Yard Sales
When I was 8 or 9, my grandmother used to take me yard selling. We’d get the newspaper on Friday afternoon and make our plan. We’d pick which ones were the best, and plan the schedule around them.
We would map out all of them and make an order we’d hit them, the best ones we’d hit as early as possible. I remember waking up when it was still dark and getting to the best yard sale by 7 AM so we’d get the pick of the best stuff.
Fast forward about 20 years.
I have gone yard selling a few times in my adult life… most of the time by accident. I’d just drive by and see a sign, so I’d stop to see if there was anything good. Most of the time, the good stuff was gone because someone got there early.
This morning I woke up at 4:30 like I usually do and worked for several hours. Wrote a few blog posts, worked on a couple websites, had some coffee, got ready. Then I decided to see if there were any yard sales. I hit the road, filled up with gas and grabbed a biscuit. I pulled up the newspaper website with my iPhone. I jotted down some of the better looking addresses and mapped them using Google Maps.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find any good stuff… the only thing I bought was a $0.50 book. But it got me reminiscing about when I was a kit yard selling with my grandmother. And it gave me an idea…
I got an idea for a web application that’s a mashup of other web services like classifieds, Google Maps, and of course, yard sales. I actually thought about it a while back too, and just dismissed it as another one of those ideas I’d never actually do. But I think it might be a pretty good idea… and am going to look into a bit more.
DebtFreeBlog.net - A blog about financial responsibility
I’ve launched a new blog - DebtFreeBlog.net. The website came about as my wife and I have taken a strong look at our current financial situation. We looked at our current debt levels (normal for our income) and I figured how much money we actually spend on interest per month and year. It’s just astonishing.
As I began doing research into financial management (which has always fascinated me), I thought of so many ideas and tips that could help our family get out of debt, build savings for retirement and kids’ college education, and eventually build wealth for our children after we’re gone.
DebtFreeBlog.net is a blog about these ideas, tips & resources. I’ll be posting book reviews, tips and tricks, resources and more. Check it out!
ProBlogger Book by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett have published a book about how to make money blogging: ProBlogger Book — Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.
I first met Darren at SxSW in Austin in March on the Chitika/ProBlogger Beer Bus and at the b5 Blog Network Camp. Darren and Chris are both full-time blog publishers and know their stuff. If you’re interested in making money from blogs, you should seriously consider buying this book.
The book is fairly concise, at only 220 pages you can read it in a weekend in your spare time. It is filled with the same type of useful information you’d find on Darren’s blog, ProBlogger.net.
Among the tips are examples of successful blogs and things they do to get to and stay at the top of their niche. It covers everything from getting started to the best ways to monetize your blog. Whether you can install WordPress from a shell prompt or have never even heard of Blogger, you’ll find the book useful.
Do search engines even work?
This is more of a rant. As you probably know, I own large size shoe retailer 2BigFeet.com. I frequently check our rank in the major search engines for terms such as “large shoes”, “large size shoes”, “large men’s shoes”, etc.
Today after running my regular monthly report I followed it up by actually searching a few of the terms on Google and Yahoo! to see who was above us (we have first page rankings for almost every major term we track).
When I searched for “large mens shoes” on Yahoo! the #1 result is a search page on Target.com. It’s a dynamic search results page, which I have no problem with. The problem is that the actual search results have anything BUT large shoes.
The results? 3 watches, a belt, 2 pair of insoles and ONE pair of shoes, which is not available in large sizes (it’s only available in two sizes - small and large).
How did Target get a #1 rank for this term? There is no content on the search results that would lead me to believe they got it from keywords on the page. I can’t imagine there are actually backlinks to their search results with the anchor text “large mens shoes.”
I completely understand when one of our competitors gets ahead of us in search ranking… at least the customer is finding what they are looking for. But when completely random results are shown above our site for no apparent reason, I have to wonder why.
Does a bigger monitor increase productivity?
We’ll see soon enough. My boss’s new MacBook Air wouldn’t support his 30″ Dell 3007WFP so I got a hand-me-down (in addition to a newer and faster MacBook Pro). Here’s my new setup:
I’ll be testing it out for the next couple of weeks to see if it does in fact increase productivity. Still, it surely can’t hinder productivity and is cool so I like it either way.
