Homeschooling & Socialization

We homeschool our kids. Most people think that is a cool thing and want to know more. Some give that quirky grin and bring up the question "The only thing is, are they getting enough socialization?" The answer is "YES". But to back that up, I suggest reading this... http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/blog/?p=629

Reflecting on 2010

Wasn’t 2010 a great year? I hope your 2010 was as rewarding as mine. Both of my sons were Baptized, my Mom is surviving an incurable blood disease + breast cancer and is doing great, my family has grown closer, I am reading the Bible through for the first time, I sponsored a kid in El Salvador, KidsEat4Free.com exceeded all financial and traffic expectations, we are attacking our debt, I am losing weight, my wife and I are very happy together, and the list goes on. It was a good year for me in many ways. It was also a bad year in many ways too that I will not list. Life can be good or bad, it’s up to you to choose what you want to focus on. Just keep in mind, whatever your situation -good or bad- there is a God up in heaven who wants to put his arms around you and cares about you very much.

Did I hit every goal I had in 2010? Nope. But I hit several of them and I have my 2011 goals listed and ready to go. I am very excited to see what  challenges 2011 will bring. Happy New Year everyone!

Bad Store Policies

Earlier this week, I was in Target shopping for a video game for my son for Christmas. I found the one he wanted and then proceeded to use my new iPhone app to scan the barcode on the shelf to make sure I was getting a good deal. The app is very handy –it reads the number, then looks online at other retailers selling the same thing and finds the best prices. I found the same thing at Walmart just down the road for $10 cheaper! Cool! As I was doing this a store associate came up to me and said “You know that’s illegal, don’t you?” To which I replied, “What do you mean?”. He went on to tell me that it is considered “shoplifting”. “But I am not taking anything.” I replied. He said, you are taking “Target’s proprietary number.” He clarified that scanning the number on the package was legit, but the number on the shelf was not. He went on to say that over at his other job at Home Depot, they would have had me walked out of the store if they had caught me doing this. I opted to be nice rather than raise a stink, and politely said thanks for the info, and walked away. The rest of the time we were shopping, I was scouring the Internet trying to find out if what this guy said was in fact true. I found absolutely nothing. I searched more at home and came up empty. The only thing I found was Target’s iPhone app that had a barcode scanner that was written by THE SAME COMPANY that wrote the other app I had! I find it highly improbable that reading a publicly displayed number with my personal cell phone is illegal –maybe against store policy, but certainly not illegal.

The rest of the story: I went over to Walmart to purchase the video game that was $10 cheaper and as it turns out, it was the same price as Target. You see, Walmart deliberately misleads people by displaying a lower price online and then the normal retail price for the exact same item in the store. If you order an online item and have it shipped to the store (which takes several days), you get the benefit of the low price, but they will not give you the online price in the store, unless you ordered it online several days earlier, period. Good store, bad policy.

Waiting on the Search Engines

I’ve done wrong, and I am paying for it big time. In an effort to try to optimize my website in the SERPs (search engine results pages), I made some changes. Simple changes really. I just replaced an underscore in some file names with a dash. You see, search engines will index two words with a dash between them as two separate words, which is what I want. Underscores squish the words together in the indexes making them index as one big word –which is what I don’t want. I built the pages not knowing this, so I fixed that, and for a few short hours, I sailed to the position I wanted in the SERPs. However, I neglected to tell the search engines about it by putting a 301-redirect where the old page had been. So now, all of those hundreds of old pages –that had been indexed, are pages not found in the search engine indexes. The search engines HATE this and penalize dramatically for this hideous sin. I immediately fixed the problem, but now, it is just a waiting game to let the old errors roll out of the cache. That means going from number 2-3 to number 16, which means big time lost revenue. Meanwhile, I have to find alternate ways to lead people to my site, which can be very expensive. Ugh! There is SO much to remember when tweaking a website!

When changing your website…

I recently made a few changes to http://KidsEat4Free.com. These changes were designed to bump me up from #11 on my keyword searches to around #8-9. Instead, after a couple of days, I went to #14!!! Huh?! Upon investigation, as a result of my changes, I found that I had about 1100 new issues due to pages indexed that did not exist anymore (I had failed to put a 301 redirect in). There is so much to remember when working on an existing site, that I felt the need to keep a checklist. I will grow it over time. This is for me, but I hope you can find it useful.

• Page Names: Use dashes instead of underscores, if you want the words in your filename to be thought of as different words. Use underscores if you want the page name to be all one word.
• If you change the name of a page, create a 301 redirect in place of the original page, so the search engines know what happened and won’t penalize you. It’s as simple as this:

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.kidseat4free.com/" );
?>

• Make sure your keywords & meta descriptions match your content.
• Make sure every word in-between your title tags is in the page’s content somewhere.

Building a website

Designing and building a website is almost overwhelming. Nope, I am not talking about a blog, or starting out with a template and just a couple of pages, but designing from scratch a full scale web application. Little did I know when I started out back in 2007 with http://KidsEat4Free.com, what I was getting myself into. Not a big deal, I thought. Just write some HTML and throw some graphics in, right? That was fine until my data became more dynamic. Then came PHP –code that runs on the server that outputs different HTML based upon responses from the user. Then there is  JavaScript when you want to offload processing onto the user’s computer. But what about the graphics? I had to learn GIMP to and graphic design, also had to learn about web colors and choose colors that looked good together. Then there is putting all of those colors and graphics in the right place with CSS, which is code imbedded within the HTML! Now that we have a shell of a website, I had to learn SQL to make sure all of that data was stored in the database tables properly, and how to retrieve it in the right order too.

Now we need people to start using it? I had to learn the elusive art of SEO or “Search Engine Optimization”, which is huge if you want people to find you on Google. Looking back, I wish I had focused more on SEO while I was building the site –rather than after it was already built. There is “on page optimization” (page title, meta content, outbound links, page content), “off page optimization”, (inbound links, page rank), and around 200 other metrics major search engines use to rank you amongst your competition. KidsEat4Free.com currently ranks around 11-14 using keywords “kids eat free”, which sounds great out of 36 million pages, but is really not, since I am currently on SERP (Search Engine Results Page) #2. Only a fraction of people go to page #2 when looking for something. I’ve “SEO’ed” myself silly and now it is just a waiting game to see if any of it worked. Now I am investigating other channels of radio advertising, web advertising, and underwriting,  to let the world know about the site.

Speaking of advertising, learning about advertising was fun. First there was advertising the site, which cost money to put my ads out on other websites around the world. Then there were ad “zones” on my site where I get paid when others click on the ads I display. At first, I only had a couple of ads on the entire site and was doing okay, but when I created many more ad zones, the income more than quadrupled. I was astonished. However, when someone clicks on an ad, it takes them away from your site, so you have to find a balance.

This is just a sample of the road I have travelled with KidsEat4Free.com over the past 3 years. I am sure I have left many things out. I love learning new things, and you certainly have to have a passion for learning to do well as a web programmer / designer. Many folks hire this type of work out, and I will likely wind up doing that someday, but in the meantime, I am really enjoying the ride.

The Yard Plan for the Spring

For too many years my lawn has been slowly becoming more and more weed infested. It was beautiful when I first moved in, and since it is too late this year, I am going to take 2011 to get it back. Here is my plan for Spring 2011 (don’t want to re-sod the entire yard, or pay someone else to do the work.) Shout out if you know of a better way to do this or have any better ideas.

1. Mow grass very short & bag it up (i.e.: don’t let clippings go back into the yard.)
2. Rent a core aerator and do the entire yard.
3. Rent a verticutter and pull up the dead stuff.
4. Clean up the debris.
5. Seed the entire yard using either a tall fescue (hearty) or KY Bluegrass. lay it down at 8 lbs. per 1000 square feet. Follow up – how big is my yard?
6. Verticut the yard again perpendicular to the first time.
7. Lay down 6/20/20 fertilizer.
8. Water every day for 3 weeks.

Other ideas:

• To cut down on the pain of watering, use “RainMaker” -timed release watering pellets.
• Lay down humate / charcoal after step 2.

Hopefully after doing all of this (and spending about $300 at Art’s Rentals & Lowes), I will have a yard that looks a little more presentable.