Dawn of the Geeks

Looking at my stats for Free Ringtone Heaven I see a flatline for the first few weeks with few to no hits. Then my server crashes. At first I redirect to here. After seeing how many hits this site is getting with little revenue I switch over to pointing at FRH. There is an very large spike in hits to FRH and a large increase in ad revenue. One week later hits go through the ceiling and ad revenue goes up accordingly.

The reason it turns out is that in only a week Google has placed FRH in the top 10 results in a number of countries for the search term “free ringtones.”

If my server hadn’t crashed it would have taken months to get here but by harnessing the power of large exisiting sites FRH had instant credibility with Google despite being a brand new domain name. Google saw it as a replacement for already highly ranked sites.

The lesson here is that if you’re killing off an existing web-site that’s been long established in Google, redirect the traffic to your new project. You keep the traffic and Google doesn’t hesitate to index the new site.

Indiepedia is the first of what will probably be many new sites being hosted on the alternate server. It’s a complete read-only mirror of Wikipedia. Google’s entire business model is taking other people’s information and sticking ads on it. It works for them so why not?

Not so surprisingly it works rather well.

It turns out the drive that failed is exactly the same model that I bought to replace it. The box on the new drive says 5 year warrenty. I wonder how long the old drive had considering it’s now out of warrenty. Both are Seagate 160GB drives. I’m hoping that the old drive can just be formatted and then reused. We’ll see. One way or anther though, my server will be getting backed up on a regular basis.

on the way to fixing the server. At first I was annoyed that my server’s content drive crashed and I lost three large sites. But after pointing the server at Free Ringtone Heaven and watching ad revenue go way up I’ve decided not to be in a such a hurry to repair the server.

What a lot of spammers do is create large content filled web-sites full of garbage which is then indexed by Google but when visitors find the site they are deluged with ads. My version of open directory was getting around 600 or more unique visitors a day from thousands of different search terms every month. Now that all hits are redirected to Free Ringtone Heaven, FRH is getting all those hits and effectively being found with thousands of different search terms.

The difference between what spammers do and what’s happing with my server however is that Google will be getting redirected just the same as all the visitors. I just happen to not believe in 404 error pages. I think they’re pointless and stupid. Rather than telling a visitor what they were looking for is gone I’m pointing them at something else that might be useful. In the case of Indie-Mobile, those who were searching for ringtones will end up at a very good alternative rathing than just being told the site no longer exists.

So basically now all the searches that ended up at Indie-Mobile and DMOZ (and other minor sites) are being filtered into a single point of entry. The result is a huge increase in ad revenue. And, since Google takes forever to clean up sites that no longer exist from it’s database, I can expect to maintain this increase for at least a month or two.

So the moral of this story is that if a site isn’t making money, crashes, or you just want to move on to something else, don’t kill your old domains. Redirect all the traffic to your new project. You can then benefit from all the existing search engine indexing and visitors which speeds up the process of your new site being indexed.

Just DO NOT show Google one thing and your visitors something else. You will very likely getting dropped from Google.

Google was taking it’s sweet time indexing Free Ringtone Heaven. I think with more than 1000 unique visitors a day, Google will speed it up a bit.

So DMOZ, Indie-Mobile and DevCenter are done for. Indie-Mobile was the most profitable but FRH is doing fine as a replacement. Indie-Mobile will just remain a redirect to FRH so I don’t lose all that indexing on Google before FRH is indexed itself. Once I get the server repaired I’ll be working on whole new projects.

Well shucks. The server’s content drive has crashed and it doesn’t appear that any of the files can be found on it. This means that DMOZ, Indie-Mobile and DevCenter are gone. Which is fine actually. DMOZ was a flatfile based beast. Indie-Mobile was for the most part duplicated with Free Ringtone Heaven. DevCenter was just a mess of files. The only site really bringing in revenue was Indie-Mobile. So for now, any requests made to the alternate server (any *.icarusindie.com:2004 sites) will be redirected to Free Ringtone Heaven.

With the large influx of hits to FRH, I’m hoping Google will finally get busy indexing it.

Indie-Mobile will most likely remain only as a redirect to FRH. I may duplicate FRH as Indie-Mobile. There is a database version of DMOZ sitting on the alternate server that was never put into use. Now it will. DevCenter, Homebrew etc won’t be returning. Coming soon is IndiePedia (a wikipedia mirror). That was actually what I was working on when the server died.

One of the key reasons no backup existed was because of all the excess junk that was being hosted. There really wasn’t much of a reason to back things up. Now I’m going to focus on streamlining and will be keeping a backup of the server just in case.

It’ll be interesting to see if the drive that failed can be formatted and reused. I’ll find out after I replace it with a brand new drive.

A couple years ago now the main drive for my server PC (the drive with all the actual web content on it) decided to die. Except it didn’t really die. It just kind of got confused and forgot where all the files were. Well. It’s happened again. I’m currently in the process of recovering all the files.

Sites affected include Indie-Mobile, DMOZ and DevCenter

No files should actually be lost and fortunatly there are actually three drives in the system. One for the OS and Web Applications (Win2K, Apache, etc), one for the log files and mySQL and one for the web content. I had the sense to do this because I know that the web-content drive is the most abused and most likely to fail and I didn’t care to risk everything on a single drive. Especially where there is a 100% chance that every year or so it will crash.

IIRC all the drives I use are Seagates. I use them because they don’t tend to physically die and they’re cheap. Plus, they now come with a 5 year warrenty. Even when they crash I can recover all the files, format the drive, put the files back and I’m good to go again for another year or so. If revenue keeps going up like it is then I’ll be investing in better hardware. For now it works. Most of the time. The main thing is just having backup drives so if a drive dies I can plug in a mirrored drive and keep going and recover the failed drive without interupting the site.

If you’re looking for ringtones Free Ringtone Heaven is the new edition of Indie-Mobile. Check it out, it’s awesome. It’s cohosted through GoDaddy and is blazingly fast and reliable.

The Hidden Imam

The Hidden Imam, however, will eventually leave his Greater Occultation and appear (zuhur ) to the world of humanity. This return is the most significant event in the future for the Shi’ite faithful and has thunderous eschatological consequences. This return will occur shortly before the Final Judgement and the end of history. Imam Mahdi will return at the head of the forces of righteousness and do battle with the forces of evil in one, final, apocalyptic battle. When evil has been defeated once and for all, the Imam Mahdi will rule the world for several years under a perfect government and bring about a perfect spirituality among the peoples of the world. After the Imam Mahdi has reigned for several years, Jesus Christ will return (raj’a ), as will Husayn and others. It is the return of the dead that falls under the Doctrine of Return; the Mahdi will only appear to humanity.

2 Thesselonians 2:3-4

3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.

“That day” refers to the second coming. It makes sense I suppose. Christ is traced back to Isaac. Muslims trace back to Ishmael. They were two sons of Abraham. It wouldn’t be entirely suprising if the anti-Christ (there are many anti-Christs but the one in this prophecy is the big one, the devil himself) came through the line of Ishmael since Christ came through the line of Isaac.

All *.icarusindie.com:2004 websites (such as Indie-Mobile) use the same database to track ips and whether or not they have Javascript enabled. The results are interesting.

86506 ips counted
42560 ips with javascript enabled.
49.1988994983%

There’s no break down by user agent since I don’t store that information (perhaps I should because it could be interesting) but overall just under 50% of all ips that have visited my sites have javascript enabled. The sites are restricted if javascript isn’t enabled.

It’d be interesting to know why. My assumption is that it’s still a hold over from when everyone was claiming that Javascript is evil and will steal your information. Meanwhile many large companies such as Google and various banking institutions utilize Javascript to create more user friendly and feature rich web-sites.

Javascript is not evil. In the past it has just been the victim of evil people.

Some of the mass media is wetting itself in delight over the “massive” protests put on by illegal immigrants and their supporters. The Arizona State Press for example prints picture upon picture of the protestors and one small picture of a counter protestor flipping the bird. That’s almost a balanced report. When I told my wife I never read The State Press because it’s a Liberal rag she disagreed since I had objected to the editiorals and political cartoons and not the main stories and so I started reading it again so we could talk about things. Well they ran a completely false story (well they got one fact right) about a new bill concerning state sponsored grants and whatnot for students. She no longer wonders why I stopped reading it. They have the same quality of fact checkers that the New York Times has apparently.

When Hurricane Katrina hit there was a lame fund raising event organized by some goofball which involved wasting money on beads and other give aways on top of trying to give students guilt trips in order to get them to donate. Give your money directly to the Red Cross. They don’t waste your donations on stupid trinkets and they don’t say stupid things to try to guilt you into donating. Anyway, the person who did the report told people to contact this guy if they wanted to help but failed to give any contact information.

But anyway, back to Taco Bell. On May 1st there’s a new protest brewing. This protest however is asking that all illegal immigrants stop working for a day. I think they think they’re going to show that without illegals we’d be hurting. I seem to recall a movie called “A Day Without a Mexican” which got into some hot water because people said it was racist. Hyprocicy aside let’s consider where the illegal immigrants work: Filleberto’s and other assorted Mexican businesses which are mostly frequented by Mexicans.

Okay so the cheap burrito shop is going to be closed and all the other Mexican businesses are going to be closed. So that means I’m going to have to eat at Taco Bell, Chili’s, On the Border, etc if I want Mexican food on May 1st. I can feel the pain now.

So let’s see, the first protest showed how many illegal immigrants there are leeching off our society. I think the organizers realized this because the day of the protest it was all about changing the minds of the legislature. However, today the claim is that it was all about “uniting Latinos.” In other words, they know it was a collosal failure. Especially when a poll that 73% of people said the protests would create a backlash. Which isn’t surprising since the whole “protest” looked like just a massive stroll around the block. They only went three miles for pete’s sake. And they didn’t have any powerful speeches.

When African American’s did their thing they walked and walked…and shock…had long powerful speeches on many occasions. Why? Because African Americans had valid grievences. Illegals are just bitching because their free handouts are looking to go away.

So now they’re trying a new tactic: show the US how much they need them.

So remember when you’re chowing down on Taco Bell because Filleberto’s is closed: you need illegal immigrants.

So now that everyone knows what a massive collection of leeches we have draining our society of funds they have no legal rights to because they’re illegal immigrants, I wonder what they’ll try after they demonstrate just how unnecessary they really are to our society?

As soon as there’s a shortage of American citizens to fill all the jobs available I’m sure we’ll miss those illegal immigrants. But since we seem to have too few jobs as it is, good riddance.

Watching historical tapes of the African Americans’ fight for civil rights you just can’t not be impressed by what they did and what they accomplished. I’m watching these “historical” protests by illegals and I can’t stop shaking my head. It’s just so rediculous.

Go get in line or get out.

Read E-Mail, Make Money

InboxDollars is an easy way to make some money just by reading e-mails. Like all such web-sites, the real money comes when you start either activly doing trials with sponsoring companies or get a lot of people to sign up under you.

There are a number of offers which don’t require paying anything and you make a buck or two. Other more lucrative offers require signing up for a service which you can then cancel later.

If you bust through the back door of a club to avoid the bouncer watching the front door you’re not going to be handed free drinks and shown a good time for your “marvelous” act of breaking in. You’re going to at the least be thrown out and possibly arrested.

I’m not sure why illegal immigrants think they have a right to be rewarded for their illegal act of breaking into this country.

Today in Phoenix we had alledgedly 100,000 - 200,000 people marching to protest potential new laws that would result in illegal immigrants being more readily tossed out of the country. I think it did a good job demonstrating exactly why we need these new laws and enforcement to go with them.

An anti-protestor was holding a sign that said “Illegal Immigrants are Criminals” to which some protestor tried to get into a shouting match about how she wasn’t a criminal before being pushed away by an organizer of the protest. Clue by four time: if you break the law, you are a criminal. Therefore by definition, an illegal immigrant is in fact a criminal.

Some were holding signs saying how much voting power they have. Illegal immigrants have no voting power. They have no right to vote as they are not citizens. And if they do vote that’s all the more reason to kick them out. It’s also assumed that all the legal immigrants back them up. This isn’t actually true.

Despite all the people protesting there was little in the way of lost productivity. The only thing reported was that businesses closed not due to lack of employees but lack of customers because of the crowds blocking traffic. When African Americans stopped using the buses, cities lost huge amounts of money. This again shows how weak this giant is. It may be large but it is crippled. African Americans didn’t block customers. They were the customers. The illegals are not the customers of the businesses that closed for the day.

The only businesses affected by the protesters not working were businesses owned by Mexicans. So in fact the only people they are hurting are themselves. African Americans went for over a year not riding a bus. They had the support of many in the community making it possible for them to not need to take a bus. They were not affected at all by their actions. Only those who opposed them were.

And frankly, we’re not afraid of losing the illegals as workers. We have plenty of unemployed citizens that would be more than happy to take those jobs. The only reason they don’t have those jobs now is because illegal immigrants will work for less than minimum wage.

JD Hayworth sees that and isn’t afraid to keep a tough stance on the issue. The protestors claimed that a “sleeping giant” had awaken. When the Japanese woke a sleeping giant, we had the real power to defeat the enemy that had bombed us. We have the legal power to remove the illegal immigrant “giant” no matter how large. Japan picked on someone stronger than them. The illegals are not strong. They are just many.

Some will say those who oppose open borders are hyprocrits because the people who founded the New World just barged right on in and took over.

So? Does that make it right? There’s not too many people I’m aware of that would agree with the founders methods. So in fact they are not hypocrits for opposing people just barging in.

There’s the line to the front door to get in. Use it or get out.