Untwisted Vortexdsl

Necessary Time Off

RT Cunningham — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:32:21 +0000

Do you ever feel like your rowing a boat upstream or climbing a hill that never ends? That's what I feel like sometimes. Well, I took 2 days off from posting anything at all so that I could put things in perspective. Usually when I take time off from posting, it's because I don't have a choice due to power outages or a lack of DSL connectivity. This is one of the few times I purposely didn't write anything.

Not only did I not write anything, I refrained from responding to comments and email messages as much as I could. I don't normally do that either. In order to see where I stand, I needed to ignore as many things as I could get away with ignoring.

Traffic Patterns

Apparently, all of my work and experimentation with traffic generation methods have paid off. I mentioned before that my daily traffic was around 300 unique visitors per day. That number has increased, in a very short time, to more than 400. Even the weekend traffic didn't dip below 300.

Of course, some of the merging of content from the other two blogs probably has a little to do with it. It can't be that much, though, because the combined traffic from both of those blogs was less than 35 unique visitors per day combined. Not only that, but I haven't moved even half of the posts yet.

Niche Blogs

I now have 3 niche blogs online. The first one, which was online 2 days before the second one, is only halfway indexed while the second one is completely indexed except for the home page (go figure). I expect the third one to index within a week. All 3 of them are included in my Google Webmaster Tools account, Google Analytics and Yahoo Site Explorer.

The first 2 blogs are already receiving a very small amount of traffic. Some of the posts are appearing in the Google SERPS already, but nowhere near the first page. This kind of thing takes more than just a few days, so I'm not chomping at the bit quite yet. Besides, I didn't pick extremely good keywords to target on those.

The 3rd blog, on the other hand, should see quite a bit of activity once it gets indexed. I'll write about all 3 (or more) at the beginning of July and provide some of the stats I'll have by then.

Research

Most of my time was spent doing research. Writing articles for niche blogs doesn't take very long since I type more than 60 words per minute. I found 3 more keywords to work on. Actually, I found 4 in the last few days, but I gave one away to someone else because it's a niche I really don't want to work, no matter how well it would do.

Researching keywords was not my main focus.

Doing Things That Are Different

That was my main focus. I'm quickly growing weary of writing about writing, writing about blogging, writing about search engines and the topics that bring in a few social visitors. I'm at the point in my blogging career where I don't want to write about the same things all the time. That's what niche blogging is for, not this blog.

In fact, I'm probably going to write more food and health-related articles in the future, or possibly more tech-oriented stuff. Perhaps I'll write more scripts… I just want to do things that are different from my own normal routines.

Projects

I have some ongoing projects that I've neglected and plan to do a lot of catching up this week. If I skip another day of posting, it'll be for that reason alone.

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Link Clustering and Getting a Piece of the Action

RT Cunningham — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:49:31 +0000

When you hear of websites that get thousands of unique visitors per day, wouldn't you like to get a piece of the action? Even a small piece of the action? If you concentrate on link clustering while writing, on a continuous basis, you'll begin to receive website traffic like that. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.

If you don't know what link clustering is, you need to read Courtney Tuttle's article, "Introduction To Link Clusters". He gives a detailed description of what link clustering is all about, and I'm going to give you a real world example in detail.

I'm going to use my previous article, "Broadband and High Speed Internet Choices in Olongapo City, Philippines", as my example. In a future article (probably within a month), I'll report the results of my efforts.

The Post Idea

I've written many times about my DSL connection problems. In fact, I wrote about problems getting any kind of [high_speed_internet] service as early as September of 2006. You won't find those articles on my blog, however, because I included the information in my example and then used the WordPress Redirection plugin to redirect the now non-existent URLs to it.

I'm not sure exactly why I picked broadband as my latest topic, but it's probably because I saw so many references to it while browsing through my archives. I ended up redirecting 8 old posts to the new one.

Composing the Post Title

Some people like to write the article first and give it a title after they're finished. I'm one of the people who likes to start with the title. After all, I know what I'm going to be writing about before I even start.

I started with "Broadband and High Speed Internet Choices in Olongapo City". I then went to Google's keyword tool to check for synonyms, advertiser competition, and search volume for broadband. I made a list of all of the keywords and terms that had a solid bar for advertiser competition and a half bar for search volume.

I then went to SpyFu to see what advertisers were paying for those keywords and terms. There wasn't any sense in targeting keywords that don't pay very well.

The final step was to use the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool to see which keywords and terms were searched for the most. It turned out that "high speed Internet" was searched for twice as often as "broadband", so I included it in the title. While I was at it, and since I had left it out, I added "Philippines" to the title. There were actually more searches for "Philippines" than "high speed Internet".

Okay, there were more keywords I targeted, but they were in the article and not the title.

Creating the Link Clusters

After I finished the article, I went back and changed a few of the keywords around. These were the keywords I wanted to target, most of them in the title. Then I started scanning my archives for articles I knew would have the same keywords and terms.

I linked 9 articles for some of the keywords to my example article and 10 to the rest. This article has link number 10 for 3 of the keywords. Of course, I have an advantage over many of my peers. I have over 1200 posts and pages on this blog to choose from, a blog that isn't 2-years old yet.

Getting a Piece of the Action

According to what I found, these are the estimated daily searches for some of the keywords and terms I targeted:

broadband – 790
high speed Internet – 1591
Philippines – 2284
DSL – 1926

I'm not expecting to get a chunk of the exact keywords, but I am expecting to get a lot of searches for related terms. I don't want to get all the action. I just want a piece of it.

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Is It Fixed Yet?

RT Cunningham — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:48:15 +0000

I was going to title this post as "The Return of Dumb and Dumber", but thought it was better to leave that alone. Back in November, Dumb and Dumber spent some time at my house checking my internal wiring and such. They didn't fix my DSL connectivity problem.

A few days ago, I mentioned that I had spoken to "Doofus" as part of my first gray matter exercises post. On the day before yesterday (it's after midnight now and I have to remember which day I'm on), an unnamed technician called and asked if my connection was working right then. I told him yes, but that it wouldn't be in a few minutes. He said he'd check some other things. Since I didn't get another call within a couple of hours and the end of their work day was nearing, I called "Bonehead" and told her that I lost the connection less than 5 minutes after the unnamed technician called. I did more than banter with her; I exercised my balls of steel and had her apologizing multiple times. I explained that I'd been dealing with this crap for more than 4 months now. She assured me that the situation would be resolved soon.

I was up all night after that for 2 reasons: 1) Nighttime is only time I ever had a stable connection, and 2) My wife calls me on the IM at night and keeps me tied up for hours. Yesterday morning, after sleeping a mere 3 hours, my mother-in-law rudely awakened me by ringing my doorbell many, many times. As I staggered to the front door, ready to swear at the top of my lungs, I spotted Dumb and Dumber through the window standing off to the side. She was saved from my wrath.

After Dumb and Dumber spent more than 4 hours checking wiring again, they found a grounded wire at the nearby junction box. The ground was between that junction box and the primary junction box about a half-kilometer away — it wouldn't have affected my connection in any way. Dumb and Dumber thought they had the situation resolved with that and hooked their company laptop to where the line comes into my house, bypassing any wiring to my jacks. They got a connection on the first try and one of them had the audacity to tell me that the problem was with my internal wiring somewhere. Yeah, sure, right. He changed his tune when the connection suddenly dropped about 3 minutes later.

I went away (in order not to expose my temper) while they talked to the main office. In fact, I left the house and went off to visit neighbors. About an hour later, one of the technicians called me out on the road and told me the situation was resolved. I went back inside and they explained that they changed a line at the ISP, a port at the ISP, and the IP from the modem to the ISP and everything started working properly. In other words, they put my modem on a different node. In one of my past lives I was an IT manager for a huge telemarketing company, so I knew the nature of the problem from the very first time it happened and explained it to Doofus back then. It took them 4 months to figure it out themselves. The problem is that an Internet cafe was put on the same node with me back in September and it ate up all the available connections during the daytime hours that it was open for business.

I spoke to Doofus on the phone just before Dumb and Dumber left and verified that the connection was working. Is it fixed yet? I won't be sure until a week has passed without any down time that isn't caused by external forces such as a power outage, high voltage spike, or something of that nature. I have my fingers and toes crossed, my lucky rabbit's foot is losing all its hair from all the rubbing and my good luck pendant is starting to tarnish. I can only hope for the best and if everything works out, I will not longer be blogging as a vampire.

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Gray Matter Exercises #1

RT Cunningham — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:53:02 +0000

This is the first of what will probably be many miscellaneous item posts. It's a collection of thoughts, rants, and what have you that I don't want to dedicate to individual articles or posts. Take what follows in the context in which it's meant. When in doubt, look at the image. I think it's appropriate sometimes.

A Little Whine (or Whinge)

Okay, so I can't get online every day. It's not my fault! I didn't ask to get sick and I didn't ask Subictel to give me poor DSL service. In fact, after the fiasco yesterday of only having 2 hours of uptime in 24 hours, I complained rather loudly to the technical support representative (hereafter to be known as "Doofus"). I will be complaining to Doofus every day until Sunday (I can't complain on Sunday because it's never down on Sunday) and if that doesn't work, I'll be complaining to his supervisor (hereafter to be known as "Bonehead") next week. Then, if that still doesn't work, I'll move up the chain of command and let them deal with Bonehead and Doofus.

Yes, even outside of the military, there's always a chain of command in place.

UHT Milk

UHT stands for "ultra-high temperature" or "ultra-heat treatment", depending on where you see it. The local Filipinos seem to think it's something fairly new (as in the last 10 years). Well, they're wrong! We had UHT milk on our ship when I was deployed in 1983. The brand was "Magnolia" which is still sold today. The brand I prefer to stock up on (and it has a non-refrigerated shelf life of at least 6 months) is "Cowhead". Cowhead, among other brands, is imported from Australia. It doesn't sell well in America, but it would have saved me from throwing out milk that soured within days of purchase.

Is it healthy? Who knows? Who cares? I'll probably get run over by a reckless Filipino jeepney driver long before I'll ever have to worry about something like this.

Don't Ever Call Me A Liar (Unless You Can Prove It)

I may neglect to tell the truth at some time, but I will never intentionally lie about anything. I swear I can't remember where it was, but my blog reviews were pointed out as paid reviews. The commenter obviously had never read my blog with any kind of objectivity and was so far up Google's butt, I didn't know where Google started and this guy ended.

The point is that I have never required anything in return for a blog review and I never will. Now, if you offer me money to do one, I won't turn it down — that would just be foolish.

Reconsideration

I did it. I received payment for the last PayPerPost sponsored post that I wrote and then put the nofollow attribute on all the links. I immediately went to Google's webmaster tools and requested reconsideration. I no longer have even one post in the "Sponsored Posts" category.

Just to make something clear: This is a preemptive measure. If Google is capable of lowering pageranks, what's to stop them from lowering my posts in the index? I don't, and I never will, care about my Google PageRank. I'm attempting to protect the integrity of the search results for my blog.

The Passing of Postum

Robert Campbell gets around and he must really like the taste of Postum. I saw the comment but didn't think anything of it because I never was a Postum fan, having only tasted it once more than 23 years ago.

I was trying to figure out why I was seeing so many searches for "Postum" and "postum coffee" in my stats log. So I did a search of my own. It seems that Postum was a favorite of Utah state residents and they're lamenting the fact that Kraft Foods pulled the plug on production after quite a long time. Color me stupid, but wouldn't it make sense to maintain production but market it in one of the few places where it might be considered a staple?

Nobody ever said that American food companies had the best and the brightest people on board. I think Google claims that fact.

Internet Piracy

My outlandish (or so it would seem) article titled "Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal" still continues to draw a lot of search engine traffic. There's a good reason for that. Peer-to-peer file sharing is changing the way the entertainment industries are doing business, although they're very sluggish about it and fighting it all the way.

The same thing happened when books started being printed on printing presses a few centuries ago. "Steal This Film II" is a movie worth downloading with a bittorrent client, even if you don't use a bittorrent client on a regular basis. It's an eye-opener.

Favorable Responses

Yes, I noticed! Many of you enjoyed my article on how to make money online and the article in which I asked "am I boring you?".

Well, I plan to do many more articles like those because I really enjoy seeing some of the reactions. Also, look for more link frenzy-style posts (including the backlink bonanza thing) and even some new blog drive-bys (when I get a long, steady and stable connection for more than 24 hours in one stretch).

Posting Frequency

The underlying theme here seems to be my not so high speed Internet service. Nonetheless, I'm planning to post three times per day until the situation is resolved in one way or another. It never fails that either the ISP, the electric company, or inclement weather will trip me up on any kind of schedule — so trying to maintain one for the foreseeable future is out of the question.

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Dumb and Dumber: Technical Morons

RT Cunningham — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:18:39 +0000

My DSL connection was intermittent and so bad for the last 24+ hours that I was lucky to have a connection for more than 60 seconds. When I said excuses are like anal sphincters, I didn't know that excuses from SubicTel were the only thing they knew how to do well.

I called them on Tuesday. They showed up today, on Friday afternoon. There were two technicians. "Dumb" plugged his meter into the phone jack and saw that I didn't have a connection. He sent "Dumber" to the main junction box to refresh the wiring (replace corroded connections, etc.) while he refreshed the wiring outside my house where the phone line comes in.

When all of that failed to correct the problem, Dumber called the main office. I listened to the exchange, as difficult as it was since he spoke no English, and realized immediately that he was clueless when he turned to me and asked me if I had the PC going through a router. I looked at him and could barely contain my laughter. Instead I said, "Um, no, do you see a router?"

What happened next nearly made me flip my lid. Dumber was on the phone with his main office and they told him to see if he could use the web browser after they made some adjustments. He was sitting at my PC and closed Firefox. He then started searching through my start menu and couldn't seem to find what he was looking for. He turned to me again and told me he wanted to get on the Internet. I pointed at the Internet Explorer icon in the quick launch area of the task bar. He clicked on it and it came up. Of course, Google Search is the page it was set for and it was being displayed. He then typed the word "internet" in the search block and clicked search.

After 30 minutes of watching him do various things, none of which were related to the actual cause of the problem, both Dumb and Dumber got up to leave. They both told me to call the main office at the speed dial number of 179 if I had any more problems. Then they left. I can't tell you if my connectivity problem is resolved. It seems to be working right now. I guess I'll find out within the next three days (it always works on Sundays).

I'm just wondering what kind of education you need to have to work at SubicTel. How could they send a technician who doesn't even know what the Internet is, much less how to navigate the web? I feel extremely insulted by their lack of technical knowledge, so much so that I'm not giving them another chance. The next time I have a connectivity problem, I'm heading to Globe to get set up for their wireless connection service. If it turns out that it works for me, I'll take the DSL modem and the assorted wiring and drop it all off at the SubicTel office as quickly as I can.

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Excuses Are Like Anal Sphincters…

RT Cunningham — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:59:32 +0000

The title is a mild way of starting off this sentence: Excuses are like assholes. Everyone has them and they all stink. I don't like making excuses, especially when I'm making them on behalf of someone else.

Some of you may wonder why I don't respond to email or blog comments in a timely manner. You know I'm up and around, awake and ready to go. It's not my fault I'm not responding as quickly as I should and I'm not making any excuses for my Internet provider. Subictel sucks to no end. For a minimum of 8 hours per day, during the day, I've had an intermittent connection where I'm connected maybe 10 minutes per hour (if I'm lucky — I've been trying to post this for over two hours). I have a decent connection from 10 pm through 10 am, on holidays and on Sundays.

I have a multimeter here. Rather, my brother-in-law June does. I've been using it off and on for the last month to measure the voltage and amperes coming through my 220V line (I have a 110V line also). Despite what the Subictel technical support representative told me (and I bought off on it at the time), there isn't a power issue. I suspect there's another issue, but I'm not technically inclined enough to put it into words.

Earlier today, I called Subictel and gave them a piece of my mind. They said they would start a "job order". I've heard this line more times than I can count. I have the current monthly bill in my possession. I'm not going to pay it until they fix my connection, one way or another. This isn't the US. They can't ruin my credit.

Until very recently, I was stuck with two choices: 1) Use a prepaid dial-up card and 2) Subictel DSL. A third option appeared a month or two ago that I couldn't pursue because of my one-year contract with Subictel. Globe broadband is available with a Wi-Fi connection. They even provide a router so that more than one computer can be connected. One of my neighbors, Joel, is using it now. He gets more than 3 megabits per second while I get 1.5 megabits on a good day (or night I should say). He pays 2000 pesos per month. I pay 2500 pesos per month. Who's getting the better end of the stick? He is!

For my Filipino friends: If you live in Olongapo City and you have broadband choices, skip Subictel. Their service is horrible and they make nothing but excuses for it. What do you expect from an ISP who hasn't updated their website since 2002?

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When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Go Shopping

RT Cunningham — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:32:10 +0000

My day started out with the typical routine of watching my DSL connection flake out beginning at about 11:30 am. My mother-in-law popped in about noon to let me know that the bank will be closed for the next two days, starting tomorrow, as part of the annual celebration of the "Day of the Dead". They don't celebrate Halloween here.

Great! That means I can't go to the bank tomorrow and withdraw my monthly pension. I won't be able to do it until Monday. In the meantime, I need some food in the house. I have enough to last until Saturday but not until Monday. It looks like I have to dip into my son's tuition savings to get groceries. So… I'm headed to do grocery shopping this afternoon.

Hopefully, by the time I return, my DSL connection will be stable again. Fat chance of that happening.

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Blog Reviews and Blog Drive-Bys

RT Cunningham — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:49:55 +0000

When I made my comment for a review offer, I didn't realize so many people would take me up on it. With free services like The Fair Review Project and reviewback waiting for people to join and exchange reviews, I was surprised. I have one more blog review to complete and then I'm joining services like those, while continuing to honor my offer.

Incidentally, my last batch of blog drive-bys was published on August 15th, about the time my list of reviews started growing and my DSL connection started disconnecting on a daily basis. I miss doing the drive-bys. If I was somehow limited to only one posting per day, I would choose the drive-bys. For those of you "not in the know", my blog drive-bys are almost exactly like the speed-linking posts that other bloggers do. The difference, I think, is that I spend more time selecting good articles which are not only from prominent bloggers.

My plan is to finish that last review today and then to start on the next batch of drive-bys. My source for blogs to look at is coming from the commenters on this blog from the month of July forward, which haven't been included in previous drive-bys. I'll also include a blog with something worth mentioning when I spot it and it won't necessarily come from my comments. The blog most likely will have been mentioned before.

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A Not-Quite-So Rambling Update

RT Cunningham — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:52:25 +0000

I spoke, or wrote rather, a little too soon. Almost 20 minutes after my previous post, my DSL connection went bye-bye. I had intermittent connections for the next 8 hours. It was more "no connect" than "connect". I couldn't load a complete page most of the time before the connection was gone again. I called Subictel at 2:30 pm and the technician told me they would monitor the line and call me later. They never called. This means it will go down again today between noon and 2:30 pm and will be down for another 6 to 8 hours. I will, once again, give them a call. If this connection problem isn't rectified soon, I don't know what I'm going to do (besides visit and choke the person in charge).

I guess my wife worked out some problems on her end and won't be coming home soon. Damn.

I'm going to get a few things done before I lose my connection again, so I'm cutting this short, like right here.

(Update: After calling and speaking to several people, it turns out it isn't the fault of the DSL provider. It's the lower voltage being put out by the electric company in the afternoon. Fixing it is going to take more than I thought.)

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A Rambling Update

RT Cunningham — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 05:53:29 +0000

It appears that my DSL connection is back to normal. The key word is "appears". It didn't disconnect at all yesterday from what I could tell. A Subictel technician called me this morning to ask me if my service was operating correctly and I told him about yesterday. He canceled the "job order" and told me to call if the disconnects started happening again. Prior to yesterday, the disconnects were routinely happening between the hours of noon and 6 pm on some days and between 3 pm and 9 pm on other days, almost always for exactly six hours. To me, it was if the service was being intentionally interrupted for whatever reason(s). The fact that it magically restored itself tells me it was something on their end causing the problem in the first place. Oh well, I have the speed-dial number ready to call on a moment's notice.

My laptop computer is not healed. When I put it back together again, the fan worked. It worked for about 10 minutes and I haven't felt any vibrations from it since then. I have a software temperature gauge on my taskbar, over in the corner, giving me a constant readout. If it reaches a certain temperature, I have to stop. The machine has already shut down twice on me while editing an image. If I let the machine cool off for a few minutes, the temperature stays in normal operating ranges.

I spent part of yesterday and part of today working on the other blog and getting it set up with plugins and such. The Redirection plugin works perfectly. I redirected the oldest three movies in the movie category to rewritten articles on the new blog. If you want to take a look, VideoTyme is live. There's at least one addition to the second sidebar that I need to make and there may be other things I need to do, but it seems to be working just fine.

I did calculations last month on bandwidth usage as well as eyeballing my bandwidth usage this month and I should come no where close to using it up with the current setup. I miscalculated at times before and thought I was using much more than I was. Color me stupid. Anyway, my hosting plan includes unlimited addon domains and it wasn't hard to set one up once I realized I was an idiot. I kept getting a blank page and discovered the new blog didn't automatically select the default theme.

It's extremely hot today, so it's difficult to sit in front of a hot computer and do much of anything. I plan to continue with blog reviews and other assorted things when it cools down tonight. A big thanks to everyone who supported me and UV for the past few days.

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