freshare Podcasts

I decided to start a podcast series on the freshare site and actually produced the first one in late December. Click the program title to listen to that installment: freshare Ozarks Outdoors podcast.

The plan was to create a new podcast every week following a format of introducing listeners to some of our top stories before a segue into the feature: an interview with someone who has close ties to the Ozarks outdoors.

But the format proved to be an awful lot of work to undertake on a weekly basis for a company our size and with a lot already on our plates. Still, I think podcasts are a great tool to reach a new and different audience, and I do like the idea of introducing some very interesting folks to our listeners. Eventually, we might be able to accomplish the weekly interviews but that would be after we clear some of the other items we have going like the t-shirt site, design work, and promting that site, the fresharestore.

So, I think I will take some middle ground and use a format that includes a brief summary of some of the top stories on freshare, a commercial (to promote the store), and a feature that could include an interview but might be a story, or an outdoors related poem or a description of some new photos added to the freshare gallery. I think this format will ease the pressure of researching, interviewing, cutting and editing tape and producing an extended piece every week. Plus, it will mix things up a little so the podcast doesn't get stale.

That said, I think I'll start in on this week's installment.

Odd Backyard Critters

I'm beginning to wonder if we have some mutations in the animal gene pool around my house. Last Spring, a white dove settled in for a meal of birdseed under one of my feeders. Now, a tailless squirrel and and his stubby-tailed cousin are frequenting the feeders.

By the way they move, it seems both squirrels must have been born without the trademark bushy tails average squirrels sport. Neither seems hampered by balance issues unless trying some quirky move so it makes me think the little guys adapted at an early age.

The tailless guy has the oddest appearance at first glance and it makes you wonder if it's a rat you see streaking across the front lawn. His cousin has a bushy tail, it's just that the thing is very short. Abnormally so.

I have a photo of the white dove, but I have yet to capture an image of the squirrels.

I Resolve

I'm usually not much of one for New Year's resolutions and here is my only one for 2009: I plan to write more. Throughout last year, all my writing appeared only on my Ozarks outdoors website, freshare.net, and on a few article sites. But I have missed blogging and resolve to do more of that in 2009. Here, on Amblin Cafe and for a soon to be developed outdoors blog on freshare.

If you check this blog and Amblin, I'll save you a trip today because the same post you are reading appears on Amblin, too.

The Genie

My daughter and her husband had a baby shower a week or so ago. This is their first child and my first grandbaby, so we are all pretty excited. Check out the post about our ultrasound experience.

The best gift they got at the shower, in my view anyway, was a diaper genie. I had not seen nor heard of one until the shower. It's ingenious. Kind of like the biohazard containers you see in hospitals and doctors' offices.

Just drop in the dirty diaper and it is locked up inside the device so the smell, the mess, the sight is gone! Wow.

We can send men to the moon and we can dispose of dirty diapers. Baby technology sure has come a long way in the last twenty-five years.

First Peek

Yesterday, I got a chance to see my first grandbaby for the very first time. I don't want to sound like some wayward grandparent, so let me clear that up by saying I saw her with a 3D ultrasound. She's due to arrive somewhere around March 18 but I welcomed the opportunity to take a sneak peek.

The nurse pointed out all these wonderful and amazing features - nose, fingers, big toe. I couldn't see any of it. Nothing. Everyone else in the room seemed to, or said they did. But I didn't. Oh, I tried. Strained my eyes, squinted, tilted my head, but all in a vain effort to see what they saw.

Soon I discovered that 3D ultrasounds are a lot like those pictures you see on the comics page in the Sunday paper. You have to stare at the meaningless series of images, really concentrate, then Bam! A 3D picture suddenly appears. And my little granddaughter did, too.

She covered her face with her tiny hands for a while, then did a "peek-a-boo" tease, and we finally saw her chubby little cheeks and her beautiful little face. At one point, she even treated us to a very clear, discernible smile.

Now, people will tell you that babies do not smile. They say it's just gas. But when did you ever smile when you had gas? No, my friend, babies are fresh from God. How can they help but smile?

Fluid Mechanics

One thing I like about websites is that they are easily changed and updated as suits the readers and visitors. We've been running a poll on freshare as well as checking which content gets the most reads, what topics get the most attention, even which pages have the highest Google rankings.

From all that information, we are getting a clearer picture of what our readers want, what brings visitors to the site in the first place and what we should be offering.

The next revision of freshare won't be nearly as exhaustive as the last couple were but it will soon be time to update the site and put the emphasis where readers want it to be. I think this is and should be a never-ending process for web sites.

Long Walks in the Woods

I'm sitting here wearing my hiking boots and that made me think about a long hike I took the weekend before Christmas. A nearly three hour trek through the Arkansas hills and woods.

It was a cold day, mist rose from the wet creek bed along the path. I saw several deer, found a cave, uncovered a rock to find a sleepy salamander. Found some old scrapes a buck made the month before, poked around a couple of old house places and finally got to the river. My favorite place.

I drank in the sights, the smells, the sounds of water moving along its trip to the sea. Quenched and renewed. That's what long walks in the woods are for.

2007 Review

We are coming off one of the toughest years I have ever faced as a businessman. We abandoned a dying print publication in late 2006 and replaced it with what is now freshare.net. But the whole process was like launching a brand new business instead of building on an old one.

Our customer base for employmag was much different than the one we'll have to continue to develop for freshare. And, building a regular readership has proven more difficult than anticipated, at least at first. Plus, the actually physical construction of the site was a learning process that was both expensive and time consuming.

Still, we built the web site traffic to a decent rate by year end, and in fact really only did so between our official start date of June 5, 2007 and year-end. That building will be a never-ending process, but we have the tools and knowledge necessary now to carry it further.

There are still tweaks and a few features we have left to develop for the site, most notably the freshare store, but those are in process at year end and into 2008.

From the knowledge gained building, re-building and launching the site, we learned a great deal about web site construction and aesthetics. That knowledge base has already led to a new side business we hope to continue on into 2008.

While 2007 was difficult and finances strained about as far as they could go, there is new hope going into 2008 that we have a solid platform as well as the means to continue building on it.

Here's to looking forward instead of backward!

Weather Related

Well, the ice storm I talked about in the last post did not affect our immediate area too badly. We just had a little accumulation on the trees and none on the roads. To our west and throughout much of Oklahoma it was a lot worse. Hundreds of thousands lost power and some are still without power.

Last weekend, we were ready for a major snowstorm that meteorologists were predicting could dump up to 10 inches of snow. Temperatures remained higher than expected and we mostly got rain. We did get a couple of inches of snow Saturday night, but it was gone by Sunday afternoon.

Another Ice Storm

We are bracing for another ice storm today and tomorrow. So far, it's only been rain here, but not too many miles to our north and to our west, ice has already fallen and caused power outages, heavy tree limbs and icy patches on roads. The news reported that the entire town of Lamar, Missouri is dark, without power.

We are all hoping this storm won't be of the same magnitude as the January ice storms that broke so many power lines and utility poles causing widespread outages for weeks at a time. Still, the memory is fresh enough that precaution prevails. Grocery stores have been packed with people stocking up several days' supply of food, generators are flying of the shelves, as are batteries, water, flashlights and propane heaters. For many in the area, it was difficult enough last time. Can't blame them for wanting to be prepared this time around.

As I write this, it's 27 degrees. Certainly if precipitation does fall tonight, ice or snow would be the result. Radar shows a band of showers extending all the way back to Texas and growing. Could be a long night.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Besides eating until I nearly burst, I went fishing over the the Thanksgiving holiday. The White River - my favorite spot on the planet. It was still deer season in Arkansas, and there was only one camp at the landing - a deer hunting party. The rest of the river was mine.

It was cold, maybe 40 degrees, and a bit windy but the fish were biting well. The river was very low and the water clear as gin. I caught a limit in less than forty minutes and played catch and release after that.

The rest of the weekend was business. I worked on a website design for my client in the UK and then there was the business of putting up Christmas lights, which I accomplished between rain showers.

The Woods

I was out in the woods over the weekend. Deer season. Arrived before first light. I climbed into my tree, had a cup of coffee and stared up at the stars, listened to coyotes howl about half a mile away and deer move cautiously on dry leaves.

As the stars melted into morning, Venus was the last to give up her light. And soon, the blackness turned to gray then to full color as the sun rose higher in the sky.

Two does, startled by something I could not see, passed directly in front of my stand. Running, ducking under branches, escaping. I let them pass. A fawn was following, confused, and got separated from the two. Hopefully, they found each other again.

That was the end of my deer sightings in the woods that day. The weather was too warm, too windy for deer to move well. But it didn't matter. For seven hours, maybe eight, I was at one with the woods, with nature, with the great outdoors, and nothing else mattered. The real meaning of deer season.

Panel Discussion at MSU

Last month, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion sponsored by Missouri State University's Journalism Department. The panel met yesterday and discussed ethics in citizen journalism. It was a great experience and I felt privileged to be a part of the group which included Brian Lewis, a columnist for the News-Leader, and Doug McGill of the McGill Report and formerly of Bloomberg and the New York Times organizations.

What most thrilled me was how readily the professional journalists on the panel including the moderator, Dr. Andy Cline, embraced the citizen journalist movement. On the surface it seems journalism practiced by untrained people could be threatening to career professionals, but these folks saw it very differently. Rather than be concerned with how the trend affects individual journalists, they viewed citizen journalism as an enhancement to the process of reporting the news. They explained that there are many experts out there who need to be sharing their expertise with others and that this new way of reporting would only make the flow of information faster, better and with more detail than could be done before.

It was the process and the result of news reporting that most impressed this group. They see journalism as an extension of democracy and citizen journalism as a better means of making democracy work. Very refreshing to see professionals advance their cause instead of defending their territory.

freshare Site Version 3.0

I had the best of intentions. Really, I did. My plan was to design a complete makeover for freshare.net. And I did that part. I was lax in pursuing the other part of my plan. I wanted to blog my design process and talk about some of the pitfalls encountered and successes achieved along the way. But I got too busy designing and constructing with a fast approaching deadline. There was little time to write.

So here is the condensed version of how it all went:

I needed a more navigable site with a front page that would give visitors a sampling from each major category we had to offer. I wanted to move away from a detailed menu that told what was available and instead display the samples that would show visitors what stories were inside. And it needed to be clean, no ads on the front page.

My html and css skills are improving, but I am still pretty slow at the process. Since I have to run the publishing business and write content for freshare, most of my site building needed to be done before or after work each weekday, or on the weekends - time I usually spend writing stories for my blogs and in my journal.

The content management software I used for the upgrade was the same one I started with: Expression Engine. It is powerful, top-notch, php-based software that accomplishes everything I need it to and has more features I have yet to use. It is a low cost alternative with one drawback: there is no direct customer support, which is OK if you don't mind investing your own time into figuring out how to use EE to build your site around.

If you enjoy programming and coding, the trade off is well worth the effort. Besides, there is unlimited, 24/7 access to the Expression Engine Forums where hundreds of helpful people can guide you through the rough spots.

All in all, it is the way to go. I paid under $400 for my license,and I get to upgrade every time a new version comes out for a small fee of $19 a year. Compare that to other options that cost in the five-figure range and I think I did the right thing.

The results were great and I was able to accomplish all the goals I had for the site upgrade. We add the content, but how and where it is displayed is dynamically generated by the Expression Engine cms.

Although the most difficult part of the re-design is behind me, we will be adding new features soon, like a freshare store, podcasts and video. All supported very well by the cms.

Take a look at the (almost) final results at: freshare.net.

Debit Cards and Gasoline

The price of a gallon of gasoline is getting way out of hand. Even the filling stations and convenience stores think so. If you pay by debit card, beware. A store could, legally, put a hold on your checking account until such time as the charge you made against it for gasoline goes through. And, sometimes, that could take several days.

In the meantime, you may not be able to get cash from an ATM and checks you write could bounce. And it's all legal. Banks, credit card companies and gas stations say they need the protection to make sure everyone pays for their fuel. But guess who's liable when checks bounce their way back to your bank? That's right - you.

Stores typically put a hold on amounts ranging from $50 - $150 for gasoline purchases, so if you have that or less in your checking account you could experience some problems. Some stations automatically stop their pumps at a certain dollar level and control the issue that way.

Since nothing has to be posted to warn consumers, just be cautious when using your debit card for gasoline purchases.

Website Update

Well, our stats continue to climb in terms of the number of visitors and the number of page views. The "viral marketing" components - email articles, print stories, tell-a-friend - all are picking up steam, so that should result in ever higher numbers of visitors and page views.

The MySpace page also seems to be sending traffic to freshare, although it's difficult to measure exactly how much.

We are at a point where it is possible to approach potential advertisers in the area.

Spike in Visitors

The publicity package actually did hit on June 5. Since then, we have been seeing about a thousand page views per day as word gets out about the site. Pleased to note, too, that people are going deeper into the site than just viewing the front page. They are also reading articles, emailing them and printing them off.

We completed work on our MySpace this past week as well. Already boasting nine friends. Kristen Dudley put the site together for us and did a great job. Check it out right here: freshare's MySpace. I have to admit, I was very skeptical about having a MySpace spot. Sydnee Crain, our editor, finally convinced me that we needed that presence to help draw attention to freshare. I think she's right. We are also exploring a Facebook site and Squidoo lenses to round out our networking presence.

Traffic Trends

We are beginning to see a bump upward in traffic to the freshare site. Google ad revenue is showing upward trends, too. The publicity package has yet to be completed, so we may be seeing traffic from new links we requested from a variety of other websites.

We also launched a unique search engine powered by Google technology that only searches the top quality blogs in the Ozarks. It's a great way to get word out to the world that good writing and good photography blogs exist in Missouri and Arkansas. We have a search bar right there at the top of our home page.

This week, we hope to have the publicity plan executed and would like to see measurable results in terms of additional page views.

Things Are Looking Up Again

Finally got to speak with our linking strategist about plans for the freshare site. I told him that the linking strategy was going slowly - a lot of tedious work with very few solid results. I wanted to move on to the publicity part of the plan.

We discussed that strategy and what was needed. Then Eric made the best suggestion yet. One that made the wait worthwhile and the consulting fees money well spent. He suggested we put a very specific search engine on our site. One that only features the best bloggers and citizen journalists in our region. Such a search engine would greatly simplify things for visitors who only want information from local bloggers and it would help gel our relationship with those bloggers. We put the engine in the very next day.

This weekend, I'll work on the site announcement for Eric to send out to his contacts. After that, I'm hoping we'll see a readership begin to emerge.

Another Tough Week

Our expert in linking and publicity strategy has pretty much ignored my emails requesting the final conversation and the publicity package I've already paid for. Today I sent out an email reminding him I already paid him (two months ago) and expect an immediate reply. I got one. We are slated to finish up tomorrow. We'll see.

I've also been looking into affiliate programs to see if I can find some webmasters who are interested in selling ads on our employment and classifieds sites. I tried HydraMedia and, after talking to a rep, the program sounded solid. All that was left was for me to sign a credit / financial agreement and an insertion order.

Good thing I read through them first. Hydra wants to check credit anytime (presumably even if we decide to dissolve our business relationship) and they want to use only their figures in determining affiliate payment with no room for discussion if we see an error.

I don't mind a credit check, but unlimited ones? Accessing credit reports can have a negative impact on credit scores. Would you give a stranger that kind of freedom? Probably not. Neither would I.

Using Hydra's numbers for calculating affiliate payment does make sense. But give up my right to challenge those numbers? Never.

I presented these concerns to my rep. So far, she has not replied.