This read more like a ProBlogger post than most of my typical content, but I think it’s worth saying…
I didn’t tell too many people, but for the past 2 months, MobileTracker has been absent from the vast vast majority of Google search results pages (SERPs). I wasn’t trying any crazy blackhat optimization techniques–I just rely on having great and timely content–so it came as a complete surprise. I talked around a bit and consulted forums and found out that for whatever reason this can just sometimes happen. I’m happy to report that it looks like the dark days are over and the goodtimes are back.
Luckily, I had some great exclusive content pieces that went up during the outage, as well as a lucky uptick in placements at Yahoo. Still visits were down about 25% overall–missing a few thousand visitors that average a few page views apiece is a hard thing. Advertising revenue was down, but was still at a decent amount (very livable). Personally I would have thought AdSense would have seen more of a dive since search engine viewers click ads more often than daily visitors.
Traffic is now higher than ever and the future is rosy.
While it wasn’t fun, it’s nice to know that it’s possible to continue with the site and income if there is a big (permanent) shift at Google. This experience reaffirms my goal to not depend on any one source of traffic or revenue.
I was in Chemistry, I don’t remember exactly what period that was but I’m guessing it was third. Class hadn’t started yet and someone came in and said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit. I don’t think most of my classmates realized the gravitas of the situation. The TV was on for the rest of the day save for my American history class. Like 9/11 wasn’t history.
Some classmates got picked up early but I was there the rest of the day. If watching Fox News and CNN counts as being there. Oddly I don’t remember how lunch was, but I can imagine it was very very quiet.
(After reading this and checking my math again I just have a hard time believing that was four years ago. Wow. How things have changed.)
It’s already September–where did the summer go?
Interesting word trivia here, consonant letters can be spelled out. These are valid words according to the dictionary and are playable in Scrabble. Vowels don’t have spellings that I can find.
I think it’s a little bogus that these spellings include the letter they are spelling, but I didn’t create the rules.
bee, cee, dee, ef, gee, aitch, jay, kay, el, em, en, pee, cue, ar, ess, tee, vee, double-u, ex, wye, zee
I first learned of this several years back after seeing a kid in the National Spelling Bee go home after getting confronted with spelling the letter H. He/she had never heard of being able to spell letters and was totally blindsided.
UPDATE: I see that Robot Wisdom has asked, “Which two consonants can be spelled without using themselves?”
I’m having a lot of fun over at GoogleRumors. A while back I stopped following Apple news as closely and Google has really taken over my newshare. Not that Apple isn’t interesting to me, but too many of the news stories (and rumors) have to do with really boring things like iBook speed updates and iPod related news. I still use (and love) Macs, but Google is just plain more interesting to read about these days. That is until the Intel switch gets closer I suppose.
This is probably as bad as introducing religion or politics, but do you place email replies before or after the text you are replying to? I’m most often a bottom replier with threading used for longer messages. My reasoning is that I like to know what I am reading, so by placing my reply at the bottom I am giving the other person context.
And you?
I made my second dive today–this time with my girlfriend Samantha. It was to celebrate her birthday which is neat because she’s going to remember this forever (it was her first jump). We went at SkyDive City which is one of the largest drop zones (DZ) in the world but is also only 40 minutes away from my house. I got the picture/video set for Sam, linked below. What a rush!
UPDATE: I replaced the H264 codec video with an MPEG 4 version. Evidently QuickTime 7 isn’t yet widely installed (I got four or five complaints that the file didn’t work).
I just made a reservation to go skydiving. This will be the second time I have jumped–the first time (which has been a few years now) was so much fun that I have been looking for an excuse to go again. I’m taking my girlfriend for her 21st birthday which should make for a gift to remember. She’s excited like crazy and has never done anything like this before. The first time I went it was with a (male) buddy of mine so we didn’t get the video/photos, but this time I signed up for the DVD and photos. Check in sometime after August 7th for some interesting shots! We’ll be jumping from 13,500 feet…
If anyone is interested, I am jumping with Skydive City. There are other places around, but SDC has a big plane that allows a bunch of people to go at once (which means I can go with the lady at the same time) and is a pretty big operation. I also used these guys for my first jump.
I think the 4th of July may be my favorite holiday. It has a lot going for it, namely BBQ and explosives. The explosives help it edge out Memorial day and the warm weather gives it one up on New Years. It lacks a huge corporate driven shopping spree like so many of our holidays, such as Christmas and Halloween.
Happy 229th America!
Welcome to the new WordPress powered site. I have been meaning to move the weblog over to this server (the same one that hosts MobileTracker) for a while. I may even start updating more.