Official Everywhere's Local Blog

Complete redesign is underway

2008-03-10T14:58:00.001-05:00

Sometime later on this year our website will be completely different! You won't even recognize it. We have a new logo (or "actual" logo), new format, different color scheme, different navigation, new features -- well let's just say it'll be so different you'll swear a new company took it over.

News released to the wild!

2007-02-01T19:44:00.000-06:00

qrsevlo, Inc. released a press release today about the new "make an offer" pricing for all goods. Of course this policy already existed for Everywhere's Local, as well as Sex, Love & Friendships, but it has been extended to Quantum Rift Software as well.

All three companies are actually the same company.

The press release is available at: http://qrsevlo.com/pressreleases/2007-02-01.phtml

Brief problem last night.

2007-01-23T14:50:00.000-06:00

Apparently we had a brief downtime last night due to the mysql database crashing, and the tech support people removing the username we connected to thinking it was causing the problem -- ironically had they of checked the database they would've realized that the problem was due to a corrupt table that our site uses for every page. Trying to write a few thousand records to a damaged table = mysql crashing. But they thought it was the id, and removed it temporally.

Hopefully this occurrence won't be happening again. Unfortunately, we were led to believe that mysql was capable of handling inserts into a mysql database with no real size limitations -- and this might not be the case.

Minor changes

2007-01-20T19:58:00.000-06:00

We've made some minor changes to the website just now: preferences tab in the navigation.

Now you're able to hide the USGS, Snopes, Missing and Exploited Children tabs (which can cut up to 10 seconds off the page load on a slow day!), as well as hide the weather map at the bottom. Of course the weather map can also be disabled by adding ?weather=no in the address bar of the main page.

We also made a few minor changes to the main page removing some redundant text.

February 2007 -- Free online dating on a personals website!

2007-01-10T02:45:00.000-06:00

DATE: February 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Robinson, IL -- Everywhere's Local will be unleashing our new personals system in February 2007 located at: http://friendslovesex.com. It's one of the first of it's kind. A fully-functional free dating site, where anyone can add a personal (if they're over 18) for either pen-pals, romantic/marriage, or even just a casual date (or sex). It is just an extension of Everywhere's Local classifieds, but the "Sex, Love, & Friendships - Everywhere's Local Personals" site is separate to keep our main site completely child friendly.

Our personals website will not allow any adult content that would be banned from any 5-9pm network programming in the USA. No nudity, no closeups, no vulgar language; basically there'd be nothing damaging for a young adult to see if they happen to stumble across the site - although they are not allowed to view or even create a free personal ad.

All members will be able to send and receive e-mails for free, as well as view profiles and pictures! Like other dating websites, we will limit some features as the site grows, and we will have two memebership plans. Unlike other dating sites, our fees are "make an offer" just as with Everywhere's Local's normal website. So, for as much (not to exceed $100/year), or as little as you want to pay per year, and you'll have a membership with the site!

To protect minors, "Sex, Love & Friendships - Everywhere's Local's Personals" is rated with standard online rating agencies as having "nudity, obscene language, etc, etc" however as stated before, these items are prohibited. We are listed as such so that filtering software will block our website (http://friendslovesex.com) from view.

Any town, paper, or organization wishing to use our dating & personals website are free to do so.

As with Everywhere's Local, "Sex, Love & Friendships - Everywhere's Local's Personals" is maintained in a way by the community! This means that feature requests will actually be listened to, and if feasible, added.

For any questions, please contact:
Joshua Rodgers
Everywhere's Local
jlrodgers @ everywhereslocal.com

Confusing posting?

2006-09-03T13:04:00.000-05:00

Well apparetnly we've had a few people not read on the site that certain areas cost money, and posted (attempted) without an account. Well, to make sure that there's no chance of people "misunderstanding" (we believe a few may have misunderstood, others were trying to screw the system), the first page of our "post message" screen has in a box, with yellow, what type of account you need for what post or if you can just use an e-mail address/password combo.

We hope that this will prevent any misunderstandings, and help deter anyone trying to screw the system! Really, a default price of $25 for a job posting, that's not much now is it? Especially when it's negotiable! You can't even get a posting that cheap in a paper. (Besides, we use a percentage of the money to advertise in the area, and a percentage of the profits get donated to that area!).

Alerts now "police only", "Death Notices" are "funeral home" only

2006-08-16T13:27:00.000-05:00

To help protect against anyone trying to abuse the system, pickup kids to molest, or just otherwise try to do illegal things we've made some changes to our site:

Alerts are now police-agency only, where we manually check the numbers/addresses provided by the agencies to make sure it's actually a police station. A similar thing is done for funeral homes for any death notices. Both are due to abuse, missing children's pretty obvious; but for death notices - we don't want someone putting up their neighbor as of dieing when they're alive. While it's not right, it can also lead to legal problems for us, the poster, and the person listed as dead!

So those changes have been made.

A minor change to the "housing" will also be done to help guarentee that it complies with all "fair housing" acts.

Of course, due to the massive amounts of changes this caused on the backend -- some things might be "broke" that we don't realize! Please tell us if this is the case.

That's all for updates as of now.

Everything's back to normal

2006-08-13T14:10:00.000-05:00

Everything is up and working normally now, and we don't foresee any problems in the near future. We're on a new server, have new network structure stuff between us and the world, power problems (should) be fixed. So, unless an earthquake, tsunami, or volcano hits, we should be good!

Power Problems, Server Problems, all makes a mess

2006-08-12T16:23:00.000-05:00

Well, over the past month we've had a lot of excitment at Everywhere's Local. Power problems taking down the website; power problems taking out routes to our website; our server crashing (and having to be switched out).

All on top of a few modifications on the site itself, some not yet put up due to the other problems.

It all makes for a slight mess, but all in all, everything's working better now than ever! We're happy.

And to promote our happiness, we're trying to spread word of our events post abilities. Everyone has events, but some papers charge for them, we're free. Even if other sources are free as well, we're just more exposure. Events are a pretty popular theme that people want listed. So, post all you know, tell others, and let Everywhere's Local list your events!

We have also added two new subcategories on our website: "birth notices" and "death notices". Shockingly, we here just realized these could be useful to people! Unfortunetely, it took a death of a classmate before it hit us. But we now have them. And we may even have a "poster" for these as well -- a easilly printable page that is.

We Need You! Changes are a good thing.

2006-07-02T14:14:00.000-05:00

Tons of small changes were made, more things are dynamic instead of cached (surprisingly... it took the exact same amount of time to get results dynamically as from cache). New subcategories have been added, and a new category for GAMES! Yep, time wasting games. Of course we only have one up for now, but more will be added.

We Need You!

If you can read this, your help is wanted. While we're working out the bugs of our idea right now, we're working on a "word of mouth affiliate" program.

How's it work you ask? Well it's simple. You go out in the world and tell others about out site, and give them a piece of paper with the address to your local classifieds, and a "id for special pricing" to guarantee that they can name their price! The "special pricing" id is really just your referral id. Then, a certain percentage of any sales from your referrals will go to you, and you get the knowledge that 25% of 35% of our profits are also being given back to your community.

Or, if you want a diagram:

You give url + id to company -> they give us money (and use your id) -> we give you money + your community

It's simple. Of course since we hate spam more than probably anyone (upwards of a thousand messages a day, every day that we have to actually sort through manually!), we won't allow a simple "url with id" scheme. That'd make people less likely to spam with it.

So don't spam. Spam is bad. Even the canned spam. If you spam your id, we'll can you.

We're also needing people to do something else for us, tell your television stations and newspapers about us! Don't worry, all they have to do is visit our website and download news releases from there. We also have our releases released to the press, but they're more likely to publish what people want and request.

S o that is all for now. And have a good 4th.

New posting system finally available

2006-05-16T23:13:00.000-05:00

After about 5 months of work... tons of known bugs fixed.... the new posting system is finally up and ready for use!

Of course we do expect some problems as the "real-world" use starts. So we recommend all people writing out what they want on their computer, then pasting it on our site -- that way if it errors, they won't lose anything.

And don't worry, if it errors, we'll post the message for you! (and for no charge*)

* that is assuming the post would be normally free.

Sometimes googlebot drives you nuts.

2006-05-05T18:46:00.000-05:00

For the past week, almost every day, googlebot has decided that Everywhere's Local deserves to be indexed.... so... for a timeframe varying from 6 hits per second, to 1 hit every 10 seconds, they've been nailing the website indexing the index page about 15,000-50,000 times each day during a 3 hour period. If they kept it up for every hour in the day, it'd be 200,000 hits a day; fortunetely they don't do that.

Now all the other bots read the robots.txt file, and actually know of and obey the "Crawl-Delay" parameter. Googlebot doesn't. I'd ask for it to be slowed, but from what I've read, they don't slow the bot, they stop the bot. How much simplier it'd be for Googlebot to obey that command -- at least then 3 hours each day wouldn't be spent monitoring web page views to potentially block bot access.

Although, if anyone out there wishes to donate money to us, invest money, or otherwise just use our paid services, we wouldn't have to worry! But for now, we have a limited amount of resources that can be used each day, and the bots are using them all up -- well googlebot is right now.

Search Engines Eat Resources

2006-04-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

I love it when search engines finally decide to index the site. More listings, greater chance of people finding us! But just today I checked the server logs and discovered that about 20 minutes of processor usage was used for just ONE search engine!

That's a lot of time when you think about it. So, being the curious type I am, I checked the logs and discovered (hopefully) why this was: the search engine had indexed the exact same 5MB 30 second load page 82 times!

So for now, a change was made, the page is only available from the index page. If the high processor usage hits again, the large page will be altered into many smaller pages. There are times I wish there was a way to tell a seach engine "it's the same page, you don't need to re-examine it"

April 13th Press Release (Early to our blog visitors!)

2006-04-01T18:08:00.000-06:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:

Joshua Rodgers

Everywhere's Local

618-544-5692

jlrodgers@everywhereslocal.com

http://everywhereslocal.com

Non-Profit Organizations, Donation Based Business Entities, and Community Assistance Groups Needed.

Robinson, IL 31 March 2006 -- Everywhere's Local is currently seeking the names and contact information for any non-profit organizations, donation-seeking companies, and all community assistance groups throughout the United States and Internationally. Any group fitting this description will be entered into our database and will be eligible to receive money from us, based on our 35% of profits donation policy.

While which organizations will receive donations from us, is up to us, it's important that we know about them first. Any donations we make are based on our estimated profits for the year. At the end of the year, exactly 35% of our profits will be donated to different organizations and projects.

Company donations are provided to organizations that promote our general beliefs. Our intention is to fund projects such as scholarships, school fundraising (for books, music, etc), park development, building maintenance, and providing support for business startups.

We also plan on supporting organizations that help maintain forested land, as well as organizations that promote green building development. Also organizations that promote or develop renewable or alternative fuel sources.

About Everywhere's Local:

Everywhere's Local is an online site where people can post and view classifieds, job postings, housing, weather, and anything that's community-focused.

###

24 hours

2006-03-23T13:08:00.000-06:00

What a difference 24 hours can make!

Our last idea of using the subdomains for our cities, such as los-angeles.everywhereslocal.com or los_angeles.everywhereslocal.com or even losangeles.everywhereslocal.com has been redone.

Yep... a bit easier to use yet a lot more flexible. Our system has been modified so that our format follows the following:

http://city_name-state_name-zipcode.everywhereslocal.com
http://city_name-state_name-country_name.everywhereslocal.com

a _ must be used to signal a space in the state or country name (although a cityname can be entered without a space), and a - is the separator. At a later time we may decide to let all fields be without a _ in them (ex: albany-newyork-unitedstatesofamerica), but for now we're enforcing the _=space rule.

Update on our new city system!

2006-03-22T16:48:00.000-06:00

Our simplified way of getting to your city (or close to it anyway!) of:
http://cityname.everywhereslocal.com

still works. However, we recommend that if your townname has spaces in it, replace the space with an _ or a -

ex:
http://los-angeles.everywhereslocal.com/

http://new_york.everywhereslocal.com/

New City Access Features

2006-03-21T15:53:00.000-06:00

Starting today, you can now access your town in a multitude of ways.

You can enter: http://everywhereslocal.com
followed by:
/state/statename
/city/cityname
/zip/zipcode
/postal/postalcode
(/zip & /postal are the same system wise, but provided for internatinoal users!)

or... followed by:
?city=cityname&st=statename
?country=countryname
etc

or, perhaps the easiest way for some locations:
http://chicago.everywhereslocal.com
http://losangeles.everywhereslocal.com
http://your_town_name_without_spaces.everywhereslocal.com

Of course, the first hit in our database will show up first. If you enter a cityname that doesn't show up as you'd expect (i.e. it's a major city, but a non-major city page shows), please tell us!

Also, if you get a "cannot connect to ____" message, please try again later... it may take a while for all the DNS stuff to propagate through the internet.

Minor Site Update

2006-03-09T21:37:00.000-06:00

Everywhere's Local has undergone a minor site change. We've matched all the main page's colors, put similar items in boxes that are the same width, added a bit of "no script" information in case visitors visit our site with javascript turned off. All in all, I think it looks a lot better!

Personally, I recommend firefox to browse the internet, some things look a bit better, it's more standards compliant in some ways, but the one feature I love is being able to turn off javascript and java easilly. It makes many web pages load a LOT faster! Of course those of you who do so know why -- ads are displayed on websites via JavaScript. So... disable JavaScript... disable ads.

But some sites do require JavaScript, but it's easy to re-enable them.

Pages finally start to stay in Google

2006-02-25T23:08:00.000-06:00

Yep, it's finally happened... after over 6 months since the site was submitted (I think, thereabouts anyway), about 80 pages seem to stay on google's index constantly, with about a 169 pages somewhat staying there... hopefully... it'll stay like that!

Our First News Release!

2006-02-07T14:25:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow, 8 February 2006, our first news release is being sent out! Of course, it is supposed to be submitted to Google and other news sources, but we'll see.

Hopefully, we'll get some exposure from this, perhaps our local paper might end up finding it and put something in it. They have been notoriously bad in not putting in new business information for any businesses whose business concept they don't like. Of course they say it's because of editorial reasons, but I seriously doubt that companies that spend tens of thousands of dollars every month in advertising are the only "editorial sound" businesses to include in the paper for local business news.

Search Engine Woes Continue

2006-02-03T14:31:00.000-06:00

Still the same problems, google indexes a page has a cache listed online. Then, it's gone. I even went so far as to check out the cached pages, and found something a bit disturbing, they aren't even current! The cached pages (that they end up removing) are up to two months old, some only a week old. However, all of the pages have been visited by the googlebot the same day, so they should have the current data.

This makes me wonder. Is google checking out my site, following links, but judging the content based on cached information? That wouldn't seem to make any sense, yet seems to be the case. Haven't heard anything from my e-mail sent to google. Surprising in a way since I normally got a reply with a few days at most.

Although the googlebot keeps on chugging away indexing all the pages on my site, yet doesn't keep them. Shame. Three pages on my site, it keeps only one of them. With the exception of "Everywhere's Local" one of the pages isn't even similar to the others text wise. All three pages are under 10% similar in content, yet it doesn't keep them. Pages are relavent to the company, and to the page itself, but still they toss it out.

It's things like that which cause problems for a company. Pages showing up as links are useful, but if there's no content cached, the page is only returned if you type in the url. If you go and type a quoted section from the page (that's fairly unique -- i.e. 0-10 hits max in a search engine) no pages are returned from us, even though the page's url is in their listing.

Annoyance runs amok

2006-02-02T02:25:00.000-06:00

For the past week or so now, google has indexed our entire site, listing up to 150 pages! But then... sometimes under a few hours, or even upon a page refresh, they remove all the listings again.

And I'm not even talking about pages that are identical... pages that are similar only in the header, nav links, and footer, everything else (up to a page worth) is completely different. I've checked out a few other websites, ones that have content that's virtually identical on pages -- and they have all the "identical save three words" pages listed, so it's not that... Sent off an e-mail to google, to try and see if they have any reason, if they can provide a reason, since nothing in the help files says "I'm listed for one hour, but then I'm not again, but within the next five, I'm back, but then gone again -- but google hasn't used the bot on my site during the time, and it's the same pages coming and going." Nothing like that at all there. Perhaps it's a glitch? Who knows... All I do know is all the non-google search engines (major ones) have hundreds of pages indexed and listed, and 98% of our hits come from them, 2% come from google... and probably from me checking out the few timeouts that are listed (amounts to 0.0001% of the total pages).

Moving forward

2006-01-27T00:31:00.000-06:00

Every day something new gets added to our site to enhance the functioning and usability of it. Of course, much is in beta form and not visible to our users. I find that to be a shame really. Of course the flip side, it has to be done to keep the site secure.

Unfortunetely after breaking my toe a while back, I haven't been able to go out in the world to relax, so updates here, and on the site have been rare in ways. Of course we have added numerous new features that are visible to users, but only if someone searches for their location.

Well... as always, we're open to suggestions! So if you're here, please visit our site, and post a message.

Advertising & 2006 special

2006-01-09T17:19:00.000-06:00

So far we've had a number of businesses taking advantage of our special! But no where near where we'd of hoped. Of course having 2006 people register in a few hours wasn't exactly a realistic goal, but I was hopeful.

Advertising... it's evil.

So far we've discovered the following based on our experience, and that of other businesses that we have relationships with:

Spending money to advertise in a paper is throwing money away (at least in small towns)
Total amount of money spent in advertising for our company and others: $5000
Total amount of sales received from advertising: under $50
Total number of hits on website from the paper advertisement (we do check ips you know!): 6

Spending money to advertise on the radio doesn't work either
Nope... $150 later... one hit. one. No sales, no questions, just one hit.

Spending money to advertise in theaters.... who knows.
We haven't personally advertised in the theatres (or theaters, depending on which spelling you prefer), but of those that have, few to no new customers.

Summary stuff
Fortunetely my company hasn't spent but about $500 in advertising, but we haven't had any hits, sales or anything warrenting that expense... One of my friend's businesses has spent $15,000 in advertising! The difference? We've had better luck than they have as far as money/customer ratio. Sad really. And to think I was always taught, to make money you must spend money. Perhaps this only applies to cities. Or maybe with people that are technological sound and with it as far as society works.

Alas I may never know. Well... I will probably create a survey eventually to find out to an extent, but for now I will never know.

What's up next for Everywhere's Local to advertise? Fliers... fliers given to businesses for the purpose that if they want, they can put up in their business (with of course the ability of them being in the 2006 companies, thereby acting as b2b advertising).

New Year's Special!

2005-12-31T18:05:00.000-06:00

I decided to go ahead and post it now. Why you might ask? well I just now realized that tomorrow's Sunday... and New Year's day. And I really didn't want to be working!

So, here it is... Tell your friends!

New Year's Special!

The first 2006 business that we have register* will receive FREE:
- 2006 job postings*
- 2006 credits (credits are our "no money value" money)
- 1 banner advertising for 2006 months (basically life)
- 1 catalog listing for 2006 months (basically life)

* - if you're a job finding agency (i.e. you're primary job is to list jobs, place people in jobs) who posts jobs that aren't for your company, but for other companies, you'll be given 4012 credits, and 50 job postings