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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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!

Traffic from Halloween Past

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

This top spot gives insight into seasonal web traffic flows.

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

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

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

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

DNS Problems Resolved

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

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

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

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

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

I apologize for this inconvenience.

Sites Are Coming Back Online

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

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

Instead, I experienced a cloud burst.

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

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

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

Sincerely,

The Management

Sites Are Still Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving to the cloud has proven a negative experience.

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

MillCreek is the Worst Name ... EVER!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MillCreek is the stupidest name. EVER!

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

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

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

Second Quarter a Bust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adding Mobi URLS

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile Blog

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

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

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

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

Master Index

I made a Master Index for the community color site.

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

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

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

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

Utah Color

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

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

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

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

Link Friendly Directory

Opening the Arizona sites is taking longer than I anticipated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arizona Directories

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

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

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

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

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