Deeds

After 20 years working with computers and 10 years putting Web pages on the Internet, I finally got around to making my first eBay purchase. My first purchase on eBay helped end a five year search for a 1948 football card of Ray Evans while he was quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Ray Evans not only was an NFL quarterback, but he also the University of Kansas' first All-American in both football and basketball.

Why did I want this football card of Ray Evans? Well besides the fact that he was a great athlete he was also my great Uncle. For the past five years I've searched the Internet looking for this card and ironically it showed up three weeks ago on eBay. The auction ended just in time for me to give the card to his niece for a birthday present.

A few months ago I came across Alexa Web Search for the very first time. Alexa not only offers the usual search engine features, but also additional site statistics dealing with traffic ranking. Naturally, I entered my own site into the rankings to see what I could find. Considering my site has been around for only six months I was impressed that I had a traffic rank under 300,000.

Considering that there are nearly 50 million sites presently on the Internet, a site ranking under half a million is pretty good in my book. I had heard that sites using the Drupal content management system ranked well with the various search engines so I was pleased I chose Drupal for my site. All and all, those first few moments visiting Alexa were spent patting myself on the back for a job well done.

Then to my surprise I noticed that although I had typed in cmsreport.com, Alexa displayed uly.net. Uly.net was a domain I had never heard of before visiting Alexa.com. Worse, it appears that uly.net may have been benefiting from the traffic my site receives.

Traffic Rank for uly.net:

218,200

Where do people go on uly.net?

• cmsreport.com - 98%

Now some of you might be asking yourself, why do I really care how my site is ranked? I'd like to say, it really doesn't matter to me either since I do run this site for "fun". But, I have an ego. I do get a sense of pride for finally having a site where people actually show up and visit. Put it this way, when you host sites that rank above 2 million you feel somewhat rewarded to finally have a site with only six digits in its rank. More importantly, there is benefit to understanding how traffic rankings from sites such as Alexa, Google, and Technorati are being utilized.

As you can tell from the screenshot below, I am using a release candidate of Mozilla's Firefox 2 while viewing and editing content in my Drupal site. If you look closely at the image or click on the image to enlarge it, you will also see that I don't always focus my browsing on Drupal. Take a look at the tabs and you'll see me taking a look at a number of other open source projects (such as Joomla and e107). I have been known to have 20 tabs open referencing just as many different portals, forums, and blog applications as I can find. What can I say, I'm obsessed with Web content management systems (CMS).

A few months ago, I posted that I use Akismet in both Drupal and Wordpress. Akismet is a spam filtering service that can be used in content management systems via plug-ins and modules. The Akismet plugin ships with Wordpress 2, but some setup is required.

While visiting my Wordpress site I noticed the specific number of comment spams the Akismet filter had caught so far and made sure I took a screenshot. The image below was taken by me and I assure you that no altering of the photo was done. I'll let you be the judge whether you agree that spam through site comments represent the evil the number shown implies.

As some of you may have noticed, I returned a few days ago from my low-tech week. It's taking me awhile to adjust being stuck at the computer so you'll have to bear with me. It's been tough enough to spend the PC time at work, so spending my "free time" on the PC is challenging. It's kind of like not eating fast food for a week and then suddently having to ingest it for every meal. Drupal addict and Yoga for Geeks guru, Sarah Pullman, mentioned a similar experience in one of her posts. To add insult to injury, I blew up three sites on my VPS and had to put the pieces back together.

I'm working on an ecommerce site using osCommerce to enable the shopping cart functionality for my client's online store. This is the first time I've used osCommerce so I'm still working on improving my comfort level with the application. osCommerce is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. According to the osCommerce site:

Karen and I posted some new pictures in our photo album. These pictures are from Easter 2006 and the rest of Spring 2006. During that time we celebrated our fifth anniversary and made a trip to Kansas City. The night of our anniversary was spent dining at the Plaza and staying at a nearby hotel. Logan spent the time being entertained by his Grandparents and this was really our first time away from Logan as a couple.

Over the past few weeks, I put together Logan's new swing set. The "two to four hour" project took one full day and several evenings. Logan didn't seem to mind though...

I finally had a chance to pull Thanksgiving photographs from the digital camera. I'll eventually get the pictures online and sent in email when time allows. My family, my sister's family, and my Uncle Ron were in Kansas City for Thanksgiving dinner at my folks. You never know how small a house is until you put 9 people together to share three bedrooms and 1 shower. With Logan and Preston sharing the same room, I'm not sure how much sleep any of us got. However, Preston and Logan seemed to enjoy each other's company and we all enjoyed seeing them together. I have no doubt when the two cousins get together in the coming years that there will be more games and adventure for them to discover.

Over the past several years, I have had a number of people ask me for advice on how to get their own Web site online.  I've been very cautious in the advice I've given.  I simply didn't have the resources available to really get them where they needed to go and stay there.  You would think with more than 20 years of computer experience, helping the government manage their Web pages the past  ten years, and having my own Website would be enough to start my own Internet business.  However, someone who wants to put their business online needs much more than just a single computer geek can provide.  They need 24-hour user support, they need various options in Internet services as their business grows, and most importantly they need to have online security.