Just a quick post to let the readers out there know why I am slacking lately here. I have been trying to get a new blog off the ground and am trying to get ten posts finished so I can submit it to a blog community that promotes expats, Americans or Europeans living abroad. As most of you know I am in China and the new blog is about my life and adventures (or misadventures) here. The site is called Commentarius Perpetuus (onrunning commentary) and is at seven posts now and I have have broken considerable ground with the sidebar and layout. I guess I can relax there and swing back this way and finsih these two posts that have been gathering dust for almost a week now.

Also happy to report that I am able to download BTs again and access IRC (which I have yet to learn all the ropes) and so am getting movies back in. I got in a bunch on Rapidshare as well but tonight it is acting pissy and does not want to download. So, let me go do some research ( as in lying my ass down on the sofa and zoning out on B-movies until I pass out) and I should be caught up with stuff tomorrow, and then can do this meme thing. Seems easy enough. I need to do a post on the last poll as well which did not get many votes, all of 5, but I still need to do a write up and commentary on it.

And lastly for a while I will be running the cafe with five posts per page for a reason that I am too tired to explain, but I need to do this way for a week or two maybe. It will look funny since the sidebar is so damned long now. I got addicted to to tweaking my sidebar obviously, and in the process my site loads so slow it is causing some trouble here and at some places that need to crawl my front page. Should be temporary or there may be changes so it can load faster, but not tonight.

See ya

Bill

As of this writing it is now 12:00 PM 1 Nov 08 in China, which means there are about three more hours in the States until this riveting poll closes at midnight on Halloween night. I feel any decent  American or European is out trick or treating or partying right now, and not home reading my blog. Barring some unforeseen event I feel secure in releasing the final results in this, the first ever (but not last) Uranium Café public opinion poll. And the question, if you have not read the heading yet, is a burning one: who would you rather sit in a room with and chug down a bottle of Jack Black with? This is an odd poll for me since I do not drink alcohol, but I participated nonetheless. My vote you inquire? Well, I will share my vote, so read on dear reader.

Coming in last place is a guy who I thought used to be so cool and handsome in that rugged, worn down way, Mickey Rourke. Mickey did pull in two votes towards the end and I am happy to see this. Why so few votes for a guy who was once so cool and under the influence, I would assume, be rather interesting? Well, because under the influence he might also whoop your ass for the fun of it. And you would have to sit there and wonder what the hell happened to Mickey’s face? He had to have seen the same plastic surgeon as Joan Rivers. Why the hell did this guy leave films for five years and pursue a senseless boxing career in near middle age? What is up with the domestic violence issues?  These are not question to ask this guy shit faced.

In third place is a guy who probably has a chronic blood alcohol content of  0.50% (the other 50% being God knows what), Keith Richards. Keith has been boozing and drugging it up long before most readers of the Café were even born and he shows little signs of changing his ways other than he chases his whiskey now with shots of Geritol. Keith is a great guitar player and despite the wild stories is supposed to be a decently behaved guy enough of the time that a little fire side chit chat may be doable. To see how the Stones killed time while on the grueling road see The Cocksucker Blues, a bootleg movie that Keith and Mick have tried to distance themselves from over the decades. It is tragic what these multi-millionaires are driven to do from boredom in their spare time in their luxury hotel rooms.

In a close second place is the guy I voted to sit and have tea with while he drinks some Jack Daniels (or whatever he chooses) with, Jimmy Page. The picture is from, I think, 1975’s Physical Graffiti tour, and Jimmy was often seen during this period with a bottle of Jack Black before and after shows, and almost always while aboard the famous Zeppelin Starship, as he was petrified of flying. I was lucky enough to see Led Zeppelin way back in April of 1977 in Cincinnati Ohio. I also saw him and Robert Plant in various solo outings as well. I understand the guy could be moody but given the right situation could be easy going and fascinating to talk to, but don’t ask him about Aleister Crowley!

And the winner with a staggering 11 out of 27 votes is that girl in the cowboy hat and bikini from that terrible Japanese zombie flick Onechanbara, Otoguri Eri ( I guess that’s her name… who cares really). I can see that this chick stumbling around drunk in a bikini offers potential explorations into human nature the same situation with Keith or Jimmy never could. For some reason though the image of a drunk Mickey Rourke in a bikini is something I would want to see. She can’t act and I hated the film, but she is certainly a cute little creature and I would like to know why she had to kill zombies in a red bikini, a cowboy hat and fuzzy white boa. Wouldn’t combat fatigues be more suitable? Anyway, we can’t deny the girl is a winner and the readers of the Café know who they prefer to hug the toilet with… this sexy babe! Well, that ain’t gonna happen in a million years, so please settle for these steaming hot pics and my thanks for all the votes.

Looks like the poor, late Wally Wood knows how it can feel

So I have really gotten behind on posting. There are some reasons for this and I do not want my fan base (all four of you) to think the Cafe will remain in this pitiful state.

1) I am having some bandwidth and connection issues. I can technically connect to my site and edit it, but it is so blasted slow sometimes. This problem is supposed to corrected “in a week”. I have been hearing that for abut three weeks now, and was told yesterday “in a week”.

2) Some work stress lately leaves me little mental energy for posting the quality posts that the Cafe has become internationally renowned for. I quote George W. Bush in a recent press release: “When I ain’t nuking goat farmers I’m reading the Uranium Cafe with Laura and the girls. We all love it.”

I teach ESL in China and thus are the wages of sin my brethren. I will not go into the details, but the Chinese education system is really something. As well my wife Ivy is off in Tibet on some quest and will not be back until January perhaps. That is stressful for me too since I am a big baby and am afraid of the dark because of all these freaky movies I watch.

Those are the main reasons things are slow here lately. There are some changes however. My FTP was back up one day and I managed to activate a couple new plug-ins. For recent news and updates check out The Wall of Uranium at the bottom of my side bar. It is basically a guest book application, but my theme will not show the actual guest book until I do something in the edit page and for now I have no clue what to do. But feel free to leave a comment or love sonnet or whatever. I do edit and delete things I do not like. I am in China for God’s sake. No freedom of speech here unless I allow it.

Also partake in the Uranium Cafe socially significant polls I will be conducting. They will always be matters important to our lives in this modern world, such as the current poll asking who you would prefer to chug a bottle of Jack Daniel’s black label with. We take life seriously here at the Cafe during these hard and trying times and we want to know what you… yes, you… are thinking and feeling.

My BT connection is blocked. I have good ranking memberships at Demonoid and Cinemageddon that are frozen now. I am using Rapidshare and Mega Upload for now but there can be limitations to those services unless you pay. That may be what I will have to do eventually.

There are reviews to be posted. Currently editing images for a Double feature post on The Brain Eaters and The Flesh Eaters. Lots of Vincent Price material I have watched lately. I love the guy and his immortal voice though he is a ham and a half. Dramas and adventure posts coming as well, on films  like Ice Station Zebra, In Cold Blood and a couple great westerns- McKenna’s Gold and Hombre- coming. Of course more image themed posts with movie posters and comic book art, and some music posts on Black Metal bands like Carpathian Forest and Psychobilly rockers The Cramps.

So, it is not for want of material that the Cafe has slowed down. Rather the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. And since I am quoting the Gospel please checkback soon for a small post on those wonderful little Chick tracks you normally find at bus stops and in phone booths (back when there were phone booths). I love those little things.

Sorry for the slow posting and I hope to be back at it shortly.

Bill

P.S. Recently checked my Google Analytics and found my number one vistes post was a movie I panned to death, Oneechanbara. It knocked my Jane Fonda as Barbrella post into 2nd place. I think that is strange.

Anyone working with Wordpress as a blog platform knows it can be rewarding but it can be blasted hell too. I am having some problems I need to iron out before I can move on comfortably. One is with my Java Media Viewer that I use for my photo gallery displays. I wonder if anyone even goes to those pages or clicks on the images on the sidebar? Jeesh… or if they do if their plug ins and such will even display it the way I see them. God… lets move on form that. In any case I want to have a workable viewer that looks cool and allows the person to see the images without going to a new page. I have some Tangerine Dream music for listening pleasure as you view the images. Once the problem is solved (I am not  a  computer nerd but I am stubborn and I will figure it out by Crom!) I am move on and post again as I will not be plagued by this blasted monomaniacal thinking affliction I get when I something like this happens. After upgrading to WP 2.6.2 I have had a lot of problems and I have been at it for almost three days trying to solve them. Please check out my galleries in the side bar and let me know if they display well on your computers.

For some reason too my site will not load all the way on IE. I do not really use IE but like to view the blog there sometimes to see if it is displaying properly. IE does not like something someone on the page and refuses to finish opening the site then quits. Gives me one of IE’s famous error reports I loathe so much. Some problem on line “69″. What the hell does that mean? I work on the blog in Mozilla and prefer to see it in Safari. But most people in the world still use IE and so I like to be sure things are displaying. Sometimes they are not you know.

On an  up note I worked out some old problems I have been having for a long time with text formatting. My paragraphs and images used to cram together and cause me a lot of extra work. Now they actually do what I want without me putting in these stupid little black lines. If you check out my older posts closely or  my raw looking RSS site you will see them between all the paragraphs and images. Like little ants.

Well, while I work out these damnable issues yet again at 3 AM I will post a few home movies from Ivy and myself here in Kunming China. Nothing fancy but sort of fun and personal. I typically do not veer far from the mission of the Cafe, basically because I have such a boring and dismal life and there is not much to talk about. But I think a few regulars may get a kick of these. Will be back with more horror and cult stuff soon enough, so relax.

And last but least for some useless diversion Ivy worked on a Flash animation of me transforming into a …er…guinea pig of ours. Not exactly Hammer material but I sort of thought she did pretty good for a first time experiment. She is at the base of Mt. Everest (Qomolangma they call it here) right now with some friends. I cannot travel through Tibet as an American right now because of the political climate here in China and there are plenty of para-military police all over the region with AK-47s to insure I do not revert to my rebel without a cause mode of thinking of some 20 or 30 years ago. I am a tad jealous and a little worried too, but it is a once in a lifetime experience and I hope she has a blast.

After note a day or so later: For now aforementioned technical plagues have been solved. Plug in conflicts prevented some functions from operating properly and kept my IE from loading. All is safe for now. The world can sleep a little sounder… for now.

Here is a selection of some of the things I have been messing around with on my computer using Adobe Audition and Sony Acid 5. Everything is pretty loose and experimental and more geared towards  trying to learn the process of recording onto a computer using software programs, which is not easy for me. I have some new stuff and equipment and have reverted back to the Sony software after a long struggle with Adobe, which I like but there are some problems I am tired of trying to solve.

Hopefully in the future there will be some more structured song material with…gasp… my vocals as well. The songs here are all done using loops, if you know what I mean. It is still a long and tedious process. Future recordings too will be loops since the digital platform is suitable for all that. I just got a new bass guitar and some injury issues I have had with my left hand seem to be much better and I can do all the basic chords again.

Well, does not look like Yes or Led Zeppelin have much to worry about, but I have fun doing it. The songs here sound sort of flat and I guess you will have to monkey with your equalizer a little. I guess transferring MP3s from one site to another is going to compromise the sound. The bass is gone it seems. If you think any of it is cool let me know. No stories really behind any of them. The last song, If You look at the Evil, has Ivy and a good friend Paul as loops and the title loop is from a philosophy lecture I have from TTC on Nietzsche. That’s about it. The pictures are all from Beijing.

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I’ve noticed more than a couple bloggers have some considerable artistic side to them and share some of their work on line. I guess the net can be a place to share our creative output with an actual audience. I do not have the passion to draw much any more but I am working on some songs right now and trying to record them onto the computer using Adobe Audition. There have been some experiments in learning to use the software and I may post those here in a while. I will give a plug to Rik Rawlings at Psych Skull because he is a fine illustrator and posts of his stuff occasionally on his movie/comic book/art blog.

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I used to draw quite a lot and sadly, for whatever deep seated psychological reason, have simply stopped. I have some sketch pads and pens here and am trying to get back into the swing of it. I hope that by posting something here and seeing in on line I may gain some motivation. These drawings are all old and while I do actually still doodle here and there I all but given up on long, worked out pieces.

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I will share these with no pressure on myself, but if some new stuff comes out I can post that material as well. I do have some ideas and maybe I just need to lighten up and draw for some fun again. the scan quality is pretty poor really and sometimes just washed out, but I do not own any of drawings anymore. I went through one of those odd phases and gave them all away and threw away thousands of old journals, you know how that goes maybe. Anyway, I gave the drawings to my son along with my comic book collection, so I am sure I provided him with a suitable foundation for his future and rest well at night now.

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Gilligan over at the always informative Retrospace wrote an interesting piece on how to try and get more traffic to your blog site. Its really something I am sure we all think of whether we talk about it or not. I for one have done some research into the matter and only scratched the surface before really just giving up and getting back to simply blogging. I am not saying that I leave things to chance and that I have not done some things to improve my “chances” of hits and longer visits, but lately I have decided the thing that comes first, for me, is simply content and appearance, then tweaking my Search Engine Optimization settings and trying to figure how the hell to upload a sitemap to my server comes later, if ever.

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I felt it was a good topic and decided I could offer some advice, though I know so little on the topic both generally and specifically. I have learned some things along the way and yet I am not sure of what value they really are, and I wonder how much it really helps everyone to go to Google Analytics and see they only had 25 hits after busting their gonads for over a week on an in depth essay on the life and films of Hershell Gordon Lewis. Before I even give my dubious advice I would say that most of the blogs I visit are sites that are labors of love and I think most of the bloggers would continue to do posts even if they got 2 hits a day. I am certain most if not all of them (including myself) make no money at it and yet, understandably, they want recognition and community of some sort.

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My site here is totally new, less than one month. While the material was moved from an old URL that address is gone totally and does not redirect traffic. So after a month or so my highest traffic for a day has been 75 hits, and I am happy to see it going up and if I had a couple hundred a day a couple times a week (not counting myself when I click in) I would consider my work to be not in vain. But I even wonder of what value it is to really rely on things like Google Analytics to judge the “success’ of your site. I have a site at the now blocked in China Opera.com that was the original Uranium Café and a couple months ago it had a page rank of 3 on Google. Not real bad. It was getting a lot of traffic to get that rank. What is funny though is I had not even updated the site in over a year! It may have been getting hits from the Opera community, I do not know. I never added Analytics to the site to track the hits and now cannot since I can only access the site via proxys. Well, the point is that site ranks higher than my site now with a big fat zero, and I do not even work on it.

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On an up note I will assume my current site will generate traffic over time and get more and hits and maybe do better than that site did. I hope so. I will admit, I want traffic and comments and hugs from the net world. How to get the affirmation and submission I desire? Well, I will just give you my do and don’ts and see what happens. I think if anyone has any advice they can contribute from their own site, but I am not making a challenge or tagging anyone. Gilligan had a lot of good and practical advice and I will reinforce or perhaps slightly disagree with some of his points (such as long written posts), though I think I may go off in slightly different direction than he did, as he seems to have a little better idea of how some of the technical aspects work.

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1) Maintain a good and interesting site. Period. There will be good posts and there will be bad ones. You do not have to post everyday or ruin your marriage with your obsessions, but you must work and you must take what you are doing a little seriously, whether you ever make a single penny from it. I can usually tell a site right away that I want to save and visit a few times a week. The person writes with vigor and there are lots of well chosen images. The banner is self made and the sidebar is loaded with relevant topics and images. The site is balanced and shows concern for image as well as content. I do not care how well written the material is if the site lacks a vibrant appearance I just move on.

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If you want people to stay and come back you have to post regularly and maintain some reasonable standard of quality, and that can vary from person to person of course. What represents the standard for Bill at the Uranium Café is not the same standard for some one else, but a spotty half blank page that is updated once a month will go no where and stay there. Of course I have had some sites like that and it took a while before I got to the point where I could set something up like I have now in a month or so. We can also encourage people whom we think has some potential, and that is to be seen in their writing and basic layout ability rather than what they do with CSS or Adobe Photoshop. I am reading on CSS and HTML in my spare time, but some people are not yet there and we can help them out. I want more control over the page than I have now, but at one time I just worked with default settings. Takes time.

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2) Learn some things about how to optimize search engines to find content on your site. Look, you don’t have to try to outrank all the Viagra ads on Google, but you may want to learn how to track what you do and see what content people like and don’t like. That does not mean you have to change one damn thing that you are doing, but it can be fun to sit back and see what pages and posts draw traffic. On my site it is usually the pin up stuff, not surprisingly. My researched essays on Yes and Robert Fripp may as well be blank posts, but I will continue to do those posts, if only for myself because…er… I am a megalomaniac I guess.

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ANYONE CAN IMPROVE THEIR WEBSITE TRAFFIC, EVEN A HEAD IN A LABORATORY TRAY

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Some of the SEO stuff gets to technical and you can spend (e.g. waste) hours trying to figure how and where something is to be added in your header or footer, or what a sitemap is and how to make one and where it goes. Some platforms (like Wordpress) have plugins that help you set up some SEO options. It can take time to figure out how to use and then to see results. I think if your site is selling something you will want to drive traffic too you and away from others and all of this stuff is more vital. I knew a guy who could get high page ranks on Google using automating scripts or something. He would buy like 100 domain names and use the scripts to generate content on each one, with purpose of directing traffic back to his primary site and in crease his google page rank, just to try to sell people his Taoism program. Over my head and he definitely felt I was wasting my time. Maybe I was compared to what his goals were (to make big money off the net), but in the end you yourself have to decide whether you get 500 hits a day or just 5 is your site going to continue or not.

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Learn how to set permalinks. That is simply the way your post’s title is going to appear in the URL window. First select the setting that shows the name of your post and not the one where it is all letters and numbers. I don’t know what they are called but you have to figure some of this out for yourself the way I did okay.One type of permalink may look like this: http://mysite.com/6722=asd?hy5l/. How can any search engine figure that out. It is better if the permalink reads: http://mysite.com/bela-lugosi-as-dracula/, or the title you gave it. Usually you have to change this setting or you get stuck with the first one. It is hard to go back and change permalinks after they are set. I have read it is possible but I just change the setting before the first post now.

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You also will then need to learn to make what are called “long tail” titles. So if you write a Led Zeppelin post and the permalink is http://mysite.com/led-zeppelin then you have to compete with all the other Led Zeppelin permalinks on Google or Yahoo. Better to long tail it into something like http://mysite.com/led-zeppelin’s-1971-zoso-album. Now you have a better chance of getting a hit since you added a date and album title and band name.

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3) I tend to use lots of writing in my posts and that is a tricky issue. Lots of text can be intimidating. I do tend to not read over written posts or sites that only retell a movie scene by scene with little comment from the writer. If I am reading a site that relates to philosophy or history I expect lots of type but not sites about movies, music or comic books. However I cannot take a site to seriously that has no real body of writing. Some people post a picture then write two sentences about it. That can be okay as a break from hard work and way to keep posts regular and therefore your site alive in the blogosphere. A short post is better than a week with none.

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I think the blogger has to decide what they want. First of all, can they even write well enough to keep someone reading for a long post? If not they need to adjust their style and do shorter posts. I tend to rely on graphics and media a lot. I break up a long essay with pictures in between selected paragraphs. For a couple reasons. A movie blog needs pictures. People want pictures, to look at and use for themselves. And they want images they do not usually see on the regular sites. And second by breaking up the long post with images it gives the illusion that the post is not that long really (a trick I learned in Nam). Paragraphs broken by images can be digested more easily. You can of course add video and music media as well. I will not supply a tutorial on that since different blogging platforms (I use Wordpress) can use different plugins and widgets and methods of getting the media to work. No need to rely only on media however as some blogs do, since I can go to youtube.com directly if I only want to see videos. There are some site that are nothing but youtube videos lined up in a column with no comments really.

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Also, I am able to think about what I am writing quickly and I can type at a reasonable pace with a manageable amount of typos that I correct with spell check quickly. I can type up a long post rather quickly really. If you have that knack then by all means write your heart out. If people are gonna read it they will and if not they won’t. Spruce the post up with pics and promises of money. Do what you are driven to do while you are doing it.

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4) Comment on other people’s blogs. It is not possible to leave a comment at every blog we visit, but if you like someone’s site send a shout. A few words are fine, no need to debate with them or dominate their site with long comments. If they get back to your site once in awhile and say hi then keep it going. Leave your link at their site of course. See whose sites gets lots of comments then join in. Be supportive and polite. As they say in Chinese “pai ma pi” or roughly translated, kiss their ass. I jest, but really, if you want comments and visits you gotta give them too. Be reasonable of course with people and realize that they cannot always leave a comment no matter how thrilling your post is. I work hard on some of my music posts but none of them have a comment. I wonder if people like them at all, but I will continue to do them for a sort of therapeutic purpose I suppose.

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5) Join relevant forums and leave your link. Again, if you are abrasive and crude expect no visits from the forums you go to. I tend to just not deal with that stuff. I have gotten crude remarks to my site and they are spammed right off. You can disagree with my content and debate me even, but I do not have time for web psychos.

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Join blog communities like Technorati (I joined but still have no clue what the hell it is) and LAMB. I really like the LAMB and when I see a site I like I suggest to the person who runs it that if they ever want to see their children alive again they should join the damn LAMBs!!! I sent an invitation today to a guy whose site I like and I see he works hard on it. We all need to help each other really. Make links for the sites you like. You can use a free service at http://www.bannerfans.com/ that leaves a bearable watermark. Ask people to link to yours. I have found cool site from the links on people’s sidebars, like Becca’s at No Smoking in the Skullcave. If you can get a big site to link you then you will be doing much better, but that is almost a matter of chance and work both. You have to have the content and they have to find it.

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6) And lastly to get traffic always be sure to have pics of sexy girls in abundance. Not too sexy so that you do not become a pornographer, but I am telling you cleavage gets traffic. And just to be safe after this windy, pompous post I am going to put some strategically placed hooters right here. Better safe than sorry you know. I mean, if some one opens this site and sees all my witless scribbling they will pass this post right by, but if they scroll down and see gratuitous jugs then they will exclaim “bingo, just what I was looking for!!!”

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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

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INCREASING GOOGLE PAGE RANK

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Well, those are my bits of wisdom. I think if you are making a site you like and love then do what you want to do the best you can. Do it in the hopes someone will stumble across it, like it, bookmark you and come back once in awhile. I think steady posting with good content and layout will get you reasonable traffic, unless you’re going for the gold medal in blogging or something. There are A LOT of movie and cult culture blogs on the net… A LOT! So go with the flow and find a little hole and burrow in and be content to some degree. And be patient. It takes time for your content to get crawled by search engine spiders. Not all of you content will be found and sent out to search engines, but relax and just keep posting. Strange things can happen.

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I recently was looking up information on Jimmy Page (whether he is part Asian, and it does seem his mother was part Chinese, I never knew this!) on the net and as I was scrolling down the 1st page of Google at position six was my site’s post about Jimmy Page’s Death Wish II soundtrack. I think I got a mere 46 hits for the whole day, but still it was exciting to see that my site somehow got to the 1st page for the search I was making. No prize but my wife gave me a kiss on the cheek and told me good job. That meant something at that moment and lets hope we can all have some little times like that in front of this grisly monitor.