Thank You, Robyn

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Up until a few months ago, I was part of a group of bloggers who were making a concerted effort to visit each other's site on an almost daily basis. While it was great to read each other's latest posts, the main objective was to help our Alexia score. The motivation behind that lie in our financial dealings with PayPerPost.

Then, with PPP latest changes, there was a fear that our efforts would be meet with a fate worse than death -- expulsion from the PayPerPost system. Fortunately, PayPerPost has finally clarified their position and our Alexia group is back in operation. This group is only possible through the generosity of a fellow blogger, Robyn. Thank you, Robyn, for the recently posted blog roll.

Poker - Alexia Style

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I don't know what to make of my Alexia scores. I bet if I sat at all the poker tables in the world, I would do better than I am at this stupid popularity contest. A couple of months ago, my score was under 150,000. Today, I am up to over 206,000. This means that there are 206,000 sites with more alexia visitors than this blog. But so what? The Alexia group is a tiny fraction out of the millions of travelers on the Internet. Yet, one of the pay-you-for-blogging companies uses this flawed metric in divvying out their opportunities. Apparently, if the number of non-alexia visitors to your site continually increases, that is not important. But then, it's all a game, isn't it. In poker, you can increase your luck with a little skill. But this Alexia nonsense has as much skill as playing a roulette wheel. Perhaps it's time to fold ...

Slow Wireless Router

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Are you using a wireless router in your home? Have you noticed times when your speed seems to drop to a snail's pace for no apparent reason? Well, here is something that you might want to check out. If you have a microwave oven in your home, how close is your wireless router to it? I've seen some spectrum analysis that shows how microwave ovens blast through the frequencies used by wireless routers. Since the 2.4 GHz band is unregulated, there is a myriad of devices using that frequency. So there is also a chance that your cordless phone and any other wireless devices (such as speakers and headsets) are interfering with your wireless router. Just thought I'd pass along to you...

My Alexa Score has Flatlined

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Ever since day 94 of the Alexa Project, my score has bounced around the 180,000 mark. Day 94 is May 16th. So with no further drop in my score after two months, it's sad but safe to say that my site has reached a plateau in terms of Alexa popularity. I wonder if anyone else in the Alexa Project has experienced the same?

Looking for Branson

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You can find almost anything these days on the Internet. For example, type the word Branson into your favorite search engine and you end up with diverse results ranging from Branson, Missouri travel and shows information to companies such as Branson Ultrasonics and Branson Tractors to famous rich people like Sir Richard Branson. What you do with this information is entirely up to you, provided that you live somewhere on the globe that isn't censoring what you're searching for.

Freelancer's Toolset

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Since I became involved using my blogs to freelancing, I have added several tools to my computer make my job easier. Of course, the Internet is a vast resource to goodies of every kind. I know that there are applications out there that I don't even know about. A last week, I happened across this site which has 100 web apps for everything a freelancer could need. Very in depth even though the author mentions a calendar app which isn't supported any more and missed one that I've found to be extremely helpful (Airset.com). Still, I highly recommend that you visit this site.

Picking Stocks

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You can take action and learn from your mistakes. But this tends to be an expensive and timely method. Or you can learn from those who have figured out the best way to do what you want to do. As I'm getting more into the financial world of the stock market, my goal is to have the best performing stocks in my portfolio. Yet, left to my own selections, I've had better success picking my nose than I have had with picking stocks. So I'm looking into what others are doing. There are a lot of recommendations out there! So to find out who knows what, I've found Tradermatch.com which gives Traders Ratings on its members. This site has very helpful and insightful as I watch the stock picks of various members against the actual performance of those stocks. Tradermatch makes good use of Yahoo! Finance too. I was able to search on a stock that interested me and get its "Intraday Chart" directly in the site. All-in-all, I think I have found a very useful (and soon-to-be profitable) site for my finances.

This post is sponsored by Tradermatch.com

Week 9 of the Alexa Project

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The good news is that my score has improved signicantly from its start of 1,025,188. However, these last few weeks has found my score's daily change improving less and less. Look for yourself at the graph at the end of this post. The red is my actual Alexa score. The yellow is the computed daily change between each reading. In the beginning, the yellow plot is high, showing vast improvement in my score. At times, a drop of over 25,000 points per day. Lately, I'm now dropping slightly over 2,000 points a day. What is changing? Less visits from members of our Alexa Project? At this point, I don't know. When I get a moment, I need to check to see if anyone else is experiencing this.

I do thank everyone who has visited my site. Robyn has over 170 links for us to visit. With my schedule, it takes me two days to make my rounds.

Malicious Web Sites Exploiting Internet Explorer Users

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If you're using Firefox or Opera browsers, go ahead and breath a sigh of relief because this latest security problem doesn't affect. You users of the Internet Explorer (6 and 7) need to read this!

Blogging About Our Small Towns

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My life has been spent in several towns all over the United States. The only way I can share those experiences with you right now is through pictures and memories. I could do a much better job if I had taken the time to write down impressions that would have matched those faded pictures. Of course, this means I wouldn't have been able to verbally embellished those memories that are even more faded.

With that in mind, I signed up with an Internet project that is focused on blogging about small towns across the United States. I'm rather excited about using www.LocalTownBlogs.com to write about my experiences of living in Spring Lake, North Carolina. I've been here over 20 years and have seen a tremendous amount of change. And I can tell you that there are a lot more to come. Once my blog at http://localtownblogs.com/blog/NorthCarolina/SpringLake is approved, I will look forward to your visits, comments, and suggestions.

Two Milestones

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Last night, my Alexa dropped by 81,293 to 881,420. Of course, three points do not a trend make ... unless you're in politics. Still, a forth reading will help determine a general direction and perhaps a little predictability. At this point, I hope PPP changes nothing about Alexa. The standards have changed enough to make this pay-for-blogging more frustrating than it should be. Now I need all the help that I can get.

Last night, I also set up an account with bluehost.com to create my own domains. Now that learning curve starts and a three month deadline looms to get my blogs in place. I'll release links to my site(s) when they have a little substance to them, ok?

Ok, I can't resist! Here is an extremely rough forecast for this coming week's score. The green is the more conservative forecast, while the blue line is the closest matching to current scores:

Share Your Stuff With This Widget

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If you don't already know, widgets are small snippets of code that let you

embed objects into your web page. The good thing is that you don't need to be a programmer to have videos, songs, or any other type of file show up in your page, especially if you take advantage of box.net widget. With it, you share your favorite video right in your post. I have been looking for an easy way to share audio files. It looks like box.net has just what I'm looking for - a free drag-and-drop widget and they have up to 1GB of free hosting for my files. I think that this one will be a winner. Let me know what you think. For now, I'll use box.net's widget to share a picture of my winning design for a March-Of-Dimes T-Shirt:

Get your own Box.net widget and share anywhere!

Hurray, Another Drop In My Score

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Sometime between 5:30 this evening and 7:30, my Alexa score dropped to 962,713 from 1,001,770 - a drop of 39,057 this time. Does this mean that there is a four day pause between score updates? Hopefully PPP will reflect this change on their site tomorrow. The gaming experiment continues ...

Review My Post and Make Some $$?

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PayPerPost (PPP has rolled out several features over the past couple of days. Judging from the increase of 'help me' messages on the forums, their development is now putting large scale fires. Yet, when these features are all corrected, they will become just that-- features, helpful and money making. One that I have added to this blog is a button for a reader to click and review my post, any post, and get paid for doing so. One of PPP requirements is that I put the button on every post on my blog. This turned out rather easy to do once I figured out how to modify blogger's template for this blog. As for you, the reader, I believe the catch is you must sign up to PPP first. This would mean you could only review one post. Of course, after that you would have the opportunity to make money from your blog, but that is another issue.

What do you think? Should I keep those buttons on my post or remove them?

21 Million Bloggers in China

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This morning, I read an article from Xinhua news agency that said China now has 20.8 million bloggers. As a result, their government wants all users to register with their real names before blogging. "The real names of bloggers will be kept private as long as they do no harm to the public interest." according to China Internet Survey Report 2007. Of course, given the nature and history of China's government, "no harm to the public interest" means no criticism of rules, regulations or policies. Agree?

The other item that interested me in that article was the how much a Chinese web user spends online on average. For about $22 every month, they pay for the costs of web access, online shopping and games. I spend $45 just for web access! But I don't think I'll be moving to China for cheap Internet.

Wireless .... Rabbit?

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Now I have seen everything ... a rabbit that connects to the Internet to read your e-mails out loud to you, let you know if your stocks are rising or falling, tell you the latest headlines, announce the time, give you a weather forecast, etc. All this while twirling its ears and flashing lights on its body. The Nabaztag (Armenian for rabbit) is a 9-inch tall white plastic rabbit from a French company called Violet. Once you have your own Nabaztag, you sign up online and customize what you want your rabbit to do once it connects to the Internet. I don't know if it uses rabbit ears for antennas but I do know that it is wireless. This will probably be next year's got-to have gadget.