Ted's Blog

Amazon sales remained down, so it’s not quite as much fun to do a quarterly report. Still, there are some interesting surprises. I only have the one page with AdSense ads. It is getting about 40 ad clicks per month out of 2,000 page views with the result being about $3 in revenue per month. It’s a long way to a $100 deposit.

In May I thought my troubles were over as I sold 29 items with Amazon compared to 6 the month before. But in June I sold a miserable 5 items, though part of that was because 3 books purchased in May were returned, so 5 items was my net. For the quarter the total was 40 items with a price of $730.69 and a commission for me of $35.35.

The biggest seller was the Turbo Charge iPod charger with 5 sales, though last quarter I had 11 sales. The most expensive item anyone bought was a radon gas detector for $120, so I got $7.20 as a commission. The most unusual item was a handful of books on trauma including 4 copies of one book plus a couple of other trauma titles and a Ham radio book too. Three copies of that one book were returned.

I am also still getting money each month for ads on my iPod pages and right now that is more than Amazon and AdSense revenues combined.

Recently there was a paragraph in the paper about my neighborhood saying that a rabid bat had been found in someone’s house. I then made a question about this the first post on the new local bulletin board to see if I could find any additional information about it. I didn’t, but one person responded and that made me go look up more information. It’s not that I was worried about it, I had just never heard of rabid bats being a problem and wondered it if was just fear mongering or a legitimate public health concern.

I found an excellent page at the CDC’s website about bats and rabies and was very surprised to find that most cases of rabies in humans are caused by bats! Not dogs, not raccoons, but bats. So it is a more serious problem than I originally thought, though rabies still isn’t all that widespread. I imagine that one reason it can be a problem is that bats are pretty small and the sick bats are more likely to get in your house or come out during the daytime. Then people try to move them and, BAM! bat bite.

For a while the city of Avondale Estates had a community bulletin board on its website. It wasn’t all that active, but it was a good place to go for information sometimes and every now and then there would be a good discussion. But about a year ago, the bulletin board was removed and it looks like nothing has taken its place. I know one of the city council members was active on that bulletin board, so I looked up his e-mail address and asked him if there was a new one. He said he had invited people to start their own Yahoo or Google groups when the city pulled their site, but it doesn’t look like there is anything all that active except for a few very specific uses.

Based on my experience with the Engineer’s Association bulletin board, I knew it wouldn’t be that hard to get a domain and install some bulletin board software. avondaleestates.com has been taken for a while, but I thought lakeavondale.com would be a good substitute since the lake is kind of a place for people to get together. It was available, so I went ahead and bought it for a year.

I can host it along with igirder.com on my asmallorange account. Nobody will know they are related since they will look completely indepdent. I had used PunBB for the Engineer’s Association because it was free, simple, not hard to install, and handled all the basics. Last time I checked there was a fork of PunBB called FluxBB and they were both still updating their software. Would this still be the best option?

I found MyBB as a more powerful alternative. It is also free, but allows users more customization, so I figured it would be better for a community.

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