Magic Bean Dip

Gotta love a white christmas. Usually we don’t get much snow until January, but this year we are abundantly blessed with the white stuff. I’ve heard rumors we’ve gotten as much as 10 inches. This first image is my favorite picture. It’s looking at the creek southwest of our house.

This view of the field north of our house is actually what inspired me to get up off my but to go out in 20 mph winds with single digit temperatures. All the drifts remind me of waves in a sea scape. You can see a 6 foot high bale of hay in the top left to give things a little scale. The line of grass through the middle is a gravel road.

This is a picture of me in the tractor clearing off the snow in front of our store. The pile of snow in the middle of the street behind the tractor is actually obscuring most of the 2 story buildings behind it.

And of course I’m sure everyone can’t wait to see our horse with snow on his butt.

Google Trends is what I had in mind when I mentioned monetizing traffic data previously. The graph at the right shows the searches for Bean Dip during the last quarter of 2005. The spike it shows at the end of the year is similar to the spike in traffic data shown in my own server logs.

Google included options to limit searches by time and geographic region and automatically displays related news articles and points on the graph showing when the articles were released. Since displaying articles is automatic and not a selectable option, I’m assuming Google has observed the news having a dramatic effect on searches.

Trends confirm that “Christmas” is the king of holidays

The volume of searches originating from an area is not necessarily proportional to the population of an area. “Los Angeles” shows that even though Santa Monica has a population of 87,823 and Los Angeles has a population of 3,845,541, more people from Santa Monica searched for the term “Los Angeles” than people from Los Angeles did.

But when you compare the volume of searches about an area, they appear to be proportional to the population, “Santa Monica vs. Los Angeles“.

Here’s the official Google Blog post announcing Google Trends. And Michael Arrington over at Tech Crunch has an interesting graph from Google Trends that shows a comparison of searches for Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

This Page Rank Reporting tool (aka: Page Rank Bean Counter) checks the Google page rank of several urls at once and gives you the option of displaying the results in .CSV format.

I wrote the script myself using a slightly modified version of the PHP pagerank script that’s been floating around the internet. I’ll post the source for the script in a few days.

I originally bought my Itronix XC 6250 laptop to connect to a personal weather station. The monocrome lcd and 133MHz Pentium had plenty of horsepower for that application, but since I took the weather station down, I’ve found little use for it. It would certainly be more usable if I could get the external monitor connection to work. If you know how to activate the external monitor or you’ve got any good ideas about how to use the laptop, let me know.

I’ve had a hard time finding drivers for the laptop, so I thought I’d share some files and information I’ve found useful.

Itronix Documentation

Louis Ohland has some nice documentation on special features of the XC6250, including keyboard shortcuts. When the system locks up, hold down both mouse buttons for about 10 seconds and it will reboot. He’s also got BIOS upgrades if you think you need them.

Itronix Drivers

Scott Griepentrog has links to windows drivers, but the files are missing. Let me know if you notice the files are back.

The drivers direct from Itronix are hard to find on their site and some of the files appear to be missing. SETUP.EXE is not included, so installation will have to be done manually. It does however include software to monitor the battery and activate the internal modem.

Accurite PassportCard Travel Floppy

Drivers for the Accurite PassportCard pcmcia card with Travel Floppy external drive: Accurite PassportCard Travel Floppy Drivers ~64kb. I’ve gotten these to work with Windows 95. The floppy shows up as drive E: on my system and is also accessible in a dos prompt while windows is running.

To install the floppy drivers I went to Control Panel > System > Device Manager > Other Devices and highlighted the Accurite PassportCard, then Properties > Driver > Update Driver. The floppy drivers beep when Windows is loading if the PassportCard is found.

To boot from floppy plug in the PassportCard, but don’t connect the floppy drive. Reboot and wait for the computer to ask you to plug in the floppy drive. This will also make the floppy accessible from DOS if you don’t have the drivers installed.

Traffic data is an unmonetized asset of the Internet. This graph represents the web traffic on MagicBeanDip over the New Years holiday. The red line represents the average traffic over the past month.

Why Google should care about bean dip

As you can see, there’s a relatively large spike on New Years Eve. These traffic spikes aren’t uncommon and I almost didn’t give it a second glance. But it was a bit larger than usual and I was looking for something to do on New Years Day.

To my surprise, virtually all of the extra traffic was from holiday party planners looking for a new bean dip recipe.

By itself, this is an interesting bit of trivia. But, if I actually made money from selling bean dip, it would be quite valuable. This graph makes it plain that focusing a big marketing campaign on the New Years holiday would be much more successful than at other times.

That’s why bean dip should matter to Google. This type of information is readily available to search engines. It has tons of value as marketing research. And its true potential as an asset, has yet to be tapped.

Here’s an updated release of the Cache Page module for phpWebSite 0.10.2. Cache Page improves phpWebSite speed by about 6 times faster than without Cache Page.

phpWebSite 0.10.2 left out the pear lib/pear/Cache module, so I’ve included a copy of the pear module distributed with phpWebSite 0.10.1. Copy the patches/0.10.2/lib/pear/Cache directory included with Cache Page to the lib/pear/Cache directory in your phpWebsite 0.10.2 installation.

Download CachePage0_0_3.zip (52kb)

Please feel free to post a comment with the url for your website if you’re using Cache Page.