What Google Thinks About You

Posted on September 1, 2010 by William

Ran across this today and thought it was kind of interesting.

When you have an adsense account, one of the things you can choose is whether or not to allow interest-based ads; in other words, advertising that’s based on the user’s search history rather than anything on your site. I have that turned off, because I’m currently targeting high value search terms and I want advertisements based on those; additionally, I want the user to see ads related to what they’re looking for right now, not what they were looking for a week ago.

Anyway, I found out earlier today that you can see what Google thinks you’re interested in; just go to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences. According to Google, my interests are:

  • Games – Board Games
  • Games – Board Games – Miniatures & Wargaming
  • Online Communities – Blogging Resources & Services

I’m not sure where the minuatures and wargaming bit comes from, but the others certainly do fit what I’ve been reading about lately! (They probably also make me a lousy candidate for interest-based advertising; since I doubt any of those have a high CPC). You can also add interest categories yourself, so that you see advertisements for things you’re interested in; I took out wargames and put in abstract strategy games.

Of course, if you don’t like being tracked like this, there’s also the option to disable your cookie and get only contextual advertising rather than interest-based ads.

And that’s our random aside of the day..

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Getting ready to retire: Internet marketing experiment

Posted on August 23, 2010 by William

Over the last decade, I’ve occasionally thought about trying to make some money on the Internet (I know, me and two billion other people!), but I never had any success at it and lost interest fairly quickly. Since I have a little bit of free time now, due to being (STILL) unemployed, I decided to give it one more chance. I have a Google Adsense account still sitting around but not doing much; for example, in July it got 192 page impressions and no clicks. Pretty impressive, huh?

Of late, I’ve been doing a bit of reading and figuring out what I did wrong before. I’ve decided to take one of my old sites, which has no pagerank but has several pages indexed with Google, and see what I can do with it. (I also have a few other experiments going on, but I won’t mention them for now) The site I’ll be focusing on is Twenties Retirement; I put it together about four years ago but haven’t done anything with it since, and it still have no pagerank. I had some pretty decent information there – actually, a friend whose sister is a financial advisor told me she was sending some of her clients there for information – but the site was pretty ugly, didn’t get updated often, and didn’t have enough backlinks. I didn’t know about the nofollow tag and ended up getting a lot of backlinks from Yahoo! Answers that didn’t really do much good!

This time, I’m doing it a little more systematically. I’ve switched the site over to WordPress, which makes it a lot easier to update. I have a list of retirement-related terms that people actually search for, and I’ll be attempting to put up an article relating to one of those terms every day for the next month.  I don’t want to end up in the Google Sandbox, so I’ll be careful with my linking strategy, but I’m hoping to start ranking for my keywords within three months.

I get distracted easily, so this time I’m setting a goal for myself: $1000/month in adsense income within one year. I started working on this right after Brit and I got back from the honeymoon, so I’m setting actually my deadline at just under a year: July 31, 2011. Possible? I don’t know…but I’ll give it a shot.

For the month of August, I got 4 clicks across all of my sites (plus two of a public service ad that doesn’t pay anything) for a total of $4.89 in adsense earnings, which is considerably more than I make online most months, so we’ll see how it goes! Three of those clicks were for about a buck and a half apiece, while the other two were 23 cent clicks on one of my fun hubpages articles (Why dogs make you healthy). I’ve been really ticked off about Amazon no longer allowing Colorado affiliates, but I do have a workaround now on my book review site; I don’t get all of the affiliate revenue, but I’d rather have most of some revenue than all of no revenue! The service I’m trying out is called viglink; they have some twelve thousand affiliates, and when you link to any of those affiliates without using your own affiliate code (sheesh, did I use the word affiliate enough times in this sentence? Thought so) a little javascript code adds their code to it, after which you split the earnings when someone buys something. Was going to test it out Sunday when I ordered from Thinkgeek, but I forgot to click the links until after I’d already ordered :p. Will see if any money comes in from that, once traffic picks up. My book review site is already PR2 and should be updated fairly frequently with all the books O’Reilly has been sending me, so hopefully I can get traffic up a bit on that.

Ok, that was a bit of a longish post. Comments?

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Thinkgeek has the coolest stuff…

Posted on August 22, 2010 by William

Check this out:

Even on sale for $70 ($20 off), it’s too expensive for me, but still…want!

Browsing Thinkgeek because I need a new wallet; had wanted one of the stainless steel wallets, but they cost too much so I ended up picking a duct tape wallet instead. I did have a hard time choosing between that and the dot matrix wallet! If Amanda and Raelene hadn’t given us some nice salt and pepper shakers as a wedding gift, I would totally be getting this set:

Salt and Pepper Shakers

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Windows 7 Settings

Posted on August 19, 2010 by William

So I ran across a cute little trick today that was apparently doing the rounds in January, but I never ran across it. It’s to make it easier to get to all the settings under Windows 7. It works with earlier versions of Windows as well, but apparently will crash 64-bit Vista.

What you want to do is create a new folder with the name XXX.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}, where XXX can be whatever you want (I called it “Master Settings”, but the rest of it, from the . to the closing }, should be exactly as written. This is a developer feature built into Windows; if you create a folder with the extension {YYY}, where YYY is a class ID, only the first part of the filename is shown and it does cool stuff. In this case, it gives you a search folder containing all the various controls you’d normally find in assorted folders in the Windows Control Panel.

If you’re like me, it can be difficult to remember where everything is. You can use the search to find it, which actually works pretty well, assuming you remember what it’s called, but it’s cool to have all the options available in one place.

One thing people have reported is that, should you decide to delete the folder, you might need to start the computer in safe mode. Additionally, while I haven’t tried it yet, there’s the possibility that this trick could allow users to get into settings that they normally shouldn’t. Depending on how you look at it, that could be a good thing or a bad thing; I’ve definitely been in situations where I had to tolerate a minor annoyance because I didn’t have sufficient access to change a setting!

Anyway, not exactly world-shaking news, but I thought I’d share. I’ve been using Windows 7 since the beta and I’m pretty happy with it; on the whole, it seems to work pretty well.

Granted, my websites are still going to run under Apache! :-)

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Making News or Reporting It?

Posted on August 18, 2010 by William

News Corp, which owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, recently made a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association.

I’ll let that sink in for a second. The owner of Fox News, which republicans see as “fair and balanced” and everyone else who pays attention sees as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican party, is actively putting a large amount of money into attempting to elect Republicans.

While it’s not unusual for media countries to support candidates, the donations are generally small and support both parties. For example, in the past year General Electric (which owns NBC) has given $245,000 to the Democratic governors and $205,000 to the Republican governors, while Disney (which owns ABC) donated $20,000 to Republican committees and $11,000 to Democratic committees. News Corp is the only one to give on such a scale. This isn’t the first large donation they’ve made, of course; Murdoch (the owner of News Corp) has previously made a $1 million donation to the California Republican Party.

My point? None really…I hold on to a futile hope that if the obvious bias at Fox and News Corp is pointed out often enough, people who still give them any credibility as a news organization might eventually stop doing so. However, I’m not counting on it.

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Up to 1 year free webhosting at 1&1

Posted on August 15, 2010 by William

I’ve been using 1&1 webhosting for about a decade now; I got in on a “3 years free” package they were offering and never saw any reason to leave afterwards. I actually ended up upgrading from the basic plan to their $10/month business plan, which includes 3 domains and 250gb of web space, and I have about 30 domains with them. Someone who just wants to hold a small personal site would probably be happy with the beginner plan, which provides 10gb of space for $4 per month. As of last year, all plans offer unlimited bandwidth.

One possible issue is that while they provide a reasonable number of mySQL databases (50 with my plan), they are limited to 100MB apiece, which may be restricting for large dynamic sites; I’ve only recently started putting up WordPress sites, so we’ll see if that actually becomes a problem.

Anyway, the current promotion is 1 year free for a home account (150gb, 2 domains, $7 per month regular price) or 3 months free for the business or developer accounts. If you’re looking for a new provider, they’re probably worth a look.

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More on Politics

Posted on August 12, 2010 by William

I’ve been looking forward to reading the political news over the last few days, now that the Colorado primaries have ended. As I’ve mentioned before, I found the Colorado governor’s race particularly entertaining. Between McInnis’ plagiarism and Maes’ campaign finance violations and inane comments (he recently announced that Denver’s bike-sharing program is a threat to personal freedoms and could be part of a UN plot), the Republican party didn’t really have any good candidates, so I can’t really blame the thousands of people who voted in the Republican primary but didn’t bother to check a box in the gubernatorial race. The undervote was so severe that Jane Norton, who lost the GOP Senate primary to Ken Buck, received more votes than Dan Maes, who won the primary for governor.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when more polls start coming out and Maes and Tancredo get busy calling on each other to drop out of the race; the last I heard, Hickenlooper was beating Maes 50-38 if Tancredo drops out, 48-23 if Tancredo stays in (in which case Tancredo gets 22 percent of the vote).  Between the two of them, they can almost catch him! One wonders whether they’ll be spending time attacking each other as well as Hickenlooper.

On the national scene, the GOP (which has been filibustering…well…basically everything on the grounds of not wanting to add to the deficit) recently announced a plan to extend many of the Bush tax cuts. Yesterday the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation released their report on the measure. The report shows that it would add over $36 billion to the deficit next year, of which the lion’s share – nearly $31 billion – would go to households earning over $1 million per year, an average per-household tax cut of around $100,000.

As usual when it comes to Republicans, file this under hypocrisy..

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Upgrading Old Sites to WordPress

Posted on August 10, 2010 by William

I have a book review site that I’ve been updating on and off for over half a decade now; in fact, out of curiosity, I looked up the original (part particularly good!) 2004 design in the Wayback Machine. I’ve gone through, I believe, three different HTML editors, starting with NetObjects Fusion and eventually upgrading to Dreamweaver; my wife actually created the last design. The site never seemed to get updated much, though, partially because it’s a pain to do.

Enter WordPress! A quick installation, a few minutes moving over some of my reviews, and bingo..a shiny new site that couldn’t be easier to update! While I’m in the process of learning to create my own themes (the plan is that Brit will design new WordPress themes and I will code them), for now I used one of the free themes available on the net. It’s not exactly what I want – if nothing else, where are way too many links on the main page (although that may have changed by the time you read this, as I’ll be doing a bit of editing) but it works, was easy to install, and it looks good.

Why am I ramping this up now? I’ve recently been added to the list of regular reviewers with O’Reilly, so I’ll be getting a number of books from them; I’ve been wanting to get into web programming and thought that forcing myself to do regular reviews was a good way to do that. I’m also looking into possible book review columns in a few magazines and I needed some reviews to demonstrate to interested editors.

Anyway, this is what I love about WordPress: even for a site that’s not really a blog (at first I wasn’t even going to turn on comments), it makes keeping your content updated very easy. People think of WordPress as being just for blogging, but it really is a complete content management system.

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The Odds in Las Vegas, or Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Posted on August 8, 2010 by William

I’m not big on gambling, but one game I enjoy is Video Poker. The nice thing about it is that, with proper play, the house advantage is very small; less than half a percent. And it’s exciting!

Well…the house advantage is small if you can find the traditional 9/6 JoB…which I never could, after checking every video poker machine at the Paris and many of the other machines in Vegas. (Another reason to go off the strip next time, I suppose!) JoB stands for Jacks or Better, in which you win if you have at least a pair of jacks. You get five cards, redraw between zero and five of them, and make your best poker hand. A pair of jacks gets you your bet back, and it goes up from there, with a Royal Flush on a 5-coin bet paying off 4,000 coins. The 9/6 refers to the payoff on boats and flushes; a boat (or full house) pays nine coins and a flush pays six.

Unfortunately, while the rules for JoB are the same for every machine, the payoffs aren’t. With the exception of a row of 8/6 machines I found in the Paris Champaign Slots, every machine I saw was 8/5 or worse. Most people will just start playing without bothering to check, which means they’re very likely to end up with a 7/5 machine…great for the casino, not so much for the players! In one casino that offered progressive JoB (where the prize for hitting a royal playing 5 coins grows over time), there were several rows of machines sitting across from each other; the only difference was that one row was paying just over 1000 coins and the other was paying just over 4000 coins. There were more people on the former row. Of course, it only matters on the rare occasion that you actually hit a royal..

Blackjack is almost as bad. With many people playing basic strategy (which reduces the house edge to about 2%), the casinos try various things to increase their edge. One is introducing additional bets (such as betting that your first two cards will be a pair) or otherwise changing the rules; Blackjack is perhaps the only game where the rules tend to differ from table to table. The other is, as in video poker, changing the payoffs. Many of the tables now pay 6:5 for a Blackjack rather than the standard 3:2; with a $10 bet (the smallest allowed at most casinos on the strip), that’s a $3 loss for the player every time you hit a blackjack!

Simple lesson: always check the rules before you start, and be ready to play in a less convenient location if you want to get fair odds. And try to find a dealer who’ll give you something better than a three when you double down on 11!

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I’m getting married today!

Posted on July 31, 2010 by William

In about 5 hours, I’ll be getting married. Needless to say, I won’t be posting on this blog for the next week! Wish me luck in Vegas..

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