Cash value 1/20th of 1 cent
Coupons have that cash value statement printed on them. Does that mean that I can collect 20 of them and they’ll give me a penny?
Kitten and Cena
Cena’s mom got a kitten last minute while she was visiting Petersburg. All three of us are in Juneau now.
A Ryan McFarland update
All i seem to be able to do is talk about myself. I really want zieak.com to come up as the first result for a search for “Ryan McFarland” and i think my previous efforts helped a little. The most important changes can probably be made on my own site. I noticed that individual post pages of mine showed up in the search results titled “zieak.com >> Archive >> Post Title.” Who cares that the post is in the archive? A quick change in my site settings and it switched to this:
And i have decided that isn’t good enough. I changed the page title to “Ryan McFarland” instead of “zieak.com.” Soon the search results will say “Ryan McFarland >> on zieak.com >> Post Title.” This dinged me on my site Page Strength (part of my weekly Wednesday site stats) by .5 because now my site is not #1 in Google search results for the title of my page. That’s alright though – i’m fairly confident that a little time will push me up the rank quickly with this new tweak. Now the H1 tag in the html is “Ryan McFarland” which is probably the most important criteria.
Website Score tool
Website Grader compares your site to the others that have been submitted and checks the site quality, links, and a few other details to grade your website. I used it and scored an 89 at one point. Added a “description” meta tag to my headed for my site and waited a few hours and then tested it again. I then scored a 96. Part of the reason my score jumped so high is that many other people submitted their site and didn’t score as well as i did which pushed my percentile up.
I wonder if it had been able to calculate my Google and Yahoo inbound links if my score would have increased at all.
This is similar to Silktide’s Sitescore (before it broke again) or the Page Strength tool by SEOmoz.
Via John Chow via Darin Carter.
100 years of Scouting in the USA
I was clearing out junk mail from one of my rarely used email accounts and there was an announcement from the Boy Scouts of America in there. They are calling for entries for a design contest to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the organization in the United States. Participants must be in scouting and have to be a youth in the organization. The 100th anniversary is in February 2010.
Flashback Friday
One year ago, Cena and i were just about to head up to Anchorage for the annual ARPA fall meeting. This year that meeting will be on October 13th.
Two years ago, i wrote a short list of firsts – so a list of seconds would be a good idea.
Three years ago, was a little birthday party at the Christensen cabin for Angie. Last night was a party for her 30th birthday at the Harbor Bar. Complete with trivia (which she brought to Petersburg 4 years ago). Marley went fishing for humpies and the photo is definitely worth posting a second time. This also seems to be about the peak for commenting on my blog. Very few posts i made three years ago have no comments on them. I was also doing quite a bit of tinkering with scanning children’s book pages which i just made to shirt designs. Three years? I need to be more on the ball.
Four years ago i made the caroms board table. I need to make another because i have far better tools now and have an older and nicer caroms board. I don’t have a photo of the original table on this site at all.
Snob or shy?
I said last night that i’m actually incredibly shy at times. More than twice people have told me that they thought that i was stuck up until they got to know me. Cena observed that people that are shy and people that are snobs might demonstrate the same characteristics. The difference, she said, is that snobs tend to be good looking and shy people tend to be not so good looking. So whether a person is shy or a snob is really in the eye of the beholder.
Subscription cards
I hate inserts in magazines. Perfume ads or other tear out garbage just irritates me and will not make me buy a product. I just received a Consumer Reports. It had six inserts in it. Five were subscription cards. One was for their sister publication about health issues. The five subscription cards touted a $26 annual rate. Twelve issues would cost $2.17 each at that rate. Post cards cost $0.26 each. The five subscription cards add up to $1.30. Since they are postage paid, i will be mailing them back (i’ve done that off and on for years). Cena wondered if they actually hoped that the subscription cards would fall out in the post office or in the parking lot. CR effectively reduces their profit by more than half by filling their magazine with these annoying inserts. Otherwise, i love the magazine.
Italian Marie Claire issue interested in the cart bike
The kind folks at Idealist not only commented on my cart bike link woes but also just forwarded me an email they received…
Dear Sirs, my name is Antonio Mancinelli and i am a senior editor of Italian Marie Claire. We should like to publish your pic of cart-bike (the outside shot one), because I’m writing a story on new eco-friendly design. We will send you a copy, for the November issue (out 15th. October). The images we would like to receive by e-mail in high resolution (jpg files of 300 dpi in a size of full page namely 20x30cm/10×14 inches, in a size of half page, namely 20x15cm./10×7 inches). Waiting for your news, hope to have them as soon as possible.
Thanks in advance,
Best Regards
Antonio Mancinelli
They replied;
Hello Antonio,
thanks for your interest in Idealist.The Cart-Bike idea was created by Zieak, you can find the original material at: “http://www.zieak.com/2007/08/19/bike-and-shopping-cart/” you can contact him at (my email address) *I send a copy of this mail to him in order to put you both in contact. I would appreciate if any reference to Idealist can be made as a source of insightful designs and ideas. If you can’t make any reference to Idealist, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time and other occasions will arise.
You can find more examples of eco-friendly designs in the following links. http://idealist.blinkr.net/index.php?tag=recycle
http://idealist.blinkr.net/index.php?tag=green
Thanks again for your interest and I wish you the best in your article. Good luck.
Idealist
Of course i had no idea what Marie Claire is. Here’s one description of the magazine… “While backing women on their path to freedom and pushing them to develop their curiosity, Marie Claire delivers the newest information on beauty, fashion, health, and other aspects of the daily life of women in the 21st century.” And Cena’s description was “Very girly.”
Wednesday site stats
I added post and comment count statistics and removed the “How much is my blog worth”metric because it just used Technorati information.
- 1262 posts – 16 new this week!
- 2509 comments – 14 new this week
- Technorati Authority: 113 (up 12) rank: 45,592 (improved 6,511)
- Google Page Rank: 4
- Alexa: 308,191 (improved 46,826)
- Silktide Sitescore: still not working
- Page Strength: 4
- Feedburner subscribers: 32 (up 6)
- SocialMeter: 228 (broken – increased 48)
- BlogTopSites: 110 (improved 22)
- Blog Juice: 2.1 (improved .1)
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