Link Development v. Search Engine Optimization

I've engaged in several conversations about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on social media platform called Hive.

I made a few negative comments about SEO and realized that I needed to elaborate on these views.

I believe that web developers have an obligation to the Internet community at large to consider how their web site works with the flow of traffic through the World Wide Web.

The hyperlink is the defining character of the Web. Users of the web will follow links into a web site. If a web site is designed well, they will follow links back out of the web site.

Web developers and  content creators have an effect on the overall flow of traffic through the web.

I consider this to be a wonderful thing.

The term I like to use for this concept is "Link Development."

Many Internet Marketers engage in a dark art called "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO for short.

SEO assumes that most web traffic will start with a search engine. SEO Marketers employ tricks to get their web sites listed at the top of Search Engine results.

SEO Marketers tend to develop their web sites to the desires of the Search Engine companies and fail to engage in proper link development.

Hive has a feature called a "community." In this upcoming week, I will launch a Hive Community that talks about and openly engages in link development. I will mirror this conversation on my blogspot blog as well since blogspot has a larger potential audience.

Milieu Control

The term "Milieu Control" refers to the practice of controlling people by controlling the sources that they can read. In the video Thinker of Thoughts talks about how Scientology used milieu control to manipulate its adherents.

Lets Encrypt

Industry pundits advocate use of encryption. Unfortunately the certificates broke the budget of most web sites. I attempted to maintain SSL certificates, however they actually cost more than the revenue I received from advertising.

It also takes a huge amount of time to update certificates.

The

I used the instructions on Digital Ocean to load a program called certbot. I then installed certificates on irivers.com, communitycolor.com, pcut.net and gjct.com. I also installed an SSL certificate on my blog site.

Business Problems Require Business Solutions

The world's population is 7.4 billion people.

Feeding, housing and providing health care for these people is a business problem. Business problems need business solutions.

Big government, big social media, nor big business can solve these problems.

To solve the world's problems we need to develop businesses that work at a human level.

I have thrown decades into developing strategies that can develop the small businesses that could play a positive role in helping people with their day to day lives.

Anyway, last year I developed a new business model that could help a large number of people earn some extra money by doing real stuff in the real world.

I joined the SteemIt platform because I thought it might be a jumping board into new business opportunities.

Unfortunately, these new social media systems aren't sending people in a positive direction.

Anyway, the point of this message is to see if there is anyone out there interested in finding ways to make money doing interesting things.

If there are; then I would go into details of the business.

Your Personal Web Site Should be the Center of Your Online Life

I've been playing on the site SteemIt.com. The site is interesting in that it has a built in mechanism for rewarding users of the site. I've made $14.00 on the site so far.

This is more than I've made on Twitter or Tumblr.

Of course the price of STEEM is dropping; so my $14 might just go up in a puff of steam.

I decided to put my guide on my personal web site because I believe that people should make their personal web site the center of their online life and not a social media site.

Here is the announcement for the guide.

A Partisan Press is a Danger to Democracy

The American Press has become increasingly partisan through the years.

In a partisan press, reporters pass each of their stories through a partisan filter.

Reporters on both the left and right have partisan filters. The partisan filters of the groups we oppose tend to shine brighter in our minds than the partisan filters of the groups we support.

A large portion of the main stream media is engaged in partisan reporting against Donald Trump. Trump is in the right to call out the partisan reporting. Trump has actually done a decent job of calling out the partisan reporting without crossing the lines of censorship.

Notably, just after the election reporters claimed that Trump won because of "fake news." Trump focused this claim back onto the press as it turns out that partisans of all ilk are prone to producing questionable if not straight out fake news.

As I write this, the main stream media is engaged in a co-ordinated assault claiming that Trump's calling out partisans is akin to censorship.

No, calling out partisans is not censorship.

Politicians calling out partisan bias in the media is not censorship. Calling out biases is necessary and natural part of a free press.

Interestingly, the press is doing this in the very week that Alex Jones was kicked off Youtube and other social media sites. Kicking people off supposedly open platforms is censorship.

The International Left appears to be engaged in an increasing amount of censorship.

I suspect that the Mainstream Media will end up shooting itself in the foot with its co-ordinated attack on Trump. The very fact that members of the MSM got together to co-ordinate an attack against a partisan foe re-enforces the claim that the press is partisan.

A partisan press is dangerous. Calling out the partisan press is a just action.

A podcast and steem

I decided to start blogging again. I just started a podcast using podbean and a Steem It account.

I am eager to see how the Steem payment system works. So, I decided to accept Steem payments for advertisements on community color. I currently charge $25 for 100,000. My traffic is primarily from the Mountain West (Az, Co, and Ut)

Dichotomous Thinking Rips Communities Apart

A Youtuber using the name "FlackerMan" put up an interesting video about foundational dichotomies in Mormonism.

The video was designed to draw people into the question of whether the "Book of Mormon" is true or false. Here it is:

Mormonism is not the first thought system to use dichotomies to gain power power.

People have used dichotomies to divide and conquering since antiquity.

When one comes across a really intense dichotomy, one needs to step back and look at the effects that the dichotomy has on society at large.

As a non-Mormon living in Utah, I simply see that Mormons have succeeded in creating an extremely mean and divisive society.

Wikipedia Does Not Do a Good Job Covering Corporate History

I like to use Wikipedia to learn about the things I come across in life. For example, there are strip malls that have the title "Furniture Row" in many towns. These malls include a eclectic selection of "furniture stores." On seeing these stores, I've wonder is: "'Furniture Row' a collection of independent stores, or is it one huge store that presents itself as a multiple businesses?'

There was a page on Wikipedia that answered this question, but one of the editors at Wikipedia decided that the chain was too insignificant to deserve a Wikipedia Page and the editor deleted the page.

The Furniture Row corporation is quite large. Their web site lists 115 locations. These locations have about 300 pseudo stores. (BTW, the answer to my question is that Furniture Row is a single company with multiple pseudo stores to make Furniture Row appear like a row of different stores.)

It is possible that Wikipedia dislikes this marketing scheme. Making the departments of a store look like different businesses is a bit deceptive. Wikipedia encourages its authors to point out deceptive and controversial thing about firms.

Many of the Furniture Row locations are built on the outskirts of town. I dislike this type of construction as it encourages suburban sprawl. This is something that can be addressed in articles.

The press page of Furniture Row talks about how they give money to The Salvation Army and the Tim Tebow Foundation. It is possible that the Wikipedia editors dislike the politics or religious affiliations of the company.

To be honest. I have no problems with capricious decisions. Problems arise when one entity, like Wikipedia, dominates the information society. In such a world, capricious decisions have effects.

I believe that the information society is better served by having a large number of independent researchers on independent platforms researching things like corporate histories than it is to have one huge platform pretending to be the authoritative voice simply because is run with a group-think process.

In my case, I am researching the world from the community up. I live in the Mountain West. Furniture Row has a bunch of shops in the Mountain West. It fits in the category of things I am researching so I put up an article Furniture Row.

Examining Grifol's

As mention in the last post: I am examining acquisition chains.

I noticed an ad at a local University soliciting "plasma donations" by a group called Grifols Plasma. The word donation is a bit misleading. Technically what happens in you donate your plasma, but they compensate you for your time. Their site says people can make up to $200 a month donating plasma (I do not know if this is a good deal). They put the money on a prepaid Visa. You must given them your SSN and must have a photo ID. I suspect you have to pay taxes on your compensation.

I went to Wikipedia and found out that Grifols was a Spanish company. Wikipedia had little info on how Grifols entered the US Market.

Anyway, I went to the site GrifolsPlasma.com and found the site listed 150 centers. The centers had names like Talecris Plasma Resources and BioMat USA. The site did not tell me how these collection resources were related to Grifols.

I googled around for the term "BioMat" and finally found that had something to do with a company called SeraCare. I then discovered articles that claimed Grifols bought SeraCare in 2002 and others that said Linden Capital Partners bought SeraCare in 2012. Linden has a huge list of companies which it bought and sold.

This is what I think happened. A company called "SeraCare" had two divisions. One division collected plasma, the other processed it. They decided to sell the collection centers and began rebranding them as BioMat. Grifols bought the collection centers as a subsidiary in their effort to enter the US market.

There ended up being a financial scandal 2006. So, BioMat collected the plasma. SeraCare bought the plasma. The CEO of SeraCare was on the board of directors for both firms. He was in charge of negotiations and accounting for both firms. This is a guaranteed crisis. A audit discovered discrepancies. The SeraCare stock crashed and several people fired.

The acquisition of Talecris went as follows: Talecris was created in 2005 when Bayer sold it blood processing unit to a private equity firm called Cerberus. Cerberus hoped to sell Talecres to CSL Plasma but was blocked by the FTC. Cerberus began buying up shares of Grifols. Grifols had a market capitalization of $2.36B in 2010. Cerberus arranged a deal in which Cerberus acquired Talecres for $3.4 billion. (The smaller fish swallowed the bigger fish). Cerberus is reported to have made $2B in this deal. The FTC tried to block this merger as well but failed since Grifols was a relatively smaller in US plasma collections at the time.

Examining acquisition chains

It broke my heart. Most of the small businesses that I've worked with over the years have failed. Something is happening in our economy that is systematically wiping out small businesses.

I wasted years trying to convince small business owners that the only way small business can survive in the Internet economy is if small businesses created mechanisms that linked their small business to the other small businesses in town.

Google wrongly describes the organic links between small businesses in a local communities as "link farms" and people are scared of Google.

So, I've decided to concentrate on acquisition chains, private equity firms, conglomerates and other entities which are accelerating the destruction of small businesses in our towns. As I delete the links to all the failed businesses in town, I am creating "information pages" for the big businesses which are displacing the small business. Once I have the basic structure in place, I hope to transfer the information articles into a database that will allow for a more detailed examination of acquisitions.

Small Business Saturday Report

Small Business Saturday is a marketing gimmick created by American Express (big finance) in an effort to sell card processing services to small companies that, to be frank, prefer cash.

The marketers of this effort are so out of touch with small business that they failed to realize that most small businesses are closed on the weekend.

Small Business Saturday resonates with big media. This reporting has a populist appeal that increases ratings.

In other words, Small Business Saturday is a tool created by big finance and used by big media to centralize things.

It is a funny paradox.

It is a funny paradox, but I have been worried about the state of small business in our communities for awhile.

I find it such a concern that I have invested thousands of hours into creating directoies for communities in the Mountain West to help raise awaress of the plight of local communities in the internet age.

I have been woking on this project for seventeen years.

I build directories. I add sites as I find them. I check each link periodically to see if it is still live. If not, I pull the links.

This project gives me a feel for how our communities are evolving.

My current stats show that, through the years, I've added 47642 links. I've pulled 17432 links. The vast majority of the pulled links are failed businesses. Many of the dark links were for events and political campaigns.

Of the links that belong to institutions, the majority are small businesses that have failed.

I wanted to write a good quality post on my findings. My data really isn't good enough and I lack the resources to get the quality data that I need.

I happen to live in Utah. As I am not LDS, I started the project by moving North. I helped some groups develop directories in Idaho, Montana and Oregon. I gave away all but Missoula.ws..

I moved back to Salt Lake for the 2002 Olympics. I believe that everybody who lives in an area is part of the community. I have been told multiple times by members of the LDS church to leave.

I was born in Denver and Longmont. So, I started creating directoris in Colorado for places like Grand Junction, Boulder and Colorado Springs. Arizona has a small number of counties; So I started a top down directory called Arizona Color.

Anyway, I believe that the best way for people to promote their local community is to get involved with their local community.

Like most Americans these days, I feel frustrated with our politics. I am working on a project where I am trying to find ways to support businesses from the bottom up. I have receive nothing but open contempt for the effort.

The revival of our small business community is not going to come from the top down. Small Business Saturday is a joke. The event is used by big business to gain populist feel. Anyone who actively engages with small business knows that small business owners like having the weekend off.

If you want to help small business, you need to visit web sites of the small businesses in your community and to talk to small business owners. Hint, I have a small business. I build directories that feature small businesses. I have been working on this problem from the bottom up for years.

Any I have a large amount of data showing that the small business community in America is in trouble. About 70% of the small business web sites I listed a decade ago have gone dark. I don't want to quote the exact figures because I need to clean up the data to make sure I have not built a bias into my data.

I know that there are troubling statistics. For example, state agriculture departments have been reporting steep drops in the number of locally owned farms. Most of the Chamber of Commerce web sites I visit are listing fewer businesses in their directories. Locally owned banks have been consolidating at a record clip.

I believe that a directory project is a good way to start an investigation into the fate of small business in our communities, but I need a better source of data before making any broad claims about what is happening.

A Day Wasted on FTC Compliance

Oops, I just discovered a problem. I told blogger to use ssl for this. I can't afford an SSL certificate for my site; So I can't post resources from my primary site on this site.

I just wrote a post on FTC compliance that I put on my other blog.

Never Shop At a Store that Uses Domain Privacy

I was reading through the "Terms and Conditions" page of a web site that I was considering promoting.

Line 15 of the terms read:

15. 1. It is mutually understood and agreed that this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the place where the Company holds its principal place of business,

The web site itself does not say where the company is located.

Their contact page just has a web form. They use a 1-800 number and they bought the domain privacy feature from Godaddy which masks the information used to register the business.

The fact that this company does not report its location makes the whole idea of doing business with this company absurd.

If you are considering doing business with a company you should always check the company's contact page and find out where they are. Any contracts you make with a company will be governed by the state (or country) where the company resides.

If the company does not report their location on the contact page; you can often discover it with a whois tool like whois.domaintools.com or whois.icann.com or even whois.godaddy.com.

If a company does not report its location on a contact page and is using domain privacy; you should not do business with that company.

I decided not to do business with the company in question. Quite frankly, I suspect that others have decided not to do business with the company for the same reason.

Businesses Should Never Use Domain Privacy

I believe that we need to protect the privacy of individuals. If you are blogging about a political opinion; buying domain privacy is smart.

If your goal is to engage in business, you should never use domain privacy.

Domain Registration and SEO

Millions of people look up whois information. There are robots that troll the whois database as well. These people compile lists and make reports. Many of these reports end up online.

These people end up creating free links and traffic to your business. When you buy domain privacy, you lose out on a bunch of free traffic.

The robots that troll the whois database send a lot of spam. The answer to this spam is simply to create a throwaway mailbox for your domain registration. See, if you have a domain name, you have an infinite number of mail box addresses. I used the mailbox spam for my registrations: eg spam@example.com. I only use this address for domains.

You do not need to buy domain privacy to protect you from spam because you get an infinite number of email addresses with your domain name!

If you have money (I don't have money); you should get a box at a local mail center. The starting price is usually $8 per month. (Postnet, UPS Store, post office. The address should have the correct city and state of your business. Some local office buildings will offer mail boxes.

ADVERTISEMENT: If you had a lot of money (starting $50/month); you might consider getting a virtual office with DaVinci Office. This option gives you meeting space at prime locations around the globe. You can add a virtual reception and other cool features.

Conclusion: Business contracts tend to be regulated at the location of the business. You should never do business with a company that uses Domain Privacy services. Conversely, if you are a company and you want to do business; you should avoid using domain privacy.

The best way to protect your privacy is to get a mail box or virtual office. You can protect your email address simply by using a dedicated email address for domain registrations.

Outdenting the Listings

I am a big fan of using defaults.

The original concept behind the web was that people would customize their browsers to the font and font size that they found the most readable. Web designers should then use the default fonts.

What happened is that manufacturers increased the resolution of their screens. The browsers kept the default font size in pixels and web sites relying on defaults became less readable.

Anyway, I decided to clean up broken links. I've removed 700 so far. While doing so, I decided that the site was just too illegible at the current defaults.

So, I switched the lists to a sans-serif font. I also decided to outdent the list.

I am happy with this change.

I think I will be able to pull another thousand broken links from the site.

Reviving the Community Color Project

In this last year, I've been investing my efforts in a fool-hearty attempt to revive the Community Color project.

This project examines the way that different communities are reflected on the Internet. The projects includes directories for towns in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Wyoming.

I actually started this project for towns in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. I gave away the first directories, but kept the Missoula.ws domain.

My effort to revive the project began by rewriting the code for the site from scratch. I then began feverishly adding new pages and "site reviews." I have also been investing time in removing broken links. The number of web sites that failed in the last few years is disheartening.

I now need to work to build some inbound links. I figure that the best way build such links is to blog about the site and the efforts I am taking to revive the site.

Updated About Page and fixing broken links

Maintaining a web directory is time consuming enterprise and has little reward. Anyway, I just updated the about page for Community Color.

I also started fixing some of the broken links to pages in the directory which will hopefully increase traffic.

My last server could only deliver 10,000 pages a day. I believe that the new server will be able to deliver several hundred thousand page views per day. The challenge is figuring out how to create content that is worth that many page views.

DMOZ Died

I logged into DMOZ.org yesterday and was sad to see that Mozilla's "Open Directory Project" had finally failed.

DMOZ was a really big thing back in 2000.

DMOZ was a human edited directory maintained by volunteers. The directory was arranged in a hierarchical fashion which is a common structure for organizing data.

The DMOZ directory was a primary source for some of the early search engines. For awhile a listing on DMOZ resulted in a big boost in one's position on Google and Yahoo.

Apparently, DMOZ inspired the creation of Wikipedia.

DMOZ was owned by AOL (America Online). AOL was a huge thing back in the 1990s. AOL provided online access before the general public was allowed to connect to the Internet and instantly became the biggest internet service providers when the public was allowed access. AOL was acquired by Verizon in 2015.


My desire to build community portals coincided with the creation of DMOZ. I never found a funding source. I never developed a network of volunteers because I believe strongly that people should be paid for their work.



My idea is to mix affiliate ads with the free listings on the directory. This income stream fails because people don't use directories for shopping. They use directories for browsing.

Anyway, I am staring at the blank page for DMOZ and am left wondering if I should see the fall of the largest Internet directory as an opportunity or if I should see it as yet another sign that the days of my project are numbered.

New Home Computer

I finally faced up to the fact that the last computer I purchased did not have enough power to do complex tasks like edit photos, open spreadsheet files or load ad laden web pages such as Tumblr.

The computer had enough power. IMHO, the real problem was that Windows10 had become so bloated even fast computer is bloated down by bad software.

So, I bought a new computer.  Since I've been using Ubuntu for my web server, I decided to get one built for Linux. It is Meercat from System76.

Porting to new server

I am finishing the job of porting web sites to the new server. The new site uses PHP7, SQLite and HTML5. Things are different enough that I have to rewrite every single line of code in the program.

Anyway, I would love to receive comments on the site. I've been working on this project since 1999 and have actually received any comment on the idea of creating local directories.

The site currently does not have any interactive features. So, I will use this blogspot blog for comments.

I just moved iMoab.com to the new server. The site seems to respond quickly. The last Utah directory to to will be the Salt Lake Directory.

The Martyrdom of Parley Pratt

I was raised in Denver and grew up loving the history of the Old West.

One of my goals in creating the Community Color sites was that sites would justify taking time to explore the colorful history of different regions.

My family moved to Utah some decades ago. The problem I face is that I really do not like the history of Utah.

Utah was settled by Mormons. Mormonism, it turns out, is a culture war religion. The Book of Mormon claims that there was once a great extermination war that took place on this continent between the Nephites (who were white and delightsome) and a variety of other tribes who were dark and loathsome. The Nephites lost the war.

Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young claim that the proof of the Book of Mormon is the base observation that Europeans have lighter skin that Native Americans.

Mormonism teaches that a group of righteous saints are to be gathered in the "latter days" and that these saints are locked in an unending culture war with everybody who is not a member of their tribe.

Joseph Smith liked the ladies. Smith restored the principle of polygamy and sealed himself to as many women as he could get his hands on. Smith's band of wives included some fourteen year old girls and the wives of his followers.

Polygamy is an interesting device in that it allows powerful men to grab even more wealth and power.

The history of Utah is one in which Brigham Young and the Mormons would form powerful polygamist clans and would then use the clans to grab as much territory as possible.

There were invariably conflicts between the immensely powerful Mormons and everyone else.

The story of Saint Parley Pratt provides the typical settlement story, but with one sensational twist. (Members of the Latter Day Saints consider themselves Saints on earth).

Anyway Parley Pratt was an early convert to Mormonism and was a part of Joseph Smith's twelve Apostles. Pratt saw the potential of polygamy and took to marrying multiple women with a vengeance.

After emigrating with Brigham Young, Pratt helped with the survey of Parley's Canyon and, being an extremely powerful member of the LDS Church, grabbed the choice chunk of land which is now Park City.

While in San Francisco, Parley Pratt seduced a woman named Eleanor who was married and had three children with a man named Mr. Henry McLean. Without gaining a divorce, Eleanor was "sealed" to Parley Pratt in Salt Lake.

I need to point out that Joseph Smith had sealed himself to the wives of several of his followers. So, marrying another person's wife is not considered outlandish among Mormons.

Anyway, Henry McLean was cantankerous. He tried sending his children to their grand parents in New Orleans to keep them from the clutches of Parley Pratt.

Parley and Eleanor went to New Orleans to collect the children. After Pratt took the children, Henry McLean followed and eventually shot Parley Pratt.

So, Parley Pratt, who was an Apostle of Joseph Smith, was pursued, persecuted and martyred by an evil gentile named Henry McClean.

This martyrdom of Apostle Parley Pratt is held by Mormons as one of the great persecutions of their faith.

I guess Mormons hold that a great man like Parley Pratt should be able to marry the wives of non-great mean like Henry McClean without repercussion.

Now, here is the problem I have with Utah history: Mormonism is a culture war religion. The LDS Church teaches that its adherents are the righteous who were gathered in the latter days to engage in an extermination war with the evil gentiles.

Because the area was built by people engaged in culture war, every piece of history in this state gets interpreted as part of the culture war. It is impossible to research the history of the state without getting drug into this mean hateful culture war.

The town of Park City was originally named Parley's Park City after Parley Pratt.

Park City is one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the Mountain West and is now an internationally recognized destination resort.

One cannot talk about the history of Park City without discussing Parley Pratt.

One's opinion of Pratt almost always follows culture war lines.

The righteous hold that Apostle Pratt was a great patriarch of the faith who married 12 women  but was persecuted and martyred by an evil gentile. Non Mormons tend to look at Pratt and see a lecherous lout who broke families apart by seducing married women.

The great culture war that dominates live in Utah means that people in general cannot talk about the history of the area without being drawn into a mean hateful culture war launched by Joseph Smith.

BTW, I do not believe that Native Americans are loathsome. My observation is that people in southern climates tend have darker skin than people in northern climates because they spend more time in the sun than people in cold northern climates.

New Site and Advertising

I am finalizing the the new site design for Community Color. I have only two sites pointed at the new server.

The new site is much faster than the old site, and I hope it will be able to handle a hundred times the traffic of the old server.

The Community Color project had over 10,000,000 page views last year. The old server would freeze up whenever I exceeded that amount.

Sadly, I made less that $3,000 revenue from the site. Last year I performed three test purchases on the site. I received credit for only one of the three purchases. It makes me livid. I am sending hits to advertisers by the thousands who are not crediting me with the traffic.

I figured my best bet for salvaging the project is to replace the affiliate ads with direct advertising. The problem with direct sells is the collection cost. Spending two hours to collect $10 from an advertiser is a path to insolvency.

So, what I decided to do is to sell the ads in units of 100,000. The price for the unit will be $25.00.

As mentioned, I had 10,000,000 page views last year. I should be able to consume 100 lots of 100,000 ads.

Advertisers can order an ad (I need advertisers in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Southern Wyoming.).

If I approve the ad; I will place the ad on the site and send a Paypal invoice show the ad placement. If the advertiser is happy; the advertiser can pay the bill. If not; I will delete the ad after a week or so.

Now for the scary part. I am betting the boat on my ability to sell 100 ads for $25 a pop to make $2,500.

The market for local advertising has been so weak for the last few years that I am not sure there's a hundred businesses in the Mountain West that would buy the ads.

Anyway, I have the ad ordering program online. The ad is 738x90 banner that goes above the fold on the page. I have at most one such ad per page. The ad can be text or an image.

I am looking for ads in Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Southern Wyoming. Here is the ad ordering page.  You can order an ad. I will put it online and send a Paypal Invoice. If you like the ad, you can pay the invoice; Otherwise I will remove the ad.

Reviving Utah Color

I have put this project off for too long!

I am in the last stages of moving the Community Color sites to the new server. Due to changes in PHP, I've been forced to rewrite the code from ground up and it is going extremely slow.

I decided to start the migration with the UtahColor.com. The new design will feature a subdirectory for each of the 29 counties in the state. Egads, 29, this is a lot of work.

I am laying in a framework starting with Beaver, Carbon County, etc.

I appreciate any feedback on the site.

Quite frankly, the reason that I've taken so long on the rebuild is that I have not received any feedback and the lack of input has zapped my enthusiasm for the project.

Small Business Special

At the dawn of the Internet, I realized that small business was likely to get the shaft while big businesses make big deals between themselves to dominate the web.

I decided that I wanted to do something to help small business; So I started making little directories for local businesses in select towns in the Mountain West.

The original idea was that I would build directories and web services for small communities. The directories would be funded by affilate ads from big business. The big businesses would pay for free services for small businesses and charities. This worked okay for awhile.

This year, I decided to experiment with selling ads directly to small businesses. The ad rate will be $25.00 for 100,000 page views. The Ads are 728x90 banners that gone in the upper fold. Note, I serve the ads in SVG and they scale to screen size. The ads can be a 728x90 banner or just plain text. I present the Text in SVG. The ads scale to screen size.

The sites show at most one ad per per page. The click through rate on my old affiliate ads was a little over one click per thousand page views.

I am only interested in local ads from small business. The directories are in the mountain west. I have select towns in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. I have a county by county directory for Arizona.

The work flow for ordering an ad is: You select a directory and a subject within a directory. You then define the ad. The Text ads have two lines. The title line should be under 28 characters and the text line under 75.

If you have a 728x90 image on line, you can enter a link for the image. I will copy the the image to my server.

I also use box ads (336x280). These ads go on calendar events. My ad inventory for these box ads is really small. So I am not pushing the box ads.

When you order an ad I require that you give me your name and an email address.

If I approve the ad; I will place the ad on apropriate areas on my site. After placing the ad, I will send you an invoice via Paypal to your email address for $25. The invoice includes a link showing the placement along with ad stats. You can then review the placement.

If you are unhappy with the placement; don't pay the invoice!

Note, I do not offer a money back guarantee after you pay the invoice. I am giving you a review period in lieue of a money back guarantee.

Some ad campaigns have a fixed duration. If your ad expires in the next 90 days, enter the expiration date. I charge only $12.50. I turn fixed duration ads off when they expire or have 40,000 page view, which ever comes first. I cannot guarantee 40,000 page views and don't offer a prorated refund as calculating a prorated refund for $12.5 is a pain in the tush.

This program is in an experimental phase. I do not mind if people order the ads just to test the program. Write in the note area that the order is a test.

Here is the ad ordering page for Park City. The first line of the program lets you select the site for your ad. Park City is the only site on my new server. This new ad program goes live as I move sites to the new server.

Demise of ITT Tech

Looks like The Obama Administration was successful in shutting  down ITT Tech. I wander if they will be able to shut down the University of Phoenix this year?

The closure of ITT Tech makes me sad. A decade ago the school had a curriculum that was better than most local community colleges. ITT Tech students were actually getting a higher return for the amount of money they invested in education than other schools.

ITT Tech was briefly owned by ITT and was truly focused on giving students the skill sets needed for the technology environment of the day.

Businesses tend to align with their funding source. The primary funding source was the Federal Government and guaranteed student loans.

So, instead of focusing on developing a better curriculum for less. It appears that ITT Tech took the low road and turned into a mill for processing student loans.

Even worse, ITT Tech appears to have devolved into a student loan mill during a weak job market. The poor students would pop out of the company into a soft job market and simply be umemployed and deeply in debt.

I had the misfortune of wasting two years of my life as an instructor for a student loan mill in Utah. The company was very good at getting students to sign the dotted line on the loan application, but was providing a subpar product.

Many public universities appear to be little more than student loan mills. Since the universities don't have private investors, they don't get raise the ire of the public. When public universities go bad, Democrats simply yell for higher taxes.

Anyway, now that the Obama Administration has the formula for closing down private for profit schools, I wonder how many schools he will be able to close before the end of his administration.

Replacing Affiliate Ads with Direct Ads

I am upgrading the Community Color Web Sites to PHP 7. I am also replacing MySQL with SQLite3 and upgrading to HTML5. It's a big project that I hope to complete this week.

As part of the upgrade I will replace the Adsense Ads and Affiliate Ads on the site with direct local ads.

I like the basic concept of affiliate advertising. A site with a product to sell offers a commission on sales. Web sites run their ads and get an occasional commission.

There are tens of thousands of merchants with affiliate programs. These merchants offer millions or products.

I believe that affiliate marketing is a good thing. Because there are so many products, web sites can run ads for things they support without compromising their message.

The problem I have with affiliate marketing is that the huge networks that offer affiliate ads aggressively track user activity. These use the information they gather to manipulate user behavior. They often engage in activities that undermine the sites that run their ads.

I believe that my sites are well enough established to break from the clutches of the big marketing firms and that I will be able to replace the ads. Currently, I have over 10,000 page views a day. My 10 year old server freezes up when I have more. I believe the new new server and improved code will be able to handle a hundred times more traffic.

I decided that the best way to handle local advertising is to sell the ads in blocks of 100,000.  I am currently getting about $30 for every 100,000 page views. Since I will bill in advance, I decided to charge $25 for every 100,000 page views. This is a super low rate of 25¢ CPM.

The new site will go live in a week or so. I would love to have a few people buy ads before the site goes live so that I can tweak the program.

The ad is a 728x90 banner that is in the upper fold of the page (between the page title and contents). I put text ads in a stylized SVG block. You can pre-order ads on my test server.

Use this form to order text ads.
Use this form to order a banner ad (you need a link to a 728x90 banner).

The ads won't go live until I switch to the new server which I hope to do soon.

I only have 10,000 page views per day (which I've split into targets). I only want ads related to the target. I don't want to show ads for Denver Lawyers on the Moab Real Estate page. The flow of the program is as follows. A person orders an ad. If I have a relevant target, I will approve and place the ad.

Some time after the new site is live, I will send the user a payment request using Paypal (Paypal accepts Visa, Mastercard, etc). The request will show the ad placement. If the person is happy, they can pay the bill. If not I will remove the ad. I am using a delayed payment instead of a money back guarantee.

Still No Date Picker in Firefox

I am bummed out. Firefox still hasn't implemented the date picker that was in the HTML 5 specs that came out a few years back.

I hold that the date picker should be provided by the browser because it gives the client a unified experience across sites. Here is a sample form with the new HTML date types. Chrome and the other browsers I tested have date pickers. Firefox does not.

This means I can't depend on the feature. Arrrggggggghhhhhhhh!

New Privacy Policy

I created a new privacy policy page for the Communtiy Color sites.

The privacy policy tells the world that [gasp] I track activity on the site.

I track the activity to see what parts of the site people visit. I use this data to figure out how to expand the site. If people are interested in sports, I add more info about sports. If they are interested in history, I add more pages about history.

Our leaders and media vilify small sites for using cookies and tracking activity. The EU requires that web sites apologize if they use cookies.

A cookie is simply a device that allows web sites to carry information between pages. I do not use cookies for casual visitors to the site. However, I do drop a session cookie when a user logs in to the site. I need the cookie so that they can modify the information on their account.


Now, I find the idea that every site provides a privacy policy to be absurd. The only privacy risk of small sites is that they might send spam if they require a user's email address. This risk is adverted by being careful in giving out one's email address. Personally, I use multiple emails addresses and never give up my most private addresses.



As for this new policy:

I've been hoping to replace my large national advertisers with small local advertisers; So, I am using the privacy policy to sell my new local advertising product.

My advertising product seeks to replace advertisements from large national advertisers that track user activity with small local advertisers that do not.

So, while I think the demand that every site includes a privacy statement to be foolish, I am not adverse to using the page to sell a product. If advertisers bought their ads directly from sites, it would help replace ads from big advertisers that create user profiles with small sites that do not.

Online Advertising

I've been working on upgrading the Community Color sites. The process is taking longer than I had hoped.

The new design will offer targeted local advertising.

The way this works is I assign each page a target. The Design an Ad page allows advertisers to select a target and create an ad related to the target. The program will allow both text and image ads. I create the text ads with SVG.

The cost for the ads will be $25 for 100,000 ad views. That is an ad rate of 25¢ per thousand ads. This is an extremely low rate.

The catch is that it might take several years for me to display 100,000 ads on some of the smaller targets.

The new design is not yet live, but my test server is up.

The process will work as follows. Advertisers can design ads on my test server. If I approve the ad; I will send a Paypal invoice to the advertiser after the new site goes live. Advertisers can then accept the placement by paying the invoice or reject it by not paying the invoice.

You can order an ad. See what it looks like on the site and then cancel the ad just by ignoring the Paypal invoice.

It would be fun to have a few ad orders before going live. That way I could test the program with live data.

SQL Table Object

I open sourced the code for the object I use to create simple HTML tables. This is somewhat of a Swiss Army Knife object that can be used to create tables in multiple ways.

To understand the object you will want to look at both the source code and the demonstration page.
The object I use to produce forms is much more complicated. I am updating it for Forms 4.0.

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NOTE: The program uses the sqlRow() function which  encapsulates the PHP PDO object. It uses the htag() function which indents the output; so that my HTML is well formatted.

Path to Citizenship?

In 2013, the US naturalized 777,416 immigrants. The chart on uscis.gov indicates that the United States has naturalized well over a half million immigrants every year this decade.

Hillary Clinton's claim that there is no "path to citizenship" is a lie. The fact that the United States continues to have the most generous immigration systems on the planet proves Clinton to be a liar. (Not surprising for a person married to a convicted perjurer).

The problem we face isn't the lack of a "path to citizenship" but the fact that that millions of people are blatantly ignoring immigration laws which makes it much more difficult to define that path to citizenship.

In today's speech, Clinton made the claim that illegal immigrants pay some $13 billion into Social Security.

I need to point out that it is the employers who pay into social security.

The true statement that employers paid some $13 billion into social security.

Quite frankly, this same amount of money, if not more, would have been paid into the system on the behalf of US citizens if the employers hired US citizens instead of illegal immigrants.

I personally do not hire illegal immigrants. Many illegal immigrants appear to be part of a shadow economy and the people in the shadow economy work in cash and do not pay social security.

The claim that Republicans are anti-immigration is a blatant lie. We have a path to citizenship proven by the half million people who make it through that path each year.

The problem is that we don't have an effective path for denying citizenship.

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As for deportations, If I were president, I would make enforcing visas a priority. A visa is a contract. People violating the terms of their visa show a contempt for contracts and the rule of law.

Hillary's statement that she would only enforce immigration laws in regards to violent offenders is horrible. We need to enforce visa laws to have an effective visa system. By openly declaring that she would not enforce Visa laws, Hillary has made it more difficult to have a liberal visa system.

Aggressive enforcement of visas is not anti-immigrant because it allows for a greater liberalization of visa laws. The idea that being granted a visa should be seen as a path to citizenship is absurd.

Quite frankly, since violating the terms of a visa shows contempt of law, I would say that people who grossly violate the terms of the visa should be kicked off the path to citizenship. Showing respect for contracts, including a visa contract, should be part of the path to citizenship.