Two weeks ago on June 18th we loaded the minivan with our 4 kids (11, 8, 6, and 3) and enough snacks to stock a 7-11 and headed on the road to Columbus, OH for my wife's sister's wedding. We started in Spokane, WA and went through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio on the way there with stops in Billings, MT, Rapid City, SD, Cedar Rapids IA, and then Columbus. Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse memorial were our big tourist stops on the way. Made the trip out there in 4 days. 

My wife comes from a big family (she is 1 of 11) so there was a ton of time with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins while we were in Columbus for 5 days. My sister-in-law made a beautiful cake for the wedding and my wife did the flowers (she used to work for a florist) so I got to spend a lot of time with the kids while she was busy with that. 

Then we re-loaded the snack bucket and headed for home. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington on the way home. We stayed in Omaha, Cheyenne, Cody, and Butte so 5 days home. While we were in Cody we went to the rodeo they have every night there and the kids loved that.

A day in Yellowstone was probably the highlight of the trip home. We could have used a couple more days and some legs that could handle more walking (especially the 3 year old) but we saw the Grand Canyon of the Rockies, Hayden Valley, some mud pots and a cool spring called Dragon's Mouth, Old Faithful, Grand Prizimatic hot spring, Mammoth Hot Spring, and a bunch of other geysers, fumaroles, and springs. What amazed me was the huge variety of landscapes there were in the park. You could be in a big, grassy meadow and then go around the corner and you are in a huge canyon or in a super lush forest. Didn't see any bears or wolves but lots of elk and bison. 

5016.4 miles driven, way too much money spent on hotels, food, gas, and souvenirs and now I need a vacation to recover from this trip. Awesome memories made along the way and a great time with the family. 

Pretty cool site that lets you drop a raindrop and follow it to the ocean: https://river-runner.samlearner.com/

Anyone else seeing this on Google? If I search on Google for keywords I am ranking for with an account connected to Google Analytics and Search Console I am seeing this data in the attached image. Never seen that before yesterday.

After 5 LOOOONNNNGGGGG years in Florida we are moving back to Spokane, WA. I will still be working for Fanatics but they finally agreed to let me work remotely. It will be good to be closer to my parents (alzheimers, cancer survivor, generally getting old) and have the kids get to spend some time with them.

Looking for a house now and should be moving in a month or so.

My company is looking to fill a LOT of tech positions in our San Mateo office. Data engineers, marketing data analyst, principal engineer, software engineer, sr. software engineer, product managers, etc.

If you know anyone looking let me know. The office is located in San Mateo.

What are you thinking about this one RC? Some models have it hitting here in FL, some have it moving farther north, and some have it just staying out to sea.

https://ignitevisibility.com/seo-movie/

Roscoe Joseph Sousa. Born 9/28 at 9:18 PM.

Does anyone know Dennis? He is Dutch, was head of SEO at AirBNB, was at Ebay before that.

Our company just hired him to head up our SEO department. Just wanted to see if anyone here knows him or has worked with him in the past. I only chatted with him for a minute so wasn't able to find out too much about him.

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370

Another "ahhh, the good old days" post to bring up memories of the past.

For a few years back in the early late 90s and early 2000s when the Yahoo Directory was still relevant and still valuable from an SEO perspective I was lucky enough to know an editor. His job was to find sites to add to the directory so when he happened to "find" them in an email from me it just made his job easier. Got hundreds of sites listed (some for some of the people here) and all I had to do was send the guy some steaks every now and then. And we included it as an "add on" to our rudimentary SEO services. I think we might have charged $500 or so for that.

Ahhh, the good old days...

Frances Maybelle Sousa - 7 lb 10 ozs. Mom and baby are both healthy and doing well.

Well, it is time for me to switch gears for a bit. I have taken a position as an affiliate manager for an OPM. Gonna be working with 4 different merchants for the time being and probably more in the future. For the most part I am just a bit burnt out on being an affiliate and wanted to try something else out for a change. We will see where it leads!

My wife and I had our first baby yesterday at 7:12. He was 8lbs 13 ozs and was 21.5 inches long. 17 hours of labor later I have a whole new respect for my wife.

Clyde William Sousa is his name. Not sure why but I have always liked the name Clyde.

You can check out the pics here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150425285526997.355528.586796996&type=1&l=77779a662c

Doesn't he look great? Or am I just a bit biased?

Just got back from Affiliate Summit East in New York City. I am pretty sure the only other Core members there were Jim Banks and Jangro.

Anyway, it was a great time and if any of you are looking for a fun conference to check out I would recommend it. The next one will be in Vegas in January. I won't be able to make it to that one since I will probably have a 2 week old baby and a wife to take care of but if you can make it you should. If not it should be back in New York in August next year.

Great time hanging with friends, spending way to much time at the bar, talking with people smarter than me, golfing, a Yankees game, great food, and some great parties.

Thinking of giving Wishlist Member Pro a shot on a new project I am working on. Anyone ever used it? It is worth it or should I look elsewhere?

Pretty much just gonna build a fairly simple, basic membership site and from what I can see I think Wishlist will do what I need it to.

Some time around December 22nd there should be a new member here. My wife and I are pregnant with our first child! Had an ultrasound a couple weeks ago and everyone looks healthy so far.

Quote from: Rupert on May 11, 2011, 10:22:21 AM
Welcome Guys.

It would be an fun roll call to see who was an the various function over the years.  An old Maids forum, and if you were there... post

My first outing was Nottingham... a couple at the Duke of York, got to Boston, Florida. Stopped going abroad when WMW got too big imho.
I cannot network 2000 people.

My first public apperance was in Irvine and I went to WMW in Boston, Florida, and the first couple in Vegas. I also have been to Affiliate Summit about 8 or 9 times and a couple other smaller shows.

A friend who was at SES in NY passed along to me some info about a company he talked to for a bit. They are http://www.clickbroker.com and overall it looks somewhat similar to Textbroker. Pricewise they are roughly the same depending on the quality you want. Textbroker is cheaper for 4 stars and less but if you want 5 star articles clickworker is cheaper. It will be interesting to compare the quality of the two and see how these articles rate.

And supposedly through this link http://www.clickworker.com/SES2011/ you can get a $52 credit although I signed up, placed an order and didn't see that credit. Maybe it will show up.

Anyway, I ordered 14 short articles (100-150 words) today and when they come back I will let you know how they are and how quick the turnaround was.

So I have this perl script we had written probably 7 or 8 years ago that takes a datafeed and builds a site out of it. We sold it for a while but then got tired of supporting it so we stopped. It still works good and I still use it all the time. It can build multi-level sites and can build thousands of pages in just a few seconds.

Anyway, I am thinking of dusting it off and selling it again. We want it to remain a server side script. The biggest reason we wrote this script was I was tired of using another program that built the pages locally and then I had to FTP thousands of pages. I would always see a mistake so I would have to reupload all the pages.

My main questions are:

1.  Is there any reason not to leave it in perl? Should I have a programmer convert it to PHP? Any advantages either way? Is it an easy conversion?
2.  Do you think there is a market for something like this? There are a few good WP plugins but I haven't really seen a good solution for building a standard HTML site using datafeeds.
3.  If you were to have a program like this what features would you want? I want to add in some stuff like downloading the images, automatic affiliate URL redirects, and stuff like that.

Anyone have any experience with datafeed plugins?

The best one I have used is http://blogpig.com/products/csvpig/. It is pretty simple to use and does a good job of quickly building a WP site based off a datafeed.

I have also tried http://www.csv2post.com/ and it is decent but not quite as good as CSVPig.

The other one I know of is http://www.datafeedr.com/ but I have never tried it.

You guys have any experience with any of these? Are there any others I should check out?

I have been using them to build some simple, quick super targeted sites like http://giantsworldserieshats.com/ and http://aluminumstockpots.com/. Nothing super exciting about those sites but I have been seeing them get 1st page listings in Google in about 2-3 days. I usually just go manually comment on some related blogs, give a link or two from other related sites I have, and they are good to go.