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Alexa: Wayyy kewl, but what does it mean?

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The Alexa toolbar I added to the ineffable Firefox generates a fair amount of ego-boosting. Really. Where else, this side of Snow White, can you gaze into a mirror and have it murmur sweet nothings back at you?

According to this sweet cooing program, Funny is busting its seams with fattening popularity. (If only Adsense would get the message!) When I signed on to Alexa, sometime around the first of the month, Funny’s ranking was around 235,000. None of this striking me as very important, I didn’t note either the day or the exact figure. But there you have the same general idea as I do.

Fifteen days later, the ranking has risen to 170,881, easily busting through Yakezie’s challenge goal. (See, 1 is high, 87 gerjillion is low. Yakezie’s challenge is to break into the 100,000 range, assuming you’re one of the gerjillion.) According to my exquisitely sensitive calculations, Funny’s Alexa ranking increases at an average rate of 4,813 points a day.

Exciting, isn’t it?

Well, it would be, if we had a clue whether it has any meaning outside of Technoville.

We’re told we must jack up our rankings if we wish to monetize our site, because advertisers, for unknown reasons, attach high significance to Alexa rankings. And maybe Google uses Alexa in its rankings.

But what is it, anyway? Wikipedia reports that some folks classify it as a form of spyware or adware, possibly not something one would like knowingly to install  in one’s system. I don’t know about that…and hope it’s not so, now that it’s lurking among the too-many-toolbars at the top of my screen. The thing is heavily skewed toward webmasters, the highly techie group that originated it and forms its base: apparently most people who have the toolbar installed are webmasterish. And even that set expresses some skepticism about its significance. But they swear that advertisers commonly use it as a gauge of how many viewers might see their pitches.

And it’s apparently pretty easy to game Alexa. If, that is, one wanted to diddle away a lot of one’s hours at such an activity, an activity about as meaningful as a game of Spider Solitaire.

Well, it does seem to me that if Alexa had a direct line to Google, Adsense revenues would rise in lockstep with Alexa. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Not that I’m not grateful for the ego boost! Just sayin’, is all…

Lazy Day Yakezie Roundup

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Feeling a little under the weather today, having overdone with two or three 18-hour days in a row. The brain gone completely numb, I decided to cruise a few of the four score sites belonging to members of the Yakezie Challenge, in search of ideas and entertainment.

Here’s some low-hanging fruit you may enjoy:

Len Penzo got up to conducting a highly unscientific study of store-brand vs. name-brand grocery-store products. Very entertaining, and the results are not necessarily what you’d expect.

Bucksome Boomer inherited a headache with her new Verizon telephone number and wonders if you have had a similar problem, and if so, whether you have any suggestions for how to handle it.

Speaking of Verizon, another Tale from the Customer Service Crypt is bubbling up at CJ Bowker’s Life of an Insurance Salesman.

The Girl with the Red Balloon is searching for health insurance—quite a dizzying conundrum!

Little House in the Valley contemplates the possibility of building an eco-friendly kit home. Hm. I wonder if the beach comes with the Eco-Cottage.

In a nice think piece, Frugal Zeitgeist argues that minimalism is a form of activism.

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability was surprised to learn that, contrary to what she had been told, January estimated tax payments count toward the prior year.

Budgeting in the Fun Stuff and her readers discover that the free renovations delivered by Extreme Makeover can drive the residents to bankruptcy.

Hmmm… Wonder what’s going on with my friends in the non-Yakezie universe?

Over at MSN Smart Spending, Karen Datko has busted free from the chains of pay TV. Along the way, she throws off a whole lot of information sparks…lots of ideas and facts here.

At The Digerati Life, SVB contemplates ways to get out of an upside-down car loan.

Revanche suggests that you should keep your résumé up to date at all times, explaining why at A Gai Shan Life.

At Room Farm, Chance has thrown off the cancer. She and her partner are about to embark for a trek through Nepal, and so she’s planning to take down her wonderful blog. She does hold out some hope, though, that she may come back with a new site.

Simply Forties holds forth on sparkling wines, explaining how they’re made, what to look for, and what to serve them with.

Frugal Scholar started ruminating about home-made yogurt yesterday; today she picks up the conversation with a mellow and humorous post on how making bread and yogurt can save you money.

So there you go. I’ve accomplished almost nothing today, but fortunately others have been busy. 🙂

Sidestream Income: Have you read this guy’s amazing story?

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Good grief! I’ve just been browsing around a site called Deliver Away Debt. This guy decided he was going to pay off his debt by throwing sidestream income at it. The stream? Delivering pizzas.The blog is the story of his adventures in this quest.

Each month, he details his daily earnings and then totals them up. The man is earning $1,400 to $1,800 a month moonlighting 22 hours a week!

You realize…$1,500 was what I netted in 80 hours at a mid-level university administrator’s job, with a Ph.D. and 30 years of experience. LOL! Another boat missed. 😀

Glorioski!

Deliver Away Debt is a member of the Yakezie challenge. He just published 600 Money-Saving Tips that he personally gathered from his fellow Yakezites. It’s quite a compendium!

Image: ElfQrin (Valerio Capello). GNU Free Documentation License.

Funny Joins the Yakezie Challenge

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Yakezie-symbol

Lookit this spiffy golden clover! There’s one over on the right sidebar, too. Designed by Eliminate the Muda and CJ Bowker, that’s the badge of the  Yakezie Challenge, a network whose members try to break 100,000 in the Alexa rankings.

This scheme the brainchild of Financial Samurai, who promises that all proceeds generated by the group’s site will be donated to charity.

The goal is simple: build traffic. Says Sam:

If you’re outside of the top 200,000, get in the top 200,000 within 6 months. . . . If you’re already in the top 200,000, get in the top 100,000. And if you’re already in the top 100,000, get in the top 50,000.

Funny’s Alexa ranking is at 212,477 today. It’s been rising slowly since I signed up for Alexa about ten days ago, although it’s off from April, when a large spike in traffic pushed the ranking into the 100,000s. (The lower the number, the higher your ranking.) I’d like to keep traffic up at a constant level in the “spike” range—the site cranked money during the two or three days the spike lasted. And every dollah Funny cranks is a dollah closer to freedom from those de rigueur freshman comp courses! 😉

Several of my friends, most notably Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Mrs. Accountability, and Jackie at Money Crush, have urged me to quit dragging my feet and sign up. Apparently there are now around 80 members—to see who they are, check out this page.

So! I’m psyched! Can’t wait to see what happens next.

Three Don’t-Miss Personal Finance Posts, Plus One

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Here is a story that truly is not to be missed: Donna Freedman contributes a retrospective post to Get Rich Slowly describing what happened after she published an amazing post at MSN.com about getting by on $12,000 a year. Lordie, but this woman can write! Follow more of her stuff at Surviving and Thriving.

Frugal Scholar, who likewise is no slouch in the writing department, reflects on proposed rule changes governing private student loans, bringing a fresh point of view on the issue.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche reports success at returning a defective sweater to a reluctant retailer and proves that persistence pays dividends.

And Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has a new do: she’s migrated her site from Blogger to WordPress. The new look packs a lot of features into one page and yet keeps the body copy clean and easy to read. Click on the banner and a new image comes up! Some of the scenics are really spectacular—I love the pearlescent sky; reminds me of Arizona.

Possible down time forthcoming

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A fair amount of comment spam is getting through my current spam filter. Besides the annoyance factor, dealing with this issue is starting to waste way too much time. So, in the next day or two I’m going to reactivate Akismet, a highly effective spam filter.

That plug-in has throttled FaM in the past. Akismet has issued a couple of updates since I deactivated it, so I hope the problem has resolved itself. But there’s a chance it will take FaM down, and if so, it may require some time to get BlueHost on the phone to fix it.

So if you drop by and get an error message or some such, don’t give up. Come back later—the problem will be temporary.