Community Color Redesign

PHP7 was released last week.

I am doing a huge redesign of the Community Color sites. I am writing and testing the code on the domain yintercept.com .

I know this sounds pathetic, but I stopped programming a few years back because my coding style is considered an "antipattern" by the technorati. The word "antipattern" is the way that thugs in the programming world put people down.

I finally decided that it is stupid let oneself be cowed by a bunch of thugs.

So, I decided to call my coding style The Resource Model of Web Design.  I just opened a Disqus Thread and invite people who enjoy code or have comments on design to drop a line. The site uses PHP7, SQLite3, HTML, CSS and SVG.

Note, I am blocking in the structure for yintercept.com in HTML. I will add the PHP script after I've tested it line by line with PHP7.

Happy Small Business Saturday

Happy Small Business Saturday.

The theme of today's post is simply that ownership matters.

Personally, I believe that the most robust form of society involves a large number of small businesses owned by people who are active in the local community.

Mathematically, one can show that networks with a distributed framework and many independent yet interconnected nodes is more robust and more resilient than societies formed in a hierarchy or dominated by a few control centers.

History provides thousands of examples where communities depending on a single business or product fail when faced with adversity, while diverse communities are able to adjust to changes.

Societies that depend on big government, big business or big capital might thrive for a moment but are subject to systemic risks which can can cause untold hardships.

The driving theme of the different project that I engaged in on the Internet is that ownership matters.

So, rather than shopping at a small business on this small business Saturday; I would like to encourage readers to think about and research the ownership of the companies with which they do business?

Look at your credit card statement. How often do you spend at a big business and how often do you shop at small businesses.

One should look through their household. Where did the stuff come from? How much, if any, of things were made locally?

You can look up your web history? How often do you visit small locally owned web sites?

I believe that ownership matters. I want to frequent locally focused small business whenever possible.

One valuable tool for researching ownership is the whois lookup. whois.ICANN.org lets you look up the current owner of a domain. whois.domaintools.com maintains a database with the domain history, but you have to register to use the service. (more domain related tools)

The whois record shows who owns a domain-name. Some times the the domain name is owned by a different person or group from the business. Even worse,  domain registrars push "enhanced privacy services." These services mask the domain ownership.

If you have a business; you should never use domain privacy service. Instead you should maintain a good clean registry entry with your business address. If you are own a business and are using a domain privacy service, you should cancel that service and display accurate information about your business.

The one privacy caveat is that you should not use your primary email address in the domain record because unprincipled marketers harvest publicly displayed email addresses and spam them. Since you can control the email address on your registry record; you don't need to buy privacy services.

I use the email address spam (at) community color. com to inform the user that I treat every message received by that address with suspicion. To date, just about everything I've received on that email address is useless marketing garbage.

A useful shopping tip: If you are considering purchasing something online, you should check out the whois record first. I never buy from a web site that uses privacy services. If a business is not willing to display good contact information, then I assume they are hiding other things as well. Domain privacy should only be used by opinion sites.

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The Internet makes it easy to trace down owner the ownership of a domain. It is more difficult to track down ownership of businesses.

Publicly traded firms are required to post quarterly filings with the SEC. I've been maintaining a list of stocks of local concern on this page irivers.com/stock.html .

Unfortunately, only the largest businesses in a community are traded publicly.

Wikiepedia often has good information on huge corporations. But almost no information on local firms.


Anyway, my goal for 2016 is to track down other sources to help people figure out who owns what in their local community. There are many good sources of info on the Internet. States require businesses to file incorporation records and DBA records. Counties often have good databases on land records.

My message for Small Business Saturday is that ownership matters and that responsible consumers should be attentive to who owns what and should consider ownership in purchasing decisions.

Black Friday and onto Small Business Saturday

It's Black Friday and I feel that I should do something commerce related like post coupons or sales.

The truth of the matter is that I really don't care too much for marketing.

My experience is marketers of the modern-mindset tend to do negative things in their efforts to control markets.

Marketing gimmicks like Black Friday tend to be dominated by big commerce and big media.

I like the idea of Small Business Saturday. This is a gimmick invented by American Express in which people are coaxed to support small local businesses after Black Friday.

The Community Color project fits this format better. This project lists web sites from select local communities in the Mountain West. The main page lists directories for Arizona, Colorado and Utah.

NOTE: I started this project by creating sites for towns in Idaho and Montana. That project was taken over by a different group. I kept the domain Missoula.WS because my partner didn't like the WS TLD.

Originally, I intended to make sites for towns. The ArizonaColor.US has a county focus.

The first design included numerous interactive features. I discovered that the people who make posts on general information sites tend to rude; So, I removed all the interactive features.

I wanted to include maps and other resources. Unfortunately, I ran out of diskspace. I will be switching web hosts with the release of PHP 7 and might start reading interactive features.

Basically, if you live in the Mountain West, you can go to the site and find directories with links to local businesses. I fund the project by listing affiliate programs for national web sites. My plan was to create a structure in which big business funded free listings for small business.

To be truthful, the sites barely make enough money to pay my web hosting fees, but, as I said at the beginning of this post. I am not very good at marketing. I want to find ways that give small business and individuals a voice to counter big media and big business. But this is really not something that people support.

BTW, the site aFountainOfBargains.com is my attempt at affiliate marketing. Anything I make from that effort goes to pay the web hosting fees for the community sites.

Adding SSL

I've read several blog posts by people who say that they refuse to visit or link to web sites that do not SSL.

I would never enter a credit card number of buy from a web site that does not use SSL, but I have never been so paranoid as to refuse to visit unencrypted web sites.

SSL does not encrypt the meta data left by your computer browsing. A hacker who finds out that you visited this blog will see exactly what you see when you visited this blog ... just a bunch of opinionated posts by a computer hack.

SSL certificates do not prevent advertisers from tracking your every move. They only prevent people who are sniffing web traffic on a router from seeing the content that you see. 

I have not added SSL certificates to all my sites for a very simple reason. The certificates are expensive and require regular maintenance. A certificate for a single subdomain costs  about $70 per year. (The sale price of certificate at Godaddy was $62 on 11/26/2015) Wildcard subdomains cost several hundred dollars.

The cost of SSL is prohibitive for charities, small businesses, and information sites.

This particular blog is hosted by Google on blogspot. I decided to turn on the SSL option. You can see the SSL version the site at https://communitycolor.blogspot.com. Google is a huge company at the center of the Internet world; So, I guess they are able to get wildcard SSL certificates at a sufficient discount that allows them to give the things away.

Turning on SSL is a simple matter of going into settings page on blogger.com and clicking SSL.

They only have SSL options for sites ending in blogspot.com. I cannot add SSL to my other blogspot blog blog.yintercept.com.

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*It is possible to add a self-signed certificate to a web site. Internet browsers raise a warning when you enter a web site with a self signed certificate. I find the warnings silly because a site with a self signed certificate is more secure than a site with no certificate.

Tax Day

It's Tax Day. I am sitting here doing my taxes and feeling depressed.

For some odd reason, I've found that I am unable to do my taxes before the deadline. I will often finish gathering all of my tax documents in January and February. But when I sit down to finish my taxes, I get so depressed that I am unable to finish the tax.

This is the only task that affects me so deeply. And I really don't know why.

Actually, I do know why. I get depressed because the way the United States goes about taxation is absurd.

In the current system, the government collects taxes from our employers and business relations. We have to clutter our living spaces with petty little documents then refile all of the information to the IRS.

If the IRS decides there is an error in our taxes, the IRS rains down upon us like a ton of bricks.

If Americans had a functional political system, we could very easily streamline the process.

I dislike this antiquated tax system. This year, I decide to take a stand for sanity. Early this month, I launched a KickStarter Campaign to publish a book about tax reform.

The reform I propose is quite simple. I want our government to create a computer program that calculates and collects taxes to eliminate the need to file a tax return.

The reform suggests that Congress start an Open Source Program to create an account based alternative to the current income tax system. I named the reform The Object Tax after Object Oriented Programming. I named the reform after a design methodology because the reform is not about changing the tax code. The goal of the reform is to use computer technology to streamline the process of tax collection.

The reform creates a thing called "A Tax Aware Account" as an alternative to payroll withholdings and an annual return.

The Tax Aware Account would include all the information needed to calculate a progressive tax. Taxpayers would get their whole paycheck deposited into the account. They would pay taxes when they withdraw the money for spending.

Lets say you earned $1000 and your progressives tax rate was 20%. When you withdrew the money, the account would send $200 to the government and you would get $800.

The Tax Aware Account includes all of the information needed to pay your taxes. This way people wouldn't have to file a tax return. (If a person's tax status changes during the year. They would record the change in the Tax Aware Account which would calculate the effect of the change and create a transaction to reflect the change.

I must emphasize. The program creates an alternative to the existing system. The taxes collected in the new system are based on the old system. People would only use the new system if they found it more convenient.

I like the approach of creating alternatives better than the audacious approach used by programs like PPACA and The FairTax which force a reform on the entire nation at once.

I want to publish a book on this reform proposal because it includes some unique insight on taxation that I have not found in other works about tax reform.

For example, this reform changes the flow of money. In the current system, the money flows from employers to the government. With the Tax Aware Accounts, the money flows from taxpayers to the government.

The bureaucracy tends to form around the flow of money. Because our tax dollars flow from employers, the government aligns itself to employers and large corporations. Changing the flow of money so that it comes from individual accounts would make the bureaucracy responsive to the needs of the people.

Let's face it. The fact that Walmart and other big corporations write huge checks to the government each month gives these huge corporations additional clout. If these same tax dollars flowed from Walmart workers to the government, the government would be less attentive to the corporation and more attentive to the worker.

Changing the flow of money also transitions the income tax from a tax on production to a tax on consumption.

My articles on consumption taxes makes one extremely important argument that many economists seem to have missed: In order for a tax to be a true consumption tax, the money has to flow from the consumer.

Supporters of the FairTax want to replace the income tax with a national sales tax. The advocates of the FairTax believe that a sales tax is a consumption tax, but they miss the subtle point that since the money flows from the producer, the FairTax is still a production tax.

From the point of view of the producer, a sale is the moment when one realizes profit from production. A huge sales tax dampens production at the most important moment in the production process ... the point of sale.

The Object Tax is a true consumption tax because the money flows from the consumer when the consumer prepares for consumption. The FairTax is a production tax because the money flows from the producer at the point of sale.

The Object Tax also brings up some fascinating discussions about the role that the Open Source Movement could play in implementing public policy.

In our current way of doing things, Congress bids out contracts to huge service providers. The service providers with the best inside connections usually win the contract. The contractor then builds a huge monolithic program. The contractor is often monolithic nature of their program to accumulate even more wealth and power.

The effect of this approach is that it concentrates wealth and power in a few hands.

The goal of the Object Tax is to create a computer program that collects taxes.

Rather than seeking a single provider, the reform launches an Open Source Project that would invite thousands of service providers to create a base of common code that could be used be used by hundreds of thousands of companies. This reduces the concentration of wealth and power that occurs in the status quo.

There are some other really cool things that would happen if Congress launched an open source program to create an account based alternative to the current income tax. For example, the open source project could be designed so that it is extended by state governments to collect state and local taxes.

If programmed properly, the Tax Aware Accounts could provide a single point from which to collect federal, state and local taxes.

While the Object Tax is really just an thought experiment on my part, the project introduces insights that might be of value in other attempts to reform the tax code.

My Kickstarter Project has been up for several days and has received zero backers. It runs until May 13, so I get to spend a month checking a project that most likely will receive zero support for a month. yippee, hooray.

Anyway, I have to get back to my taxes. If you hear a person jumping off a bridge in despair. That's just me. I get depressed at tax time because I know that there are better ways to go about collecting taxes than this stupid system of payroll withholdings and an annual return.

HTML 5 Date Picker

Firefox just updated itself.

Every time Firefox updates, I stop what I am doing to see if Firefox has started supporting the new date picker functionality of the HTML 5 specifications.

A few years back, I started upgrading my sites to HTML 5.0. Since several of the sites needed a date picker. I decided to put off the upgrade until the functionality of HTML 5 was in place; So, I am really irritated that this needed function is not yet in place.

Chrome, Opera and Safari support the new date picker. Firefox is pretty the last hold out. I should say it is the last holdout that matters. I have no idea what Internet Explorer is doing.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to see if the date picker works followed by an essay on why the date picker should be implemented on the client side.

Date:

Time:
Week:

Client Side Date Picker

Dates and times are extremely important in computer systems. We use the date and time to figure out the sequence of events.

While it is easy to use timestamps to record the date of computer actions, we need an easy way to query users for events that took place outside the computer.

A date picker is not a difficult piece of code to write. For the most part it is sufficient to know that weeks are seven days long and every fourth year is a leap year.

It is easy to write a javascript date picker. The problem here is that such code needs to be tested on hundreds of devices. Ideally, it should be checked in multiple languages. This type of testing is very expensive.

After that expense, the next problems kick in. The first is that the web site needs to send the javascript to the client with each page that contains a date. The second is all the web sites need date checkers send different code. This creates a confusing experience for users.

A client side date picker will present users with one consistent date picker that can be used on multiple sites. This greatly simplifies both the life of the web user and the developer who needs only send the parameters for the date.

Anyway, I've been anxiously awaiting the inclusion of a date picker in Firefox. The main purpose of this post was to create a form with a date, week and hour field to see if the picker was implemented yet.

If Firefox does not support this feature soon, I will probably just switch to Opera or Chrome.

Live Long and Prosper This Cyber Monday

This post was about a company that was merged into another company and no longer works.

Small Business Saturday

Happy Small Business Saturday.

Small Business Saturday is an advertising gimmick dreamed up by American Express in 2010. The event takes place on the Saturday between Black Friday and Cyber Monday as a way to work small businesses into the holiday sales mix.

There is a little irony in the fact that Small Business Saturday was created by one of the thirty stocks in the DOW Industrial Average. I guess we are also suppose to glance over the fact that a large number of small businesses are closed on Saturday.

Here is an interesting historical note: In the 1980s AMEX wanted to expand in the financial service sector. It acquired Shearson, Lehman Brothers Loeb, EF Hutton and other firms to create a leading brokerage system which it spun off in 1995. So, the multinational that created Small Business Saturday had created one of the investment banks that went belly up in the 2008 financial crisis.

In the last few years, small business has gotten smaller, but it is good to have events that recognize the role that small business plays in the economy.

I realized early on that small business plays a central role in the economy and that small business was getting systematically squeezed out. What I've done through the years is to create and maintain a collection of local directories under the brand Community Color. These directories give free links to small local businesses. I fund the directories through the affiliate programs of big ecommerce shops.

So, the directories will have free links to all of the small shops and an affiliate link to Walmart ... the employees of Walmart are members of the community too.

The directories get 5000 page views a day but the affiliate programs no longer collect enough money to pay the hosting fees.

I have directories for Utah (where I live), Colorado (my home state) and one for Arizona.

I admit, I have a rather quaint idea about community. I believe that everyone in a community should be considered part of the community ... even if they don't belong to the State's religion.


The idea behind local directories is that people could link to the directories and help support independent businesses in their community.

As you see, the whole point of the internet is links. If we want small businesses to succeed in the information age; small business has to be linked in. The best way to link them in is other small businesses.

My directories link to all the businesses, blogs, charities, government agencies and church groups that I can find.

I've been working on the directories since 2000.

Sadly, In 14 years I've yet to have anyone express even passing interest on the Utah directories. (There is some interest in the Colorado and Wyoming Directories. I happen to be a third generation Coloradan. My ancestors moved to Denver in the late 1800s.)

Anyway, Let's say you wanted to do something for small business this small business Saturday and you lived in Grand Junction. You could write a blog post that included a link to gjct.com. This would send a little bit of web traffic in the direction of Grand Junction businesses. A miniscule amount of traffic might go to the affiliate programs that fund the site.


If you aren't in a small business mood. I have tumblr galleries with pictures of Arizona, Colorado and Utah as well.

Age Plus Plus

I needed a quick birthday jingle for a data geek; so I tapped out this to sing after the Happy Birthday Song:

Age plus plus; update; commit;
The years spin round and round.
Age plus plus and so it goes
We're happy you're in town.

I assume programmers prefer age++ to "Happy Birthday" since incrementing the age variable is more efficient than legacy birthday systems.

Anyway, geeks seem to appreciate the age plus plus bit.

Salt Lake Startup Weekend

I was getting prepared for the Salt Lake Startup Weekend scheduled for tomorrow. I logged on to check the address for the event. To my dismay, the program was moved back a week to avoid conflicts with Labor Day Weekend.


Scheduling startup weekend for the Labor Day Weekend was not the best move. People who are working on start ups often have to give up holidays. Giving up Labor Day didn't register as a concern for me, but it may have reduced participation.

Delaying the event might prove to my advantage.

I plan on giving a pitch related to the recreation industry.

The pitch is the type of thing that might appeal to students. So, I am really happy about the change in venue from an office downtown to the Junior Achievement section of Discovery Gateway. If you are young and want to make a little money in recreation, I have a great opportunity.

So, the more I think about it, I am happy with the change in time and location of the event.

Denver Color Crosses Million Hit Mile Marker

My directory for the Mile High City (Denver Color)  just crossed the million mark. The directory has 4300 active links. I've deleted 1380 broken links through the years.

Sadly, a million hits doesn't mean much in Internet speak. My ad revenue has fallen to about four dollars for every hundred thousand page views. Fortunately, the most popular page on the site is the shopping directory which is the one page that has the most potential.

To celebrate crossing the million hit mark, I created a page about the the founding of Denver. My original hope was to add a large number of pages about local history, but without an adequate funding source, I've been unable to accomplish that task.

Startup Weekend

I just plunked down $50 to attend the August 28th Start Up Weekend in Salt Lake City. I am going to pitch an idea and I am hoping beyond reasonable hope that there will be a few people at the event wanting to jump in on the ground level of a really fun low cost opportunity with a tremendous upside.

My big fear is that the event will be overloaded with idea pitchers and few working bees. Even worse, I fear that winning pitches are decided before the event, in which case I will be left brooding at an empty table.

But who knows. There might be people there wanting to coach start ups or others attending the event to network in which case I might succeed in starting up a business.

I will have only a minute for my pitch, but my pitch is strong and offers a world class opportunity for all takers. (HINT: It involves playing games, taking photos and traveling. Imagine making money to help pay for travel!)
 
If you are wanting to get in on the ground level of a multi-billion dollar new industry; You should sign up for the Salt Lake Startup Weekend on August 28th. If you are going there to pitch an idea; don't bother, as everyone will be flocking to my idea and you will be left brooding at an empty table.

PS: If you don't want to spend the money on the weekend but still want to get in on the opportunity, could just contact me and I will deal you in. If I find support at Startup Weekend, I will be hosting free events after the Startup Weekend.

The Independent Web is Failing

I've been building independent community directories since 1999. To my dismay, I've seen the vast majority of small independent web sites fail.

The failure is not limited to poorly designed, content free sites. Well designed and content rich sites are failing as fast as other sites.

The reason for this high fail rate is simple:: No-one links to small independently owned sites.

The web is all about links. If no-one links to you, then you fail.

For some odd reason, people simply are not willing to link to small independent sites.

I want people to succeed.

I figured that the best solution to this problem of rapidly failing sites is for people like me to create and maintain dedicated local directories. I created a selection of directories for the Mountain West with town centric sites that cover Arizona, Colorado and Utah.

My site for Grand Junction is gjct.com. My site for Moab is iMoab.com. These directories actively seek out local sites. The open directories list every site I can find (with the exception of pornography and hate sites). The directories include free links to small businesses, blogs, churches, and campaign sites from all parties. I list a ton of independent photo sites, artist web sites and more.

The idea behind an independent directory is that people who want to support locally focused web development can link to the directory without all of the hassles involved in maintaining a directory.

Maintaining a links page is a big hassle. As mentioned, sites have a high fail rate. Through the years, I've listed 10,000 links on Salt Lake Sites. I've pulled out 4000 broken links so far. There are still several hundred broken links among the 6000 links listed on the directory.

Unfortunately, independent local directories are bound to the same fate as all independent sites. If no-one links to the directory, then the directory fails.

That said, I still think that small, independent, locally focused community directories are still the best hope for maintain a vibrant web full of diverse ideas.

By linking to an independent directory, one supports the local community with a minimal amount of effort.

I think I've done a fairly good job of linking to a rich selection of sites in the Community Color directories.  These directories focus on the Mountain West. I fund the site by linking to affiliate programs by the big chain stores. I have links to Walmart.com. My Walmart affiliate links have pulled in $130 in revenue which helps me cover my webhosting fees. I clearly mark all the affiliate links..

Because the links go through the affiliate program, the links to the chains are seen by search engines as advertisements and not as organic links. The revenue does not detract from the local focus as much as one imagines.

Many pundits are predicting the demise of locally focused directories and geodomains. But, I believe that, in the long run, such sites are still the best hope for maintaining a robust independent local web. I would encourage anyone reading this post to search out and support independent local directories in their community.

It is very simple exercise. Google your town and the word "directory." I Googled "Salt Lake Directory." Not surprisingly, my site (Salt Lake Sites) no longer shows up in Google's listing. What really disappoints me is that, in 20 pages of listings, I found only one inclusive local directory.

I found multiple cookie cutter sites that reprint the Yellow Pages and White pages. There are a few associations that show only links to members of the association, but the search term "Salt Lake Directory" no long pulls up any independent inclusive directories.

There used to be 20 or more good locally owned geodomains for the valley. They locally focused geodomains have all been systematically purged by Google. The fact that my site was purged just tells me that I haven't done a good job. The fact that all independent geodomains have been purged tells me something is wrong with Google.

The last few years have been hard on small business. If you happen to be a supporter of small independent businesses, a positive step that you can take is to drop links on your blog or web site to geodomains that link to small businesses and independent sites.

The heart of HTML is the hyper-link. Linking to independent sites is something that we can all do to help encourage independent web development and small business.

Going Live with Local Deals

I stumbled on a company called "Prosperent" out of Denver.. This is a technology company that aggregates data for affiliate marketers. They have a huge database of products and deals from thousands of merchants.

I am interested in developing Geodomains in the mountain west. At this point the domains are basically a local directory and calendar. My problem is that I haven't found a way to fund the sites. If I can't fund the sites, I can't expand them.

So, I decided to try Prosperent API to see if I can make some compelling ads.

The API includes an interface for searching local deals. So, I made a local deals search engine for each of the sites. Here are entry points to the search by state: Arizona, Colorado and Utah. If you go to the state site, you will see a list of local communities. Simply press the Search button next to the community name and you will see the local deals.

I will receive commissions from local searches. Affiliate Networks report that earnings for local deal sites run from one to two pennies per click. I am hoping to get about 2000 searches year at and make $0.02 per click which would be $40/year income. I have my fingers and toes crossed. A more realistic expectation is 200 searches per year generating an average of penny per click, which would be below the minimum payment threshold meaning no money.

I don't expect the local deals to be enough to pay my hosting fees but, if I combine local deals with other  efforts, the sites might return to a state where the income covers the hosting fees ... which run about $100 a month.

The reason I went through the brain drain adding a local deals database to my sites is that I believe that it would enhance what I am doing with the sites. I am trying to create a structure in which local sites can get some traffic outside the huge search engines that dominate the market. The Local Deal sites allow local merchants and restaurants to list coupons and deals. LocalSaver gives a site a direct link along with the coupon.

BTW: I also have sites for Missoula and Cheyenne.

New URL CoDir.us

The URL colorado.CommunityColor.com was too long, so I bought a new short URL for my Colorado directory project. The URL is CoDir.us.

ArizonaColor.us is my directory for the Grand Canyon State and UtahColor.com for the Beehive State.

Embedding SVG

SVG is a graphic presented in text. It is possible to embed SVG in any site that allows you to post large blocks of HTML. This post tests this idea. This is a map of Arizona embedded in this blog post. If your browser supports SVG, you will see a map of the counties of Arizona. If not, you see something strange in a 500x584px box.

SVG Maps

I want to start including advanced features from HTML 5 in my web projects. I am interested in using SVG for graphing and mapping applications; So, I just added an SVG map of Arizona Counties to the front page of Arizona Color. Unfortunately, older browsers such as internet explorer 8 do not render SVG; so I put the graph below the fold.

SVG is a human readable and editable file format. This means one can build graphs from very simple shape files and manipulate them on the fly. For this graph, I copied the shape files from a public domain document on Wikipedia. The data for the file came from the US Census Bureau's TIGER project. So, the next step is to decipher the TIGER Data. Unfortunately, while the TIGER data is public domain, it is stored in a proprietary format.

Anyway: Here is the map.

A Trailer Park with a View

If blogspot is considered a low rent district on the Internet; I think one should call Tumblr the Trailer Park of the Internet.

Like blogspot, the rent is cheap (free). The neighbors on tumblr are noisy and hooting it up all day with many engaged in "Not Safe for Work" activities. But if you can ignore the noise, Tumblr has a pretty view.

The site is set up for photo sharing.

Tumblr was designed for the world's creators. Designers (and the public at large) post their photos and media creations. Tumblr addicts "like" or "reblog" the photos they like. The best photos get hundreds of thousands of hits. Most get only a few page views:

I just happen to live in one of the prettiest places on earth: The Mountain West. So, I decide to make tumblr blogs for the states of the Mountain West. The blogs cover the following areas:

• Arizona
• Colorado (West Slope)
• Idaho,
• Montana
• Utah (Moab)
• and Wyoming

Each of these blogs contain a large number of photos from the state (about 500 photos a piece). My hope is that some traffic from Tumblr might find my collection of local directories.

The challenge of tumblr is that most people using the platform only look at sites from their dashboard. Since there are millions of blogs on the site, your actual blog will only get a few posts.

A year into this effort, I am seeing about 1 person per day visiting the blogs.

I thought about putting hit counters on each of the site, then having a race to see which gets the most hits. Since the blogs get very few views, I realized I'd be showing failure stats, not success states; So, I did something even more nefarious. I put ads on the site. Ads have internal hit counters.

Most people hate ads. But the most common conversation in the trailer park is: "How do we get out of this trailer park?" Ads are pretty much the only legal way to make money off the Internet.

Direct Advertising

It is the end of the year. Would you like to buy some unused ad inventory in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Utah)?

I admit 2013 was worse for my web business than 2012. While visits to my site increased, ad revenue dropped precipitously.

My original idea was to try and fund a collection of community directories with affiliate ads. At the time affiliate marketing worked out as follows: I would get a click on a ad about every 100 page views. About 1 out of a hundred clicks would result in a sale. The average commission was about $10.00. This year it takes 500 page views to get a click and only about 1 in 500 clicks converts to a sale. The average commission has dropped to $5.00.

I believe that these poor stats result from browser helper objects that sense affiliate ads. The BHOs either block the ads or change the ids on the ads. Fraud in the industry has caused merchants to cut their commission rates.

I would like to experiment with direct advertising.

Direct advertising should have a higher conversion rate for advertisers than affiliate marketing.

To price the ads, I thought I would start a slight discount from the rate I get from a major internet company that starts with a "G". I get about $2.00 CPM from this large advertiser. So, I figure $1.50 CPM would be a good starting point.

I don't want to deal with transactions lower than $30; So, I decided to offer advertising at $30.00 for 20,000 ad views.

I currently am using two types of ads: boxes and leader boards.

I use box ads (either 300x250 or 336x280) on the events in the calendar.

The events in the directory are viewed on average of 120 times. If I accept your ad, I would place it on 100 or so relevant events in the directories of your choice.  If you are in Cedar City, I would put the ads on the Cedar City Utah Calendar. If you are in Durango; the ads would go on events in the Durango calendar.

I use 728x90 ads for leader boards in the upper fold of a variety of pages. These pages are much less predictable. Some pages get more than 20,000 page views a year. I will place the ads on pages that should add up to 20,000 ads a year.

I am testing direct advertising right now. If you would like to buy direct advertising, please contact me. If there is interest, I will create a program to automate the purchase of direct ads ... at which point I will raise the rates to industry standard rates which are substantially higher than a $1.50 CPM

Christmas Was a Total Bust

The Online Christmas Season is coming to an end. Ground shipping can take two weeks, express shipping makes gifts too expensive. It is foolish to buy online after today.

Darn, I didn't have a single sale this year. My idea of building community directories funded by affiliate sales is now a total bust.

My experience in affiliate marketing is that it takes 500 page views to get a click on an affiliate ad. One in 300 clicks results in a sale. The average commission is $5.00. So, it takes 150,000 page views to make $5.00.

The affiliate industry is notoriously crooked. Most affiliate sales are sucked off by parasites or simply not credited by merchants. I did two test purchases this year. Both failed to pay my commission.  If a person with a Browser Helper Object visits my page, clicks on an ad, the Browser Helper Object will change the source of the click to help itself to the commission.


I will take a stab at selling advertising direct to the public. I was getting three dollar for every ten thousand page views from a large advertiser. That fell to a dollar per thousand page views this year.

I want to sell ads in $30 chunks. So, I am thinking of selling blocks of 20,000 ad impressions for $30.00.

My hosting fees average to $100 per month. Selling four blocks of ads a month would pay hosting fees, which is the most a small site can hope to achieve in the current economy.

If you are interested in buying advertising in Utah, Colorado or Arizona, please contact me.

If not, my deals page shows online steals and deals. This is pretty much the last day that you can order online and get economy shipping.