Checking for hot wires with your finger isn’t the best idea in the world.
I watch my website hits pretty closely. Mostly I monitor my Webalizer stats on my Glowhost account and watch the average visits per day on a monthly basis, but I glance over at the main hit counter on my blog control panel every time I log in to post a new blog. And two days ago, I crossed the 100,000 threshold. This is a hell of an accomplishment for me. Sure, it’s “hits” instead of “unique visits,” and hits include image downloads, page call-ups, etc. instead of a single set of eyeballs. But it’s still impressive.
Unfortunately, hits doesn’t tell you whether you’re getting eyeballs, bots, or spam. And when I check on my account stats, it appears that I get more hits from bots and spammers than I get from real eyeballs. Unfortunately.
If anyone knows a good freeware program that can differentiate between real people visits and bot/spider visits, let me know. I could generate an Excel spreadsheet and filter the raw data myself, but I’m not that ambitious.
100,000 is still a big deal. I just wish they were all real people.
Never assume that the people who wired your house did so in a logical fashion.
You know you’re small fry when you ask for a “bunch” of 2 cent stamps and the first clerk asks “What’s a bunch?” and the second suggests “80,000.”
(Yes, they did have someone come in and ask for 10,000 or 80,000 2 cent stamps recently. Yowzer.)
Today, the Denver Post ran a story about how high-school students in charter schools don’t do as well as their public school counterparts. According to the article, “charter school advocates say that… charter high schools may appeal to students who don’t necessarily fit into a traditional high school.” Students like those under principal Liz Aybar, who runs a low-performing charter school in DPS, P.S. 1. She’s quoted in the article as saying “There are students from very difficult backgrounds, students who haven’t had success in school; they may have been in the juvenile justice system.”
This is another example of why charter schools aren’t the panacea for improving education that the supporters of the CSAP and grading schools think it is.
But what’s remarkable is this – if an article pointed out that public schools with students from similarly difficult backgrounds have similarly lower CSAP scores, the school and the teachers would be blamed for the low scores, not the students’ backgrounds. Similarly, do you think it would be ok to point out that maybe elementary charter school students do better because the students in elementary charter schools have generally better backgrounds than students in public elementary schools? Backgrounds like having parents who are engaged in and value their child’s education? Of course not – when charter schools do better, it’s because the schools are better, but when charter schools do bad, it’s because the students aren’t as good.
And that, folks, is rank hypocrisy.
It’s not the quantity of the work that matters, but the quality.
I offer the following “speech” to any Democrat or independent politician who wants an idea of how to reframe the national security issue and yank it out from under a Republican opponent.
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National security is a term that the Republicans and the Bush Administration love. Why? Because the conservative national leadership can do almost anything they want when they can say that it falls under the umbrella off “national security.”
But even more than that, the Republicans love talk of national security for one reason: they want you to be afraid. They want you to be scared when you walk through the TSA checkpoints at the airports. They want you to be afraid that you’ll get blown up on your way to work. They want you to be afraid that illegal immigrants will poison our food supply. Because history has shown that people who are afraid vote for politicians who offer them safety.
For that reason, the Republicans have done everything they can to keep you terrified. Because if you’re afraid, you’ll vote Republican. Not only that, but the Republicans have used your fear as an excuse to do bad things. Because they’ve convinced us to be afraid, we don’t complain when they torture people in our name. Because we’re afraid, we don’t complain when the President wiretaps American citizens without warrants and against the Constitution Because we’re afraid, we don’t mind when our Congressmen suggest spending billions of dollars we don’t have fortifying our borders to keep out illegal immigrants.
I think our government has done a great job of keeping terrorists out of the United States. I think we do need to keep our borders secure, and our airports and subways safe. And I don’t blame people for being afraid. But I, for one, am tired of being afraid. I’m not going to let someone else tell me when I should be afraid. And there is no way on this earth that I’m going to let some politician my fear to further their political agenda.
I refuse to live in fear any more. I will no longer fear the terrorists. But more importantly, I will no longer allow politicians to demand that I huddle in terror in my home. I will no longer jump when the Republicans shout “boo!” And I will no longer permit fear-mongering Republicans to use our national fear as an excuse to get away with murder.
Stand up and tell the terrorists that they don’t scare us any more. Stand up and tell the Republicans that they will no longer use fear to strip away our freedoms. Join me in standing up and announcing to the world that the United States is no longer afraid.
I’ve been interested in Google’s AdSense service for a while now. If you’re not familiar, AdSense is a way for a website owner like myself to make a little money from adverstisements. It basically works like this:
I sign up with AdSense and offer to allow “targeted” advertisements to appear on my site. Google scans the most recent posts on my blog, for example, and puts up ads that are related in some way to the topics and text of my blogs. For example, my George Lakoff posts might get an advertisement for a Lakoff-authored book at Amazon.com. A discussion of global warming might get a paid link to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. And every time someone clicks one of those links, I’d get paid a small amount by Google into a PayPal or similar account.
Not bad.
The problem is that I don’t get a ton of traffic here at the Daedalnexus. Sure, as I get more active in other forums, I am able to temporarily drive traffic to my blog, but I doubt that even 25% of my 135 average daily visits are from real people who’d actually bother to click a link anyway - the bulk of my visits are probably spambots and spiders. On the other hand, my low expectations of any income from my site is simply paying for the monthly hosting fees and annual website registration fees, and that might be possible. Well, defraying some of the hosting fees, anyway.
Which brings me to this: Would I be selling out if I joined the legions of bloggers and websites on the shadow Google payroll? Since Google tailors their ads to my content, rather than the other way around, AdSense strikes me as pretty harmless. On the other hand, I got into blogging initially to vent my frustrations and lately to try and develop convincing arguments and strategies to change the world, not to make money. But, back on the first hand again, is there really any reason not to make money on something when given the chance?
I’m not really sure. We shall see.