There actually is a grain of truth to those Google related spam traps. Big G just sent me a check for a little over $100. This is the amount that I’ve earned in the past 14 months since I signed up for Adsense - Google’s text based ads appear on a few of my pages and if anyone clicks them I get paid!
I hooked up with the free service StatCounter a bunch of years ago. They let me know which of my pages are the most popular as well as a slew of other stats regarding who’s visited, how many times, etc. What I learned was that 95% of my hits were to pages inside my Ego-Surfing cache. Once upon a time I used to collect references to myself that popped up on the net. It’s called “ego-surfing”. I created a page of all the funniest/most impressive links that reference someone named “Eric Dalton”. Years later I went back and noticed that many of the links had gone down and were gone forever so when I redid the page I saved the pages & put them in my Ego Link Cache.
As years went by the original pages vanished and MY version of the page became the only reference on the internet to a sometimes quite obscure topic (Sonoluminescence for example). At one point if you searched Yahoo for “gospel stage plays” I was the #1 link! Someone sharing my name had posted a message in a forum regarding “Madea’s Family Reunion” and other gospel stage plays by Tyler Perry. When the original forum went down my page became a top source of information on the topic. Cool! I never thought of using the cache that way, but I’m happy to provide a service, albeit a tiny one, to the www at large. The nice part is that if I put an ad on that page with links to related information the searchers have even more options. Even better - I get a few cents for every link clicked.
Over the months I included ads on 7 pages. The Tyler Perry information is my top draw and biggest earner but the quickest way to earn me a buck is to download one of Google’s software offerings from my referrals page. Thanks for reading, and thanks Adsense for giving something back to the little guy!
You probably wont notice, but I changed the site in a primarily cosmetic fashion. The headers are more along the lines of my color scheme & each posting has category icons now. It’s all done through the style sheets & custom code to do the icon things. No plug-ins for me, man! Custom code all the way! I’ll eventually make better icons but for now I’ll do with what I have. Enjoy! Or don’t! Whatever!
If you don’t touch your website on Geocities for a few ages they disable the account. I hadn’t touched My Original Website since the late 90s and it (finally) went disabled! Fortunately I somehow managed to remember my username and password and re-activated the site.
I realize now that I was really bummed about the site going down. At the time I was quite proud of my creation. I self-taught myself HTML before there were guides online or books in the stores. I created all of my own graphics from scratch pixel by pixel. More importantly, it was Mine. The worst part is that I realized I don’t have the site archived anywhere, Google doesn’t have it Cached any more and even the Wayback Machine doesn’t have a working copy. I thought it had really vanished for good this time.
Well, web historians needn’t worry because this scare has set me right. I’ll be archiving the site on the Ego Surfing page and my personal hard drive ASAP so that future generations shan’t be deprived of the worst website in the history of the World Wide Web!
How do you know I changed my site if I don’t let you know? Well, you can visit it every 10 minutes, call me and ask if I’ve changed it every 10 minutes OR you can subscribe to the RSS feed. For the uninitiated; RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is like email but you have to subscribe. Someone pushes an email your way. You choose to pull an RSS feed. Got it? Just like you need a program to read your emails, you need a program to fetch your RSS feeds. I use Thunderbird & the one built into Firefox, but if you really don’t want to have to run another browser or email related program just to receive 1 or 2 feeds a week, there’s another way. Why not Email an RSS feed automatically?
There’s lots of services out there that will convert your Blog’s RSS Feeds into email but they all have down sides. I’ve implemented a way for folks to receive emails of this site’s changes without giant [Brought to you by {Service}] branding, Attached ads!, Risk of being sold to sp@mmers or Monetary requirement$. What I setup was actually intended for cross-publishing to other blogs, but works just fine for syndication. It simply emails the content of the posting. No frills. No fees. I control who gets it. Simple.
Wanna subscribe? Drop me a line or comment and you’ll get an email every time I update the page.
I’ve been away from the website for a few months for several reasons. First and foremost I was tired of updating the site in the manor I had been. The two big downsides were the fact that I couldn’t update the site if I wasn’t at my home computer and what I call the Custom Code aspect. It wasn’t so bad really modifying dates, copying code around and so forth, but it was written in my own brand of custom HTML and in the day and age of blogging there are just better ways.
So, I’ve installed WordPress, themed & skinned it to vaguely resemble my main page and I’ll be dropping “news” tidbits in here. It should work nearly seamless like to the way it used to except that folks shall now be able to comment on my news and possibly brain-drippings.
I know… I sold out and installed a “package” to do most of my websmithing, but apparently the alternative was no updates. Which is the lesser evil?
I’ve also been gnarly busy. We’re trying to buy a house. I’m enjoying the outdoors. I’m training for my first 10k. I’ve entered the Tour De Cache. The Sopranos’ final season is upon us. Like Kermit’s bedroom, I’m swamped!
Enough of this palaver. No excuses: More updates shall follow! Thanks for reading!
Fusion is Hot! (Sorry) As I’ve recently stated in the news section of this site-o-rama, the reason that there is a big “Fusion” in the upper left is because Fusion is the theme for this iteration of my site. The official tag-line is “A Fusion of Thought and Emotion”. I try to make sure all of my rantings have at least a little of both. Failing that, I go with the unofficial tag-line which is “Going ballzout & bananas”.
Anyway, I first used “Fusion” in October 2004. Since then it’s become a hot marketing word. Not quite as bad as the word “Extreme” or the prefix “i” but certainly more so than “Fugly” or “Otiose”. There has always been Jazz Fusion and dance styles known as Fusion, but this is a full blown marketing-buzz-word-mania! By my current count (and I’ll update it if I find more), there were four products introduced during my tenure as Fusionista. I’m excluding Coke’s line of “Fusion Drinks” because the text is only on the label and they’re not marketing them as such.
Gillette brought out a (hideously overkill redefining) razor (with friggin’ batteries?!) bearing the fusion moniker as well as a supporting line of shave gel & barbed wire. The bloody thing (ha!) has 6 blades. Two of said blades are hidden somewhere in the packaging! Can you find both without using the included chain-mail gauntlet? Everyone dance the masochism tango!
Ford did its part by introducing the Fusion. A zippy little car that looks NOTHING like the Saturn Ion. Hrm. Fusion… FusION. Hrm. Actually, it looks like the Corolla. Well, actually like that one Scion. Hmmmmm. Not unlike the Focus either. What the hell? I personally think they wasted the name as Fusion would have been a fantastic name for a car powered by… uh… Fusion. At least it would have made a good “Hybrid” car powered by both gas and marketing hot air.
What’s up with Lifesavers’ “Fusions” candy? Well, they’re actually Two Flavors in one hard candy shell just like nature always intended! I don’t have much to say about these since I haven’t tried them since none of the flavors are “Pizza” or “Mt. Dew”.
Then there’s my favorite: Trident’s Fusion gum (with XYLITOL!). It tastes different depending how you chew it believe it or not. They market it as a new experience in chewing gum! w00t! Everyone dance the mastication tango!
So what’s up with the glut of fusion-cloning? Lets look at it from a marketing perspective, shall we? Of course we shall!
FUSION:
Root = Fuse. Those things that burn out or blow up your firecracker. Nobody ever noticed a fuse unless it blew when they plugged in the air conditioner or it wouldn’t light/burned to fast and resulted in a lack of eyebrows. This can’t be the reason.
Rhymes with Disillusion? Not good a good Image. Rhymes with Collusion? Another word with a bad press rep. Never used with anything legal. Thiscan’t be the reason.
Considering gas prices, global conservation is a hot-button blah-yadda natural resources wossname. The Powers that Be would like it if we all warmed (no pun intended) to the idea of Fusion as a power source. Coal is Oil and Oil is out. The Powers obviously got Bush elected so the entire f’n world would turn against Oil and those who sell it. Dr. Evil will be president before this country allows another Oil Baron in the oval office. Unless he/she is religious anyway. Fission is out. Three Mile Island & Chernobyl and the fact that we haven’t built a new plant since the 70s proves this. Bio-fuel? No way! A power plant that smells like French fries? NIMBY! Wind farms? They require land and the rich own the land. The rich are also Congress. Those Distinguished Gentlemen are busy falling over themselves to get some press opposing wind farms. NIMCOD! Besides, they’ll kill birds and we can’t just let them rot but, lets face it, a KFC at the bottom of every windmill would be just too damn many KFCs. We don’t have enough dam rivers to go with Hydroelectric. Besides, I’ve seen what happens when those dams burst. Nature’s pent up fury has a way of cleaning up all those pesky houses and bridges that we’ve built after damming the river. That leaves us with Fusion. We’re getting closer to being able to pull off true thermonuclear fusion, which is the real power-source of the future… but we’ll need MASSIVE amounts of funding to be able to force it to create more energy than we used to sustain the reaction. That kind of funding would only be possible with Big Government Grants. We’ll need a Fusion Friendly Fuhrer to supply those grants and we’ll need a whole lot of marketing to create a favorable brand around the word Fusion before The Powers can get someone elected on a Fusion platform. It has begun my friends. Or maybe that’s just too much conjecture. Wait, I have it and it’s obvious! The companies just want to be me. Oh, and I’m sweet like the candy, sharp like the razor and full of gas like the Ford. Yeah, that’s it. Perhaps The Powers that Be have me in mind for the Fusonista “leader”? I can say “Oook” as well as the next guy. Just in case, I’ll invent a buzz word right here on the spot that I can throw around later and sound cool. Before I do, I’d like to point out the Creative Commons Copyright on my main page. Ok, ready?
“I’ll make an excellent
representative because I have a fusionistic
view of our future!”
There you have it folks. I’m a shoe-in.
[UPDATE]
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but I just ran a search of Amazon.com for “Fuson”…. I received around 15,000 hits. A few hours later… I’m worn out looking at Fusion Products. The canonical list of All Things Fusionistic would be well beyond the scope of this webpage. So… I’ll have to get creative.
