Wanderings

Anything you dream is fiction,
and anything you accomplish is science,
the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
- Ray Bradbury
October 7th, 2009

Random Hugo Award Winning Novel Widget

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).

This was a request from Steve Davidson.

You should be able to see the widget on the right a little ways down.






August 25th, 2009

Blog Changed and Traffic

I made some changes to the home page and the blog. My intent was to improve the navigation. Of course, I wound up changing the wrong elements and, as of 10 minutes ago, the blog is totally screwed. Since the blog is so big it takes 15 minutes to republish it and any mistakes I make are bound to be seen by a few people.

My weeks of traffic glory are now over. Stumbleupon no longer sends me traffic and the BoingBoing link is not sending any new surfers. Inexplicably my Google Page Rank is now down to 1 on the blog and 3 on the home site. This makes no sense unless I somehow offended the Google Gods. I am worried that my eBay pages, which make a good chunk of money, have somehow polluted the site.

My traffic is back to pre-stumbleupon rates plus about 30%. Gone are the days of 1,500+ viewers a day. I’m back to normal. I did notice that people explore more of the site, which is nice. The average person is looking at 4 or more pages, and that is phenomenal.

The reason that I redid the navigation menus is that I want to see this trend of surfers actually reading pages keep going up.

Hunter S. Thompson is still my most popular entry. My Joke-a-day blog is somehow getting hits, even though it is experimental and I never linked to it. Next is the clich� page. A surprise hit are the blog entries about my poker buddy Jim’s kid Stella Maeve who is an actress and is surprising everyone with her performance in The Runaways.

I just checked and the pages seem unbroken and the menus work again. Any ideas for improving the navigation would be appreciated.






December 2nd, 2008

Cyber Monday

Here’s how I did on Cyber Monday:

Stars: $98

Google: $26

Chitika: $0.30

Kontera: $1.50 (estimate)

Ebay Partner Network: $5 (Estimate)

The last two sources delay their reports. Ebay might not report until the actual auction closes.

About $130 for one day, which ain’t nothing to sneeze at for such easy work (no work really, I wrote the freenameastar.com program three years ago and have been collecting ever since).

Last year I did about $70 on Cyber Monday. Things are generally looking up.

Month to month I’ve been doing about double last year. This November I did about 70% better than last November and if that holds I should do quite well for December. Last December the biggest days were on the first Thursday and Friday of December and then the three days before Christmas. I think Cyber Monday may be a media invention.

Imagine what it would be like if there were no recession!






October 22nd, 2008

Kontera links going away

I have been making less than $2 a day on the Kontera context links and page views have gone down since I put them on the page. I will wait a few more weeks (until I get $100) and then pull them. I have already taken them off the blog. In the mean time I am randomizing so that they appear on about 1/3 of the pages.

I found the Kontera context links to be distracting and I think that users may have been put off by them. Anything that gets between the content and the reader is not good.






October 6th, 2008

Switched to Kontera Context links

I you see light blue links with a double underline on my web pages, that is Kontera dynamically adding context links to the page. From what I have seen the keywords seem to be generic. Amazon’s links were usually much more relevant. I’ll leave it up, but if I decide it the intrusive aspect of the links is not justified by the income I’ll pull them off. The links are on pages that total about 8,000 hits a day. I’ll know in a day or two if they work.