It was time, I decided, to do some spring cleaning on my growing venues of expression. I scrapped the former blog "NBK Stuff" and saved only its former space on Blogger under the temporary title of "Summitsummers." But that blog didn't succeed in distinguishing its purpose or tone from this one, "Write to Say It," so I deleted Summitsummers also. I still maintain several blogs with my main expository journaling Writetosayit, my fiction and poetry writings, Inner Elves, and now a new blog on my commercial website, Pageamonth.com, in support of my spreadsheet budget product. That's really enough to catch ahold of whatever I feel I can say publicly.
I scrapped NBK Stuff because it outlived its purpose: to try Adsense ads on a blog and see if it made me a millionaire overnight. It didn't, and so out she goes. But why did I try to start Summitsummers?
It had to do with the way Blogspot is set up. When you delete a blog, the dashboard keeps it around in case you change your mind and want to reinstate it, and also asks you to create another blog on the spur of the moment to take its place. In fact, it doesn't even let you leave the page until you type in the name of that new blog. So I did, and called it the first word I could think of, "Summitsummers." Where that came from is beyond me. But it got me off the page.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Everybody Blogs Today
Everyone takes pictures today, so why ever hire a photographer? Everyone sings, so why pay to hear a Pavorotti or Sinatra? Everyone also blogs, so why read another's posts?
Yes, we can all do lots of things, but we recognize there are some who can do them better than we can ever hope to.
Now we blog, and it seems today people around the planet are posting away with feverish abandon, pouring out whatever they think for the world to read. But we don't have to go far to find that some are more widely read than others. Why?
Having posted for several years on several sites, I'm convinced the main reason some blogs are more avidly read and others read only by friends and family is a sense of the writer's authenticity. That's a complex thing to define exactly. But it comes through whatever is written, from choices about site design and lauout to a "feel" of the template and look of the font, what the writer says and how he or she says it, the style, the sound, the rhythms of speech and imagery, the choice of words and so forth. Some writers seem more authentic than others, to have more to say, or to say it in a memorable way.
As a student I had a fascination for the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair. While classmates found his writing a slog, I just loved to hear whatever he said. Garrison Keillor, author of the Lake Wobegon Days and A Prarie Home Companion on NPR is another such idol of mine. I never tire of listening to or reading his work.
That's authenticity, personality. So if everyone blogs today, who will read them? Actually, many will, if readers sense in their words an engaging authenticity, if they feel the author has something to say in an engaging way.
Yes, we can all do lots of things, but we recognize there are some who can do them better than we can ever hope to.
Now we blog, and it seems today people around the planet are posting away with feverish abandon, pouring out whatever they think for the world to read. But we don't have to go far to find that some are more widely read than others. Why?
Having posted for several years on several sites, I'm convinced the main reason some blogs are more avidly read and others read only by friends and family is a sense of the writer's authenticity. That's a complex thing to define exactly. But it comes through whatever is written, from choices about site design and lauout to a "feel" of the template and look of the font, what the writer says and how he or she says it, the style, the sound, the rhythms of speech and imagery, the choice of words and so forth. Some writers seem more authentic than others, to have more to say, or to say it in a memorable way.
As a student I had a fascination for the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair. While classmates found his writing a slog, I just loved to hear whatever he said. Garrison Keillor, author of the Lake Wobegon Days and A Prarie Home Companion on NPR is another such idol of mine. I never tire of listening to or reading his work.
That's authenticity, personality. So if everyone blogs today, who will read them? Actually, many will, if readers sense in their words an engaging authenticity, if they feel the author has something to say in an engaging way.
We Lost Our Compass
We're getting ready to take a Ritz trip, and we're not sure where. It may be one of those existential junkets where we move around as the spirit moves us and the weather seems inviting. When we get our of Florida and head west, it's often flooded around the Mississippi. When we go north the rains or heat waves can be intimidating. When we go to the eastern seaboard we get eaten alive by giant mosquitoes. And we can't go much further south.
My inclination so far is to head for Branson, Missouri. We've never been there, but we've seen some features of it on television and it looked like somewhere we'd enjoy, kind of a laid back country music mecca like Gatlinburg, Tennessee which we like, or Nashville. We saw the Grand Ole Opry there a year ago and loved it. So with an RV and our informal tastes we ought to fit right in at Branson.
One year we headed for the Rockies and got close enough to Denver we could see the mountains, even though we were still in Kansas. Thunderheads rose up over them into a blue sky, and we knew we were in for it. That night it rained so hard, with hail beating down on our poor tent pull camper, that we had to run for our lives into our van to wait it out. It lasted for hours, and we slept in the van. In our haste we didn't have time to slide the beds back in under the roof and they got sopping wet.
The next morning we drove about six miles into Lawrence, Kansas with our clothes, our sleeping bags, our pillows and our foam mattresses all soaked with water even after we wrung them out and tried to mop out the camper. Fortunately, we found an open laundromat and began drying things out.
The operator of the laundromat listened to our tale of woe about the night before, and said he'd never seen so much rain there, nothing but water, water everywhere. It reminded him of his years in the navy, which, he said, was the reason he moved to Lawrence, Kansas. He said he never wanted to be near so much water again, and he had taken a ruler and a US map and calculated that Lawrence was the furthest point in the Continental US from any ocean, so that's where he'd live. Now that's quite a reason to live somewhere, I think--to get as far away from something you hate as possible.
We won't go to Branson for any reason so dramatic, but it seems far enough from South Florida that we'll feel we got away from our routines for a time. We'll see.
And from there we might go on further west up the Missouri valley, or over to Memphis and see Graceland, or up the Mississippi to the Dells, or over to Virginia's Shenandoah, or down to New Orleans, or who knows where. We don't.
In most years we didn't have this freedom. Lots of years we didn't have a special destination in mind, but we knew we'd be going to our hometown of Huntington, Indiana, because that's where the folks were. For the forty-one years of our marriage we might go west, east, north, or south from wherever we were living at the time, but we'd need to catch Huntington either going or coming back. For many years we'd stay at the house, but when dad and mom needed to go into nursing homes, we started staying at a motel. Living and working in Florida, we got to see them only a couple of times a year at most, often only once. We treasured those visits because we feared each time we might not see them again.
So this is really the first summer in forty-one years we're free to go wherever we'd like, because for the first time, sad to say, we have no living parents to visit. Barb's dad, then mom, died within about two months of each other this past fall and winter. We still have other relatives and friends in there, but they're apt to be around for awhile so we don't feel the same pressure to head for Huntington.
Maybe that's why we have no real destination in mind this summer. Mom and Dad in their Huntington nursing homes were like a compass, charting every summer trip for four plus decades. Without that compass, we're kind of lost, I think. We don't know where we ought to try to go.
My inclination so far is to head for Branson, Missouri. We've never been there, but we've seen some features of it on television and it looked like somewhere we'd enjoy, kind of a laid back country music mecca like Gatlinburg, Tennessee which we like, or Nashville. We saw the Grand Ole Opry there a year ago and loved it. So with an RV and our informal tastes we ought to fit right in at Branson.
One year we headed for the Rockies and got close enough to Denver we could see the mountains, even though we were still in Kansas. Thunderheads rose up over them into a blue sky, and we knew we were in for it. That night it rained so hard, with hail beating down on our poor tent pull camper, that we had to run for our lives into our van to wait it out. It lasted for hours, and we slept in the van. In our haste we didn't have time to slide the beds back in under the roof and they got sopping wet.
The next morning we drove about six miles into Lawrence, Kansas with our clothes, our sleeping bags, our pillows and our foam mattresses all soaked with water even after we wrung them out and tried to mop out the camper. Fortunately, we found an open laundromat and began drying things out.
The operator of the laundromat listened to our tale of woe about the night before, and said he'd never seen so much rain there, nothing but water, water everywhere. It reminded him of his years in the navy, which, he said, was the reason he moved to Lawrence, Kansas. He said he never wanted to be near so much water again, and he had taken a ruler and a US map and calculated that Lawrence was the furthest point in the Continental US from any ocean, so that's where he'd live. Now that's quite a reason to live somewhere, I think--to get as far away from something you hate as possible.
We won't go to Branson for any reason so dramatic, but it seems far enough from South Florida that we'll feel we got away from our routines for a time. We'll see.
And from there we might go on further west up the Missouri valley, or over to Memphis and see Graceland, or up the Mississippi to the Dells, or over to Virginia's Shenandoah, or down to New Orleans, or who knows where. We don't.
In most years we didn't have this freedom. Lots of years we didn't have a special destination in mind, but we knew we'd be going to our hometown of Huntington, Indiana, because that's where the folks were. For the forty-one years of our marriage we might go west, east, north, or south from wherever we were living at the time, but we'd need to catch Huntington either going or coming back. For many years we'd stay at the house, but when dad and mom needed to go into nursing homes, we started staying at a motel. Living and working in Florida, we got to see them only a couple of times a year at most, often only once. We treasured those visits because we feared each time we might not see them again.
So this is really the first summer in forty-one years we're free to go wherever we'd like, because for the first time, sad to say, we have no living parents to visit. Barb's dad, then mom, died within about two months of each other this past fall and winter. We still have other relatives and friends in there, but they're apt to be around for awhile so we don't feel the same pressure to head for Huntington.
Maybe that's why we have no real destination in mind this summer. Mom and Dad in their Huntington nursing homes were like a compass, charting every summer trip for four plus decades. Without that compass, we're kind of lost, I think. We don't know where we ought to try to go.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Donald's Amazing OPEC Greed Index
When the economy fell off the cliff last fall, Donald Trump predicted, "I'll tell you one piece of good news: you will see the price of oil drop like a rock!" And he went on to say, "I hate OPEC. Every time the stock market goes up, OPEC raises the price of a barrel of crude and takes the profits. Every single time!"
He was right. Within days gasoline prices followed the price per barrel down, down, down from the high over $4.00 a gallon last summer to a little over $1.00 at its lowest point in the depths of the stock market decline. But now, with the market improving, up, up, up goes the oil price again, creeping up through the dollar-something range to just over $2 at the pump. Then, yesterday, here, ka-boom! Up suddenly 16 cents per gallon all over town! They couldn't even wait for Memorial Day weekend.
Some say they're just responding to increased demand for summer driving. I say balderdash, they're following OPEC's deathlock stranglehold on the Dow. Summer driving's actually predicted to be lower this year, but the oil companies and station owners are gleefully jumping the gun on declaring the recession over, I guess. (Odd how they all seem to agree on the same amount to hike their prices in one day in our "free market system" isn't it.)
But The Donald's insights may provide a convenient index to how much we've grown the economy since the pits last January. If gas has gone from about a dollar to about two dollars per gallon, then the economic recovery, by the Trump Index, has come back about 50%. Similarly, if it fell from about four dollars per gallon to about two dollars, it has fallen about 50%.
Forget about the Dow, the Consumer Confidence Index, the Gross Domestic Product and all the other imposters that attempt to tell us how well or how poorly we're doing. Trump's OPEC Greed index may be all we need.
He was right. Within days gasoline prices followed the price per barrel down, down, down from the high over $4.00 a gallon last summer to a little over $1.00 at its lowest point in the depths of the stock market decline. But now, with the market improving, up, up, up goes the oil price again, creeping up through the dollar-something range to just over $2 at the pump. Then, yesterday, here, ka-boom! Up suddenly 16 cents per gallon all over town! They couldn't even wait for Memorial Day weekend.
Some say they're just responding to increased demand for summer driving. I say balderdash, they're following OPEC's deathlock stranglehold on the Dow. Summer driving's actually predicted to be lower this year, but the oil companies and station owners are gleefully jumping the gun on declaring the recession over, I guess. (Odd how they all seem to agree on the same amount to hike their prices in one day in our "free market system" isn't it.)
But The Donald's insights may provide a convenient index to how much we've grown the economy since the pits last January. If gas has gone from about a dollar to about two dollars per gallon, then the economic recovery, by the Trump Index, has come back about 50%. Similarly, if it fell from about four dollars per gallon to about two dollars, it has fallen about 50%.
Forget about the Dow, the Consumer Confidence Index, the Gross Domestic Product and all the other imposters that attempt to tell us how well or how poorly we're doing. Trump's OPEC Greed index may be all we need.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
pageamonth.com lives! (but it's lots harder than blogging)
My budget spreadsheet enterprise, formerly at nbkauffman.com (see previous post below), has a new home now at pageamonth.com. I gambled that a more descriptive domain name might better facilitate searches for budget programs. And I set it up with justhost.com, ranked number 1 in Best Web Site Hosting reviews, chose my domain, and set up shop.
This time I'm not just referring potential customers to affiliate sites as I did before because I had no way to accept payments conveniently on my former site. (Snail mail, checks or money orders, etc. ". . .went out the window with the cracker barrel cask and demi-john," as the song says. Today's buyer expects instant access for digital products, and rightfully so.) So I set up a Paypal purchase button on my homepage that accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, or Paypal accounts and triggers an instant download. Most of the rest of my pages provide help with setup, use, budgeting advice and faq's.
Next I needed to try to get listed in the search engines and directories which could help steer traffic to my website, and of course soon got overwhelmed with offers from the legion of advertising and Search Engine Optimization companies who all promise the moon. It's odd that anyone trying to start up an online business of any kind would believe they could move a new budget spreadsheet product, which lists on average about 70,000,000 sites each wanting the user searching for "budget" on Google to click on them alone, into the top ten listings in two days, as many promise and often guarantee.
The hardest part of setting up my new dot.com has been waiting for the various search engines to send their robots to my website and crawl my content, set up my listings, and announce my birth to the world wide web of ecommerce. When I was creating the site for a few weeks, I always had things to be done, and I worked in "terrier mode," as Barb calls it, till it was ready. After I installed my Paypal system, I bought my own spreadsheet twice, once each with my Visa and my Mastercard, to make sure the customer experience was smooth. It didn't cost me very much, about 80 cents each, to test these. I quickly got my spreadsheet onto my own desktop as ordered.
But for nearly a week, while the search engine bots have had their way, I have tried to occupy myself tweeking, refining my pages and my product, and strategizing my marketing. But I hate to wait.
This afternoon about four pageamonth.com finally popped up on MSN's Live Search, my new site's first listing on a major search engine. And this time my search for "pageamonth" didn't direct me to nbkauffman.com, but to pageamonth.com. I've rejected trying to redirect or add nbkauffman.com to my pageamonth.com site as too expensive. To register a second domain for the sake of a redirect almost costs more than the first name. Besides, as I whined in the previous post below, no one besides family visited nbkauffman.com for a whole year when it was on my previous hosting company. There's no reason to think they would on a new one. I'll just have to make sure pageamonth.com moves ahead of it in the listings with use, which I think will happen since anyone who clicks on the now defunct nbkauffman.com will get a 404 page not found error.
I notice Google and Yahoo have now both sent their robots to index my site, so their listings should follow MSN's soon. But I still fear what every ecommerce "startup upstart" fears: no one will visit the shop, no matter what tags we use, no matter where or how much we advertise, no matter how many links to our site we beg from our friends and relations, or even in desperation subscribe to link farms to push up our rankings. Visitors won't come, because of a simple reason: they won't know about us. We'll get lost in the hundred gazillion trillions of other sites doing the same thing, offering similar products, and people won't have the patience to find us after the first ten pages of trying higher-ranked budget sites first.
My original problem, as I see it, remains: No one knows what a pageamonth is. I thought of pageamonthbudget.com instead but concluded it was too long. Now I'm having second thoughts, because at least the latter tells a potential buyer what my product is, and that it's not what the only other pageamonth listed seems to be: a wedding planner.
Unless and until I throw up my hands and end this torture yet again, I'm sure I'll have more perils of pauline to relate about my plunge into ecommerce again through the summer. But this much I can assure my blog readers: ecommerce isn't for the faint of heart. It's not a blog, and you're not going to get curious visitors like a new blog, or higher rankings from creating more posts, text, and photos like a blog. Anyone who expects to get rich for little effort as an online merchant is just nuts. And the only good reason to try it, the one that drives me still, is that he believes in the usefulness and value of his product. I do. I wrote my budget spreadsheet and have used it rather than Quicken or MSMoney or the more sophisticated software packages for many years, wish others would try it, and invite anyone interested to visit the emerging pageamonth.com and have a look, tell your friends, spread the word, buy one for your graduate, and let me know what you think with any suggestions you might have, in comments here or at my email, nbkauffman@yahoo.com. I'll "get a hit out of you," as another song says, and move up my ranking a notch from 69,998,762.
This time I'm not just referring potential customers to affiliate sites as I did before because I had no way to accept payments conveniently on my former site. (Snail mail, checks or money orders, etc. ". . .went out the window with the cracker barrel cask and demi-john," as the song says. Today's buyer expects instant access for digital products, and rightfully so.) So I set up a Paypal purchase button on my homepage that accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, or Paypal accounts and triggers an instant download. Most of the rest of my pages provide help with setup, use, budgeting advice and faq's.
Next I needed to try to get listed in the search engines and directories which could help steer traffic to my website, and of course soon got overwhelmed with offers from the legion of advertising and Search Engine Optimization companies who all promise the moon. It's odd that anyone trying to start up an online business of any kind would believe they could move a new budget spreadsheet product, which lists on average about 70,000,000 sites each wanting the user searching for "budget" on Google to click on them alone, into the top ten listings in two days, as many promise and often guarantee.
The hardest part of setting up my new dot.com has been waiting for the various search engines to send their robots to my website and crawl my content, set up my listings, and announce my birth to the world wide web of ecommerce. When I was creating the site for a few weeks, I always had things to be done, and I worked in "terrier mode," as Barb calls it, till it was ready. After I installed my Paypal system, I bought my own spreadsheet twice, once each with my Visa and my Mastercard, to make sure the customer experience was smooth. It didn't cost me very much, about 80 cents each, to test these. I quickly got my spreadsheet onto my own desktop as ordered.
But for nearly a week, while the search engine bots have had their way, I have tried to occupy myself tweeking, refining my pages and my product, and strategizing my marketing. But I hate to wait.
This afternoon about four pageamonth.com finally popped up on MSN's Live Search, my new site's first listing on a major search engine. And this time my search for "pageamonth" didn't direct me to nbkauffman.com, but to pageamonth.com. I've rejected trying to redirect or add nbkauffman.com to my pageamonth.com site as too expensive. To register a second domain for the sake of a redirect almost costs more than the first name. Besides, as I whined in the previous post below, no one besides family visited nbkauffman.com for a whole year when it was on my previous hosting company. There's no reason to think they would on a new one. I'll just have to make sure pageamonth.com moves ahead of it in the listings with use, which I think will happen since anyone who clicks on the now defunct nbkauffman.com will get a 404 page not found error.
I notice Google and Yahoo have now both sent their robots to index my site, so their listings should follow MSN's soon. But I still fear what every ecommerce "startup upstart" fears: no one will visit the shop, no matter what tags we use, no matter where or how much we advertise, no matter how many links to our site we beg from our friends and relations, or even in desperation subscribe to link farms to push up our rankings. Visitors won't come, because of a simple reason: they won't know about us. We'll get lost in the hundred gazillion trillions of other sites doing the same thing, offering similar products, and people won't have the patience to find us after the first ten pages of trying higher-ranked budget sites first.
My original problem, as I see it, remains: No one knows what a pageamonth is. I thought of pageamonthbudget.com instead but concluded it was too long. Now I'm having second thoughts, because at least the latter tells a potential buyer what my product is, and that it's not what the only other pageamonth listed seems to be: a wedding planner.
Unless and until I throw up my hands and end this torture yet again, I'm sure I'll have more perils of pauline to relate about my plunge into ecommerce again through the summer. But this much I can assure my blog readers: ecommerce isn't for the faint of heart. It's not a blog, and you're not going to get curious visitors like a new blog, or higher rankings from creating more posts, text, and photos like a blog. Anyone who expects to get rich for little effort as an online merchant is just nuts. And the only good reason to try it, the one that drives me still, is that he believes in the usefulness and value of his product. I do. I wrote my budget spreadsheet and have used it rather than Quicken or MSMoney or the more sophisticated software packages for many years, wish others would try it, and invite anyone interested to visit the emerging pageamonth.com and have a look, tell your friends, spread the word, buy one for your graduate, and let me know what you think with any suggestions you might have, in comments here or at my email, nbkauffman@yahoo.com. I'll "get a hit out of you," as another song says, and move up my ranking a notch from 69,998,762.
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