Does this make the blog formatting go all crappy?

edit: Update – No it does not.

Installed.

So in the never ending battle of trying to think of something new to write about during a brainstorming session I had an idea. What about having a section on the website that listed domains for sale. Probably right over there ——–>>>> in the sidebar. Not just random websites but sites that I own.  I currently own close to two dozen domain names. I’m somewhat of a domain hoarder I guess you could say. I love coming up with a good name and then hurriedly checking to see if it has already been registered. It’s as if I feel like someone else had the thought at the exact same time I did and we’re racing to see who can register it first. Sound familiar to anyone?

Like the word hurriedly for example. Just typing along in that last paragraph and the word hurriedly comes up. Damn, taken. Anyway a lot of those domains sit parked at NameDrive collecting 3¢ a month. In my opinion they are good names. Why am I not putting together a site or blog and monetizing the hell out of them? Damned laziness. That’s the only excuse I can come up with.

It will be pretty hard for me to part with them, so what I may do in the mean time is register some domains for the explicit purpose or reselling them. That sounds like a better way for me to ease into it. I’ll get this up and going over the next couple of weeks.

As you can tell from the title I’m writing this post from an iPhone 3G. But, it’s not just any iPhone 3G, it’s MY new iPhone 3G. That’s right. I was finally able to get one of these bad boys. Better late than never. I’m I pretty big gadget guy but unfortunately my budget doesn’t always allow me to partake in the latest and greatest. The original iPhone was just too damned expensive, price drop or not. But when Steve announced the 3G I knew I had to get one as soon as AT&T would let me upgrade. That happened to be last Friday. I bought the 8GB black model. Piece of advice for those of you that don’t yet have one and are thinking about picking one up. Get the 8 gig. Several people that already had iPhones told me this because unless you need to have more than a couple of movies on it, you can use the app SimplifyMedia to stream your entire music collection from home. I will add some pictures later when I get home.

*update: Links added from home. Photos coming as soon as I take them.

*updateupdate: Done.

Here we are again. The blog is now running Ma.tt and crews latest and greatest. As of today that is WordPress 2.6.2. It is always fun to see what new features they have come up with. This 2.6.x revision is looking very polished and mature. Can’t wait for 2.7.

Whew, this place sure is dusty.  Yeah, yeah, sorry I kind of abandoned the place. As I kind of predicted in my very first post here I mentioned I had the tendency to burn out quickly. Sure enough it happened. Well, I’m back again. For now.

I won’t be making any promises any time soon as far as post frequency go but I have been getting interested in blogging and trying to make some extra money online so I’ll see how that goes. More later as I feel like it.

Last time I covered Search Engine Referrals. This time I thought I would go over where I’m currently ranked in Google’s index for some words and phrases used to find the site. And awaaay we go.

• “techky” – Good to see I’m still #1 here. Wheeew.
• “blackberry pearl disable shutter sound” – 8th result, first page. Woah. Nice, first page result.
• “samsung sync camera shutter sound” – 10th. First page yet again.
• “xterra 30000 maintenance” – 1st page. 5th result. Above the fold. Very, very, cool.

All in all, I think I’m doing quite well. Techky.com is on the first page of Google results for all of those search terms. I know they are quite specific phrases but you’ve got to start somewhere. Now I just need to move up the list and start getting hits for more general phrases.

It’s time to peruse the statistics for the latest search engine referrals. I like to do this occasionally just to keep track of how people are finding the site and what keywords they are using. Let’s get right to it.

15 of the last 16 keywords that have led to this site have come from Google. For those of you scoring at home that is 94%. Here is how those last 16 referrals break down.

• “removing camera shutter sound from samsung sync a-707″ – 8 references
• “disable blackberry pearl shutter sound” – 3 references
• “sgh a-707 diagnostic codes” – 2 references
• “techky” – 2 references
• “xterra 30000 maintenance” – 1 reference

Those are the general search terms being used. For those with multiple entries I generalized the most commonly used phrase.

As for future blog topics, there are several. I can make a post answering the question that people are looking for. The camera shutter sound being a good example of this. You can expect those posts coming down the pike in a few days.

As you can see over in the sidebar I have added a new category called “Free ’til I’m Cool”. That just means that the links displayed underneath weren’t paid for or even reciprocated. If at some point I ever started receiving regular visitors that is a position on the page I would consider selling as ad space. They aren’t Text Link Ads obviously and it would make absolutely no sense to even do that since there isn’t any traffic.

Now that I have confirmed that I would be receiving relevant ads with AdSense I have removed all instances of it for the time being. In its place are links to three sites I have mentioned before. Self Made Minds, Green Llama, and Tyler Cruz. I hope SMM and Green Llama don’t mind but I have cropped or adjusted their logos ever so slightly as to make them fit my sidebar. Guys if you are still reading the feed for this site feel free to stop by and check them out. If you have a problem with it I will delete the picture no problem.

site update: Negatory on the visitors.

I thought that it would be a good time to check up on how well the site is being indexed by the various search engines. The last time I checked the status in Google for the word “techky”, it was buried on the 7th page. Now, when you do the exact same search this site is the #1 result. That is quite a move but in all actuality it really doesn’t matter YET because Techky has no name recognition and not may people are going to be searching for that term. Note to self: write a post on the importance of using a unique or “catchy” name.

On Yahoo! something even better happened. Techky.com now occupies the first two results for the term “techky”.

And then we come to MSN. Sigh. Techky.com is nowhere to be found. Nope. Zip, zilch, zero results for techky. Even though we all know that Google is the dominant force in the search world, this problem with MSN must be fixed. Why? Because MSN is the default home page for everyone that runs Microsoft Windows. Let’s say Windows has around a 90% market share of all computers. What percentage of people do you think change that default home page? It is widely speculated that as few as 10% of computer users know how or actually ever do change their home page. That is a lot of traffic to not even compete for. I will investigate.

Visitor update: Looks like we had only two unique visits in the last day.