Dog Heaven

I took Coco on a walk through dog heaven (the "wink, wink" off-leash area at Parley's Hollow).

The picture is from last year. I wish I took my camera along on this hike. Everywhere I look, I see cool pictures that I want to take. Unfortunately, my web host has not upgraded the service contract since 1999. I will have to change web hosts before I am able to upload any more pictures. Grrrrr!!!!!

Changing hosts wouldn't be a problem if I had make a decent revenue stream. The problem is that he only people willing to pay me for listing in the community sites are the mass affiliate marketers, and most of those are crooks.

I've been pouring through my stats to figure out which ones to continue and which to drop. It appears that Regional Help Wanted just passed the 5000 hit mark. They've paid zero zero dollars and zero zero cents for 5000 links. They are typical of the game.

I would actually be sending them several thousand users a month if they had a legitimate program. The world is full of people who would rather trick a little out of people than making a lot by being fair.

Since I want to list all of the sites relevant to the communities served by my directories, I've been hesitant to cut them off completely. I've experimented with different ways to stem the flow of traffic to their program.

My current idea is to make an interim page. Rather than linking directly to the regional help wanted sites, I link to the interim page. This page has links back to my directories.

My idea is to make interim pages for all the big institutions that affect communities. This structure might get more traffic flowing into the small independent shops.

Living Traditions

I went to the Salt Lake Living Traditions festival last night. The festival will run through Sunday.

I remember previous festivals having more art booths. The quality of food at festivals is definately improving. Many of the booths are now operated by area restaurants.

The next event on my schedule is Questioning Minds which will feature a talk by Pat Cutting on Kofi Annan and the UN.

It will be interesting to see if Ms. Cutting prefers a strong executive in the United Nations. Personally, I prefer the UN having separate and independent boards for each if its initiatives. For that matter, I think the one on going flaw of the United States is that the structure of the government places too much power in the president. The questioning minds presentation will be on Sunday at the SL Library from 1:45PM to 4:30PM.

Community Arts

One of my primary goals in creating the Community Color sites was to help local artists and bands promote their work. The site is succeeding to a small extent. To help give an extra boost to the arts directories, I just finished creating a arts directory directory. Hopefully, this little piece of SEO spamming will increase the flow of traffic to artists sites.

Ordered Lists

Grrrr!!!!!!

I was finishing up a web page to discover that the W3C in all their great wisdom deprecated the start element for ordered lists. Since it is impossible to know the beginning element of an ordered list at design time (when I wrote the linked style sheet), I am forced either to have an embedded stylesheet in the document or convert all of the lists to tables. The document worked so well with ordered lists. Basically, since I was talking about natural numbers, I wanted to begin the list at zero rather than 1.

I really hate the W3C. Personally, I think the ideal design for a style sheet language would be to only deprecate those tags which are defined at design time (such as fonts, background color), and to leave the tags that are used at run time to add meaning to a document. For example the strike tag was extremely useful to show editing information. The person who wrote the stylesheet would have no idea what text the editors remove or change in a document. The style sheet designer could not possibly know the start element for an ordered list. Likewise, the style sheet designer could not know if an image added in text is left or right aligned.

Speaking of design tags. The W3C gets rid of the helpful start attribute in ordered lists and they get rid of the aligh tag for inline images, but they require that images have a width and height attribute. Last I looked, width and height are design elements.

This Close to Peace

Reuters reports that Dutch peace activists were nabbed in an attempt to grab Bush's nuclear. You know, the one with the portable red button that can launch all the nuclear weapons.

Of course, Bush could still launch nuclear wars left and right with the red button under his desk in the Oval office, but we could have some peace while Bush is on the road lying to everyone so that he can build up a context to justify nuclear.

As Agent Maxwell Smart would say "We, were this close." We were this close to finally having peace.

Except, why do I always have a nagging feeling that we would be worse off if the people who claim to be "peace activists" were in power?

I've gone to several peace meetings that could best be described as people brimming over with hate, projecting their emotions onto others and getting paranoid in the process.

Of course there's also a lot of rational people who are working diligently to open communications, clean landmine fields and build a structure where peace can prevail.

April Totals

The April totals are in. In April, I sent 8442 clicks to merchants. The reported earnings were $876.12. I will generally get about 85% of the reported earnings.

Sadly, I find that the general impression of the community sites is that they are nothing but ads. Few people in a community will link to the directories because of the ads. I ran a report that compares the number of affiliate links to community links. Here's the total:

Affiliate v Free Links
Community	Aff Links	Free Links	Percent
Global	320	529	37.691%
Salt Lake Sites	121	4030	2.915%
Worland	1	103	0.962%
Missoula Websites	23	531	4.152%
Bend Open Directory	21	135	13.462%
Idaho Falls Web Sites	21	241	8.015%
Moab	8	362	2.162%
Grand Junction	21	488	4.126%
Heber City Biz	5	110	4.348%
Provo, Utah.US	72	1119	6.045%
Vernal, Utah. US	9	138	6.122%
Price Helper	4	68	5.556%
Saint George	33	326	9.192%
Tooele	8	110	6.780%
Cedar City	11	194	5.366%
Cheyenne, Wyoming. US	16	232	6.452%
Park City, Utah	23	564	3.918%
Ogden, Utah	35	266	11.628%
Denver	107	842	11.275%
Boulder Color	43	111	27.922%
Colorado Springs Color	52	120	30.233%
Glenwood Springs Color	14	38	26.923%

The most developed site in the collection (Salt Lake Sites) currently has 4030 free links and only 121 ad links. That is 2.97% of the total links are "affiliate links". Currently, only 10% of the "affiliate" programs I've joined have paid me anything. This Sears Home Center is the only page that consistently results in income.

Lesser developed sites (like Boulder Color, are a different story. I just haven't had time to add many free links. Currently, Boulder has 43 affiliate links and 111 free links. That figure will drop with time. Of course, the site has neglible traffic at the moment...since it is new.

One the positive side. The sites still show revenue growth. The growth isn't fast enough to pay for development. sigh.

Remembered my Password

I finally remembered my password...so I will be able to start posting on this blog again. I really should write these things down. I currently have about 20 different passwords jumbled in my brain and I keep getting them mixed up.

I went to the Wasatch Rock Garden annual garden tour on Saturday. Wow, there's some fantastic gardens in Salt Lake. Sadly the Wasatch Rock Garden Society doesn't have a web site. But, I made them the site of the day anyway. I took photos, but I currently don't have any diskpace on my server to display them. The North American Rock Garden Society has the domain NARGS.org.