Bob Wood’s Blogs

My friend Bob has turned into a one man publishing army. He’s got two blogs and another website all up and running. It’s not easy feeding three of these on a daily basis.

Bob used to be my expert on all things audio. I guess he still is. Now, his more eminent expertise is in home theater. There’s a subject I know zip about.

It’s amazing to look at all he’s written at http://greathometheater.com/. Lots of things I’ve wondered about are explained… well, except for that how to pay thing.

Bob and I were talking this afternoon, and somehow the topic moved over to search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Bob said his site isn’t in Google’s index. I just looked – he’s right!

As he explains it, there is a sandbox period when you exist, Google knows you exist, but they won’t add you to their database. Ouch! A huge portion of my daily traffic is driven by web surfers who’ve hit Google or Yahoo! or MSN. Without their help, how would anyone know I’m here?

How does anyone know Bob’s there?

The search engines scour this site all the time. Google’s here as often as the #7 train rolls through Willets Point. I give up hundreds of megabytes in bandwidth a month to keep them happy. It’s a worthwhile trade.

You can see I’ve added links to Bob’s sites in this entry and included the blog’s address in the text. I don’t know if it will help… it can’t hurt. Bob’s sites deserve to be seen.

My Friend Bob Blogs

I got an email late last week from my friend Bob, newly landed in Austin, TX. He wanted to start a blog and he wanted to know how?

This is one of those good news, bad news stories. The good news is, you can blog easily. The bad news is, if you take the difficult route you’ve got a lot more flexibility (and work). Since Bob isn’t computer-iffic I recommended the easy way out.

Bob is now firmly established on Blogspot, the Google blogging tool. I’ve added these links to his site because that will help Google and the other search engines find it&#185.

I’m pretty impressed with the ease at which his blog was created. I don’t think he can do all the tricks I can do here – though I’m not quite sure if that’s to my advantage or not. It will be interesting to see if he can continue to post on a regular basis.

In the meantime, in the more established ‘blogosphere,’ Arianna Huffington’s new, mainly liberal, blog community has made its debut. Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Mike Nichols and a host of other luminaries are there. That’s pretty impressive for a maiden voyage.

Again, like Bob’s blog, it will be interesting to see how it looks in a few months and whether there is enough discipline among her unpaid writers to keep it up.

&#185 – Getting links is good. I’m always appreciative when someone adds a link from their webpage to mine.

California Vacation Pictures Posted

What a job! Four hundred ninety seven pictures from our vacation are now online. I’m not really done yet, but close enough to open it up for viewing&#185.

There are just too many to randomly browse (well, maybe not – it’s up to you). To make things easier, I’ve divided the photos into sub-albums by category. Or, you can look at the entire album by clicking here.

Once you’re in any of the sub-albums, click of the slideshow function, which works great and will move you right through the photos.

Amazing View

Our Day at Malibu

Surfing at Malibu

Animals We Met in California

Looking out our Century Plaza Hotel window

Beautiful California spring flowers

Los Angeles street scenes

Laguna Beach, CA

Palm Springs mountain views

Palm Springs street level views

Universal Studios Hollywood

&#185 – In order to get Google and the other search engines to ‘understand’ my photos, I’ve got to add some sort of caption to each one. Otherwise, they’re undecipherable for searching.

A Former Teacher Finds My Blog

How do you describe a blog to someone who hasn’t read one? It’s like a diary&#185.

Forget all this political mumbo jumbo and the (false) promise of blogs as the new journalism. Blogs are diaries. Some might be political, but many more concentrate on Britney Spears or the emotional traumas associated with high school.

This is my blog. It concentrates on what’s important to me, without the controversial stuff that would prompt my boss to ask me to stop.

Here’s where a blog differs from a diary. Diaries are private or only read by a select few. Blogs, on the other hand, are available to anyone, and once indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest, become a contextual part of the Internet.

That indexing is very important. Stupid, insipid things written by me and others… relatively unimportant people, can gain weight when they concern an esoteric subject which isn’t often discussed.

Take Junior High School 218 Queens, aka – Harold G. Campbell Junior High School. On the Internet, I’m considered a source for JHS 218Q. But how many people care, or more importantly search for Campbell Junior High? So it was a surprise to read the email I got this morning

I was at the club this morning (Saw Mill River Club in

Mount Kisco, NY. I prefer the Powerhouse Gym on

Francis Lewis Blvd. but it is 39 miles away), working

away on the elliptical when I thought, “Why not go to

a search engine and type in Harold G. Campbell JHS?”

So I did (when I got home).

Your name and the Kennedy assassination article

appeared. I started reading it when I was shocked to

see my name. I then read that the day after,

Saturday, we went to a show. I have no recollection

of that but if you say it, then I must have gone.

Here’s that Google link. My website is the second citation.

The shocked man is my former 8th grade teacher, Harold Friend. He was Mr. Friend then, he is Dr. Friend now. The academic elevation doesn’t surprise me. He was very smart.

Dr. Friend was mentioned when I wrote about the Kennedy assassination. It was his classroom I was in when we got the word from Dallas.

How cool to get this email. How strange for him to search the Internet and find someone talking about him. The indexing power of search engines is a luxury of our times that never existed, or was even contemplated, as recently as 15 years ago.

After reading the email, Helaine said Dr. Friend must be old now. If he was 30 in 1963, that would put him in his early 70s now. Of course he could have been 25, or 45. To me, in the early 1960s, he was old. I was a kid. But, being in his 70s now doesn’t seem to make him as old as it once would have.

The fact that his story begins in his gym means, however old he is, he’s really younger.

Once again I have to ask myself, who reads this… and why. I can tell from my logs that most of my traffic isn’t to my home page, but people going to inside pages – archived material I had written about earlier which is pointed at by the search engines. It just boggles my mind that anything I write has any impact on anyone.

I’m just a guy who likes to write. Like all bloggers, all I bring are my own experiences and insights. It can be read, but that doesn’t make it special.

&#185 – Be careful on the spelling, because it’s certainly not like a dairy.

Blogger’s addendum – It has been established, in further communication, that he doesn’t remember me.

Thanks Google – Much to My Surprise

As websites go, this one isn’t Wal-Mart, it’s mom and pop. Actually it’s just pop, as mom doesn’t code websites in PHP, HTML, CSS and the other obscure computer languages I deal with.

What I’m getting at is, this is a very small site run by one individual. Though I want lots of people coming here, I have no way of attracting them except by links from other sites (always appreciated) and citations on search engines like Google.

A few months back I noticed lots of people going to my September 2003 archive page. What was driving them there? The answer: Google!

If you go to Google’s image search and enter “hurricane photo“, the resulting page has one shot of a ship that stands out. That phony hurricane photo, which has been circulating across the net for years, is on my site.

Yesterday I found if you enter “Thanksgiving Day Parade“, one of my photos is first on the screen! Interestingly, if you leave out the word “day” you’ll find someone else in the top spot and my photos nowhere to be seen.

Website traffic is not the difference between life and death for me. On the other hand, more is definitely better. By understanding how Google decides to do what they do, I can get more people here. I think I understand why my images do so well. Now if I could only get my text to register the same way.

My Very Strange Readers

When I look at the logs for this website, I can often see what brought readers here. Sometimes it’s a bookmark or a link from another site (I am always grateful when others link to this site – though, as you see, I don’t have permanent links to other blogs here). Many times, it’s a search engine leading folks here.

Just to give you an idea, so far in June Google has sucked down 26.5 MB of bandwidth as it indexes this site. MSN, whose search engine is just ramping up, has pulled down over 100 MB! Nearly 1,300 visitors in these 11 days of June have come from search engines. At the moment, Google brings in 3 times as many readers as Yahoo, 10 times as many as MSN.

If you come from a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, the actual search query you entered is logged for me and it’s often fascinating info. For the past few months, many strangers have come here because of things I’ve written, or photography I’ve posted, about John Mayer and his road manager Scotty Crowe (Scotty has many fewer web citations, so I come up very high on a search for his name). They have been the 1 & 2 most popular search terms for months.

Now, joining them on the hit parade is “Carrot Top Shirtless.”

I don’t which is scarier – people are looking for Carrot Top – shirtless, or the fact that there’s content in my blog that makes geofffox.com show up in the search… in the second spot on Google!

You Go Google

It is tough to turn on a financial show, or look at the Business Section of the Times, without reading more and more about Google. They have announced their IPO, and the two geeky boys who came up with the idea will be wealthy beyond anyone’s imagination.

If PR were the arbiter of how company’s do financially (and often, it is not), Google would be high atop the pack. Microsoft would be down at the bottom.

Google built its reputation by doing what it does – searching – better and faster than anyone else. There were plenty of search engines before Google, but none as good. And they did it without cluttering up the landscape with intrusive commercial content.

Stop and think for a moment of what Google has to do to perform searches for you. It seems as if they have the entire Internet cached on their servers – every single byte! Recent educated rumors say they have somewhere near 100,000 servers scattered around the globe.

Did I mention, it’s free!

After years of court battles, commissions and hearings, Microsoft is often referred to (at least on hobbyist bulletin boards) as the “Evil Empire.” Until recently, I had never seen anyone ever say a bad word about Google. There are concerns about Google’s new Gmail and its privacy implications – but even then, Google is criticized for underestimating the worry, as opposed to being a bad company.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but it seems the traits one normally needs to make a lot of money are hardly ever benevolent. So, Google comes across as a breath of fresh air because their whole reason for being seems to be based upon benevolence. And, the numbers seem to say, benevolence can work.

Wouldn’t you want your boss to speak like this as a letter to potential Google shareholders from company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin did? The letter is located in Google’s registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything. Google is organized around the ability to attract and leverage the talent of exceptional technologists and business people. We have been lucky to recruit many creative, principled and hard working stars. We hope to recruit many more in the future. We will reward and treat them well.

We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

The significant employee ownership of Google has made us what we are today. Because of our employee talent, Google is doing exciting work in nearly every area of computer science. We are in a very competitive industry where the quality of our product is paramount. Talented people are attracted to Google because we empower them to change the world; Google has large computational resources and distribution that enables individuals to make a difference. Our main benefit is a workplace with important projects, where employees can contribute and grow. We are focused on providing an environment where talented, hard working people are rewarded for their contributions to Google and for making the world a better place.

Here’s a success story where the main characters get rich because of what they did and did well – not because they screwed the other guy or played hardball in business or did anything underhanded.

Wake me. I must be dreaming.

100,000 Pages Served

Sometime on Monday the little counter on the bottom right of this website will spin past 99,999 and move into six digits. It’s my website, and I am impressed. I never thought there would be anywhere near this much traffic.

However, let’s keep this in perspective. Compared to a large commercial site like Google or Yahoo I’m not even a rounding error. This site has so little traffic that it easily shares a computer with dozens of other small sites (and my server is in Chicago).

For a one man operation with no promotion, and no draw other than a look at what I’m thinking on any given day (not much it often seems) 100k since July is livin’ large.

To define terms, each time a full page of this website is viewed the counter goes up one. This page counts as one. If you go back and look at a single archived entry, that’s another one. Looking at a full screen of thumbnails in my gallery is one more. And, if you click on any of them to get that single image in a larger view that is yet one more.

There are other counters at work on the site. Most of them operate behind the scenes on the management pages.

This is the 400th entry in my blog which started on July 4, 2003 (you can see the titles of each with links by clicking here). The combined text and images here take up 285 MB. This website has spit out a little less than 15 GB of data, enough to fill 20 or so CDROMs. There have been 56,000 separate visits to the site. If you count each individual file that’s called on, each image, style sheet, table and text files, you will be just short of 1.5 million hits!

This site is fully indexed on all the search engines, but gets the most traffic, by far, from Google. The largest number of referrals come from people entering the name, “Scotty Crowe,” John Mayer’s road manager who I had written about… and who doesn’t appear on other sites often enough to move me from a prominent showing on Google and Yahoo. In 2003, Scotty was only number 2, just behind “giblet gravy,” a term I had used in a context that probably wasn’t be searched for.

There are other Geoff Fox’s listed on the Internet – many others. But, I am the number one result when you Google my name. I’m also high on the list for ‘dissed’ and, of course, Scotty Crowe.

Each day, between 350-450 of you visit, looking at about 2 pages per visit on average.

There is a certain amount of exaggeration when you see all these numbers. Some do nothing more than reflect the Internet equivalent of a wrong number, as people come here by mistake. Others are reflecting robots and spiders and crawlers from search engines like Google, Yahoo and now Microsoft. Still more, less than 10% but significant, are from me… looking for errors and proofreading my work (I spend a lot of time spellchecking and proofreading my work and mistakes still get through all the time).

Actually, I often stay away from the public pages, lest I run up the counter.

If I told you how much this endeavor has cost, you’d probably be surprised. The main software is Movabletype, which is free. Same goes for Gallery, my photo gallery software and GrADS which produces the meteograms. All the software on this site is freeware.

Renting my little corner of cyberspace is also pretty cheap. I paid $100 for one year of webhosting, which provides the destination when you type https://www.geofffox.com. For that $100 I get 350 MB of space, more bandwidth than I can use, and the ability to control my mailboxes and truly be the master of my own domain! Owning geofffox.com is another $20 (I also own tv-cd.com).

Please accept my thanks for coming here and helping me stay motivated. I have become somewhat anal – posting virtually every day. I am surprised, gratified and a little scared when I think you’ve spent a time reading what I have to say.

I’m Watching You Watching

On this blog, some entries are better written than others. Some entries are meaningless to anyone but my immediate family and friends. Sometimes what I write is insightful and full of a worldly understanding (Hey, no one else is going to say this about me. I might as well).

Like a good geek, I go through my logs from time-to-time (All right, I’m obsessed – so shoot me). It’s interesting to see whose coming here and what they’re reading. You couldn’t do this with a Google sized site, but most of the time I can track a reader as he decides where to go next. And, I’ll admit to doing a few “whois” searches to see who owns the IP address doing the browsing.

Looking at my log, I know that at one time my largest source of hits from search engines came about because I had misspelled he name of the comedian “Carrot Top!”

I’ve just started seeing a significant flow of traffic over the last few weeks to two IP addresses at Microsoft (65.54.188.40 and 65.54.188.42). Though AWStats doesn’t see them as a search engine spider, I believe that’s what they are. This month I’ve had over 20 MB in bandwidth and 1,600 hits go to those two addresses (and mine is a little, personal site with only around 220 MB of content – much of that in photos). This is probably the beginning of Microsoft’s push to unseat Google as the search king.

Just as interesting to me, and noted by some other users of Movabletype, my blogging software, are hits in the referral log from sites that aren’t referring readers to me! Though&#185 http://paris-hilt0n-video.blogspot.com, http://www.hummer.c0m, http://blog.j0hnkerry.com, http://outd0orsbest.zeroforum.com/zerouser are listed as having sent browsers this way, searching those sites shows no reference to me at all.

This ploy, and ‘comment spam,’ are new and insidious methods for trying to game the system by having your link land on lots of blogs, using their ‘good name’ with the search engines to elevate yours. I can’t believe I’m the only one looking. What else do people see?

&#185 – To prevent these folks from profiting again, I’ve replaced one letter in each URL with the number “0”.

Searching’s Not Easy

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about search engines – sites like Google and Yahoo and Alta Vista. Yahoo, which used Google’s search engine, has now switched to another supplier. Microsoft says they’re going to go into competition with Google. This is not as easy as it seems.

First, an admission. I like Google. While the other search engines were becoming more portal-like, and more commercial, Google was keeping true to its purpose. Searches on Google seemed, to me at least, to hit the mark more often.

As tough as it is to believe, Google is the little guy! Yes, they will soon be going public for billions of dollars (no joke) they are pipsqueaks compared to Microsoft. Heck, their first day valuation will probably even fall short of Bill Gates alone.

Here’s the part I don’t understand. If these others are going to try and unseat Google, don’t they have to search just as thoroughly?

My website’s software provides an easy view of the spiders that crawl through. The chart below this text shows January 2004’s activity from the search engines. There is Google and there is everyone else. No one else even comes close.

And, imagine how large their database must be when they’re looking at 85+ mb of my stuff!

Who Came Here in 2003

I don’t have an incredibly long history as a webmaster. So, for me, it’s often confusing and at the same time interesting to peek at the inner workings of this site. I have owned the domain name geofffox.com for a few years, but it’s only been since late July that I’ve mounted this blog and photo gallery.

My webserver is actually located in Chicago, and run by hostforweb.com. It is shared with other small websites. I have access to most of the server’s guts through shell programs.

In order for you to see what you’re reading now, I have to upload all the files and images and programs from home. There are a number of programs, like the one that produces the weather forecast meteograms that run on clocks and execute a few times a day. I had to write the scripts to do that too.

Running this website has forced me to learn a little about a bunch of computer disciplines, like php, Perl, bash shell scripts, html and a veritable alphabet soup of minutiae. It’s been challenging and like Blanche Du Bois, I am often dependent on the kindness of strangers. The more I learn about computers, the less I realize I know.

With the year over in less than four hours, I though I’d summarize a little of what’s gone through this site in 2003. Since it was only born in July, the stats are (hopefully) less than what I’ll get to publish in 2004.

7.76 GB That’s the total amount of data I’ve spit out. It melts down to 10 CDROM’s worth… or a few DVD’s. The majority of my hits go to the United States, but most of Europe and the Pacific Rim are represented as well.

271.69 MB That’s what Google slurped up. Loads of spiders and crawlers moved through the site, picking up the data that goes into search engines. Google took down nearly 5 times as much data as the next biggest search engine and was responsible for 6711 page views by users. I have chronicled elsewhere my rise in the Google rankings – a feat which both intrigues and fascinates me.

Giblet gravy That’s the most used search engine phrase that sent people to the site. They must have been disappointed because I used the phrase to illustrate a point that had nothing to do with cooking. The next most requested phrase was Scotty Crowe, John Mayer’s road manager.

Thanks to everyone who’s written to ask me for John’s email address. Even if I had it, I couldn’t give it out. You will be glad to know your admiration is not misplaced. There’s a whole lot to admire about John. I don’t think he’ll be spoiled by success.

I’m not sure how or why, but people searching for dangerous Internet cafes in las vegas nv and she had to remove her shoes airport ended up being sent to geofffox.com.

My cousin Michael and his wife Melissa in Sunny Southern California became blog readers. More than anyone, Michael made me realize I could use an editor from time-to-time. I try to spell and grammar check, but you need a dispassionate eye too.

My dad reads the blog every day. That pleases me more than he’ll ever know.

From time to time I’ve looked at my logs, seeing where readers are coming from. There’s someone at NBC in NY who reads pretty regularly, same at the vendor of our station’s weather equipment and Mississippi State University, where I’m taking courses. Most readers are connecting through residential addresses, but I’m amazed by all the different companies and universities that are listed.

Once, I made reference to probes of my home computer by a virus ensconced in a PC at a San Fransisco Honda dealer. I made an analogy that used the word ‘doorknob’. A few days later a computer at a doorknob manufacturer downloaded a significant portion of this site. They’ll be as surprised as the giblet gravy crowd.

In 2003 approximately 17,000 separate viewers came calling to this site. Collectively you visited 30,000 times, downloading 872,000 files. My page counter now sits just north of 60,000.

Every word I write is read, re-read, edited, punched up and perused again before it goes online. One of the more pleasant surprises of blogging is how challenging and how much fun it is to write. I never felt that way about writing before.

Often it is a cathartic experience, allowing me to get something off my chest. Other times it’s fun to let you in on something I observed and want to share.

My family puts up with this to a point. I reveal a lot in this blog, but not everything. A friend wrote to tell me he was surprised to see this ‘warts and all’ self assessment. If there are warts here, they are a small portion of my own personal wart colony. Like most people, I keep a few skeletons in my closet.

Thanks for reading. It really means a lot to me. Really.

Look Ma – I’m on Slashdot

I love Slashdot. How could I stay away from a site whose slogan is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.”

I am there at least 4-5 times a day, following their links to see the latest in high tech. It is Linux biased in much the way The Catholic Church is Christian biased. But, it’s geek and nerd populated and I share a certain sensibility with many of its habitues (though, unfortunately I no longer share the same generation with them)

Its readers, rapidly responding to the story postings, add insight, insult and everything in between.

What makes Slashdot so effective is its self moderating system which starts limiting what you easily read (you can always get to everything, but probably don’t want to) as users come on and rate the postings. Judging by what I see, there are a lot of people moderating at any given time, though Slashdot only gives you the opportunity to moderate every once in a while. Then, later, the moderations get moderated!

In many ways it is analogous to Google, where your association with others decides your relative importance and where your links appear.

Anyway, I’m writing all this because I finally got a posting of mine on to start a thread. It started this morning, early, when I saw an article in the New York Times about speeding up media (listening at double speed, for instance) and how that is a burgeoning field.

I have used that same technique in my studies at Mississippi State, watching DVD’s at double speed. For me, it’s been very effective. Now, it’s shared with others.

Continue reading “Look Ma – I’m on Slashdot”

Small Sites and Search Engines

This is a very small website. I get very few hits… and that’s fine, for now.

Part of the challenge of a website is growing your hits, and I try to do that. I look at logs that tell me what’s being viewed, and how people got here. There is knowledge to be gotten from those logs.

For instance, I have learned one of the best way to get traffic is to misspell words!

It’s true and here’s why. Google, which drives lots of traffic on the net, decides which page to list first by a complex formula that rates websites on (among other things) their popularity with other websites. So, who links to you is important.

For a while, the page on my site that was drawing the most referrals from search engines had to do with a show Helaine and I saw, featuring Carrot Top. In the normal scheme of things, that wouldn’t be so. But, I had spelled Carrot, “Carrott.”

So, instead of competing against all the big websites, I had a corner on the very esoteric group of misspelled Carrot Top searches.

I have since corrected that spelling, and the spelling of movabltype.org (where you’ll find the blogging software I use). My hits will be down, but my English teachers will be happier.

On the Internet, spelling counts.