A Huge THANK YOU to all of You!

January 31, 2008 | 1 Comment

So… I truly thought I was prepared for my dad to pass away, but it was such a reality check when I looked at it with the perspective that I am only 42 years old (which IS still young!) and both of my parents are now gone. We lost our mother in February 2007 to a rare disease called Wegener’s Granulomatosis. For her, it attacked the kidneys and she fought a tough battle over two years. She had just started preparing her body to accept a kidney transplant and was on her first week of literally 100 pills a day, when her body fought it and she suffered a heart attack. When she passed away… a large part of my father, who had spent the last 50 years married to her, went with her.

In October, after a routine checkup and a small complaint of stomach discomfort, my dad discovered he had something a bit more than a bad gallbladder (original diagnosis) during the preoperative testing. When the doctors discovered the pancreatic cancer through a pet scan, it was his choice to skip all further testing and instead, enjoy the remainder of his time as best he could without daily trips to the doctor. He chose NOT to have the exploratory surgery after watching one of his older sisters take that route earlier in the year and find no success.

Back to my reality check… My mother died of a very rare disease, my father died of pancreatic cancer (along with his dad and three of his sisters) where does that leave me, my brother and sister, and all of our children? It appears we really need to get on the ball and have our health checked out regularly, including screenings for these diseases! The Dana Farber Institute of Boston actually has an active case study running on our family due to so many siblings being affected with the cancer and we have all already been in contact and enrolled in the study… I will be giving blood and a DNA sample in 2 weeks to find out if there is a common gene.

Anyhow - I am slowly getting myself back to work this week and will be back in full swing on Monday of next week. I want to extend a huge thank you to all of you out there who sent well wishes and prayers for out family during this time. There are very few of you that I have actually met with in person… but I received more than 250 emails from readers of this blog, all of you sending various words of encouragement, prayers, hopes and wisdom. I don’t know how to thank you enough… but will find a way.

Thank you all -

Mark

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Saying goodbye to a Hero

January 19, 2008 | 17 Comments

Well… we knew it was coming and very late on Thursday, January 17th, 2008, my father waited until most of us left his room, took his last breath and said goodbye in his own way. It was all very funny the way it happened… Several of us had been in his room all day, knowing that his departure was imminent. The booklet provided by hospice was truly a roadmap to the completion of his circle of life and the signs we read about… were right in front of us.

At 11:30 PM, we talked about how it seemed Doug would be with us for one more day… and began setting up the camp in his room where his youngest sister and my own sister were going to spend the night with him. My wife went up to bed… my brother got in his car and started driving home, I sat in a recliner, trying to figure out how to get comfortable. It was less than 5 minutes later we discovered his very labored breathing had stopped and he laid restfully in his bed…

Doug Hansen was a hero to all of us, and in the end, he said goodbye the way he lived his life… quietly, and away from being in the spotlight.

Harold Douglas Hansen 1935-2008

Goodbye for now Doug… you will missed. God bless you…

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Google PR Update and Niche Stores

January 13, 2008 | 3 Comments

I’ve not seen alot of discussion about lately - but at some point on Friday night or early Saturday AM (Jan 11-12th 08) there seems to have been a Google PR and backlink update. I use the google toolbar in my browser as a quick reference guide when I visit sites… it is a good “quick glance” measure for checking page cache etc.  On Saturday AM, I notiuced several of my BANS sites having PR1 and PR2 so I jumped over to a few datacenter PR tools and sure enough, there was a change!

Iv’e not gotten into the backlink reports yet - thats next!

Having to jump around the web and check this stuff in different places made me realize I need a good directory! In one of my domain buying binges over the last month, I registered www. nicheclouds.com . I intended to use it as a multi-level directory in the cloud format… but may just snatch up a copy phplinkdirectory and use it for different purposes now! :-)

Thank you to everyone again for the well wishes for my dad… Hospice started his morphene drip this weekend and we have gathered the family at the house as we await the inevitable. I wasn’t planning on coming back here until the middle of the week but got a phone call to get back immediately, thus I drove back on Saturday. I may be on the quiet side for the next few days again… We all thought we were ready for this time… but I guess you cant really prepare, only cope with it.

Talk soon… 

Mark 

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I need a BlogRoll - Do you Blog about Niche Building?

January 11, 2008 | 5 Comments

As I was reading the PC mag earlier this week I stumbled upon an article about reading and contributing on the web… The majority of people, including power users, who browse the web do so by reading only and never really contributing their knowledge or thoughts. The magazine had the ratio at something like 95% of Internet surfers are readers only… imagine if more of us actually started blogging about our own skills and shared them with the world!

It made me realize that only about 10% of my time is spent writing… but I tend to read at different blogs about 4-5 hours every day! Yes, I even park a laptop in my recliner and read at night while watching my favorite TV shows… which are very few!

Today - I would like to get feedback from all of you and find out if you have a blog or forum or any other method of sharing your experiences with the web world. If so, I would truly love to read them and maybe we can even share links back to each other!

Let the blogroll begin!

Mark

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Woohoo - I’ve been Scraped! Now what?

January 11, 2008 | 4 Comments

Earlier today, I was reading at one of my favorite places… www.ShoeMoney.com. While I am nothing more than another anonymous visitor to Jeremy, his insight and thoughts will occasionally get me to not only think outside the box, but daydream about the possibilities of success!

Today, he wrote a piece about getting value out of scrapers. Until I read the post this afternoon, I had not even considered anyone would want to copy content from this site. Guess what… I was wrong! Scraping is the practice of copying content from one page and displaying it as your own… call it piracy, call it stealing, call it whatever you want, but ultimately it is just plain annoying. Now, don’t get me wrong… I am flattered that someone would find what I write useful and post it on their own site, but when that person copies and pastes the information like it was their own… well, that’s another story!

Once I read Jeremy’s post, I jumped back over to this site and immediately started searching for some of the text in a few of my posts.  Much to my surprise,  found one site within just a couple minutes! Now let me just say first… I can guarantee that 100% of the content I write here is mine. If I ever even used a reference to something else, I credit them. Being new to the world of scraping I really don’t know how to deal with it all… so I grabbed a wordpress plugin named rss footer from Joost De Valk’s site. Essentially, the plugin will embed a short snippet of code to every post and credit the author in the form of a “This post is from: The Niche Store Builder blog”.

Anyhow… here is one of the sites that snatched up a few of my articles, changed 2-3 words and claimed them as his own!

His Post: here Mine: here As you notice, he eliminated the first sentence and took the rest as his own. Why did he eliminate the first sentence? Well, when I started searching to see if there was scrapings around the web, if I had searched the first portion, I never would have found it.

There are others as well, in bits and pieces. I truthfully appreciate that someone finds what I write useful, I just wish he would credit the blog.

So… if you blog about what you are doing, make sure to check for dup content every now and again.

Mark

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