866 links. Ten million divided by (23,328+8866) is 310.6 page views per link.
In the first quarter of 2012, I've added 1042 links and deleted 512 dead links. My guess is there's another thousand broken links in the directory.
I track hits on a small subset of the links. The average for the link hit counters is 93.4. The hits per link is, of course, a matter of time. Those added in 2002 average 700 hits. Those added in 2011 have had only a dozen or so hits.
The most important visitor to my site is the Googlebot and other webcrawlers.
There are other pages on the site. The Site of the Day reviews have received several million page views. The calendars and mobile versions of the site have received a steady stream of hits.
So, while few people visit the site, the program does a public good having the googlebot index local community oriented sites. It would be nice if people linked to their community directory. The directories give exposure to small local businesses and organizations that tend to be overshadowed in our world of big business and big government.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
A Tale of Two Crowds
I added new photos. On Friday, I went to the sparsely attended Stand Up For Religious Freedom Rally at the Courthouse, then to a massive crowd at the new City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake.
First the pictures of the rally: The first picture shows the crowd which is about three people deep. My guess is that 150 to maybe 200 people were at the rally. This is maybe half the size of Salt Lake's Occupy Rally.
First the pictures of the rally: The first picture shows the crowd which is about three people deep. My guess is that 150 to maybe 200 people were at the rally. This is maybe half the size of Salt Lake's Occupy Rally.
There was a huge crowd for the second day of the new City Creek Center. The new center has two decks running for two city blocks with both floors and shops filled with spectators.
I admit. I've been feeling sad. I used to work for a state owned insurance group. I quit because I realized that group funded health care (both socialism and private insurance) dramatically under serve the people. For the last three years I've been trying to get people to talk about alternatives funding mechanisms for health care. For some odd reason, people are unwilling to talk about the definitive issue of or day. It's maddening.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Domain Speculation
I've been really sad of late about the large number of small businesses web sites which have failed in the last few years.
Small business is about building equity. I had assumed that businesses will building equity in their web site. But, since I had contempt for the domain speculation process, I never investigated to see if this concept was true.
Anyway, I've been exploring the concept of buying and selling domains.
Last week, I successfully sold the domain PriceHelper.com through the Bido.com auction service. I moved the contents of the domain to the subdomain carbon.UtahColor.com.
Being a silly person, I decided to buy a domain. This way I would experience both sides of the auction process.
Anyway, I decided that I would buy a domain. I searched through several hundred domain names that were on sale and bought the domain BaitShop.US.
I chose this domain because I have affiliate relations with some wonderful small angling web sites. So, I put up a one page affiliate web site. I plan on waiting a year, then putting the auction up for sale again.
Anyway, I am finding this game of buying a web site with the purpose of reselling it at a later date to be quite informative. There is a very interesting rhythm to the auction and domain transfer process.
Although I have no intention of going into domaining as a profession, I think it valuable for people interested in web development to engage in the process simply to investigate if the concept of building equity in a web site holds true.
Small business is about building equity. I had assumed that businesses will building equity in their web site. But, since I had contempt for the domain speculation process, I never investigated to see if this concept was true.
Anyway, I've been exploring the concept of buying and selling domains.
Last week, I successfully sold the domain PriceHelper.com through the Bido.com auction service. I moved the contents of the domain to the subdomain carbon.UtahColor.com.
Being a silly person, I decided to buy a domain. This way I would experience both sides of the auction process.
Anyway, I decided that I would buy a domain. I searched through several hundred domain names that were on sale and bought the domain BaitShop.US.
I chose this domain because I have affiliate relations with some wonderful small angling web sites. So, I put up a one page affiliate web site. I plan on waiting a year, then putting the auction up for sale again.
Anyway, I am finding this game of buying a web site with the purpose of reselling it at a later date to be quite informative. There is a very interesting rhythm to the auction and domain transfer process.
Although I have no intention of going into domaining as a profession, I think it valuable for people interested in web development to engage in the process simply to investigate if the concept of building equity in a web site holds true.
Monday, February 06, 2012
Political Links
The goal of Community Color is to promote local web development. The political sector is currently the most robust area of development. I am concentrating on developing directories for Utah, Colorado and Arizona.
The problem is that the campaign cycle is so short that I often miss important political campaign web sites.
This might include the most important web site or all. Your Web Site! or your favorite candidate's web site.
This is not because I dislike you or your candidate. It is because I don't know the name of their site.
If you know of a web site for a political campaign in Utah, Colorado or Arizona, please use the contact form to tell me about the campaign. You can also tell me about campaign web site in a response to this message.
I will list any local campaign site I find free of charge, provided the site is about a campaign in a community served (Arizona, Colorado, Utah)
Feel free to tell me about your blog as well. The best way to add a blog is to register and use the addLink program. I am happy to list content sites such as blogs free of charge.
Thanks,
The management
The problem is that the campaign cycle is so short that I often miss important political campaign web sites.
This might include the most important web site or all. Your Web Site! or your favorite candidate's web site.
This is not because I dislike you or your candidate. It is because I don't know the name of their site.
If you know of a web site for a political campaign in Utah, Colorado or Arizona, please use the contact form to tell me about the campaign. You can also tell me about campaign web site in a response to this message.
I will list any local campaign site I find free of charge, provided the site is about a campaign in a community served (Arizona, Colorado, Utah)
Feel free to tell me about your blog as well. The best way to add a blog is to register and use the addLink program. I am happy to list content sites such as blogs free of charge.
Thanks,
The management
Friday, January 13, 2012
Wasatch Color
I am transitioning some of the rural Community Color sites from a town focus to a county focus. I moved PriceHelper.com to carbon.UtahColor.com.
I decided to do the same with HeberCity.biz. I moved the contents of HeberCity.biz to wasatch.UtahColor.com.
This means I have a second domain to sell (HeberCity.biz) which I just listed on eBay.
I decided to do the same with HeberCity.biz. I moved the contents of HeberCity.biz to wasatch.UtahColor.com.
This means I have a second domain to sell (HeberCity.biz) which I just listed on eBay.
Monday, January 09, 2012
Giving Sites a Boost - Video
A company from American Fork called Boostability opened up an affiliate program on Share-A-Sale. I was one of the first to join the program, and their manager called me up and asked my opinion on ways to improve their affiliate program.
People reading this blog know that I am always quick to give opinions.
Like Newt Gingrich, my goal in life is to never leave a thought unspoken.
Rarely have I been asked for opinions.
Anyway, the site had several YouTube videos. So I suggested that they upload their videos to the Share-A-Sale video sharing utility. I love YouTube; but I also enjoy seeing other firms taking a stab at video streaming. Since the affiliate industry has a built in revenue stream, I think they are a key candidate for advancing streaming technology.
Other affiliate networks offer video streaming. Oddly, few merchants are taking advantage of the service. I would give the same advice to all merchants engaged in affiliate marketing. USE THE VIDEO UPLOAD SERVICE. The more companies engaged in video streaming, the better.
The market tends to improve with competition. For example, there are many companies offering SEO services. The fierce competition in the industry forces each company to improve its offerings.
The video below is from the Share-A-Sale system. It's not as slick as Youtube ... yet. I tried the Boostability free trial and it does what the video says.
People reading this blog know that I am always quick to give opinions.
Like Newt Gingrich, my goal in life is to never leave a thought unspoken.
Rarely have I been asked for opinions.
Anyway, the site had several YouTube videos. So I suggested that they upload their videos to the Share-A-Sale video sharing utility. I love YouTube; but I also enjoy seeing other firms taking a stab at video streaming. Since the affiliate industry has a built in revenue stream, I think they are a key candidate for advancing streaming technology.
Other affiliate networks offer video streaming. Oddly, few merchants are taking advantage of the service. I would give the same advice to all merchants engaged in affiliate marketing. USE THE VIDEO UPLOAD SERVICE. The more companies engaged in video streaming, the better.
The market tends to improve with competition. For example, there are many companies offering SEO services. The fierce competition in the industry forces each company to improve its offerings.
The video below is from the Share-A-Sale system. It's not as slick as Youtube ... yet. I tried the Boostability free trial and it does what the video says.
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Q4 Was a Bust
The work I did didn't pay off.
Q3 was a bust. I thought I could turn things around by cleaning up the directory listings. During the quarter, I checked about 10,000 links. I pulled 1000 broken links and added 2000 new links (link report).
That was not sufficient. Income for the quarter actually dropped from $632 in Q3 to $614 in Q4. My expenses are $600 a quarter. (income report)
With income dropping below cost, I need to find a way to cut costs.
The big problem, of course, is not the site. There just isn't any interest in local web development. The majority of small independently owned web sites of five years ago failed due to lack of interest.
The success of Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook shows that people want to network. The independently owned web sites are all failing because people simply will not link to small sites.
My twitter account just passed 10.000 followers. I have at top six or seven links to my web sites.
Q3 was a bust. I thought I could turn things around by cleaning up the directory listings. During the quarter, I checked about 10,000 links. I pulled 1000 broken links and added 2000 new links (link report).
That was not sufficient. Income for the quarter actually dropped from $632 in Q3 to $614 in Q4. My expenses are $600 a quarter. (income report)
With income dropping below cost, I need to find a way to cut costs.
The big problem, of course, is not the site. There just isn't any interest in local web development. The majority of small independently owned web sites of five years ago failed due to lack of interest.
The success of Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook shows that people want to network. The independently owned web sites are all failing because people simply will not link to small sites.
My twitter account just passed 10.000 followers. I have at top six or seven links to my web sites.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Church Videos
I have temporary access to high speed internet and can stream YouTube and Vimeo videos; So, I am taking advantage of the opportunity to explore the creations of the local community.
Local church groups and ministries have started streaming video. Some are highly polished works. For example, The River Church of Durango has hired two of the leading intellectuals of Southern Colorado to come out of the mountains and explain up the weekly events at the church, accompanied by banjo and guitar.
Not all churches have access to such gifted prowess, and are doing simple things like posting videos of sermons and church activities.
For the Christmas Season, I will concentrate on carols and church videos for the communities in community color.
I am listing videos at random. I hope no-one feels put off because I missed their church group or video stream.
hmmmm, It would be nice to make my temporary access to high speed internet permanent. On that note. Vann's is the best place to get consumer electronics ... like video equipment.
Yesterday, I was fortunate to be accepted in the 2xl.com affiliate program. I really like this site. They have a good price point and free shipping on three basic styles of earphones: earbuds, behind the ear and full headphones. It is a product that I am likely buy. Here is the link.
Local church groups and ministries have started streaming video. Some are highly polished works. For example, The River Church of Durango has hired two of the leading intellectuals of Southern Colorado to come out of the mountains and explain up the weekly events at the church, accompanied by banjo and guitar.
Not all churches have access to such gifted prowess, and are doing simple things like posting videos of sermons and church activities.
For the Christmas Season, I will concentrate on carols and church videos for the communities in community color.
I am listing videos at random. I hope no-one feels put off because I missed their church group or video stream.
hmmmm, It would be nice to make my temporary access to high speed internet permanent. On that note. Vann's is the best place to get consumer electronics ... like video equipment.
Yesterday, I was fortunate to be accepted in the 2xl.com affiliate program. I really like this site. They have a good price point and free shipping on three basic styles of earphones: earbuds, behind the ear and full headphones. It is a product that I am likely buy. Here is the link.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Back Up for Black Friday
The Community Color sites came back online at 2:00 AM. I've been checking things out and the sites appear stable.
I loaded coupons into the directory. The site aFountainOfBargains.com lists all of the Black Friday coupons.
My webhost claimed there was a hard drive failure yesterday. So far, the cloud server has proven less stable than their standard discount hosting server.
I wish everyone a happy Black Friday.
I loaded coupons into the directory. The site aFountainOfBargains.com lists all of the Black Friday coupons.
My webhost claimed there was a hard drive failure yesterday. So far, the cloud server has proven less stable than their standard discount hosting server.
I wish everyone a happy Black Friday.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Open Technical Support?
Dang. My web sites are down again.
Could you imagine the chaos that would ensue if a webhost tried to give technical support online?
The clients would be YELLING at the webhost while the marketers at the webhost would be doing all that they can to misdirect and spin the support calls to fit current marketing plans.
Opening a technical support call to public scrutiny would do nothing but destroy the ability of the people needing technical support to communicate with the support provider.
A technical support call is best performed in private. A frustrated client calls some poor stiff being forced to work Thanksgiving Night to complain about a web outage.
An open technical support call simply could not work.
I need to let people know that the cloud server hosting the Community Color sites crashed again today. They've been offline for the last six hours. The ETA is 3:00AM ... but is likely to be later.
An outage on Black Friday will be terrible for me. Because of all the previous outages, the income of the sites fell off the cliff. I made only $6 from Nov 1-Nov 24. I was really hoping to make something on Black Friday through Cyber Monday.
I had actually spent several hours loading the site with coupons and sale notices in a desparate attempt to save the sites.
When the sites went down, I thought about logging into a hosting forum and venting against my webhost.
But nothing good could possibly come from such a public train wreck.
My petty little complaint is that people won't see my listing of coupons on Black Friday. So What?
So instead of venting against the people forced to work Thanksgiving Day, I started to think about the absurd expectations we have about the word "open."
From the "open society" to "open source." "Open" is the buzzword of the day. Yet, excessive openess simply destroys the ability to communicate.
It my tech support call, I simply wished the workers a Happy Thanksgiving and asked for information on the outage.
There is no point in venting at a person who is working a really lousy shift.
I tried imagining the same communication on a public forum like Twitter .... it simply could not have worked.
An attempt to have "open" technical support would be absurd ... perhaps most of the ideas surrounding the buzzword "open" are absurd as well.
Anyway, Community Color is down again. I don't know when it will be back up.
The silly little coupons are also on the site aFountainOfBargains.com (which is hosted by a different company). I wish the world a Happy Thanksgiving. Let's hope I am back online tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Note on Affiliate Marketing
For the last several weeks, I've been working on my affiliate links while fretting about whether or not the web site will make ends meet this holiday season.
I've spent a great deal of time on affiliate marketing because I think it is an honorable form of income.
Affiliate marketing is a simple game played between web sites. In affiliate marketing, web sites with a product to sell pay a portion of the sale to an affiliate web site that refers traffic.
It is a simple structure that holds the promise of distributing money through our social networks and web development efforts.
The major affiliate networks list over 10,000 merchants actively engaged in mass affiliation. There are thousands more engaged in private deals.
There are millions of web sites engaged in the market. So, it is a big thing.
Sadly, the market has a dark side with slimy operators pulling every trick in the book to steal commissions and engage in anti-market activity.
For example, parasiteware is a class of computer programs designed to steal commissions. Most of the browser helper objects and toolbars you find in cyberspace were designed to get commissions on sales. There are hosts of adware programs that infect computers like viruses in order to grab commissions.
WARNING: Many of the "anti-adware" products on the market are, themselves, adware.
There is good and bad in every industry. The way to improve things is to openly promote the good things we find and to steer clear of the bad things.
This is what I've been trying to do with the Community Color project. I want to make a living by emphasizing the good side of things.
In the early days of the Internet, I feared that big national sites would dominate and effectively crowd out local web development.
So, I decided to combine affiliate marketing with tools to promote local web development.
I put a quarterly summary my affiliate stats on the page: http://afountainofbargains.com/merchant.html
The Community Color sites have had tens of millions of page views. From 2002 to Q3 2011, I sent 587,000 hits to affiliated merchants and have a reported income of $53,000.
The report shows I make an average of $1500 a quarter. A full time job at minimum wage is over $3700 per quarter.
This year I made the foolish mistake of upgrading to a cloud hosting account. I also invested in a smartphone hoping to learn about the mobile market. I increased my expenses to $500 a quarter.
The cloud account crashed in August. I had 6 weeks of down time during which I lost most of my inbound links. My income fell to under a $100 a month. (gulp). From November 1 to November 21, I've sent 1856 hits to affiliated merchants, but only made $2.32 in commissions. (I made $3.84 today bringing my monthly income to $6.32. (gulp)
Because of the crash, I've been working furiously on trying to fix the income structure of the project. I've increase the number of affiliate links. The page http://linksalive.com/slime.html shows the percent of affiliate to standard links. Yes, I call the page slime because my progressive friends consider any action that makes money to be slime.
The slime report shows that community directories tend to have a low ratio of affiliate to regular links. 4.2% of the links in Salt Lake Sites go to affiliated merchants.
Newer sites like ArizonaColor.us have a higher percent of links because I decided to add the affiliate links first.
The bottom line of the report says the directory has 22525 links with 2747 going to merchant web sites. That's about 12% of the links.
This directory structure sends a ton of traffic to community services and small web sites. Close to 90% of the traffic goes to free stuff.
Community stuff is good, but I happen to believe that making money is a good as well.
Look at the chaos that ensued after the financial collapse. In many ways, I believe that the web sites that have viable business models and make money do more for the community than those that are simply excercises in free expression.
Because of the web site crash that took place in August, I've been burning the midnight oil working on affiliate links.
I believe that affiliate marketing is a good thing that could help provide additional income to people in the middle class.
I think that affiliate marketing is something that we should promote, and not shun.
I've spent a great deal of time on affiliate marketing because I think it is an honorable form of income.
Affiliate marketing is a simple game played between web sites. In affiliate marketing, web sites with a product to sell pay a portion of the sale to an affiliate web site that refers traffic.
It is a simple structure that holds the promise of distributing money through our social networks and web development efforts.
The major affiliate networks list over 10,000 merchants actively engaged in mass affiliation. There are thousands more engaged in private deals.
There are millions of web sites engaged in the market. So, it is a big thing.
Sadly, the market has a dark side with slimy operators pulling every trick in the book to steal commissions and engage in anti-market activity.
For example, parasiteware is a class of computer programs designed to steal commissions. Most of the browser helper objects and toolbars you find in cyberspace were designed to get commissions on sales. There are hosts of adware programs that infect computers like viruses in order to grab commissions.
WARNING: Many of the "anti-adware" products on the market are, themselves, adware.
There is good and bad in every industry. The way to improve things is to openly promote the good things we find and to steer clear of the bad things.
This is what I've been trying to do with the Community Color project. I want to make a living by emphasizing the good side of things.
In the early days of the Internet, I feared that big national sites would dominate and effectively crowd out local web development.
So, I decided to combine affiliate marketing with tools to promote local web development.
I put a quarterly summary my affiliate stats on the page: http://afountainofbargains.com/merchant.html
The Community Color sites have had tens of millions of page views. From 2002 to Q3 2011, I sent 587,000 hits to affiliated merchants and have a reported income of $53,000.
The report shows I make an average of $1500 a quarter. A full time job at minimum wage is over $3700 per quarter.
This year I made the foolish mistake of upgrading to a cloud hosting account. I also invested in a smartphone hoping to learn about the mobile market. I increased my expenses to $500 a quarter.
The cloud account crashed in August. I had 6 weeks of down time during which I lost most of my inbound links. My income fell to under a $100 a month. (gulp). From November 1 to November 21, I've sent 1856 hits to affiliated merchants, but only made $2.32 in commissions. (I made $3.84 today bringing my monthly income to $6.32. (gulp)
Because of the crash, I've been working furiously on trying to fix the income structure of the project. I've increase the number of affiliate links. The page http://linksalive.com/slime.html shows the percent of affiliate to standard links. Yes, I call the page slime because my progressive friends consider any action that makes money to be slime.
The slime report shows that community directories tend to have a low ratio of affiliate to regular links. 4.2% of the links in Salt Lake Sites go to affiliated merchants.
Newer sites like ArizonaColor.us have a higher percent of links because I decided to add the affiliate links first.
The bottom line of the report says the directory has 22525 links with 2747 going to merchant web sites. That's about 12% of the links.
This directory structure sends a ton of traffic to community services and small web sites. Close to 90% of the traffic goes to free stuff.
Community stuff is good, but I happen to believe that making money is a good as well.
Look at the chaos that ensued after the financial collapse. In many ways, I believe that the web sites that have viable business models and make money do more for the community than those that are simply excercises in free expression.
Because of the web site crash that took place in August, I've been burning the midnight oil working on affiliate links.
I believe that affiliate marketing is a good thing that could help provide additional income to people in the middle class.
I think that affiliate marketing is something that we should promote, and not shun.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Four Thousand Reviews
I temporarily have access to high speed internet; so I am taking full advantage of every megabyte per second and am rapidly expanding my sites. It used to take 20 minutes to download a 5 minute YouTube video. I can now stream most of the videos.
The goal of Community Color is to promote local web development in the Mountain West. A large number of people are creating and uploading videos.
So, i am scouring YouTube, WelcomeMatt and Vimeo for local videos and posting them in the Site Review section of my site. These reviews serve as the base for the site's RSS feeds.
I just looked at my stats which say that I currently have 3999 site reviews up. These reviews have received 2,533,845 page views. That's an average of 633 views per review.
For the most part the reviews are randomly selected web sites. Some of the reviews are for ecommerce sites with a local connection.
I tend to favor custom coded sites and those that have produced videos or social media content. I am concentrating on Utah, Colorado and Arizona. The mobi optimized page m.CommunityColor.com shows just the You Tube videos by community.
Youtube is overloaded with new videos about the Occupy movement. I've embedded a few dozen occupy videos on the site, but politics is not the primary focus of the community color project, and I apologize to those who think there should be more.
Anyway, the goal of this project is to create RSS feeds filled with a diversity of interesting local links. Currently, the project looks at 40 different communities. Each RSS feed shows a new link about once a week.
I am attempting to fund the project with the Store of the Day program on LinksAlive. This page shows a link to an ecommerce store. My hope is to create a financially viable structure that can help promote community centric web development. My long term hope is to some day make enough to hire a minimum wage clerk to write the reviews.
The goal of Community Color is to promote local web development in the Mountain West. A large number of people are creating and uploading videos.
So, i am scouring YouTube, WelcomeMatt and Vimeo for local videos and posting them in the Site Review section of my site. These reviews serve as the base for the site's RSS feeds.
I just looked at my stats which say that I currently have 3999 site reviews up. These reviews have received 2,533,845 page views. That's an average of 633 views per review.
For the most part the reviews are randomly selected web sites. Some of the reviews are for ecommerce sites with a local connection.
I tend to favor custom coded sites and those that have produced videos or social media content. I am concentrating on Utah, Colorado and Arizona. The mobi optimized page m.CommunityColor.com shows just the You Tube videos by community.
Youtube is overloaded with new videos about the Occupy movement. I've embedded a few dozen occupy videos on the site, but politics is not the primary focus of the community color project, and I apologize to those who think there should be more.
Anyway, the goal of this project is to create RSS feeds filled with a diversity of interesting local links. Currently, the project looks at 40 different communities. Each RSS feed shows a new link about once a week.
I am attempting to fund the project with the Store of the Day program on LinksAlive. This page shows a link to an ecommerce store. My hope is to create a financially viable structure that can help promote community centric web development. My long term hope is to some day make enough to hire a minimum wage clerk to write the reviews.
Saturday, November 05, 2011
Site Reviews by Month
I added state level web sites to Community Color to help group the town sites, and things are working out well.
I wanted each site to have an RSS feed. RSS feeds are for periodical posts like newspaper articles and blog posts. So, I created a "Site of the Day" review program that would highlight one site a day. A site a day is too much work.
You can add the RSS feed for your town's directory and you will occasionally see a link to a local web (or local store). I just made calendars that show the reviews for an entire state. Here are the three pages:
My hope is to fund the project with the Store of the Day which presents an affiliate site each day.
The reviews are pretty much random. Basically, if I feel like writing a review when I first find the site, I write a review.
I like to review sites that have YouTube or Vimeo videos because then I can embed the content in the reviews to make them more interesting. If I had time, I would end up making all sites a site of the day. But time is limited.
I wanted each site to have an RSS feed. RSS feeds are for periodical posts like newspaper articles and blog posts. So, I created a "Site of the Day" review program that would highlight one site a day. A site a day is too much work.
You can add the RSS feed for your town's directory and you will occasionally see a link to a local web (or local store). I just made calendars that show the reviews for an entire state. Here are the three pages:
- ArizonaColor Reviews shows the reviews for all counties in Arizona
- Colorado Color Reviews shows the reviews for select towns in Colorado.
- Utah Color - Reviews shows the reviews for select towns in Utah.
My hope is to fund the project with the Store of the Day which presents an affiliate site each day.
The reviews are pretty much random. Basically, if I feel like writing a review when I first find the site, I write a review.
I like to review sites that have YouTube or Vimeo videos because then I can embed the content in the reviews to make them more interesting. If I had time, I would end up making all sites a site of the day. But time is limited.
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
User Experience v. SEO
I read a fun article on SEO Experts to Avoid.
The article criticizes conversion experts turned SEO.
Search Engine Optimization SEO is all about trying to get free traffic from search engines. We all love to play the system and get something for nothing, however, it is a market that can easily go away.
Search engines are still king, but are only one source of traffic. This is especially true with local marketing where local printed ads still bring more traffic than international search engines.
Everytime Google changes its algorithm, there is teeth nashing on WeberMaster World as the SEO experts find their page ranks change.
The web designer who concentrates on user experience first will create a design that is valuable to the user regardless of the source of the traffic.
IMHO, the best web designer is the person who designs for the web site users but who is attentative enough to SEO to avoid big SEO mistakes.
The biggest problems with "Conversion Experts" is that they often fail to give any due consideration to SEO. For example, a flash site might have no keywords and the search engines never index them. Having an HTML navigation structure that navigates to the flash pages solves this.
IMHO: Small sites going for competitive keywords are better off concentrating on usability, then using traditional advertising or buying online traffic than competing for an overcrowded keyword.
In conclusion, I would say the best approach for web design is to consider the Free Search Engine traffic to be just one element of advertising and to avoid any SEO expert that wants to make free search engine treffic the primary focus of a web site.
The article criticizes conversion experts turned SEO.
Search Engine Optimization SEO is all about trying to get free traffic from search engines. We all love to play the system and get something for nothing, however, it is a market that can easily go away.
Search engines are still king, but are only one source of traffic. This is especially true with local marketing where local printed ads still bring more traffic than international search engines.
Everytime Google changes its algorithm, there is teeth nashing on WeberMaster World as the SEO experts find their page ranks change.
The web designer who concentrates on user experience first will create a design that is valuable to the user regardless of the source of the traffic.
IMHO, the best web designer is the person who designs for the web site users but who is attentative enough to SEO to avoid big SEO mistakes.
The biggest problems with "Conversion Experts" is that they often fail to give any due consideration to SEO. For example, a flash site might have no keywords and the search engines never index them. Having an HTML navigation structure that navigates to the flash pages solves this.
IMHO: Small sites going for competitive keywords are better off concentrating on usability, then using traditional advertising or buying online traffic than competing for an overcrowded keyword.
In conclusion, I would say the best approach for web design is to consider the Free Search Engine traffic to be just one element of advertising and to avoid any SEO expert that wants to make free search engine treffic the primary focus of a web site.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Politics - A Scary Subject
This All-Souls Eve I am working on the most frightening of all subjects ... politics.
The goal of Community Color was to promote locally centric web development. All of the directories had a politics section because that is a part of life.
In the last two years, I've been consumed with the health care debate (to no avail). Anyway, I want to focus on the community sites again.
In the first effort, I started with the local community and worked outward. In this new effort, I want to start with the state and work inward.
I am currently concentrating on three states: Arizona, Colorado and Utah and have three web sites with the URLS ArizonaColor.US, colorado.communitycolor.com and UtahColor.com.
I am working on the politics pages which have the path /dir/politics. They are Arizona Politics, Colorado Politics and Utah Politics.
The state level political directories will have links to state level political parties and statewide political races. The local directories will have links to local political web sites and local political campaigns.
To help tie the local and state directories together, I created a master index. Here is the master index for Utah politics. This page simply has a link to the politics directories in each of the sites.
Prior to this change I was doing silly things for state wide races. If a race had a candidate from Tooele and one from Heber, I would list the Tooele candidate in Tooele and Heber candidate in Heber. This provided no value to people who wanted to compare candidates and it looked like a tacit endorsement.
I confess, a major reason for this change is that I never found a way to monetize local web directories. People are interested in targetting local customers, but they aren't interested in supporting local web sites. The only revenue source I have is affiliate marketing. Most towns don't have enough ecommerce web sites to pay the bill.
When I bump up to the state level, I find that there are enough advertisers. For example, I've found about 100 Colorado shops doing affiliate marketing. The Colorado Shopping directory will have enough affiliate stores to be interesting.
Anyway, I working on political web sites ... it is much scarier than any of the Halloween attractions in town.
The goal of Community Color was to promote locally centric web development. All of the directories had a politics section because that is a part of life.
In the last two years, I've been consumed with the health care debate (to no avail). Anyway, I want to focus on the community sites again.
In the first effort, I started with the local community and worked outward. In this new effort, I want to start with the state and work inward.
I am currently concentrating on three states: Arizona, Colorado and Utah and have three web sites with the URLS ArizonaColor.US, colorado.communitycolor.com and UtahColor.com.
I am working on the politics pages which have the path /dir/politics. They are Arizona Politics, Colorado Politics and Utah Politics.
The state level political directories will have links to state level political parties and statewide political races. The local directories will have links to local political web sites and local political campaigns.
To help tie the local and state directories together, I created a master index. Here is the master index for Utah politics. This page simply has a link to the politics directories in each of the sites.
Prior to this change I was doing silly things for state wide races. If a race had a candidate from Tooele and one from Heber, I would list the Tooele candidate in Tooele and Heber candidate in Heber. This provided no value to people who wanted to compare candidates and it looked like a tacit endorsement.
I confess, a major reason for this change is that I never found a way to monetize local web directories. People are interested in targetting local customers, but they aren't interested in supporting local web sites. The only revenue source I have is affiliate marketing. Most towns don't have enough ecommerce web sites to pay the bill.
When I bump up to the state level, I find that there are enough advertisers. For example, I've found about 100 Colorado shops doing affiliate marketing. The Colorado Shopping directory will have enough affiliate stores to be interesting.
Anyway, I working on political web sites ... it is much scarier than any of the Halloween attractions in town.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Noah's
It's been awhile since I've uploaded any images.
I've been fretting about the mess that our government and big insurance has made of health care that I just didn't feel like taking pictures.
Anyway, I've been thinking about throwing down my own money and hosting an event on free market health care and started looking for a venue for the event.
While looking for event space, it dawned on me how most of the prime venues for public events are directly owned by the government, or operated by private firms in direct connection with the government.
All of the events I've attended of late have been at government owned facilities including The Salt Palce, South Towne, The U, SLCC, the library, Gallivan Center, the Capitol Grounds, public parks, public schools, or the Fairground.
LPAC was the only public event I've attended in the last several years that took place at a privately owned facility.
That was in Reno.
Noah's is a privately owned event facility. They have locations in Lindon, Utah; South Jordan, Utah; Chandler, Az; and Westminster, Colorado.
So, I decided to drive out to the South Jordan facility and take some pictures.
The facilities appear to be geared toward receptions and corporate parties. The manager indicated that most of the events are private celebrations.
They would not be suited for the educational events I wanted to host.
However, I decided to include them in the venue section of the Community Color calendars: Salt Lake, Lindon, Chandler, Az and Westminster, Co.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Utah Color
I am officially opening the site UtahColor.com.
I have a collection of community web sites in Utah. While adding links, I kept coming across the problem that some web sites are state wide. For example, everyone who drives must visit the Utah DMV at some point.
People are also interested in statewide elections. If one candidate for the Senate was in Saint George and the other from Logan, I would add a link to one candidate in SaintGeorgeUtah.US and the other in LoganUt.US when they really should be side by side.
So, I bought the domain Utah Color to hold state wide resources.
To monetize UtahColor.com, I added a Shopping category that lists all of the affiliate programs I've found which are headquartered in Utah. An affiliate program is a program that shares a portion of a sale with a refering web site.
As my focus is still the local community, the front page of Utah Color has links to all of the community sites.
I have a collection of community web sites in Utah. While adding links, I kept coming across the problem that some web sites are state wide. For example, everyone who drives must visit the Utah DMV at some point.
People are also interested in statewide elections. If one candidate for the Senate was in Saint George and the other from Logan, I would add a link to one candidate in SaintGeorgeUtah.US and the other in LoganUt.US when they really should be side by side.
So, I bought the domain Utah Color to hold state wide resources.
To monetize UtahColor.com, I added a Shopping category that lists all of the affiliate programs I've found which are headquartered in Utah. An affiliate program is a program that shares a portion of a sale with a refering web site.
As my focus is still the local community, the front page of Utah Color has links to all of the community sites.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Web Sites and Social Networking
Social networks are growing bigger by the day.
Unfortunately, the social network is outside of your control.
I believe that social networking is the heart of the web. I love the fact that people are actively linking to eachother on twitter and facebook.
However, I think that one's web site or blog should be the center of their social networking effort.
Practicing what I preach: My twitter account has some 9,300 followers (mostly robots). I've put hit counters on tweets. In most cases I only get about 40 hits (from mostly robots).
My personal networking site is Community Color. This site has over 20,000 active links and has listed over 20,000 community events in the calendar. (NOTE, I've removed 7,700 dead links from the directory). I've placed hit counters on entries in the directories and generally get several hundred hits per listing.
More importantly, direct links from home pages build Google Page Rank. Google uses PR to sort search requests.
Twitter blocks Google from crawling its pages. The links are marked rel="nofollow". Tweets do not help web sites build pr. A tweet or follow might send a few tweets in the direction of a site you support ... but it doesn't really help others build sustainable traffic.
If there is a cause you support, you do better to write a blog post about the cause; then tweet about the blog post.
BTW community color makes directories for towns in the mountain west (Utah, Colorado, etc). For example, gjct.com is for Grand Junction. I just started making a directory for Arizona. The Stats page shows the number of links broken down by directory. Provo has some 1600 links, Salt Lake City has some 5700 links.
In conclusion, your personal web site or blog should be the center of your social networking effort. Linking to local organizations can help sustain a vibrant local community in the internet age. I am proud of the fact that my local link list is still magnitudes larger than my twitter follow list.
Unfortunately, the social network is outside of your control.
I believe that social networking is the heart of the web. I love the fact that people are actively linking to eachother on twitter and facebook.
However, I think that one's web site or blog should be the center of their social networking effort.
Practicing what I preach: My twitter account has some 9,300 followers (mostly robots). I've put hit counters on tweets. In most cases I only get about 40 hits (from mostly robots).
My personal networking site is Community Color. This site has over 20,000 active links and has listed over 20,000 community events in the calendar. (NOTE, I've removed 7,700 dead links from the directory). I've placed hit counters on entries in the directories and generally get several hundred hits per listing.
More importantly, direct links from home pages build Google Page Rank. Google uses PR to sort search requests.
Twitter blocks Google from crawling its pages. The links are marked rel="nofollow". Tweets do not help web sites build pr. A tweet or follow might send a few tweets in the direction of a site you support ... but it doesn't really help others build sustainable traffic.
If there is a cause you support, you do better to write a blog post about the cause; then tweet about the blog post.
BTW community color makes directories for towns in the mountain west (Utah, Colorado, etc). For example, gjct.com is for Grand Junction. I just started making a directory for Arizona. The Stats page shows the number of links broken down by directory. Provo has some 1600 links, Salt Lake City has some 5700 links.
In conclusion, your personal web site or blog should be the center of your social networking effort. Linking to local organizations can help sustain a vibrant local community in the internet age. I am proud of the fact that my local link list is still magnitudes larger than my twitter follow list.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Provo Crosses the Million Hit Mark
There is a reason I spent a day working on the stats.
The Community Color directory ProvoUtah.US just officially crossed the million hit mark. I can now link to a statistics page.
The site has been up since 2002. So, it only gets 100,000 views a year. These are failure statistics, not success statistics. It simply proves that all things get large with age.
For my stats, I simply update a hit counter for each page view. I end up losing
stats when I delete or move a page. There are other pages on the site.
The first table on the stats page shows hits by category. There is a lot of interest in provo apartments.
The second table shows statistics from other pages on the site. For example, the site includes some 474 web site reviews. These review pages have had some 348,704 page views. Again the hit counts disappear when I delete old reviews. So it is probably over a half million.
Speaking about deleting things. The site has 1668 active links. I've deleted 781 old broken links. So 31.89% of the links in the directory have gone black so far.
My guess is that a good tenth of the current links are broken. BTW, I only remove the link after the web site goes blank. A large number of businesses have gone under, but still have a web site.
I don't delete the calendar data. The calendar has had 74411 hits. It currently lists 84 events. I've archived 1511 old events.
I buffer the stats twice a month so that I can get a feel of daily traffic. The Traffic page shows that the directory gets about 400 hits a day.
Moneywise. I pull in a little under a dollar for every 1000 hits. So, the directory brings in about 40 cents a day. The other pages bring in another dime a day.
My best Provo-based advertiser is Costume Craze which just happens to sell Halloween costume.
The global traffic pages shows the total hit count for all of the directories. The total traffic is about 4,000 hits a day. My hope was to make enough to hire a minimum wage clerk to maintain the site. I would need about 120,000 page views a day to pay one salary.
I keep the sites up because I believe it benefits the community and it was a good way to judge the economical viability of web development.
BTW, since I revived the stats page, Googlebot has been actively reading the site which might increase traffic. My total bandwidth seems to have increased 20% and CPU usage doubled.
The Community Color directory ProvoUtah.US just officially crossed the million hit mark. I can now link to a statistics page.
The site has been up since 2002. So, it only gets 100,000 views a year. These are failure statistics, not success statistics. It simply proves that all things get large with age.
For my stats, I simply update a hit counter for each page view. I end up losing
stats when I delete or move a page. There are other pages on the site.
The first table on the stats page shows hits by category. There is a lot of interest in provo apartments.
The second table shows statistics from other pages on the site. For example, the site includes some 474 web site reviews. These review pages have had some 348,704 page views. Again the hit counts disappear when I delete old reviews. So it is probably over a half million.
Speaking about deleting things. The site has 1668 active links. I've deleted 781 old broken links. So 31.89% of the links in the directory have gone black so far.
My guess is that a good tenth of the current links are broken. BTW, I only remove the link after the web site goes blank. A large number of businesses have gone under, but still have a web site.
I don't delete the calendar data. The calendar has had 74411 hits. It currently lists 84 events. I've archived 1511 old events.
I buffer the stats twice a month so that I can get a feel of daily traffic. The Traffic page shows that the directory gets about 400 hits a day.
Moneywise. I pull in a little under a dollar for every 1000 hits. So, the directory brings in about 40 cents a day. The other pages bring in another dime a day.
My best Provo-based advertiser is Costume Craze which just happens to sell Halloween costume.
The global traffic pages shows the total hit count for all of the directories. The total traffic is about 4,000 hits a day. My hope was to make enough to hire a minimum wage clerk to maintain the site. I would need about 120,000 page views a day to pay one salary.
I keep the sites up because I believe it benefits the community and it was a good way to judge the economical viability of web development.
BTW, since I revived the stats page, Googlebot has been actively reading the site which might increase traffic. My total bandwidth seems to have increased 20% and CPU usage doubled.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Calendar Cat Stats
I am in a programming mood.
I put a little table at the bottom of the Calendar/Category page that shows the average number of hits per event along with historical data. For example the Salt Lake Shopping category page shows 26 archived events which received 4175 page views ... an average of 160 page views per event.
Most of the page views are the GoogleBot or other web crawlers. My advertising revenue is a little under $1 for thousand page views. This section of the site has probably generated about $4 in revenue over the last three years.
It is not a lucrative business.
I put a little table at the bottom of the Calendar/Category page that shows the average number of hits per event along with historical data. For example the Salt Lake Shopping category page shows 26 archived events which received 4175 page views ... an average of 160 page views per event.
Most of the page views are the GoogleBot or other web crawlers. My advertising revenue is a little under $1 for thousand page views. This section of the site has probably generated about $4 in revenue over the last three years.
It is not a lucrative business.
Reworked Stats Pages
Back when I was on a shared hosting account, the Community Color sites would suffer slow downs when traffic started building up. So, I disabled the links report on the statistics page.
I am now on a cloud account where I pay for a block of CPU usage. So, I decided to try turning the stats page back on.
Each directory in Community Color has a stats page. Here's the page for LinksAlive.com (which displays odds and ends). The first table shows hits by category. Clicking on the category shows the history of the page.
The summary section at the bottom provides information on the internal pages. It includes information on deleted links. There are 2551 active links in the directory. I've deleted some 1270 broken links.
The traffic report shows hits per day. LinksAlive.com seems to get about 300 hits a day. The Global Traffic reports shows the whole directory tree gets about 3,800 hits a day. It fell about 400 hits a day during the server outages last month.
To be economically viable, I would need to get the site up to about 50,000 page views a day. I don't see that happening soon.
The Global Stats page shows total stats by community. LinksAlive.com is the third most visited directory in the collection.
I am now on a cloud account where I pay for a block of CPU usage. So, I decided to try turning the stats page back on.
Each directory in Community Color has a stats page. Here's the page for LinksAlive.com (which displays odds and ends). The first table shows hits by category. Clicking on the category shows the history of the page.
The summary section at the bottom provides information on the internal pages. It includes information on deleted links. There are 2551 active links in the directory. I've deleted some 1270 broken links.
The traffic report shows hits per day. LinksAlive.com seems to get about 300 hits a day. The Global Traffic reports shows the whole directory tree gets about 3,800 hits a day. It fell about 400 hits a day during the server outages last month.
To be economically viable, I would need to get the site up to about 50,000 page views a day. I don't see that happening soon.
The Global Stats page shows total stats by community. LinksAlive.com is the third most visited directory in the collection.
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Events by Category
I wanted to post a tweet saying that Salt Lake Sites had the most complete Halloween page for the Salt Lake Valley.
Unfortunately, the design listed Halloween web sites in the directory and Halloween events in the calendar. I did not have a page with complete information.
So, I jerry-rigged the directory to show events. The problem is that many events repeat. Odyssey Dance will perform Thriller a dozen times in October. To avoid repetition, I only show the first occurence of an event and created the page Category Events that shows all events for a category (even the completed events).
The directory page Denver Color - Football shows only the next Broncos home game. The catEvents page shows the full home season schedule. The events will disappear in a few months.
After this change, the first line in Salt Lake Sites - Halloween looks like:
Here is the Halloween page for Denver. (Ahem, you can buy customes online at A Fountain of Bargains - Halloween).
I hope this change will make both the directory and calendar more compelling. Above all I now have more info on my Halloween Page than Scary Salt Lake.
Unfortunately, the design listed Halloween web sites in the directory and Halloween events in the calendar. I did not have a page with complete information.
So, I jerry-rigged the directory to show events. The problem is that many events repeat. Odyssey Dance will perform Thriller a dozen times in October. To avoid repetition, I only show the first occurence of an event and created the page Category Events that shows all events for a category (even the completed events).
The directory page Denver Color - Football shows only the next Broncos home game. The catEvents page shows the full home season schedule. The events will disappear in a few months.
After this change, the first line in Salt Lake Sites - Halloween looks like:
Upcoming Events: Thriller (2011-10-12), Undead Race (2011-10-15), Spooka Palooza (2011-10-21), Spooky Symphonies (2011-10-25), Witch's Tea (2011-10-29) ... more
Here is the Halloween page for Denver. (Ahem, you can buy customes online at A Fountain of Bargains - Halloween).
I hope this change will make both the directory and calendar more compelling. Above all I now have more info on my Halloween Page than Scary Salt Lake.
Monday, October 03, 2011
Third Quarter Follies
I finished tallying up the third quarter 2011.
The six weeks of web site down time really took its toll. The quarterly income fell to $632. Ouch.
The big question is if the down time cost me back links and customers.
My traffic report page shows the total hits in the directory structure per day in two week intrevals. My goal has been to get that figure up to 10K per day.
I wish I had a way to match this chart to technical difficulties.
Historically, the site has always suffered a techinical breakdown or slow downs when it crossed 4K users a day mark. Discount web hosts often have a throttle on the site that kicks in when traffic picks up.
I had hoped that the extra $40 a month would help me increase traffic to the point the project was economically viable. Moving from a shared hosting account to a cloud account raised my hosting costs from $30 per quarter to $150 per quarter. My ISP costs are $120 per quarter. The whole thing really is a bust.
If the site was economically viable, I could add features!
The six weeks of web site down time really took its toll. The quarterly income fell to $632. Ouch.
The big question is if the down time cost me back links and customers.
My traffic report page shows the total hits in the directory structure per day in two week intrevals. My goal has been to get that figure up to 10K per day.
I wish I had a way to match this chart to technical difficulties.
Historically, the site has always suffered a techinical breakdown or slow downs when it crossed 4K users a day mark. Discount web hosts often have a throttle on the site that kicks in when traffic picks up.
I had hoped that the extra $40 a month would help me increase traffic to the point the project was economically viable. Moving from a shared hosting account to a cloud account raised my hosting costs from $30 per quarter to $150 per quarter. My ISP costs are $120 per quarter. The whole thing really is a bust.
If the site was economically viable, I could add features!
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