Category: General

Dear Diary,

It is with a great deal of sadness that I write these lines tonight. I apologize in advance for the disjointed, maudlin, and rambling text that follows. This the third attempt. The other two are in the cyber rubbish heap. It is very likely that I’ll have to come back and edit this post too. Seems like the tears keep blurring the screen on me. Damn screen anyhow.

I have fortified my interior with a split of wine, so it may be that I can get thru it this time.

Parks’ Styx River
August, 1988 - August, 2008

Yes, I know his real name was Styx. However, that certain little girl couldn’t quite make it come out right. It kept on being Stitch, so we let it ride. Stitch it was.

He didn’t care. As long as she loved him, it was fine whatever she wanted to call him. Loved him she did. She’s sixteen now, and thinks she’s all grown up. Well, she could be all grown up. Who am I to judge things like that. Stitch didn’t care a bit how old she was, or wasn’t. He was just proud to be with her.

Faithful friend. Fierce protector of children. Loving companion. Guardian of the front door (No stranger passed without the OK from within) . Tolerant father. Totally committed to our family. That was Stitch.

Like most dogs that I have known, Stitch didn’t have bad moods. He wasn’t particularly fond of the pestering he took from the various felines, but he tolerated them all.

Stitch was a cute puppy. (He was the first Doxy that our family had been close to. We have had friends or acquaintances who have/had a Doxy or two, but Stitch was our first.) I can still remember the little needles that were his milk teeth. He knew how to use them too. His ears were too long for his head, and his legs were too short for his longish body. Clumsy isn’t a real good word for his daily activities, but it’s very close.

It seems like Stitch grew up over night. I know that’s not possible, but with the passing of years I forget some of the details of his life then. As Stitch approached his middle years, he developed some health problems. The vet was very good and kept us on the right path as far as nutrition and immunizations were concerned.

Now, Stitch didn’t care for the vet shop. Not at all. He always liked to go for a ride with me. Excited to be going, he’d jump up into the floor of the truck and squirm up into the seat so he could face out of the already open window. That first trip to the vet was the last happy trip to the vet for Stitch. I don’t know if it was the smell, the sounds, or just what, but he knew when we got within a block or so of the vet shop. He flatly didn’t like to go there.

Stitch was a man’s dog. He didn’t care if I hadn’t shaved today. He was really happy to lick the salty, oily, sweat from my face when I came in from yard work. He didn’t care if I wore the same shirt two days running. He didn’t care that I had to rebuke him yesterday as long as I petted, and paid attention, to him today. For my part, I didn’t care if he smelled like a dog. I didn’t care if he dug the occasional hole in the yard. I didn’t care if he left his bone under my chair. He was my friend.

Lest you get the wrong idea from that last paragraph, I must tell you that Stitch wasn’t my dog. Stitch belonged to my wife, Jean. And, my wife belonged to Stitch. Stitch was her dog. He knew it. She knew it. And, I knew it. I’m hers too, so what the hell?

In his later years, Stitch had lost his sight and hearing. The vet said that both sets of senses seemed to be working, but the signals didn’t make it to the correct set of synapses. His nose continued to work for a couple of years after he could no longer hear. He tracked himself, and us, with that faithful nose until just the last few months. His sense of smell began to fail in late May or Early June.

Stitch had problems with his joints and spine. A combination of arthritis and rheumatism that plagued him for the last five years. There were times, lately, where we didn’t know if he would be able to stand at all. And, you could tell that he wasn’t pleased with the situation either.

The hair on his head and face began to fade about eight years ago. The progression was slow but inexorable. Much as it has been for me. The relentless, implacable, and merciless deterioration of the physical body is one price we pay for living past the norm. Stitch’s head and muzzle were completely white at the end.

Stitch is buried in the west flower bed. Right beside the Tiger Lily. That Tiger Lily is favored among all of the flowers as Stitch was favored among all the pets. Grandma’s favorites, both.

I promised to paint and decorate the small limestone slab that will be the marker for Stitch. I couldn’t do it today. May not be able to do it tomorrow either. But, I will get it done.

So, diary, now you know some about Styx River. You know more about Stitch though.

I have to close this chapter in my life. There are new puppies to love and care for. They don’t understand our sadness. I hope they never do.

Farewell old friend and stalwart companion. Perhaps you will be waiting when I make the long ride to that happiest of hunting grounds.

I truly hope so.

“It’s an ill wind that blows no good”
unknown author

The ill wind that blew down the back of my neck this past March was chilling. Downright cold.

As some of you know, the almighty Giggle decided to rain on my parade.  That’s after doing in my network back last summer.

So, I did what any self-respecting webmaster would do.  Cried a lot.  lol

No, I went about other things and left the sites where they were.  Sometimes good advice when G is doing an update or an algo change.

What do you think happened?  For  a change, something good.  One of my famous little one-pagers suddenly came to life.  I didn’t know it was back in the index until I got a check from ShareaSale.  Almost a hundred bucks worth of surprise.

Guess I’d better check on some of the other orphans I’ve left around the web.

~dink

I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while, but I’m just lazy I guess.

I really liked that nifty bookmarking widget that my friend removed to protect the innocent created. I just didn’t like the way it looked in the sidebar.

So this evening, while a new spammer script was doing it’s thing, I decided to get it placed on the pages better. I like it much better now. What about you?

~dink

**edit. Removed the widget by request

I’ve been approached by a group to write a review of their service here on the blog. The offer is for cash. Which is just as good as money. Heh.

“So, what’s the problem with that?”, you asked. “You have posted about a whole bunch of programs on this blog.”

Yes, I have promoted several programs here. But the difference is that I have tried, and use, the programs that I tell you about.

The service that the correspondent asked me to write about is not one that I would use. I wouldn’t even use it just so I could write about it. It doesn’t fit into any of my game plans.

Does that mean one of you wouldn’t use it? No, it doesn’t. What it does mean is that I can’t suggest to you that it is worthwhile. I can’t say if it is or isn’t a good deal. I’ve only investigated it enough to know that I won’t use it.

I have bought a lot of worthless shit. I have been given a bunch of worthless shit. I’m an affiliate for a bunch of worthless shit. I haven’t pointed any of those to you. And I won’t. Now, that doesn’t mean that this service is a piece of shit.

This is my place. I built it. I maintain it. You have chosen to come by here, from time to time, and see what I’m raving about .

Many of you are good friends. All of you are welcome here. I’m not about to jeopardize my friendship (or any future friendships) with you for a few hundred bucks. Note…if we were talking about millions of bucks, you’d be history. LOL

So, why make this post at all? Because I didn’t want to just email the folks and say “no” without an explanation. And, because it really may be of benefit to some of you.

To solve the delemma, I’m going to post a couple of the links the folks gave me, at no charge. You may go see what it’s all about, or not. Completely up to you. That way you have some knowledge that such a service exists, the correspondent gets something, and I leave feeling like I have done my duty.

Here’s a link to the home page of tnx.net. Here is the link to their post over at DP.

Stay outa jail.

~dink

It just struck me that all of my blathering about keywords and their importance might not be very clear to some folks.

I posted a rather long story about keywords and the way to select the right keywords for your niche over on the syndk8 blog site.

The story is aimed at those who may be rather new to the keyword generation subject. It covers a lot of the basics and a few advanced keyword selection tactics.

If you want to read up on how to select keywords, or if you want to get a little refresher on keywords generation, go read Good keywords are the key to marketing success.

~dink

Yep. Free. As in no charge, no strings, no obligation.

L3vi is celebrating his birthday by offering you a month of keyword heaven at no charge. The thing is…the deal will only last until next Monday. If you have wanted to give Wordze a spin, now’s your chance.

There is also a little known, and awesome, script that L3vi has written that can make you some serious cash. It uses his api for Wordze and looks up the freshest entries on Google Trends. The script then polls the Wordze program for the long-tail keywords that are associated with the trends.

Since Gooooogle updates the trends every hour, you should be able to hook up a cron and grab the freshest of the fresh. Work a little magic with your favorite content generator and….hey presto! the latest long-tail keywords to make pages for your site(s). How many pages can you generate per day?

Do yourself a favor and take the best keyword generator on the market for a free one month test drive. You won’t be sorry you did.

~dink

Regrets to any of you who have tried to comment in the last few days. Seems like one of my plugins developed a mind of its own. Was throwing an error message that looked like the Google police had found you out.

I think it’s all sorted out now.

~dink

I don’t do this a lot, but for the holiday season, why not? I belong to a lot of affiliate programs. Some are better than others. Some are great, some are so-so. Here’s something that doesn’t happen much.

One of the powerhouse hosting providers decided to have a special holiday sale. Now, sales aren’t a big deal, they happen all the time. What makes this sale special? It’s not available except thru the affiliate pages. You can’t just go to the merchant page and find the special ’cause it ain’t there.

So what’s the big deal? IPowerWeb decided to let us offer one of their best deals at an even better rate than usual. You get 300 Gigs of space, 3,000 gigs of bandwidth, 2,500 email accounts, and host up to 25 different sites, for $4.95 per month. Now, that price is good for the first time only, but is good for both one-year and two-year signups. After the initial term is up, the renewals will go back to the usual $7.95 per month.

Total savings on the two-year deal is $72. Pretty good savings. Here is the linky:

Not so very shabby at all. Hurry though, the sale ends Dec. 31, 2007.

~dink

We have mentioned affiliate marketing several times in this blog. Have you tried affiliate marketing? Done any good? Why not?

Do you have a clue as to why you aren’t making money with affiliate marketing? Here is a list of 99 reasons why you will fail at affiliate marketing. The article is over at affearners.com.

I like #35 “You think affiliate marketing will get you rich quick”. Yeah. Right. That’s what a lot of folks think. Put up a snarky site and wait until the checks start rolling in.

The list is worth reading through. There are some that I recognize from my early days. Even some that I’m guilty of yet.

Drop on over and see how many of the reasons apply to you.

~dink

I have been thinking about adding one of those neat looking bookmarking gadgets to the blog.

Not that you guys need one (because you are regular readers anyways), but because I’m sorta geeky. Ya, no shit I really am. Well kinda.

Have a look over at the left column. ((Heh.  It’s gone now.))

<————- See it? Yeah, can’t miss it. 

The author asked me to take it down.  Sorry folks.

I know, it looks like a hundred others you’ve seen. Except, it’s a little different. Notice how many of the bookmarking applications there are? Wanna guess how difficult it was for me to get them all in that little box?

Well, here it is. It took me all of six minutes to have that little box up and running on this blog. Three minutes of that was in figuring out that this blog theme is not ‘widget ready’.

So, how did I code up all of that in three minutes? Easy. I didn’t code anything. It’s a simple copy and paste. Opened the correct php page in the themes folder and pasted the code in. That’s it. Done.

You say you want this code too? And, by the way, how much does it cost? You can have it for free. Free. As, in nada.

Over at somesite.com you’ll find a story about it. And, a link to the actual code. It’s called the bookerbox.

Here’s what the author says:

BookerBox is a simple to use, bookmarking widget that you can just copy paste into your blog, website, forum software, or any webpage for that matter. Anywhere you would like to encourage people to bookmark you webpage, article or site, you can place the BookerBox code, and give your users 1-click access to their favorite bookmarking applications.

Go. Read the simple instructions and put it on everything. It’s as cool as it gets.

If you don’t have widgets on your blog, or you need a hint as to how to get it on a web page, give me a shout. We’ll finger it out.

~dink