As I was surfing the other day I came across an interesting site that I had come across some years ago. It is http://www.ted.com/ and it is well worth a visit. To use their own words, “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).” Also as they say TED is ideas worth sharing.
You might have heard of Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes on a group he was giving a talk to. This is the place where it happened. You can see the video of this and many other talks on the TED web site. If you have never had the chance to hear Bill Gates speak, this is an easy and inexpensive way to see him in action. His talk covered Malaria awareness and creating better teachers and education which fell under is topic of “How I’m trying to change the world now”.
Concerning the education system, Bill has some charts and some interesting observations on the current effectiveness of the schooling system. I also have some ideas in this area. Bill, if you are listening, get with me. I have had an idea running in the back of my mind for some years now that would harness the power of technology to increase education on a national scale that could easily go global but it would take someone with your resources to pull it off. Where you are talking about reforming the system, I am talking about bypassing the system and getting right to the heart of the matter.
Money is part, but knowledgeable technicians and effective teachers are the other. It involves creating an on-line school that is affordable (free) and available to all. Borrowing from some other successful models such as game sites, you tube, and social sites, education could be brought to a whole new world of individuals that are not served well with the current system as well as providing continuing education to the world of people that thirst for knowledge. I can’t do it from where I sit but you could, if you truly believe in this. What the rich were to public libraries in the past, Bill Gates could be for education in the here and now.
Bill Gates was not the reason I came to re-discover the TED site. As I said the other day, aviation is a passion for me and I came across a talk that Paul MacCready gave on aerodynamics and flight entitled ‘Paul MacCready flies on solar wings’. MacCready is the person that gave rise to the human powered aircraft, the Gossamer Albatross, that flew across the English Channel and then went on to create the solar powered unmanned aircraft called the Helios which broke the SR-71’s altitude record. He is an amazing man with a creed of “Do more with less”. This interesting video can be found at http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/176.
There is a myriad of topics and talks to be found here. I intend to delve deeper as I get the chance. Where it only takes 20 minutes I should be able to find the time. What I have seen so far just whets my appetite for more. After all, education can and should be a lifelong process. The thirst for knowledge should be unquenchable. Enjoy yours.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
14 February 2009
10 February 2009
Dreams of flying still fill my head
I was going to make an entry on economics and the new great depression and that is still to come but I kind of got distracted along the way. Saturday mornings I like to look at a few web sites and dream about aviating. I like to fly and I have not gotten near enough of a fill of it yet. So far beyond the several commercial flights I have taken, I have been given a few rides by generous fellow plane nuts, and I have taken lessons that resulted in solo flight.
My first taste of real flying, (that is anything that doesn’t involve standing in line to disrobe and walk through a magnometer), was with my uncle in his Cessna 182. I had been reading and studying in my high schooled way and knew the basics of flight and once we were air born my uncle turned the controls over to me and let me fly. It was the greatest event of the summer. My dad and brother were in the back and even though I wasn't quite as smooth as my uncle and my turns were not the most coordinated I managed to get us through the air and tour the flood area and work being done to repair the damage done by the Teton Dam flood in Idaho. Elaine Johnson has a nice story about the flood at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~idfremon/flood.htm.
Like so many things in life, when I get a taste of someone’s hobby and they really have a love for it, it is contagious and I usually want to participate and experience it for myself. Such has been the case with coin collecting, photography, books, music, movies, television, biking, cars, and flying. I could go on and on but you get the point.
I had a Boy Scout advisor that gave us a taste of simulator flying and my taste grew. Later I decided to take lessons. The cost was scary because at the time I was going to college and working three jobs but I figured it would be worth it. It was worth it but the money said either one or the other and college came first. I figured that if college worked out I would be able to make enough money to pay for my flying habit. Silly me.
Before I gave in I did manage to solo in a Piper Tomahawk…twice. That is one of those steps that you never forget. The first time was around the patch for a couple of touch and goes with a landing and meeting with your instructor who clips your tail feathers as a sign of the first time leaving the nest. It was a combination of nervous exhilaration and a sense of accomplishment that has seldom been duplicated. In fact the next time I had such confidence that I took a trip around the valley and was probably a little late getting back because the next renter was sitting there ready to go. I hardly noticed as I was having too good a time. There is just something about being in the air, just you and the machine, slipping across the country side, viewing the land from a different perspective that can’t be match from the confines of pavement.
I did try to find a way to have someone else pay for my flying, after all that is the American way. While going to school I decided to try the Air Force ROTC program and see if I could get a pilot slot. The idea was good but my timing was lousy. There weren’t a lot of pilot slots available and so the competition was high. Accountants did not score as high as Engineers and that was strike one. I was in my second year and was doubling up my ROTC classes to play catch up but that means the leaders had only seen me for one quarter where others had been around a little longer. I was still working three jobs which was taking a lot of time and energy and even though they had a ROTC presence at our school the classes were combined with the other local university. By local I mean their school was an hour drive each way from my school. This was not starting out real well.
I stayed at it as long as I could though. I even took the physical and I am pretty sure I past just fine but at the end of the 5 hour prodding they gave us a questionnaire that I was tired enough not to read closely enough. The question “Have you ever been treated for air sickness?” came across to me as “Have you ever been air sick?” big difference. At first I didn’t think it was a fair question reading it as I had since many of the candidates might never have gone up in an airplane to have the chance to experience air sickness whereas I had been up on a very bumpy commercial flight as a young teenager and had. I had the dilemma play out in my mind; should I answer honestly or lie and say I hadn’t. I decided to be honest throughout my life and I wouldn’t feel good about not being so now so I answered that I had experienced air sickness. Let the consequences come what may. I have never been treated for it but that is not how I read the question.
Between the jobs and the school schedule things had to come to an end soon or my efforts would start to deteriorate and something would suffer, grades or jobs or me. I went to discuss my odds with one of the instructors and it became apparent that they weren’t looking for accountants so I decided to drop the ROTC program and pursue the career with an eye on making lots of money to feed my desired habit. If they would have given me any glimmer of hope at the pilot slot, I would have stuck it out. Third and fourth year students that are committed receive a stipend and tuition and then the finance side of the equation would have been answered. As it is, my schooling was paid for by me through my efforts. I did not take out loans and other than living at home I did not get parental grants.
So school became the first priority and then the first job after school job. The real one, you know the one that you went to school for in the first place. It was several years later before I got to go back and try flight school again. I still really loved flying and tried to make a go of it. My job was working out so I had enough free money to use on other pursuits, and more importantly the desire was still there.
This time it was in a Cessna 152. Where the Piper is a two seat low wing trainer the Cessna is a high wing two seat trainer. They both are small, slow and simple. That is why they make good trainers. The biggest difference between the two is wing placement. Let me explain.
With initial training, one of the basic skills that must be learned is working around the airport and transitioning from a land based vehicle to an airborne vehicle. Many hours are spent honing these skills by practicing what is called a touch and go. This exercise helps refine many of the skills a pilot uses in controlling his aircraft in routine flight. The pilot flies a racetrack like rectangular pattern around the airport that includes takeoff, climb to pattern altitude, 90 degree turns, crosswind control, power adjustments, trim adjustments, traffic awareness, radio operation if there is a control tower, approach and alignment with the runway, and finally touchdown all done in a hopefully smooth and controlled manner. Once touchdown is made, the pilot will either exit the runway and return to his parking spot, or remove flaps, add power and quietly transition into takeoff mode to do the pattern over again. You can go to the airport and watch as pilots practice their skills over and over doing these touch and go’s.
When I was beginning to learn to fly in the Piper (the low wing aircraft) the visibility was wonderful. You kind of sat in this bubble which let you see all around you. Visibility of the world around you is one of the things that make flying so grand. When you make your way back to the airport, enter the pattern, it is easy to dip the wing and use it as a reference point for making the turns for the different legs of the pattern. 45 degrees past the end of the runway, time to make my turn, point the wing at the runway and rotate it around till it is perpendicular with the runway. No sweat.
When I went back to taking lessons anew, the school I originally went to was no longer in business. I chose another school but they only had Cessna. That was fine since they are both good trainers as I said. The cabin felt a little tighter but I may have grown some, and even though you sat more enclosed in the cockpit, the visibility was still good…in most cases. The first flight everything was going fine and the feel was returning pretty quickly I thought. We went out to the practice area and did some coordinated turns and stalls then headed back to the airport for some touch and go’s.
As we entered the pattern I was trying to keep up with everything as normal. I was looking to my instructor to give me direction, and I wanted him to run the radios as I focused on controlling the aircraft. The Piper was an easy plane to fly by the numbers. By that I mean you would set your plane by the numbers such as airspeed, engine speed, and such at any stage of flight and then trim to release pressure and the plane would practically fly itself. The instructor would say “at this point reduce power from 2100 rpm to 1700 rpm to start the decent while maintaining 70 knots. It still took some coordination but once you where there it just worked.
My Cessna instructor didn’t quite operate the same way, so while I was looking for numbers to try and work towards, his approach was to take each landing on its own merit and continually adjust the aircraft attitude to match the given situation. This maybe the better way to handle things because then you can recognize when you are too high, or too low, too fast or too slow, or your running long on a segment and can make adjustments as you go. It was when it came time to turn base that really shook me. I lined the wing up with the runway looking for that 45 degree point to start my turn….The time came…I started my turn…The runway disappeared…Completely.
That was a little unnerving to say the least. In the low wing Piper, the wing fell away and the full airport was in view, but in the high wing Cessna, the wing dropped into the turn and blocked my view of everything. I was trying every way possible to see through a solid object but to no avail. I immediately adjusted my outside view to try and incorporate new position reference points that I could use and determine when I had completed a 90 degree turn. I didn’t have any at hand so I just guessed. That ought to be about right I said to myself and leveled out the wings. I probably missed it by about 15 degrees but it must have been close enough that nothing was said.
Soon enough I got the hang of the Cessna enough that they let me solo in it a few times. I again had to put aside my training as a job change took away the time that I could devote to study and practice. I didn’t think it would last as long as it has.
My thoughts of flight have not left, the desire is still strong. The FAA has created the new Sport Pilot License that should make it easier to get and keep a license, especially if there are any medical issues you might be concerned about. I don’t have but I like the simpler approach it offers. You basically self certify with a valid driver’s license rather than have the continual expense of periodic third class medicals. There are restrictions on what you can fly as well as where and when but it seems a worthy trade off. The hard part is finding a valid light sport aircraft with which to rent and train as well as a willing instructor. I may have to travel and dedicate a week to an accelerated course to finish my schooling.
There will be a plane of my own in my future. I don’t know what exactly yet. I am still looking and that as always is part of the fun. The best classifieds for aircraft I have found so far is http://www.barnstormers.com/ which has a very good selection and a well laid out site. I can lose many an hour day dreaming there.
Of course anything aeronautical interest me and the other way to feed my habit is to tune into the http://www.ultraflightradio.com/ for wonderful interviews from people in the industry about the industry. You can tell that they love this stuff just as much as the rest of us.
Until I can finally make the dream come true and start flying my own aircraft as often as I want, I will have to make do with the dreaming and occasional sharing. Evidently I haven’t given up on my dream and I hope you don’t give up on yours either.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
My first taste of real flying, (that is anything that doesn’t involve standing in line to disrobe and walk through a magnometer), was with my uncle in his Cessna 182. I had been reading and studying in my high schooled way and knew the basics of flight and once we were air born my uncle turned the controls over to me and let me fly. It was the greatest event of the summer. My dad and brother were in the back and even though I wasn't quite as smooth as my uncle and my turns were not the most coordinated I managed to get us through the air and tour the flood area and work being done to repair the damage done by the Teton Dam flood in Idaho. Elaine Johnson has a nice story about the flood at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~idfremon/flood.htm.
Like so many things in life, when I get a taste of someone’s hobby and they really have a love for it, it is contagious and I usually want to participate and experience it for myself. Such has been the case with coin collecting, photography, books, music, movies, television, biking, cars, and flying. I could go on and on but you get the point.
I had a Boy Scout advisor that gave us a taste of simulator flying and my taste grew. Later I decided to take lessons. The cost was scary because at the time I was going to college and working three jobs but I figured it would be worth it. It was worth it but the money said either one or the other and college came first. I figured that if college worked out I would be able to make enough money to pay for my flying habit. Silly me.
Before I gave in I did manage to solo in a Piper Tomahawk…twice. That is one of those steps that you never forget. The first time was around the patch for a couple of touch and goes with a landing and meeting with your instructor who clips your tail feathers as a sign of the first time leaving the nest. It was a combination of nervous exhilaration and a sense of accomplishment that has seldom been duplicated. In fact the next time I had such confidence that I took a trip around the valley and was probably a little late getting back because the next renter was sitting there ready to go. I hardly noticed as I was having too good a time. There is just something about being in the air, just you and the machine, slipping across the country side, viewing the land from a different perspective that can’t be match from the confines of pavement.
I did try to find a way to have someone else pay for my flying, after all that is the American way. While going to school I decided to try the Air Force ROTC program and see if I could get a pilot slot. The idea was good but my timing was lousy. There weren’t a lot of pilot slots available and so the competition was high. Accountants did not score as high as Engineers and that was strike one. I was in my second year and was doubling up my ROTC classes to play catch up but that means the leaders had only seen me for one quarter where others had been around a little longer. I was still working three jobs which was taking a lot of time and energy and even though they had a ROTC presence at our school the classes were combined with the other local university. By local I mean their school was an hour drive each way from my school. This was not starting out real well.
I stayed at it as long as I could though. I even took the physical and I am pretty sure I past just fine but at the end of the 5 hour prodding they gave us a questionnaire that I was tired enough not to read closely enough. The question “Have you ever been treated for air sickness?” came across to me as “Have you ever been air sick?” big difference. At first I didn’t think it was a fair question reading it as I had since many of the candidates might never have gone up in an airplane to have the chance to experience air sickness whereas I had been up on a very bumpy commercial flight as a young teenager and had. I had the dilemma play out in my mind; should I answer honestly or lie and say I hadn’t. I decided to be honest throughout my life and I wouldn’t feel good about not being so now so I answered that I had experienced air sickness. Let the consequences come what may. I have never been treated for it but that is not how I read the question.
Between the jobs and the school schedule things had to come to an end soon or my efforts would start to deteriorate and something would suffer, grades or jobs or me. I went to discuss my odds with one of the instructors and it became apparent that they weren’t looking for accountants so I decided to drop the ROTC program and pursue the career with an eye on making lots of money to feed my desired habit. If they would have given me any glimmer of hope at the pilot slot, I would have stuck it out. Third and fourth year students that are committed receive a stipend and tuition and then the finance side of the equation would have been answered. As it is, my schooling was paid for by me through my efforts. I did not take out loans and other than living at home I did not get parental grants.
So school became the first priority and then the first job after school job. The real one, you know the one that you went to school for in the first place. It was several years later before I got to go back and try flight school again. I still really loved flying and tried to make a go of it. My job was working out so I had enough free money to use on other pursuits, and more importantly the desire was still there.
This time it was in a Cessna 152. Where the Piper is a two seat low wing trainer the Cessna is a high wing two seat trainer. They both are small, slow and simple. That is why they make good trainers. The biggest difference between the two is wing placement. Let me explain.
With initial training, one of the basic skills that must be learned is working around the airport and transitioning from a land based vehicle to an airborne vehicle. Many hours are spent honing these skills by practicing what is called a touch and go. This exercise helps refine many of the skills a pilot uses in controlling his aircraft in routine flight. The pilot flies a racetrack like rectangular pattern around the airport that includes takeoff, climb to pattern altitude, 90 degree turns, crosswind control, power adjustments, trim adjustments, traffic awareness, radio operation if there is a control tower, approach and alignment with the runway, and finally touchdown all done in a hopefully smooth and controlled manner. Once touchdown is made, the pilot will either exit the runway and return to his parking spot, or remove flaps, add power and quietly transition into takeoff mode to do the pattern over again. You can go to the airport and watch as pilots practice their skills over and over doing these touch and go’s.
When I was beginning to learn to fly in the Piper (the low wing aircraft) the visibility was wonderful. You kind of sat in this bubble which let you see all around you. Visibility of the world around you is one of the things that make flying so grand. When you make your way back to the airport, enter the pattern, it is easy to dip the wing and use it as a reference point for making the turns for the different legs of the pattern. 45 degrees past the end of the runway, time to make my turn, point the wing at the runway and rotate it around till it is perpendicular with the runway. No sweat.
When I went back to taking lessons anew, the school I originally went to was no longer in business. I chose another school but they only had Cessna. That was fine since they are both good trainers as I said. The cabin felt a little tighter but I may have grown some, and even though you sat more enclosed in the cockpit, the visibility was still good…in most cases. The first flight everything was going fine and the feel was returning pretty quickly I thought. We went out to the practice area and did some coordinated turns and stalls then headed back to the airport for some touch and go’s.
As we entered the pattern I was trying to keep up with everything as normal. I was looking to my instructor to give me direction, and I wanted him to run the radios as I focused on controlling the aircraft. The Piper was an easy plane to fly by the numbers. By that I mean you would set your plane by the numbers such as airspeed, engine speed, and such at any stage of flight and then trim to release pressure and the plane would practically fly itself. The instructor would say “at this point reduce power from 2100 rpm to 1700 rpm to start the decent while maintaining 70 knots. It still took some coordination but once you where there it just worked.
My Cessna instructor didn’t quite operate the same way, so while I was looking for numbers to try and work towards, his approach was to take each landing on its own merit and continually adjust the aircraft attitude to match the given situation. This maybe the better way to handle things because then you can recognize when you are too high, or too low, too fast or too slow, or your running long on a segment and can make adjustments as you go. It was when it came time to turn base that really shook me. I lined the wing up with the runway looking for that 45 degree point to start my turn….The time came…I started my turn…The runway disappeared…Completely.
That was a little unnerving to say the least. In the low wing Piper, the wing fell away and the full airport was in view, but in the high wing Cessna, the wing dropped into the turn and blocked my view of everything. I was trying every way possible to see through a solid object but to no avail. I immediately adjusted my outside view to try and incorporate new position reference points that I could use and determine when I had completed a 90 degree turn. I didn’t have any at hand so I just guessed. That ought to be about right I said to myself and leveled out the wings. I probably missed it by about 15 degrees but it must have been close enough that nothing was said.
Soon enough I got the hang of the Cessna enough that they let me solo in it a few times. I again had to put aside my training as a job change took away the time that I could devote to study and practice. I didn’t think it would last as long as it has.
My thoughts of flight have not left, the desire is still strong. The FAA has created the new Sport Pilot License that should make it easier to get and keep a license, especially if there are any medical issues you might be concerned about. I don’t have but I like the simpler approach it offers. You basically self certify with a valid driver’s license rather than have the continual expense of periodic third class medicals. There are restrictions on what you can fly as well as where and when but it seems a worthy trade off. The hard part is finding a valid light sport aircraft with which to rent and train as well as a willing instructor. I may have to travel and dedicate a week to an accelerated course to finish my schooling.
There will be a plane of my own in my future. I don’t know what exactly yet. I am still looking and that as always is part of the fun. The best classifieds for aircraft I have found so far is http://www.barnstormers.com/ which has a very good selection and a well laid out site. I can lose many an hour day dreaming there.
Of course anything aeronautical interest me and the other way to feed my habit is to tune into the http://www.ultraflightradio.com/ for wonderful interviews from people in the industry about the industry. You can tell that they love this stuff just as much as the rest of us.
Until I can finally make the dream come true and start flying my own aircraft as often as I want, I will have to make do with the dreaming and occasional sharing. Evidently I haven’t given up on my dream and I hope you don’t give up on yours either.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
06 February 2009
Search Me
As I stated earlier, this year I am going to show a renewed effort to increasing income. That includes trying to make a successful blog. I mentioned that I would share with you my efforts in these regards and so I shall. Just as I have profited from the lessons of others, perhaps you can profit from the experiences I have gone through. By sharing these with each other we all benefit. I do not subscribe to the ideal of knowledge being power only when one person has it and withholds it from another. Knowledge only has power when it is put into motion. Pass it on, pay it forward. That is how we all have been benefited and enjoy what we have today.
So in reviewing the blog results over the last year as I have shared with you on the anniversary entry, I notice that I haven’t reached that ‘viral’ stage that so many have had to hit to see real results. Do I expect to become a household name with global recognition? Sure, doesn’t everyone? Reality of course deems that real readership will fall somewhere between one (me) and the worldwide population. I’m comfortable with that.
After all, not everyone will find these rantings amusing or even interesting. Some will. I hope you are one of them. I don’t have to please everyone. Not only is that difficult, it is impossible. ‘You can’t please everyone so you’ve got to please yourself’ is a wonderful lyric as well as a hint of wisdom.
As you might have noticed, I have made some slight changes to the layout of the web site. Call it experimentation. I am trying to fine tune it and will continually try to make it better. In the process I somehow lost Google Analytics tracking ability. Google Analytics is a tracking program you load on the web page that counts how many time a page has been viewed and how many times it was viewed uniquely. It tries to see how people found your page and if they looked at another of your pages or went on to other parts of the web. It does not identify anyone specifically or in detail, just an aggregate summation of the blogs usage. If I were making specific marketing campaigns and trying to drive sales, I could use analytics too help quantify the effectiveness of different advertising approaches. As this page is about anything and everything and not about marketing any products other than the blog itself, analytics is not being used the way other sites would use it.
Anyway, in the process of moving some items around and changing the Google ads display sizes and ability to display images, I managed to lose the analytics tool. It took me a lot of searching to finally come up with the fact that I needed to reload the code. I then had to track down the right code and my id code that goes with it. The simple 5 minute copy and paste operation lasted two hours. I have checked and it looks like it is working again.
That is the thing about new technology; it comes with a new language. And like any language it takes time to learn. When computers were first introduced I remember seeing stories on the news about the changes the dictionaries had to make to add all the new words that were being created to describe the workings of computers. This explosion of lexicon was amplified by the increase of personal computers and the internet. The word blog itself is an example of this as abbreviations such as web log created first slang then standard verbiage.
As I have entered the world of online ads and marketing and blogs I have been introduced to a whole new world of language. Some I have easily adopted from previous exposure to the computer world and some that is totally foreign. Some of the terms and their meaning are easier to decipher than others. For some there doesn’t seem to be any easy reference points to quickly gain their meaning other than slogging through and hoping that repetition and context will provide a clue. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t.
Repetition and context have taken me a long way though. I can read some HTML when looking at it better than I could before. With ads there are terms like e-CPM or effective cost-per-thousand, and bounce rate and absolute unique visitors. Some make sense right away while some take time to see in action to fully comprehend.
Now to go back a little, I said that my analytics tool quit working. How did I know this? Google Adsense comes with its own tracking software code that is loaded on the web page. Whereas the Analytics tool is an option you add, the Adsense reports come automatically as a result of signing up an account to display Google Ads. Google Adsense reports are much, much simpler showing basically number of page impressions and number of clicks on ads with amount earned for those clicks and it only breaks it down into today, yesterday, week, month, last month, and all time categories. It doesn’t even tell you which pages were looked at or which ads were clicked.
Honestly I don’t even know what ads are placed on the site and that is why I added the disclaimer to the pages about the ads sponsoring me and not the other way around. I figure that if this site gets bigger and really popular, say like a Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, then I will start to dictate the ads and sell them direct. Until that time, you partner with someone that knows the business and can take care of that my knowledge and background isn’t large enough to handle. Google knows this part of the business and that is why I am here and using them.
So Adsense was the tipoff that Analytics was not working since one report showed visitors on these given days and the other didn’t. See, it is good to get information and facts from more than one source. Problem identified, problem fixed.
Or is it? I still seem to have the problem of not getting enough traffic driven to my blog. I know from experience that part of the problem is that the search engines do not see me. Analytics has shown me that the majority of traffic coming to my sight from search engines came from Google. I am glad that Google sees me but that is too be expected since this blog is hosted on a Google site and uses Google ads but what about the hundreds of other search engines out there?
I know Yahoo saw me at one time but it doesn’t seem to be able to find me now. IWON that uses the Ask search engine had never been able to find me. I have used that fact to gain points for searches as you can see on my IWON hint pages but it is discouraging. I have tried any number of different combinations or words and topics and even spelling out the web address with no matches found. This is the same result on a dozen other web sites.
As I have been searching for a solution to this problem, I ran across the idea that you had to submit a web site so that the spiders or web crawlers would go take a look. I have done this a few times and I think that is why I got a few hits from Yahoo and MSN but they only looked once and they only looked at a few pages. Google is the only one that has many pages listed.
Even finding the method to submit your web page is difficult for many of the search engines. Some you run across by accident, others from a link, but many don’t seem to want to publish this information at all. This seems strange since a search engines business is to search the web and provide all the information out there to its users. You would think that whichever service did this the best would be the winner in the search engine competition but I find a lot of them lacking.
I have stated this before about most searches now just pointing you to the commercial sites and missing all the great individual informative small sites all together. Those were the fun days of the web, when you could actually connect to people and not just businesses. It was back when businesses didn’t know what the web was or what to do with it. There must be a balance in there somewhere.
If you search for ‘search engines’ or ‘submit a site’ on most search engines you will get all kinds of things, not many of which are useful. I have found that there are a lot of services out there that will mega submit your site for a fee. Some will do it for ‘free’ only to find that free also has a cost of adding their software to your site, or submitting to a constant barrage of e-mail. Jayde Online is one such company that I have signed up for and though I haven’t seen any results from the supposed submission I have seen a large influx of e-mail. They do say I can unsubscribe at any time, but I will try their newsletter for a little while and see if there is any value. So far it looks like it is directed at full on business sites.
I have learned two things about search engines and their web crawlers. First, web crawlers will look at your site if it is referred to by another site that they have crawled. The more sites referencing your site, the more chances that your site will be looked at. Therefore, if someone is surfing and comes upon this site and decides to add mention of it on their site and it is one that gets crawled there is a chance that my site would be added to the list of sites to get crawled. That is why there are many people selling cross listing services or doing the “I’ll list your site if you list mine”.
Once the web crawler as decided to take a look at your site it must have permission to look and this is granted in a file called ‘robot.txt’. The robot.txt tells web crawler what they can and cannot look at. As I found this out I decided to take a look at mine and see if it is blocking sites. I kind of think that it might be but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change it back to a simple basic open door policy. As near as I can tell this is a Google BlogSpot hosting rule. They help you set it up initially and block things if you so desire, but it is a set it and forget it notion. I have always had the intention of having this blog shared with all so I tried to leave the setting open. I thought I had anyway. I cannot find a way to directly access the file as it is on the BlogSpot server and after hours of searching I finally came across the setup menu for the robot.txt file, redid what I thought I needed to do but it looks exactly as it did before. This may be something I just have to learn to live with.
The other mentioned items for the web crawlers is a site map of which I am not sure how to develop, again because of BlogSpot’s lock on things, and Meta Tags. I think I am using Meta tags as the topic links that I include with each entry but I am not sure if it is the same thing as what the web crawlers are looking for. These are a couple more examples of this new language I was talking about. For those that already know what these things are, do not laugh. Just reflect on the first time you heard some of these terms and remember how you just went along with it rather than admit you didn’t know. It happens to everyone, and it happens all the time.
In order to get the address out there and see if this referencing thing has any merit I am going to be surfing the web a little more and dropping the web site address if possible in comment boxes and wherever suitable and see if it makes any difference. I am not going to do this in a spamming manner. The name dropping will only be done with true contributions and comments of relevance or not at all. I still want to maintain the better side of the web where people interact with people in a positive light. I would rather shed light on the sleazy characters and scare them back into their cockroach dens than promote their way of doing things. I know I won’t always measure up to the highest standards but at least I will be trying, as I hope you do too.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
So in reviewing the blog results over the last year as I have shared with you on the anniversary entry, I notice that I haven’t reached that ‘viral’ stage that so many have had to hit to see real results. Do I expect to become a household name with global recognition? Sure, doesn’t everyone? Reality of course deems that real readership will fall somewhere between one (me) and the worldwide population. I’m comfortable with that.
After all, not everyone will find these rantings amusing or even interesting. Some will. I hope you are one of them. I don’t have to please everyone. Not only is that difficult, it is impossible. ‘You can’t please everyone so you’ve got to please yourself’ is a wonderful lyric as well as a hint of wisdom.
As you might have noticed, I have made some slight changes to the layout of the web site. Call it experimentation. I am trying to fine tune it and will continually try to make it better. In the process I somehow lost Google Analytics tracking ability. Google Analytics is a tracking program you load on the web page that counts how many time a page has been viewed and how many times it was viewed uniquely. It tries to see how people found your page and if they looked at another of your pages or went on to other parts of the web. It does not identify anyone specifically or in detail, just an aggregate summation of the blogs usage. If I were making specific marketing campaigns and trying to drive sales, I could use analytics too help quantify the effectiveness of different advertising approaches. As this page is about anything and everything and not about marketing any products other than the blog itself, analytics is not being used the way other sites would use it.
Anyway, in the process of moving some items around and changing the Google ads display sizes and ability to display images, I managed to lose the analytics tool. It took me a lot of searching to finally come up with the fact that I needed to reload the code. I then had to track down the right code and my id code that goes with it. The simple 5 minute copy and paste operation lasted two hours. I have checked and it looks like it is working again.
That is the thing about new technology; it comes with a new language. And like any language it takes time to learn. When computers were first introduced I remember seeing stories on the news about the changes the dictionaries had to make to add all the new words that were being created to describe the workings of computers. This explosion of lexicon was amplified by the increase of personal computers and the internet. The word blog itself is an example of this as abbreviations such as web log created first slang then standard verbiage.
As I have entered the world of online ads and marketing and blogs I have been introduced to a whole new world of language. Some I have easily adopted from previous exposure to the computer world and some that is totally foreign. Some of the terms and their meaning are easier to decipher than others. For some there doesn’t seem to be any easy reference points to quickly gain their meaning other than slogging through and hoping that repetition and context will provide a clue. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t.
Repetition and context have taken me a long way though. I can read some HTML when looking at it better than I could before. With ads there are terms like e-CPM or effective cost-per-thousand, and bounce rate and absolute unique visitors. Some make sense right away while some take time to see in action to fully comprehend.
Now to go back a little, I said that my analytics tool quit working. How did I know this? Google Adsense comes with its own tracking software code that is loaded on the web page. Whereas the Analytics tool is an option you add, the Adsense reports come automatically as a result of signing up an account to display Google Ads. Google Adsense reports are much, much simpler showing basically number of page impressions and number of clicks on ads with amount earned for those clicks and it only breaks it down into today, yesterday, week, month, last month, and all time categories. It doesn’t even tell you which pages were looked at or which ads were clicked.
Honestly I don’t even know what ads are placed on the site and that is why I added the disclaimer to the pages about the ads sponsoring me and not the other way around. I figure that if this site gets bigger and really popular, say like a Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, then I will start to dictate the ads and sell them direct. Until that time, you partner with someone that knows the business and can take care of that my knowledge and background isn’t large enough to handle. Google knows this part of the business and that is why I am here and using them.
So Adsense was the tipoff that Analytics was not working since one report showed visitors on these given days and the other didn’t. See, it is good to get information and facts from more than one source. Problem identified, problem fixed.
Or is it? I still seem to have the problem of not getting enough traffic driven to my blog. I know from experience that part of the problem is that the search engines do not see me. Analytics has shown me that the majority of traffic coming to my sight from search engines came from Google. I am glad that Google sees me but that is too be expected since this blog is hosted on a Google site and uses Google ads but what about the hundreds of other search engines out there?
I know Yahoo saw me at one time but it doesn’t seem to be able to find me now. IWON that uses the Ask search engine had never been able to find me. I have used that fact to gain points for searches as you can see on my IWON hint pages but it is discouraging. I have tried any number of different combinations or words and topics and even spelling out the web address with no matches found. This is the same result on a dozen other web sites.
As I have been searching for a solution to this problem, I ran across the idea that you had to submit a web site so that the spiders or web crawlers would go take a look. I have done this a few times and I think that is why I got a few hits from Yahoo and MSN but they only looked once and they only looked at a few pages. Google is the only one that has many pages listed.
Even finding the method to submit your web page is difficult for many of the search engines. Some you run across by accident, others from a link, but many don’t seem to want to publish this information at all. This seems strange since a search engines business is to search the web and provide all the information out there to its users. You would think that whichever service did this the best would be the winner in the search engine competition but I find a lot of them lacking.
I have stated this before about most searches now just pointing you to the commercial sites and missing all the great individual informative small sites all together. Those were the fun days of the web, when you could actually connect to people and not just businesses. It was back when businesses didn’t know what the web was or what to do with it. There must be a balance in there somewhere.
If you search for ‘search engines’ or ‘submit a site’ on most search engines you will get all kinds of things, not many of which are useful. I have found that there are a lot of services out there that will mega submit your site for a fee. Some will do it for ‘free’ only to find that free also has a cost of adding their software to your site, or submitting to a constant barrage of e-mail. Jayde Online is one such company that I have signed up for and though I haven’t seen any results from the supposed submission I have seen a large influx of e-mail. They do say I can unsubscribe at any time, but I will try their newsletter for a little while and see if there is any value. So far it looks like it is directed at full on business sites.
I have learned two things about search engines and their web crawlers. First, web crawlers will look at your site if it is referred to by another site that they have crawled. The more sites referencing your site, the more chances that your site will be looked at. Therefore, if someone is surfing and comes upon this site and decides to add mention of it on their site and it is one that gets crawled there is a chance that my site would be added to the list of sites to get crawled. That is why there are many people selling cross listing services or doing the “I’ll list your site if you list mine”.
Once the web crawler as decided to take a look at your site it must have permission to look and this is granted in a file called ‘robot.txt’. The robot.txt tells web crawler what they can and cannot look at. As I found this out I decided to take a look at mine and see if it is blocking sites. I kind of think that it might be but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change it back to a simple basic open door policy. As near as I can tell this is a Google BlogSpot hosting rule. They help you set it up initially and block things if you so desire, but it is a set it and forget it notion. I have always had the intention of having this blog shared with all so I tried to leave the setting open. I thought I had anyway. I cannot find a way to directly access the file as it is on the BlogSpot server and after hours of searching I finally came across the setup menu for the robot.txt file, redid what I thought I needed to do but it looks exactly as it did before. This may be something I just have to learn to live with.
The other mentioned items for the web crawlers is a site map of which I am not sure how to develop, again because of BlogSpot’s lock on things, and Meta Tags. I think I am using Meta tags as the topic links that I include with each entry but I am not sure if it is the same thing as what the web crawlers are looking for. These are a couple more examples of this new language I was talking about. For those that already know what these things are, do not laugh. Just reflect on the first time you heard some of these terms and remember how you just went along with it rather than admit you didn’t know. It happens to everyone, and it happens all the time.
In order to get the address out there and see if this referencing thing has any merit I am going to be surfing the web a little more and dropping the web site address if possible in comment boxes and wherever suitable and see if it makes any difference. I am not going to do this in a spamming manner. The name dropping will only be done with true contributions and comments of relevance or not at all. I still want to maintain the better side of the web where people interact with people in a positive light. I would rather shed light on the sleazy characters and scare them back into their cockroach dens than promote their way of doing things. I know I won’t always measure up to the highest standards but at least I will be trying, as I hope you do too.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
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