Traffic from Halloween Past

My page Salt Lake Sites- Halloween used to have the top listing in Google and Yahoo. Multiple weeks of downtime at my web host pretty much wiped me out of the search engines.

This top spot gives insight into seasonal web traffic flows.

I admit, the data is disappointing. The top position on Google and Yahoo only delivered 1800 hits in October. I got just under 70 hits per day in the week before Halloween.

There is nothing really that compelling about my list of Halloween attractions (other than it's more complete than competitors). I thought the position in Google would have delivered more traffic. Let's see, I usually get a $1.50 in ad revenue for every thousand hits. The keyword position itself is only worth about two dollars. I just liked that I was getting a predictable spike.

I do have a costume affiliate -- Costume Craze. My affiliate stats says I've sent them 1266 hits since 2006. I've sold 11 costumes and made $50.33. Targetted local traffic is slightly more lucrative than random traffic.

In conclusion. Local web sites do not pay off, but data is fun regardless, and, yes, this post was just a pathetic attempt to recapture a decent spot on Google for 2011 so that I will have another Halloween Spike in my chart.

DNS Problems Resolved

The Community Color sites suffered some DNS problems this last week. I apologize if this change caused any inconvenience.

I had my account moved to a new server last month. Apparently, the old server felt lonely. Two days ago, the old server started sending DNS update requests.

So, I had several days where the account was pointing to different accounts at different times.

For the last several days, I suffered the problme that any new information added to the account was going into the wrong database.

So, if you registered in the last two days, added events or made other changes, you information would have gone into the wrong database.

I apologize for this inconvenience.

Sites Are Coming Back Online

The Community Color web sites are slowly coming back on line.

I had moved to cloud server hoping that cloud technology would be more robust.

Instead, I experienced a cloud burst.

The cloud server had problems that would cause the site go into read only mode and not deliver any of the PHP content. Instead it sent people to an error page.

The host moved the site to a new server. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

I had 80 hours of down time during this fiasco. I apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused.

Sincerely,

The Management

Sites Are Still Down

I actually believe in shared hosting. Shared hosting shares computer resources and has a lower impact on the environment than dedicated servers.

Unfortunately, hosting companies have a tendency to oversell their servers. So share hosting is often a nightmare when web sites on the host grow.

I had had long periods of down time on my shared hosting account. So, I moved Community Color to a new cloud server.

A cloud server is theoretically more robust. The servers have a dedicated amount of resources. The web hosts add resources to the accounts as they grow.

Well, this last week the cloud turned into a nightmare. Something on my web hosts cloud keeps causing the sites to go down. Even worse, tier one technical support has been unable to reboot the sites. That means I have to sumbit tickets to a mysterious tier-two technical support ... which may or may not respond to a support ticket on a shift.

Anyway, I've suffered over 50 hours of down time this week.

The sites are currently down. They were down all night.

I was told by the technical support that the engineers would move my site to a new server today.

I am probably low on the priority list and really don't know if this will happen, or if moving to new hardware will actually solve the problem.

Moving to the cloud has proven a negative experience.

I apologize for all of the down time. This is out of my control. I do not make enough money on the site to afford my own hardware ... which means that the down time I experience is pretty much out of my control.

MillCreek is the Worst Name ... EVER!

Currently there is an effort to create a new city in the Salt Lake Valley called "MillCreek."

Yes, the proponents of the plan are using the irregular punctuation for the town MillCreek. The county site uses the regular punctuation.

Mill Creek is an uninspired name for a pretty canyon in the Salt Lake Valley. Historians say that there were some mills on the creek for a very short period of time. The mills failed, were boarded up then torn down as eyesores a century ago.

Mill Creek is not an imaginative name. There are thousands of creeks called Mill Creek in the US and abroad. Wikipedia lists a dozen towns named Mill Creek. None of them are doing that well. None of them are remarkable. Look on any map, and you will find a multitude of creeks named Mill Creek.

My favorite Mill Creek Canyon is a the slit canyon south of Moab.

Unfortunately, one needs to pay a toll to access the canyon.

There is no public access to the creek through MillCreek. You can see the creek behind a chainlink fence in Evergreen Park and you can cross culverts containing the creek. But the creek does not play a prominent role in the town.

For that matter, only about a tenth of the people in the proposed town of MillCreek live near Mill Creek.

This new city will include the land running from South Salt Lake to the base of Mount Olympus. Just about every house in town has a spectacular view of Mount Olympus. For that matter, my parents live in this area. Like many of the houses in MillCreek, my parent's house was built with windows framing Mount Olympus.

Mount Olympus is the most prominent landmark in the Salt Lake Valley. While it is not the tallest peak in the Wasatch Mountains, the mountain has a rather large and imposing face directed at Salt Lake City.

When marketers select pictures to show Salt Lake City, they invariably choose pictures with Mount Olympus in the background.

Lets face it, Mount Olympus is one of the most recognizable natural landmarks in the United States.

As for beauty and scale, Mount Olympus knocks the socks off the Flat Irons near Boulder. The Flat Irons serve as the name sake of many areas in Boulder and Broomfield County.

If I were given a chance to name a city that sits on the slopes of Mount Olympus, I would be inclined to name the town after the spectacular landmark.

The last thing I would do is name the town for mills that failed and were boarded up a century ago.

Mount Olympus is a great name. The mountain played an important role in Greek Mythology as the home of the Gods. Naming a town after the mythological home of the gods creates wonderful naming opportunities for small businesses in the town.

Naming the city for Mount Olympus would make the new city the premium address for corporations seeking to move to the Wasatch Front.

NOTE, the town of Olympia, Wa became a cultural center of Washington and eventually the state capital simply because the founders of the town gave it a cool name.

The ancient name of Olympus is so reputable that the name was used for the International Olympic Games held once every Olympiad.

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: Salt Lake City was host of the 2002 Winter Games and many Utahans hope the Olympics will return the area.

Naming the new city after the landmark Mount Olympus would associate the town with youth, vitality and recreation. Retailers and businesses associated with sports and recreation would benefit by an address named after Mount Olympus.

Naming the town for mills that failed simply associates the town with failure. Who wants to live in a town named for its failures?

If you were locating a business in Utah, would you want to locate it in a town named for failed businesses, or would you want to locate it in a town named after Mount Olympus?

The mills on Mill Creek all failed. Mill Creek has no public access in town. Less than a tenth of the people in the proposed town of MillCreek live near the creek.

MillCreek is the stupidest name. EVER!

Just about every corner of the proposed city has a great view of Mount Olympus. The mountain is the definitive landmark in Salt Lake City. The name is associated with youth and vitality.

One can come up with a hundred derivations of the name Olympus such as Olympia (home of the first Olympics and capital of Washington), Olympo, Delphi, etc..

It is sad to live in such an unimaginative place that would choose the name MillCreek over a derivation of Mt Olympus.

Second Quarter a Bust

April started out okay, but sales fell to recession lows in May and June making second quarter a bust. I made a theoretic $1241 in commissions for the quarter. Of course I never manage to collect the full commission amount.

Moving to a new server and getting a cellphone to test the mobile sites increased my costs by $100 a month. My total expenses are just about $600 a quarter. So my real income in about $641.

There is an outside change that, if I traveled to Las Vegas, I could find a small group interested in discussing the Medical Savings and Loan. I believe that, if people started discussing alternatives to insurance, we could overturn the ObamaCare, RomneyCare, The Utah Policy Project and other manifestations of socialized medicine.

The problem is that the lack of income means I can't afford a hotel room. I don't know of any good camping near Las Vegas.

Because I really want the opportunity to discuss the Medical Savings and Loan, I am going to end this blog post with an ad. By ad, I mean I would make money if I had any sales.

EvoraPlus is a new pro-biotic dental care product. Most dental care products have the futile aim of killing all the germs in one's mouth to protect the teeth. This is a futile goal because our mouths are part of a living biological system designed to digest food. The pro-biotic approach replaces the bacteria that cause tooth decay with beneficial bacteria.

The EvoraPet product is designed for dogs and cats who simply don't brush their teeth on a regular basis.

Here are two coupons that expire 8/5/2011: Save $2.00 on Evora Plus, or EvoraPet

Adding Mobi URLS

I added a slot in the community color add link program for a Mobi URL. A mobi site is version of a web page optimized for mobile phones. Mobile phones have really small screens ... usually about 300 pixels in width.

Mobi sites tend to show summarized information from the main site. Each community directory has a Mobi version with the subdomain m.. For example the Mobi version of ProvoUtah.US is m.ProvoUtah.US.

Anyway, after you define the primary URL for your site, you can add a Mobi URL. The field for the Mobi URL is the second to last line on the form. You have to be logged in to add a link.

NOTE: If your site is already listed in the web directory, just add the link to your mobi site as if it was the primary URL.

PS: I appreciate the few people who pay the listing fee as it is costly to maintain a directory. If you paid the listing fee for your primary site, just add the link and ignore the plea for payment on the last page.

Mobile Blog

Blogger just added a mobile view for blogs. As I've been promoting the development of mobile sites, I am happy to see this feature and turn it on.

In the community color program, I am actually making a separate directory for Mobi sites. If there is both a regular and mobi version of a site, I will link to both versions.

You can access the mobi version of this blog with the URL communitycolor.blogspot.com/?m=1.

NOTE: I am also turning the feature on for my other blogs: Utah Gold and y-intercept blog

Master Index

I made a Master Index for the community color site.

I made this page primarily for my own use. As noted earlier, I changed the directory structure from using category numbers to using keywords. The Grand Junction Accounting page used to be gjct.com/dir.html?category_id=755. It is now gjct.com/dir/accounting.

The master index shows me all of the page names. Clicking on the page names shows the community sites with a page by a given name.

The only interesting part of the page is the summary. It currently reads: "There are 1944 pages in the this directory structure with 537 distinct names with a total of 8,850,656 page views."

My little directory tree has almost 2000 pages and is approaching 9 million hits.

Utah Color

I added a new directory called Utah Color. This new directory will list state wide resources for Utah. The calendar items in this directory will appear in all of the local directories.

Local web development is still the primary focus of the Community Color project. The state wide directories makes it easier to list important sites like state wide political campaigns and state health resources.

My primary concern is the local directories. If you add a link to Utah Color, I will check your address and add it in the relevant local directory.

If someone pays the listing fee, I will list the site in both the state wide and local directory.

Link Friendly Directory

Opening the Arizona sites is taking longer than I anticipated.

A primary reason for moving my web sites last month is that the new service will allow me greater freedom with subdomains and mod_rewrites. Using mod-rewrites allows me to create a link friendly directory structure.

In the original design, the link to the Salt Lake Art category had a category_id in it. AKA slsites.com/dir.html?category_id=233.

The new structure uses a mod rewrite. The shopping directory on Arizona Color will have the URL: arizonacolor.us/dir/shopping.

For the Phoenix directory, I am using both both a subdomain and mod rewrite. The link for shopping in Phoenix is phoenix.arizonacolor.us/dir/shopping. Search engines prefer strings to numbers. So, although the URL is super long, it re-inforces the key words "Phoenix", "Arizona" and "shopping."

Changing the link structure should make the directory more valuable to people who list in the directory.

The problem is that I don't want to change the existing directories to the new structure until it has proved through; So, I have to go about the conversion to the new structure in a systematic fashion.

Arizona Directories

I am expanding the Community Color family of directories to Arizona. Arizona has only 15 counties. So, I decided to break the directories out by county. I was organining the Utah and Colorado directories by city name. Colorado has 64 counties and Utah 29.

Since Phoenix is the capital of Arizona, I called the directory Phoenix Color. The other directories are by county name.

I like the county structure as it allows me to include all links from the state.

In this project, I am using long names for the directories. For example, the directory for Apache County is apache.arizonacolor.us. This should maximize the SEO benefits of the project.

If you are from Arizona, please feel free to add links. I ask for profit efforts with a marketing budget to pay a $10 listing fee. You can register using the secure form on irivers.com. You can also the secure login form to login into any of the directories.

Secure Login Page

I get a free Authenticated SSL certificate with my fancy new WestHost Cloud Server.

I only get to use the account on one domain. After a great deal of thinking, I used the certificate for the empty domain iRivers.com.

The two pieces of information I want to keep secure are email addresses and passwords.

So, I created a registration form.

I am now working on a secure Login Form. The secure login form.

The secure login is interesting. First, the page checks to see that the user accessed it through a secure port. The user then selects a destination web site and enters their user name and password. If the user name and password match the account on the server the system will create a secure single use token.

The login program redirects the user to the destination site with the token. The destination site queries iRivers.com with the token. If the token is valid, the destination site responds back with a packet containing user and session information.

This design allows me to use the same user base for any web site I create in the future.

The next step is to integrate this design with Oauth and Open ID ... but I will leave those challenges for another day.

Framing Mobile Sites

While waiting for the DNS to propagate on the Community Color Sites, I decided to write a fun page calling for web masters to unite and create mobile versions of their web sites.

A big advantage of mobile sites is that people can display them in small windows on their desk top, or even embed them in iframes, as I do below.

Using a simple iFrame set at a size of a mobile phone screen, I can test too see what it looks like. This page is set at 320px. Because I want the pages to stay in the frame, I avoid using the target tag.

Moving Community Color

I am moving the Community Color sites to a Westhost Cloud Server. Being on a cloud server means that I will have resources to add new funcationality (and I do have functionality planned.

To avoid the possibility of lost data, I turned the registration and add event programs off. They will be back on when the domains point to the new server.

YouTube Index

I am only getting scraps of time to work on the Community Color sites.

My new Android Phone will play videos directly. The URL for my test video showing the start of the Salt Lake Marathon is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehU1rfv9Ssw.

When I click the URL in a regular browser, the browser displays a web page with the video. When I click it on my phone, the phone starts playing the video. Google is magic!

So, for the mobile version of CommunityColor, I realized I could just grab the video URLs that I've embedded in the main site and quickly create a fun little index of community videos.

To see project: Go to m.CommunityColor.com/yt.php?btn=sum. This page shows a summary of videos by town. Click a town name and see locally produced videos on YouTube.

NOTE: I had a number of campaign videos. I decided not to include them because the election is over ... however, I will add future campaign videos to this list.

Mobile Pages

Wow, it takes a lot of work to make little pages.

I am busily working away on the mobile version of Community Color.

I decided I needed to add some "content pages" to feed the web bots from the search engines. My idea of content super simply pages that introduced the community.

Here is a sample page for Colorado National Monument ... which will celebrate its centennial this year.

To help the search engines find the mobi sites, I am daisy chaining the content site.

I wrote a half dozen content pages and decided to tweet about them using the mlnk.us URL shortener ... and realized I made a grave mistake.

My new URL shortener has slots for the HTML and MOBI version of a page ... but I had one HTML page and six MOBI pages I wanted to tweet about.

I could have made a short URL for each of the new sites. I would then issue six tweets for each of the pages.

I decides that was too spammy. So, I redesigned MLNK.us to allow for up to 100 URLS.

This short URL for this project is mlnk.us/pages. The short URL has links back to this blog post and the seven about pages I created.

Tweet Your Link

While on the topic of mobile phones ....

I find filling out forms on my phone too tedious.

Scatching my head, I wanted to find a way for smartphone users to give me the link to their web site. To make the process easy, a "Tweet me your link" page to the Community Color mobile directories.

Here is the Grand Junction Tweet Your Link Page.

The page has the link:

Hey @CommunityColor You should add the site _____ to http://gjct.com

The link produces a tweet with my twitter account and a link to my site. It is so fiendish!

If people fell for this gimmick used this process, then I would learn about their site and maybe get some inbound links.

SEO & MOBI

A MOBI page is a page optimized for mobile phones. Since the pages will be displayed on tiny screens, the pages need to present tightly summarized information and they need to emphasize the navigational elements of the page.

It is wise to have links back to the main HTML site just in case a person with a real web browser stumbles onto a mobi page and wants to access the web optimized page.

This combination of summarized content and robust linking structure means that MOBI development offers a great opportunity for Search Engine Optimization.

From the SEO perspective, a mobile page is a small page filled with keywords and links back to the main site. It's a cheap way of building inbound links.

Best of all, building a mobile site is white hat seo marketing. The mobi developer isn't just creating pages for keywords. The mobi developer is creating pages to fit the unique needs of the smart phone market.

I started this MOBI project after using mobile.twitter.com on a smartphone. I found jumping from twitter to my blog was a bad user experience.

The Mobile Link allows me to put a mobile optimized page between twitter and my content. Using mlnk.us as the URL shortener will give smartphone users a chance to go to the mobi optimized page or to the full blown version.

There is one big hassle involved in this project. Because I now need to create two pages for each content page, I am forced to do a little dance where I jump between screens creating content on two web sites.

Here's the Mobi summary of this page. When that is done, I need to create the mlnk.us page. This is a difficult dance as I do not know the URLs until after I save the pages.

mlnk program

I am happy to announce a new domain in the Community Color family. I bought the domain mlnk.us for use as a URL shortener.

I intend to create a URL shortener with a twist.

As mentioned in previous posts, I bought a smartphone and started working on a mobile version of Community Color. I intend to create mobile versions of other sites.

The mobile versions will mirror the full HTML versions of the sites.

When I add content to a site, it will show up on both an HTML page and a mobile page!

The typical URL shortener redirects a user to a destination web page. The mlnk.us URL shortener will present a MOBI optimized page with links to both the HTML and Mobile page.

This design will make web browsing more pleasant for people twittering away their day on a smartphone (or people twittering in a small window).

Step one was to buy the domain. Step two is to design the site. Speaking of design, I decided to give my mobile pages a different background.

PS, I wrote this post before writing the program, so that I will have something to link to.