Surf the Mind

Archive for March, 2008

In preparation for my road trip next week, I picked up a new, what should be screaming fast, laptop yesterday. It was preloaded with Vista, which I’ll just have to suffer with for now since not all the fancy doodads on this thing have XP drivers, so I knew it wasn’t going to be quite as screaming as it would be with just XP, but I wasn’t prepared for the sluggish brick that all the bloatware turned it into.

The first thing I did was burn recovery CDs… after all, when you start wholesale deleting and uninstalling things, you never know what can go wrong.

The last laptop I bought required me to burn recovery CDs too, so I was prepared. I picked up a spindle of blank CDs but just about choked on my coffee when the program requested SEVENTEEN (17) CDs!!! I grabbed the spindle of blank DVDs instead, and burned the bloatware to three of those.

What the heck can they be adding to this poor laptop to fill 17 CDs! Even the most loaded up Linux distro, with Open Office, Gimp and seventeen million other applications I’ll never use, include only six CDs.

Ah well, after two and a half hours of burning, I finally started removing apps.

Norton’s gone, all of HP’s little helper apps are trashed, the lame game stuff is removed, and all of Microsoft’s little helpful ‘extras’ are eliminated.

And another two hours are gone.

Finally, I get around to installing my own apps: Firefox, Thunderbird, Homesite, Filezilla, Zonealarm Suite, Stylus Studio, Open Office.

Another hour and a half gone.

Another hour customizing everything and adding firefox plugins, custom home tabs in custom profiles in firefox, configuring email, bookmarking the important stuff…. and it’s finally done.

And this was the laptop that was going to help me be productive.

Sheesh.

HP COMPAQ NC6000 N141X7-L06 14.1" LAPTOP LCD SCREEN US $39.99 End Date: Monday Sep-06-2010 15:36:16 PDT Add to watch list

HP Compaq NC6400 Core 2 Duo 2 Ghz DVDRW WiFi Laptop XP US $202.50 (18 Bids) End Date: Monday Sep-06-2010 15:36:36 PDT Add to watch list

OPTICAL BLACK MOUSE OF AUTO SHAPE FOR HP LAPTOP NEW US $0.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Monday Sep-06-2010 15:36:43 PDT Add to watch list

Add Ebay to YOUR blog

Today via, MindValleyLabs, I learned about Quantcast.com.

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence. The free service empowers publishers to demonstrate the unique value of their audiences by tagging their websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

I plugged in the URL of my flagship site and was amazed at all the information about my audience that I could immediately glean from Quantcast’s reports.

I was actually shocked at how young my visitors are, and now that I know, I feel I can target ads and products toward them much more effectively.

I also saw that I have a high percentage of ‘drive by’ traffic compared to loyal visitors. Adding a blog or forum will, hopefully, alter that ratio.

Give it a try and see how your perceptions of your audience differs from Quantcast‘s profile of your site. You might be surprised too.

While I prefer to take my Saturdays completely away from my computer, Sundays usually include a little bit of work and a little surfing for fun time.

This Sunday, my leisurely surfing time was done by clicking Entrecards, dropping as I went. (Ick, that sounds a little vulgar, doesn’t it!?)

Here are my favorite finds from my crawl:

1. Marketing Tools Review has this mother of all Adwords tips lists. If you can’t find even one tip in there to make your day, you’re a greater Adwords expert than I. (Well, that’s not saying much, really. But check it out anyway.)
2. Telecommuting Diva offers her list of 4 warning signs of a Work at Home scam. I’ve met more than a few people taken in by these sorts of scams over the years. Reading a warning list like this might have helped a few of them. The rest have never listened to any good advice before in their lives. It’s not likely they’ll start now.
3. Think Blogger experiments with Entrecard Chain Dropping with some interesting methodology and encouraging results. The carpal tunnel effect will slow him down before long, I’m sure, so the rest of us can catch up.
4. Justin Khoury interviews Digg user msaleem. While it’s not the most probing interview I’ve ever seen, there are a few tips to pick up by reading this interview with Digg’s second most successful user.
5. JTPratt discusses ways to track search engine rankings on your blog. I should take his advice. I am very bad at tracking my blogs, but heck, I’m still not even sure WHY I blog. I think you can tell from the Adsense placements here that it sure ain’t the revenue.
6. Canucklehead reminds Entrecard users to step away from the computer now and then. Not sure what he’d say to those folks who blog in order to get away from their families. That’s not me. I think.
7. And although I’m a godless heathen now, I was raised Christian enough to appreciate Church Jokes. “…the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?” Come early and listen to our choir practice.” See, I’m still laughing

Thank you Google. Although I knew a lot of the old links pointing here were still active, looking at a “No PageRank information available” for this site in my toolbar was getting me down.

Now that they’ve got some information, they’ve decided I’m worth a 4. Not as good as I was ranking when I deleted this site, but respectable nonetheless.

Alexa too, is showing signs of improvement.

When I re-installed the blog on SurfTheMind.com, Alexa had me ranked at around 2.5 million. My 3 month average still isn’t great, but at least my 1 week stats are showing me at just over 500,000. Not a bad place to be a mere two weeks after deciding to start blogging again.

The PR I’m going to attribute to existing links that hadn’t gotten changed. The Alexa improvement I’m mostly attributing to Entrecard, which I’m finding to be an absolutely fascinating tool.

I’m still a little too busy to blog daily, so I can’t imagine my stats will skyrocket any time soon, but the progress is reassuring that I didn’t destroy a perfectly respectable, high ranking site with reasonable traffic that day when I hit the delete button.