The blog is now PR 4. I know you could care less, so I made the main page entry on the root blog.
This is a big deal for me. It was a goal that I started working on about two months ago and all of the work has paid off.
The book blog, the bee blog and the star finder jumped from 1 to 3, which is nothing to sneeze at.
JT30 and HarpAmps are not listed, yet, but I suppose that they lost out. I am going to have to redo those soon.
Before Christmas I will have converted the Cat Blog, the Bee Blog and the Book blog to Wordpress with optimized themes. I will also take a shot at jt30 and harpamps. I have been discouraged about playing harp, but I should really start working on them.
Stumbleupon.com on the average is sending a click every 10 seconds to the middle earth map on the main page. I know this because I wrote a Wordpress plugin that lets me watch the traffic, pretty much in real time. I should get about 1000 users today if this keeps up for very long
This is bigger than the cliche list hits, for a much crappier page. I noticed that stumbleupon is also sending hits to this blog. This is all very odd.
In other news I ran my guidelines link snatcher again and I have a new page of about 300 guidelines. I’ve added a dozen other links to the main menu. I now need a way to add those to the blog so I can generate traffic up as well as down the chain.
The Root directory here www.cthreepo.com is nearly converted to Wordpress. It has taken up my spare time here and even at home. I have the Bee Blog, the Book Reviews, and the Star Directory Pages to convert, but I am not sure how I should do this. There is version of Wordpress that handles multiple blogs and another that will create virtual blogs for each directory.
This conversion is the reason why I have not been blogging much lately. When things settle down here I will start converting my other websites. I also want to write a guide for converting from Blogger to Wordpress, since I am now an expert on it.
The one last page to convert is my 10 Laws of SF, including the No Nazis law. One reviewer said that it was so full of typos that it hurt to read it. I see no typos, but that’s me. I am going to import it to Word, rewrite chunks and let Word tell me what is wrong. I’ll reformat it and put it up as a Wordpress page, and hopefully, it won’t hurt anyone’s eyes.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that the search engines are sending much more traffic. This is due to the new templates and the use of a Search Engine Optimizer plugin and Google sitemaps. I get nearly double the traffic and it’s only been about a month since I started.
Erica and I went galavanting up to Ulster and Columbia Counties Sunday to enjoy the color of the changing leaves.
This 200 year old church had some beautiful golden yellow maples in the graveyard.
I took some pictures of a beautiful faded blue barn and outbuildings.
There was a corn field.
More colorful trees.
A blue bench overlooking the Catskills.
A kill, which is the dutch word for brook.
We had brunch at the Beekman Arm’s – the best brunch ever!
An evil looking wooden Indian in Rhinebeck, NY.
Rhinebeck had it’s children’s Halloween parade, which was very cute.
While up in Saratoga Springs for a guitar show. I was hungry. I asked a few people where was the best place to eat in town and it didn’t take long for the consensus to be obvious. I had to go to Hattie’s and get the fried chicken.
Hatties is on Phila Street and has been in operation since 1938, when the famous fried chicken recipe was invented.
Bill Ward over at Black Gate has a good article on writing book reviews. It is interesting that he distinguishes between writing a book review and a book report.
I have always tried to avoid writing the plot summary flavor of book report. I have been writing my opinions on the books that I read. I like to cover the quality, and position of the book in time and genre. It is more important to write about the how, why and where of a book and let the readers find out the plot by themselves.
By the way, I am now 8 books behind in my reviewing. I may never catch up, but I want to review the Varley book as well as the three Edgar Pangborn Books that I have. I read 3 SF magazines from the 1970s and I would like to discuss them, but the stories are rapidly fading from memory, so I might not get to them.
October is “Read a Book by Ray Bradbury Month”, so I will be taking Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes to work with me next week for my annual reading of this, my favorite book of all time.
I have been making some small amount of money off of pages based on eBay rss feeds. In the last 24 hours or so 1and1 disabled an important function that allowed these apps to work. It looks to cost me a few hundred a month so it is time to change hosting companies.
This is very frustrating, as there are lots of applications that use this function. 1and1 might have to fix this, but I won’t stay around too much longer if they don’t.
I worked for almost 15 years at Lockheed Martin. I still have some Lockheed stock form those days. This morning Lockheed Martin announced better than expected earnings and the stock dropped 4 and half points.
I know that this is no unexpected. Stocks go up on bad news and down on good news, but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense to me. In the book I read about the Dutch stock market (Confusion de Confusiones by Joseph De La Vega) in the 17th century there is an explanation for this. I understood it at the time, but I could not explain it now. It is a very basic fact about free markets, but I still don’t get it.
Steve Davidson turned me on to the fact that there is unusually low turnout for the annual voting for the Hugo Award, which is like an academy award except that it is for SF.
I did a little research based on Steve’s model for “Rocking the Hugos” and I was able to discover that in recent years it has taken under 20 votes to get a nomination on the final Hugo ballot. Although there are more than 500 nominations for each category, the minimum to get on the ballot was 17 a year ago. That means that all you need to appear on the final Hugo ballot is about 20 nominations. Once on the ballot you could have a real shot at winning a Hugo or at least boosting sales with a “Hugo Nominee” banner on you book, magazine or short story.
The gotcha is that it costs $50 to get yourself a voting membership in the World Science Fiction League. People who would gladly spend $50 on a weeks worth of smokes decide that it is not worth it to hack the system. You get all kinds of bling and extras for that $50, but $50 is too much.
Unless I can find 20 people with $50 burning a hole in their pockets, I can give up on “Best Short Story” this year. I would have been an honor to be nominated.
Oct. 27 there will be a reading of “The Masks” down in NYC. It’s at 6:30PM at the Paley Center, on 52nd between fifth and sixth. $50 makes it outside my budget, especially that I might cost me $75 to park down there plus another $20 in tolls and parking. Also since I don’t get home from work until almost 6pm, there’s no way to make it down there in time.
It would be a good thing to see if I lived in the city, though. Ida Lupino directed the original episode.
Lucie Arnaz, Laurence Luckinbill, Katharine Luckinbill, Robert Walden, and Fritz Weaver
and special guest Anne Serling-Sutton (Rod’s daughter) will be there.
It is cooling off and Summer is gone for a while. I love the rustic old poem by James Whitcomb Riley – When the Frost is on the Punkin. Here’s one of the stanzas:
They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees;
But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.
I wrote a short article on advertising for small websites comparing the relatively unknown advertising page Project Wonderful, to Google’s advertising options. It’s over on my Blog’s Eye site.
There was a picture today on a blog that I read of Woody Guthrie playing his guitar.
On Woody’s guitar is sticker that says “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”.
I took the sticker, corrected for perspective as best as I could with my very limited PhotoShop skills, and printed out the results.
I am going to glue it to the top of my laptop.
Here is the result. Feel free to print out a copy for your guitar, amp, computer, or hybrid car. Extra credit for sticking one to your local voting machine while not being watched (Woody would have liked that).
We stopped by the Clarmont Estate in Dutchess County, NY over the weekend. We got some picturesof trees just starting to change color and some interesting stuff as we wandered around the huge grounds of the park.
The park is on the Hudson River with breathtaking views of the Catskills in the distance.
I have all of these books that I can’t bring into the house because of the overpowering smell of mildew. There are lots of magazines (Analog, Amazing, Galaxy and even some Ellery Queen Mysteries). There are over a hundred hard cover books from the 70s and 80s, and a few hundred paperbacks.
I tried the cat litter technique and it didn’t work. This next attempt is to put a container of chlorine bleach in a sealed box of books.
I put a bunch of stinky magazines with the page ends up so that the fumes could get down into the book. I filled a plastic container about 1/4 way with household bleach. The container had holes drilled in the top. The bleach, consisting of Sodium Hypochlorite in weak solution, naturally gives off chlorine gas. If you have a pool you can use the more concentrated chlorine for swimming pools that will be more intense.
I taped the plastic box shut and left it in the back of the truck for a few weeks.
I was a little worried that the chlorine gas would bleach the magazines. It did not. The bleach lost it’s smell after about a week.
This worked better than the cat litter method, which hardly worked at all. The magazines still have a slight mildew smell, but not the overpowering smell that made them hard to read.
I have some commercial mildew remover in the form of Calcium Chloride packets that also give off chlorine gas. I loaded up another box and we’ll see in a week or two how this did.
Erica has been looking for bricks so she can build a little patio next to the deck. We have been to two FreeCycle.org giveaways and here are the results. It took four trips in the new truck, because I did not want to overload it. I tried to keep it 5 or 6 hundred pounds at a time (4.5 to 5 pounds per brick).
Fred Pohl linked back to the post on the Science Fiction League. This was nice of him and so far I have seen a dozen hits. I hope y’all come back now.
The project wonderful ads have started generating a (very) little income, but I am pleased with the ads. Currently they are for a fairly unique site that lets you continue a shared story by writing posts. I think I’ll even click on it and lurk. It does look like fun.
I know that four or five SF writers and editors have had reservations about advertising on their blogs and zine sites because the ads are out of their control. Specifically the keyword Fantasy often gets some weird ads, as you can imagine. With the project wonderful website you approve the ads before they appear on your site. The downside is that the income is pretty low for small sites. Higer volume sites (over 1,000 hits a day) can make more.
I have started advertising my Name a Star site using project wonderful and I am getting a few click-throughs. The price is quite a bit lower than adwords and I can pick and choose the sites where I want the ads to appear. If you need to advertise a site, on a budget, then project wonderful is perfect. There are numerous gaming and spec-fic sites to choose from (J. Erwine and Ephemeris, please note!)
I made a few changes to the templates. I managed to crash the blog for about an hour. I could have fixed it quicker, but there’s this whole working for a living thing going on. I tried to sneak in some “self actualization” here at work, but the boss kept coming around to find out how I was doing on a project, and I had to hide the screens. Luckily, play code looks like work code, to people who don’t know the difference between PHP and Java.
I have many ideas. I added five new short story ideas to my idea list and I have a bunch of Wordpress ideas that I want to finish. Instead of actualizing, I waste my time here at work coding for cash. Tonight the Mega Millions Lotto is well over a hundred million. I could use a piece of that.
I added a bunch of things to the sidebar as widgets and took out the hard coding. There is way too much stuff there now. I made a widget out of the theme switcher so I can position it on the sidebar without having to write PHP code. I put a bunch of stupid boxes on the side using the “text” widget, including a real creepy head reading my story “Frogs in Aspic”.
I activated a new kind of advertising today called Project Wonderful. You can see it on the right hand column (at least for the time being). I don’t have high hopes for this, but we’ll see.
In this system people bid for your ad and the bidding starts at a penny! It means that unless lots of people want to advertise on my site that I don’t make anything. I have a feeling that there are lots more publishers than advertisers. I may make a few cents a day.
If I had a self published sf book or a website that I wanted to promote, I would use this and put ads on my site with a penny a day bid, because as long as no one bids against you, it is free.
I am going to make an ad for my name a star site and advertise it on a bunch of these practically free sites and see if it generates any interest. I might even make an ad for CthreePO.com and get people coming in who’ll see the ads, generate a small (probably pennies a day) income that I can use to leverage other sites. It just might work.
If this works out it means that I will be getting some free or cheap advertising, and maybe some traffic. If it doesn’t, it will cost me practically nothing.
I wrote a wordpress widget that displays a random Hugo Award winning novel. It has a text file with a description and an ASIN so it can display almost anything on Amazon at random.
The widget has a place to enter the webmaster’s affiliate ID so it is pretty generic. I have only entered the first dozen Hugo winners so far. It’s a pain looking up each amazon ASIN since the early 1950s (sometimes there were even ties).
I watch my statistics on www.freenameastar.com because, as Willie Sutton the bank robber said “Go where the money is…and go there often.”
I keep track of where customers are coming from and for the last week there have been two major sources of traffic.
The first LoveMoney.com. I get write-ups in websites that list free stuff or bargains all the time. Sometimes I get a few thousand hits, and every once in a while I make money off of them. LoveMoney.com has been good for a few hundred dollars so far. Thanks guys, you earned your link back.
There is another weirder site that has been sending me hits. PrisonTalk.com. This is a website where people can proclaim their undying love for people behind bars. I read a few of the entries. I don’t know what to think about this, especially people who have never met, and yet have fallen in love through the mail. Prisontalk has sent me about 30 people, but so far there have been no sales.
I have had some success writing Facebook apps and Wordpress plugins and widgets. (By success I mean that I’ve written programs that work, not that they are popular.).
I decided to make an idea page so that I can set goals for the things that I’d like to write. I have one of these already for my short stories and now I have made one for Facebook apps and Wordpress plugins and widgets.
It’s time to find a new web host. 1&1 lost my database for a few hours today. I lost money on the Freenameastar site, but that was down only briefly. The blog was down for a few hours.
Bluehost.com has a $3.95 a month deal. That’s cheaper than 1&1 or hostgator. Bluehost has been around since 1996 and gets high marks for uptime. It does less well on customer service, but I don’t need any help.
It would take me a while to get all of the sites off of 1&1.
On the bus this morning, I was reading a short story collection by Frederik Pohl. I read Mr. Pohl’s Blog every morning. At age 89, Fred does a good job on his blog and it is fun to read. I only wish he would post every day instead of a couple of times a week.
Today’s post is about a suggestion that all scientists be required to own a cat in order to make them more sensitive to the needs of animals.
Deborah Webster, of Meadowbrook, NSW, Australia grew concerned about the way many scientists seemed to feel about the animals they studied — as “stimulus-response-driven robots incapable of thought or feeling” — so she wrote New Scientist with a suggestion: “Every scientist working in the field should be given a cat.”
I like the LOL cat image included. I think most people understand the idea behind the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment (no cats were ever harmed).
There was a picture today on a blog that I read of Woody Guthrie playing his guitar.
