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.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
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!
Sunday, September 25, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, September 16, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, September 01, 2011
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
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
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
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.
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.
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