Unlike some people, I really like the new Google Finance. The pages are clean and don’t get in the way (although as pointed out by Scrivs, aren’t always “balanced”).
I really like the company pages (example) - the stock chart blows me away - why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Allowing dynamic ranges and pinpoint details are so obvious…in hindsight.
Here’s something I haven’t seen mentioned before - the main page uses “nofollow” for its outbound links; the company pages do not. I don’t understand why. Pick a way and stick to it.
I’ve ended the first month of growing a brand-new content-driven website. After making the first post on January 6, at least one post was made per day on 21 days; 5 days had no posts.
I had 785 referers in from other sites. It’s hard for me to tell how many of the 13,000 on-site referals were people clicking around the site and how many were generated by me in the admin portion of Wordpress (plus my clicking around to make everything was displaying correctly). 16 people found the site via Google. Google PageRank is 0.
I added Google Adsense to the site on January 19th. To date, I haven’t made a penny. I’m not surprised. New site, few visitors, and those I have tend to be savvy and I deem them less likely to click on ads.
Participating in Blog Carnivals turned out to be a great way to drive traffic in spurts. Commenting and leaving trackbacks also works, on a much smaller scale, but my gut feel is those visitors tend to come back again. Although I have even less love for rel="nofollow" than I did before. It hinders new sites getting into the mix by denying any Google benefit from participating in a discussion. It’s meant to deter comment spam, but I’ve had none that wasn’t caught by Akismet. Too many weblog software systems build nofollow in by default with no option to turn off. I had to hack Wordpress to do it on my sites.
Anyhow, I’m still on a roll creativity-wise with the other site and am looking forward to both growing the site and reporting the progress at a dispassionate level (hopefully).
I’ve started a new website and I’m curious about how long it takes to make various search engines and have traffic build. I’m not linking to it on purpose, because I don’t want to taint the experiment.
The site was put on the Internet on January 2. On January 4, I submitted the URL to Google and created a Google Sitemap.
The site appears to have first entered the results of a targeted search on Google the morning of January 8. It also appears to have made MSN and Technorati at about the same time.
Feedster may or may not be dying - their bot has made 82 requests at the site, but I cannot get anything but null results when searching for the site. Will check back later.
A couple of other bots I’m not sure about have crawled the site.
For what it’s worth, the site is dynamically generated via Wordpress and has about 8 URLs, excluding feeds, that are valid.
Update: Feedster is now returning the site when doing a Feedfinder search (sample). It looks like they crawled the site just slightly before I posted. So, from crawl to results in less than 18 hours (I was not checking frequently, so it may have been quicker).
I’m actually impressed that the site was found at all or so quickly by them, since I gave them no help like I did Google.
Google has added the ability to overlay map elements onto the satellite views. This is incredibly helpful and useful. I’ve often flipped back and forth between the map and satellite views to see what I really wanted.
Here is my childhood home shown with the hybrid view. (Note: the pushpin is actually off by one house, but close enough)
Way cool - there’s little reason to use the other views again.
I’ve never really talked about my local library. It has been the source for 90% of the books I’ve read since I started keeping track in October.
Serving a county of 71,295 (38,967 in the city, the rest rural), the library does an excellent job as far as having a wonderful collection of books, DVDs, and services. Starting in March, free wireless was offered, which I think is a hallmark of forward thinking. You can even email a reference librarian and ask a question.
Now I’ll pick a nit. They have an excellent bi-monthly newsletter that is distributed via the local paper (affectionately called by some locals, “the second worst paper in the country”, because there must surely be one that’s worse). Unfortunately they don’t offer it online, so if you don’t get the paper or what to refer to something 6 weeks later, you’re out of luck. But, again, that’s just a nit.