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Computer Scientist, Data Munger, Doctor (PhD), Math Geek, Bargain Hunter, Baker, Budding Photographer, Crafter, Domestic Diva Wannabe and 
Archive for July, 2016
July 29, 2016
Hope
I’ve been a bit discouraged of late. The launch of my new domain not going as well as expected and other personal stressors have been conspiring to keep me emotionally drained as of late. I think that it why Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) speech resonated so strongly with me. I was emotionally primed for that message of hope.
Ignoring party politics, and the individual, it’s a pretty amazing moment for women. There’s something remarkable about seeing someone like you achieve something no one else like you has ever achieved before, especially when there is a systematic bias or prejudice against people like you. To be honest, that prejudice against people like you has been on of the additional stress of late. I thought I had done a good job of avoiding sexism in my life. I thought surely my little social bubble of friends and family, those people I choose to have in my life, wouldn’t have any misogynists. I was wrong. This election has brought out the worst in the voting base of both sides, and the worst in some people I thought I knew well.
So Thursday night, I was so moved watching the first ever woman accept a major national party nomination and giving a speech with hope as it’s primary tenet, that I couldn’t help but post on facebook. “I am full of hope <3". That's it, five words and an emoticon shared mere moments after the speech concluded. I expected my left leaning friends to like it and my right leaning friends to ignore it.
Then something remarkable, something that lifted my spirits more than any speech could ever have. Many of my conservative, right leaning friends also liked my status. Sure, a cynic might point out that my status might have been overly vague and those right leaning friends might not have caught the reference to the DNC. And I’m sure that’s true for some of them. Not all. I think this is an example that politics are not and do not have to be so divisive. That we can support each other, even if we don’t share the same views. It’s a reminder that the loud angry voices in the party bases are not the only voices.
I am full of hope <3
Posted in Life
July 20, 2016
SEO Initial Steps
Once or twice a week for the past several years I get the same spam email. They usually start out with a bit of flattery “We found that you have excellent services and products and your business has a great potential” before diving into the point “The issue on which I would like to bring your attention to is, the inadequate traffic and visitors on your website which is affecting your ranking and in turn the revenue.” They then list a couple of reasons why my site might not be ranking well in the search engine.
Being a believer in focusing on good content first (if you build it they will come), I’ve never really been on board with the whole search engine optimization concept. To me, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) always felt like a shady short cut. I realize now that that’s a pre-2000s way of thinking about it. Content is still king, but with trillions of pages out there, there’s a lot of good content out there to get lost in. (And really, the importance of SEO should have been obvious to me given my issues with search result descriptions, but I digress.) Here’s what I’ve been working on.
Validation
The easy first step was HTML Validation which probably doesn’t matter much, but is a good practice anyway.
To WWW or not to WWW
Some search engine experts recommending choosing to express all your links with the www (e.g. “http://www.datayze.com”) or without (e.g. “http://datayze.com”). The theory goes that using both forms of the URL can make a domain appear to have twice as many pages, and consequently, half as many backlinks to any one page. I am not sure how much I buy this argument. While it’s true that “http://www.domain.com” and “http://domain.com” page contents could be different, it’s standard practice that they are the same, and an easy enough for a search engine to verify. Anything that is common practice really shouldn’t hurt you much when it comes to ranking. Google’s stated goal is to serve you the best content, after all, not the most technically correct sites.
Then again, what do I know? I’m the one with the site not ranking well. It’s a simple fix, and “http://datayze.com” looks cleaner and more modern to me.
Sitemaps
This one ended up being a non-necessary headache. I expected Google to find the new pages relatively quickly since there was a 1-to-1 correspondence with the pages on the previous domain that google already knew about. When google didn’t index the new pages after a week, I decided a site map couldn’t hurt. Only I forgot about my ‘www’ prefix choice. My site map included the ‘www’ prefix on all URLs, which meant it was including only URLs that were 301 redirecting.
It appears that as google detects a 301 redirects it removed the redirected URLs from its index in favor of the new target URL. On the webmaster portal it showed me the ratio of indexed pages from the site map to the number submitted. As the URLs with the ‘www’ prefix got pulled from the index, that ratio of submitted to indexed pages grew more and more unbalanced. It wasn’t until the sitemap view showed 0 pages indexed that I finally realized the error of my ways, adjusted my sitemap to include the non-www URLs instead and everything returned to normal.
At least This mistake doesn’t appear to have negatively impact my rankings.
As I checking the google index for my domain, I noticed that google had opted to index more than just the pages I had requested. It was also indexing some paramaterized URLs.
The above search results are for the paramatertized Name Uniqueness Analyzer where the name is set to Carolynn and Lydiah. Most likely google discovered those paramatertized URLs through the Name Generator, which, when generating rare names, creates a link to the Name Uniqueness Analyzer. Carolynn and Lydiah were given to 46 and 16 babies respectively.
Google can’t discover a URL it’s never seen. Thus google does not know Carolyn is also a valid parameter to the Name Uniqueness Analyzer, because there is no link to it anywhere on my site.
I updated my sitemap to include common parameters to the more popular apps. Maybe this will generate some more traffic for me.
Next Steps
One of the things I need to work on is a responsive, mobile friendly design. It’s good timing. Along with my viewpoint on SEO, I think my splash page is also looking a bit dated.
Posted in Internet & Technology, Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft
July 15, 2016
Loosing Authority
Looks like my optimism in my last post was extremely premature. On Tuesday my stats plummeted. Between now and then I’ve had under 190 users a day, and earned just 30 cents a day. On a weekday! I would have considered those stats bad last year. This year? They’re abysmal.
Near as I can tell the best explanation for the nose dive is the loss of domain authority. I had previously read that by setting up 301 redirects that I would retain 90-99% of the ranking power. This may have been true if I redirected my entire site from SarahKTyler.com to Datayze.com, but I didn’t. I wanted to keep the splash page of SarahKTyler.com, which is serving as my online resume. I may have kept the ranking power of the individual pages that are redirecting, but that doesn’t seem to be helping much. It does not appear that I’ve kept much, if any, of my domain authority I’ve managed to build up over the years.
I’m starting off at a significantly bigger disadvantage than I thought I would. My new domain name is just 11 days old. I set up the redirect just six days ago, which means it probably wasn’t discovered by Google or Bing until six days ago. For all intents and purposes, my domain age is practically zero. In his video Matt Cutts says not to worry too much about domain age since it’s less of a factor at two or three months and it typically takes a few months to go from spalsh page to full website anyway. That’s still 53 days away. Seventy percent of my traffic is (or was) from the search engine. I’m worried if I lose those eyeballs it’ll take a very long time before they start to find me again.
I figured since my old name was in the top 2,000,000 sites per Alexa, both search engine giants would pick up on the change quickly. Neither did. I submitted a site map hoping it would help them get around to indexing my new site faster. Neither has.
I knew I would make missteps when starting my own company, but this one feels like the biggest so far. I should have held off on the launch until the new domain had a chance to be crawled.
At this point I think the best thing to do is keep moving forward. What’s done is done. Before now I’ve always been rather indifferent to search engine optimization. I’ve always held the belief that good content matters more than anything else. Now I’ve been reading about breadcrumbs, structured data, and sitemaps. Hopefully I can bootstrap this process and start getting my numbers back up.
July 11, 2016
Datayze Launched!
Last Friday night I quietly launched under my new name Datayze.com.
Unlike the other names I came up with, once I realized Datayze was available I felt like I had found “the” one not just “a” one. I pronounce it as data-yze as in “to data”. It has everything I was looking for: the credibility, the geek factor without being overly geeky, and it works across all my apps. At seven characters long it’s even one of my shorter domain names which is a nice bonus. But my favorite thing about it? When you pronounce it as data-yze it sounds like a call to action.
Even though it was love at first site for me, I polled my friends and family to get additional perspectives. Datayze was clearly a standout for them as well. DataLemma and DataQuod (Quad is latin for “fact”) were also favorites. The former is still up for sale if your interested. I never registered the later. As far as I know it is still available as well.
If there’s one drawback to Datayze it’s that it’s an off-by-one error of Datalyze. Datalyze.cc was one of the domain names I was initially thinking of, and one I was leaning towards for a while. I must admit I did type “datalyze.com” into the browser a few times when I was initially working on the migration.
Mistypings aside, I don’t view Datayze as a variant spelling. Sure, it’s one character different from both Datalyze, and Datatyze, two other domain names I considered. Unlike Dattaticks, which is one character different from the clearly better DataTicks, there isn’t a clear winner among Datayze, Datalyze or Datatyze. Each works on it’s own and independently of the others. I could see someone starting a company with any one of those names. Those two other names also aren’t being used even though they’ve been registered. Datalyze.com is a blank page and Datayze.com is a GoDaddy splash page. This means there’s no other website I could get confused with. It also gives me a chance to get out in front of users first and build my brand so that my domain is the one that gets the name recognition.
So far everything is running smoothly. I’ve set up 301 Redirects so the change should be mostly unnoticeable to my users. All old links and book marks should bring them to the right place. I even earned $2.04 over the weekend, which is higher than normal. It’s still early, but I’m optimistic that 2016 is going to be a very good year for my business. Here’s hoping.
Posted in Work Life | Tags: Domain Names, Sarahsoft
July 10, 2016
Fourpalooza
Someone is having a good birthday party, day? week? fortnight?!
When each of the girls was born near a major US holiday (Independence day for Nicki, Thanksgiving for Alexis) I was stoked. Having a birthday near a major holiday meant having an extended weekend for the party. Our family is spread out over both costs, so an extra travel day is most definitely an asset. It turns out having a birthday near a major holiday tends to draw out the festivities.
The birthday celebration started off with a school party on the 1st. Grandma and Grandpa were flying in on the 2nd. We like to keep the girls out of school for the week Grandma and Grandpa visit to maximize everyone’s time together. That meant cupcake day at school would have to be the 1st.
Who forgot about the school’s no home good policy? This girl! After making two dozen cupcake ice cream cones, fashioning an ice cream cone holder out of an amazon prime shipping box and some how managing to get them all to school relatively in tact I learned the kids would not be able to eat them. There are a couple kids with food allergies in Nicole’s class and even though the cupcakes didn’t have any nuts, the school didn’t want to take chances. I can understand that, it’s their liability after all. Thankfully there was a shop that sold cupcakes near by. When parents arrived at the end of the day they had the option give their child one of the home made cupcakes, so most of the kids got two different cupcakes.
That’s not the only thing we had double of do to a Mommy Mistake. Who ordered the wrong sized bike? This girl! I ordered Nicole a 12 inch balance bike. I thought it might be a little small, but doable since she’s on the shorter side. No dice, and now that it was put together I couldn’t return it. Domingo and I made a quick trip to Target where the only bike in her size was a frozen bike with optional sleigh doll carrier. Nicole was most definitely not disappointment about that.
On Saturday, when most of her friends had returned from their holiday travels, we had our first ever birthday party with just friends. That’s two sets of cupcakes at school, two bikes (now one for Alexis) and two parties, stretched out over two weeks. Fourpalooza for sure.
Since this was our first year having a birthday party with friends from school we had a few lesson learns:
– Write your own invitations. Computer printing is far more legible than my chicken scratch, and we can easily create the number we need. The invitations we bought came in an 8 pack which was inconvenient given there were 17 kids invited, and didn’t have enough space to write “siblings welcomed.”
– Buy Cupcakes/Cakes. Seriously, when will I learn? Our local grocery store charges the same price for the customized cakes as they do for the generic cakes in the bakery refrigerator, and they’re good, really really good.
– Do not fear Chucky Cheese. I dreaded our friend party. I remembered Chucky cheese as loud, with obnoxious
animations, but it’s really improved since I was a kid. We were assigned a party coordinator who was fantastic. Speaking of which, I need to go call them and let them know what a wonderful job our party coordinator did!
Posted in Family Life | Tags: Birthday, Nicole
July 5, 2016
A Name, I Have One or Three or Four
Well that didn’t take too long. After dwelling on it, and dwelling on it, and dwelling on it, I think I’ve finally found the a name and it’s perfect.
Actually I came up with a few. Over the past month whenever I came up with a name I thought would be a possible solution I went ahead and registered it. I didn’t want to get burned like I did when I wanted to purchase my own name as a dotcom. Back in 2004 “styler.com” was the only form of my name that wasn’t available. Since I was so used to using my middle initial I decided to go with “sktyler.com”. By the time I realized I wanted “sarahtyler.com” someone had already registered it. Lesson learned: grab a possible domain name when it’s available!
Now that I’ve picked which name I’m going to go with, it’s time to release the others.
The first name I came up with was Dattaticks.com. My niche right now is all about data, and data munging to get interesting results. “Data Ticks” to me invokes an image of processing and graphing data. It fit well. The name DataTicks.com was registered only last November but currently points no where. All things being equal I would have gone with DataTicks.com if it were available.
DataLemma.com. Lemma is a mathematical term and linguistics term so it appealed to both my Math Geek and Word Nerd sides. In Math it’s a intermediate theorem or “helping” theorem. The phrase invokes to me the image of mathematical “helping” apps. The only drawback I see to this name is it’s highly geeky and not very approachable for every day users.
Since I’m not currently planning on using those names I decided to put them up on the NameCheap marketplace for $20 and $50 respectively. The price reflects what I think the name is worth. (Hey, it took me a ridiculous number of hours to come up with those! I am saving someone that time.) If by the time you’re reading this the auction is over but you still want the name and it’s still avaliable, message me and I’ll put it back up.
The third name I registered but never intended to make my company name is DataLies.com. One of the names I fell in love with was Datalyze.com, the combination of Data + Analyze. The DotCom was already registered, as was the Org, Net and the British spelling variants Datalize. The only name available was the .cc. I strongly considered it, but when test marketing it to none technical people they kept hearing “data lies”. I was shocked that DataLies was still available. This is an excellent blog name for disputing pseudo science people! I’m not sure when I’ll have time for another blog, but I couldn’t resist and snapped it up.
As for the name I did go with, that will be revealed soon. It’s probably a safe bet that it has the word “Data” in it though.
Posted in Internet & Technology | Tags: Domain Names
July 2, 2016
June 2016 Progress and Income Report
This month was an interesting month. Overall my revenue stayed above the $1/day threshold earning a total of $37.78, but my individual numbers were all over the place. I had one 7 day interval where I earned just $5.02 and another where my income was $11.34.
There were no new apps this month. I spent my time improving the existing apps, working on the new Adblocker Workaround, and thinking about new company names. That doesn’t mean I don’t have cool things to report!
My bounce rate on my apps right now is pretty A-maz-ing.
Starting from June 15th through the rest of the month I enjoyed an average bounce rate under 1%, average time on site was 2:33 seconds with 6.96 pages per session. Those are some pretty incredible numbers. Some of my apps do require a page refresh, but none of those refreshes are automatic. That means I have a pretty wicked insane rate of visitors to my apps actually using my apps.
In terms of app use, my Miscarriage Reassure and Miscarriage Statistics Chart are finally starting to do well thanks to getting a few mentions on reddit. Some of those redditers were so positive about the apps it took every ounce of will power I had not to create an account and thank them personally. Joining the conversation would probably not have helped the professional image I’m trying to cultivate. If by any chance any of your daily users made it over here, just now that I’m incredibly happy to have built something you’ve found so useful!
This coming month will probably be another slow month. We have family visiting for Nicole’s upcoming birthday which means I’ll be down a week. My idea well is also a little dry at the moment, so I’ll probably continue to focus my energy on coming up with a new name. The name issue isn’t technically blocking me, but lately it feels as though it’s the main element holding me back.