Have you received the nifty animated report from those stats helper monkeys at WordPress? No? You may need the Jetpack plugin.
Don’t care to install yet another bloated plugin package? Use Jetpack Lite like we’re doing on our new and improved Team Agreda blog.
But this isn’t about plugins, or jets, it’s about what we’ve been up to here at LiveWorkDream.com over the past year – at least according to WordPress.
Here’s what their algorithms had to say about our blog in 2011…
Some Crunchy Numbers
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 160,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.
In 2011, there were 59 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 633 posts.
The busiest day of the year was September 28th with 1,418 views. The most popular post that day was Stephen King’s Number One Faaayuuuun… Interesting, considering the post is four years old. And that date was a week after Mr. King’s birthday, but while we originally published that post a couple days after our visit on his birthday, we didn’t mention Stephen King’s birthday at all. Must just be some good SEO juice regarding Stephen King’s birthday there – either that, or something creepy is going on behind the scenes… bwaaaaahaaaaahaaaa!
Sorry, there I go digressing once again.
How did they find us?
The top referring sites in 2011 were:
hitchitch.com
Many thanks to the crew over at Hitch Itch! It is a great site for finding RV Travel Adventures and Journals, and it continues to drive traffic here daily.
It only makes sense that those referring links all relate to our most popular posts of the year. While many of our most popular posts were written before 2011, these are the posts that got the most views last year, followed by their activity and original post date.
We assume many of our readers are on the road, or hope to be someday soon. Most visitors came from The United States. Canada & Portugal were not far behind.
If you are reading this from afar, please leave a comment and let us know what brought you here.
We shall continue working the dream life from our mobile headquarters of Team Agreda this year, and look forward to another summer at Vickers Ranch, and a return to the Right Coast next winter. We hope you will follow along and are enjoying your own life’s adventures. For more about the nuts and bolts of how we make a living on the road, be sure check out our new and improved home-based business blog and stay tuned for the launch of our new e-book about how to earn an income anywhere!
Here’s that informative post I promised before i got distracted by those great steaks and cocktails at the AA. I hope at least, that anyone who publishes an RV blog – or any website for that matter – will find this information, well… informative!
A while back, fellow Nü RVers those tech nomads informed us that a certain website was repurposing blog posts, not only from this site, but theirs and those of a number of other RVers.
Sure enough, a simple search revealed that entire posts of ours, including photos, were being republished in their entirely without our permission. Furthermore, we discovered that the site in question was a paid membership site, so it was using our content for profit!
The infringing website’s owner argued that because we make our posts available via rss feed, that the content was free to use as he wished. A bogus claim from someone who hadn’t done his homework, but a slightly grey area nonetheless.
TIP: To search a specific website for something you wrote, use Google and enter a distinct phrase followed by “site:” and the domain, like this…
Replace domain.com and the phrase or keywords to meet your needs.
While we were able to remove all existing and future content of ours from the website in question with one request, it got me thinking. I decided to do my own homework regarding the rights of web publishers, and gladly share what I found out here.
Ownership Rights of Web Content Publishers
According to the The Berne Copyright Convention, everything on the internet is considered copyrighted the moment it is written. Under the Berne Convention, copyright is automatic upon publication and does not require formal registration. When the United States joined the Convention in 1988, however, statutory damages and attorney’s fees continued to be available available only for registered works.
According to the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty of 1996, “compilations of data or other material (databases), in any form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations.” All blog content is stored in a database and is therefore an intellectual creation.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (title 17, U. S. Code) states that “Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”
Finally, by republishing our copyrighted content on a for-profit website I confirmed that the infringing site was in violation of the federal copyright fair use doctrine, as described in sections 107 through 118 of the copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code)
Please note that I am by no means a lawyer, not even close, in any way. So I consulted one. I visited the free legal advice website LawGuru.com and asked:
What law can be cited when notifying someone who has republished original website content without permission, when they insist syndicated content (rss) is in the public domain?
My research proved me correct. Here is the answer I received:
You can cite 17 USC 106 which defines your exclusive rights, including a right of attribution, and 17 USC 501-506 which define your remedies. 505 authorizes recovery of attorneys fees and expenses and 506 may make it a criminal offense, particularly when done via the web.
However, you need to know that for the Court to have jurisdiction to enforce a copyright in the US, you must first apply to register it. It is a simple process for a copyright attorney to do that online. You should use an attorney, so that the attorney can simultaneously write a CDL (cease and desist letter) to this apparent infringer. A letter from you is not likely to have the same effect and not likely to be worded for optimum impact. In fact, most do-it-yourself non-lawyer CDLs are a disaster and some even create grounds for countersuit.
There are numerous blog aggregators on the interwebs that legally republish copyrighted content. They do this by only publishing an excerpt, assigning attribution, and including a link to the original source. But there may be times when one might wish to republish content from another source in its entirety, when it is appropriate to do so. Like when said person owns the copyright to the original content, or has explicit written permission to do so.
I’ve been considering doing just that with a new Tripawds Blog that will republish posts from our five featured blogs, giving readers one location to find all the best news, gear, gifts and nutrition advice for three legged dogs in one convenient site. Just how would I go about doing this?
To republish our own content and consolidate posts from multiple different blogs in one site, I plan to use the Autoblog plugin from WPMU Dev. Should you choose to do the same, of course, we know you’ll be certain you have the rights to do so.
You haven’t heard from me around here in a while because I have been a bit preoccupied lately. In addition to our property search, home purchase, cross country move, and welcoming Wyatt into our pack, I have been buried with PHP, MySQL queries, FTP sessions and function calls.
Say what, you say? It’s been quite a learning experience really, which I care to share in depth someday. But for now, I’ll just tell you what it means…
We just completed our migration of Tripawds to the WordPress MU platform, but RVblogz was my first WPMU installation. You say what again? Basically, it means we are now offering free blogs for tripawd lovers and full-time RVers.
Yes, we announced RVblogz a long time ago, but the recent migration to WPMU has enabled us expedite blog creation and offer much more robust features for RVbloggerz. In fact you can get your own free travel blog in seconds, now that we have automated the blog creation process. Well, WordPress MU has, but we made it work!
If you want to check out a fine example of how full-timers are using RVblogz, check out the Purcells On Wheels traveling family blog! Or, how many of you have heard of the Killbarney project?
Rebuilding the Tripawds community has been exciting, as Jerry’s discussion forum members have grown to 800 strong. Now they can all have their own three legged dog blogs. And with the RVblogz Communities feature, members can create their own mini-facebook, all about RVing. OK, well maybe not. But in addition to easily publishing a travel blog with over 100 themes to choose from, you can create your own little RV community with a message board, Wiki pages, and news items.
So much to tell, such little time … just wanted any readers we have left to know why I’ve been such a stranger lately. And now that we’re headed back to ranch so I can work the Vickers hay harvest, I may become even stranger yet. If that is at all possible.
If you’re seeing this post, then we have successfully migrated to our own dedicated server. You may not be since DNS changes can take some time to propagate throughout the world, but I digress.
So, Bob is provisioning our new dedicated server. Soon I get to learn cPanel and endure the WordPress migration thing for the tripawd blog and move the Simple:Press forums. That means this site will follow. Expect downtime over the upcoming week. Thank you for your continued support.
For inquiring minds who want to know, here’s an exchange I had a while back with one such interested party who has valid concerns about blog spam. I replied with what I feel are the primary benefits of running our own installation of WordPress.
… any advice you could offer on running your own instance of WordPress rather than setting your blog up at xxx.wordpress.com … WordPress offers cautions about the potential problems with spambots posting to blogs, and note they have a variety of things in place to prevent this.
I’m wondering how much of a problem you folks have found this, and what provisions you may have had to take to secure your own blog against illegitimate postings and other intrusions?
My Reply: The “Akismet” anti-spam WordPress plugin that comes with a standard installation of WordPress catches the majority of spam comments received through our blogs. Periodically some will get through, but by configuring our blogs to require moderation of first-time comments, we can easily “spam” them without them ever appearing on the site.
We also use the WP-Deadbolt plugin which lets us blacklist specific domains from attempting to register for our blogs. This also greatly reduces the potential for comments from known spammers.
In all, spam is not an issue for us, and we have our four blogs running on our own WP installations. Management and moderation of spam must take us less than an hour a month.
The major difference between installing your own WordPress.org blog, and having a WordPress.com blog – aside from the custom domain issue – is flexibility. At xxx.wordpress.com, you cannot install plugins or customize the code behind your blog.
With your own installation you can hack away to your heart’s content and tweak the code to customize functionality and appearance however you see fit. This does however, require additional time and technical ability.
Here are just a few links that discuss the pros and cons in more detail. Hope this helps at last somebody out there!
Before we left Northern California, we wanted to take another gander at the rural Siskyou County town of Etna, in the beautiful Scott Valley, just west of Yreka.
Etna has always been one of our favorite spots. With the stunning Marble Mountains as a backdrop, this old ranching community is the gateway to some of the most spectacular, rugged scenery in the state. We’ve had many backpacking adventures in those mountains, and were never disappointed (well, except once when cows trampled our campsite, but that’s another story . . . ).
Since we hit the road, Etna has always stayed on my short list of possible places in which to buy land. And now, with a good basis on which to compare it to, we set out to take a closer look.
As we drove from Eureka to Etna, and still hadn’t arrived after reaching the four hour mark, we started thinking, “Wow, this is farther than we remembered.”
It took us a total of six hours to get there, and “there” wasn’t really anywhere. The biggest metropolis, Redding, (population 90k) is two hours away. Getting to paradise was an exhausting, grueling drive. Hmmm, guess I blocked that out.
Nothing had changed since we’d last visited. The old familar landmarks were still there. Bob’s. The ice cream shop. The brewery. But after taking a hard look around, we realized that the place seriously lacked any kind of ethnic or age diversity, and even a real economy. Not even the summer adventurers like us could infuse enough cash into that area to breathe life into it the rest of the year. What I once thought was quaint, now looked like a tired town going down the path of extinction.
After consulting with a local United Country agent (UC is the best resource for rural property sales) , we hit the backroads to check out some land parcels. But to our disappointment, anything we could afford was either so far off the beaten path that four wheel drive was needed year-round, or it was in one of a couple of tidy rural subdivisions with cookie cutter “rustic” homes. Once we measured our criteria against reality, we knew this wasn’t the place for us.
After just two days, we crossed Etna off our list. And because the rest of California isn’t anywhere I’d want to live, we crossed the entire Golden State off our list as well.
Just a few years ago, we could’ve moved to this little piece of paradise in a flash. We were so tired of Eureka. But our world was smaller then, and we were too stupid to know any better.
Funny how 18 months on the road can change your perspective on things.
OK, so far so good with our upgrade to WordPress 2.7. No fatal PHP errors or major incompatibility catastrophes. This is a good thing.
But we haven’t yet upgraded the theme which is probably why your saying, “What’s the big difference?” But with so many hard-coded theme template modifications, I may not upgrade Mandigo anytime soon. The new version does have some pretty cool new features, but I think I’ll just quit while I’m ahead here and get to work on Jerry’s site to see what can of worms I can open with the Discussion Forums upgrade.
The only other change you may notice – if you ever used it – is the missing “Email this Post” feature. Well, the WP-Email plugin didn’t play nice after the upgrade so we’ve eliminated it. No worries though, the new Sociable plugin lets you email this post using the first “Share This Link” icon below.
Please let us know if you experience any new technical difficulties, or if your subscription feed no longer works. But then, I guess you’d never get this if it didn’t!
The new year brings change indeed. Everywhere, including here. It’s high time we upgrade WordPress and all the plug-ins on this site, so that’s what we’re doing.
The site may be down or appear broken for a while, but we hope to be back online soon … really soon. Please stand by.
What’s this have to do with Mt. Shasta or our dashboard Jackalope? Absolutely nothing. Just please stand by.
Don’t care to install yet another bloated plugin package? Use Jetpack Lite like we’re doing on our new and improved Team Agreda blog.
The busiest day of the year was September 28th with 1,418 views. The most popular post that day was Stephen King’s Number One Faaayuuuun… Interesting, considering the post is four years old. And that date was a week after Mr. King’s birthday, but while we originally published that post a couple days after our visit on his birthday, we didn’t mention Stephen King’s birthday at all. Must just be some good SEO juice regarding Stephen King’s birthday there – either that, or something creepy is going on behind the scenes… bwaaaaahaaaaahaaaa! 
ehow.com
Where did y’all come from?
Finally, by republishing our copyrighted content on a for-profit website I confirmed that the infringing site was in violation of the federal copyright 
We just completed our migration of 
Rebuilding the Tripawds community has been exciting, as 
Etna
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