Google Page Rank and Changes to 3dSkiMaps.com

From time to time people ask what will happen if they make major changes to their site, so I thought I'd give an account of my recent experience.

My site, 3dSkiMaps used to have under 1000 visitors a month, probably mostly bots and crawlers. Actually I was trying to not have be too popular because my 3d ski maps weren't ready. But the site did manage a PR of 4 and that with only a few low quality external sites linking in, and it had the number one spot for my primary key phrase. It was a vertical market with no competitors.

Then I finally decided to make a big push on it, and some new competition came onto the playing field. I completely revamped the site, adding a few hundred new pages but obsoleting a few hundred in the process. I posted to some relevant forums, and started getting over 3000 visitors per month, excluding spiders and the like. 3dSkiMaps' Alexa rank went from about 4.8 million to around 320,000 now.

But my links dropped to 0 even while more and more sites were linking to my site, and my Page Rank dropped to 0 over a 2 month period. It was weird watching it happen one by one on the Google servers on livepr.raketforskning.com. Finally after about 9 weeks all servers gave 3dSkiMaps a zero for PR.

But now 11 weeks after the beginning of my campaign, Google shows 25 good links. Never mind that a search for 3dskimaps yields 740 results and climbing.

Meanwhile, my visitors remain steady and even my not very well placed Adsense ads are getting higher click through. It will be interesting to see what happens over the Summer.

I guess it's true that PR isn't everything, and you can still have good news in the face of not so good statistics as long as you continue to build and/or profit from your traffic. Now that Google is showing that I have links again, I expect the PR to begin rising too.

T619 Web Settings

To set the default web page for Samsung T619 with T-Mobile,

*#87927# to get into the Browser Settings area
Navigate to Profile Settings and open an empty profile
Enter a profile name
Enter the home url, this is the default url your phone will go to
Save
Navigate to Current Profile and select the new profile

Now when you go to T-Zones, you'll go to this page instead of the T-Zones page. I set it to go to http://3dskimaps.com. Some of the graphics took a long time to load. The user agent was

SAMSUNG-SGH-T619/T619UVFG8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0

Of course, you might find it more useful to set it to a search engine like Google.

New US Dollar = Ugliest Coins Ever!

Check this out.

http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/$1coin/index.cfm?flash=yes

Man, that's the worst artwork on any coins ever! They look like something out of The Onion, or even Mad Magazine, especially James Madison. And that's the ugliest, meanest portrait of George Washington I've ever seen. Leave it to mean-spirited, anti-art Republicans to come up with crap like that. Yet another disgrace to America.

Google Analytics Tracker Not Installed Error

I was adding Google Analytics to http://www.fortresssolutions.com, and it kept telling me it the little Javascript snippet wasn't installed. I looked at the code, it was there. I looked at the page using View Page Source, it was there. But it still wasn't working.

So I looked at it using Firebug, and found the problem. The snippet is supposed to be added just before the </body> tag, which I had done. But Firebug showed that it was inside of a div instead of outside. I had an unclosed div block, so when I added one more </div> to my footer, that fixed it, put the code in the body just before the </body> tag, and it started working.

Why Atheism Is In The News Lately

I think it's because of the virulent hatefulness of a large number of "Christians" in the US over the past 25 years, combined with similar but more extreme hatefulness and rigid thinking in the Islamic world. Extreme religionists killed 3000 people on 9/11, they helped elect George Bush twice, in the classroom and in public policy they're trying to replace science with faith, and they fervently support their divisive "us vs them" mentality throughout the world.

More and more people see no difference between various forms of extreme religionism. It doesn't matter what religion it is, they're the same people just using religion as a means of feeding their hate-filled agenda of domination and exclusion. It's no wonder people are interested in alternative viewpoints when it's obvious that religionism is no guarantee of wisdom or morality and threatens to rend apart society as we know it.

Or maybe that's just me.

Old Mobile Telephones

My dad used to work for the telephone company back when it was The Telephone Company. I got to see the insides of the phone building pretty often, and one day he showed me the equipment that handled mobile phone calls. It was just a couple of devices, about 4 feet tall I guess, and you could switch the sound on to make sure it was working or to debug it if it wasn't.

He thought it was funny that people would pay so much for a mobile phone and then mostly use it for mundane conversations. He switched it on and sure enough some guy was saying something like "Hey, honey, I'll be home in a little while, want me to pick up something at the grocery store?"

The rest of the telephone office was the coolest thing, because in those days they used huge (by today's standards) rotary relays to connect calls and the entire floor was filled with rows of racks 12 feet tall, full of relays chattering away. it's amazing to me nowadays to think that when you called someone local back then you had a direct conductive metal link to them. Nowadays when you call it's buffered on so many levels it's almost more lke real-time voice mail than like a phone call was back then.

Anyway, when you picked up your handset at home, your relay at the office would activate, and as you dialed your rotary dial, your relay would rotate too, making a clicking sound as it worked. I'm not sure exactly how connections were made, but the sound of thousands of people dialing was amazing, because you'd hear this huge 3-dimensional clicking coming from throughout the building. The clicking was completely random, but sometimes there would appear to be waves of clicks sweeping from one end of the building to the other. Then sometimes almost everything would stop and, you might hear some clicks off in the distance, and then there would be a shower of clicks all around.

I dream of making an art installation one day to simulate the effect.

CO2 Facts and Figures

Some CO2 facts:

CO2 is transparent to visible light, opaque to infrared. CO2 contributes about 5 or 6 degrees Celsius to the total Greenhouse Effect which warms the Earth by about 33C. Most of the rest is due to water vapor.

In 1850, there were 2100 billion tonnes of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.
In 2005, there were 2800 billion tonnes of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.

In 2005, humans burned

3.9 billion tonnes of oil,
2.9 billion tonnes of coal (oil equivalent units),
2.5 billion tonnes of natural gas (oil equivalent units).

In 2005, the burning of fossil fuels added about 26 billion tonnes of CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere.

By 2030, emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels will have increased to 43 billion tonnes a year.

References:

http://www.bp.com/productlanding.do?categoryId=6842&contentId=7021390
http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2_now/journal/articles/2_global_warming.htm
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/emissions.html

The Truth About Economics And Carbon Credits

What most people don't realize about the economy is that any need beyond food and shelter is just made up, an invention of the human mind. There's no inherent human need for Pyramids or SUVs or PlayStations or to go to the Moon, but crap like that keeps people occupied, and as long as they are occupied, they will think they are happy, and the economy will appear to be productive.

So humans invent the need for _things_ to keep themselves occupied, and to make themselves think there is meaning to life, and this is what fuels the economy. Now, people who are convinced that CO2 is a major cause of global warming, and that anthropogenic global warming is a bad thing, will gladly occupy some of their time with diminishing CO2 emissions or otherwise abating their effects.

Then, even though logically this anti-CO2 effort might appear to be completely useless and a drain on the economy, in fact it is not, because it fulfills a desire in a large part of the populace to be CO2-free. Thus is would have an overall positive effect on the economy even if it had no effect on global climate, as long as enough people wanted it too.

This imaginary benefit (imaginary even though it may actually be useful) is behind the inception of the huge new industry of Carbon Credits, which is real enough in Europe, though it hasn't reached the US much.

5000 Cubic Kilometers Of Coal Per Year

Imagine a cube of coal 17 kilometers per side. Now imagine burning one of those cubes each year. If this were a natural phenomenon, people would regard it as a disaster.

We're also burning a 3300 cubic kilometers of oil each year. Imagine a lake of oil 100 meters deep and 1500 kilometers square. Now imagine burning one of those each year.

If an asteroid struck the Earth, or a volcanic caldera erupted, no one would doubt that it could change the climate. Human burning of fossil fuels is a smaller disaster, but it is a disaster, and it will affect Earth's climate.