Lots of Progress

I should post more often with so much going on with the AndiFashion site. I added the dozen or so Fashion Week designers that weren't already listed.

The Shoe Section has doubled, I added about 250 new designers/brands and the whole section has doubled from three pages to six.

I have updated the Fashion Blog section and now for the next week or so I'll be reading these blogs and scouring them for the new and the hot... I've already found dozens of new retailers but these won't be integrated into the site for a week or so.

Fashion Week Designers

I have updated sixteen Andifashion categories since the last post and will now be adding any omitted fashion week designers who have web sites. It's not exactly a trip to New York but I will indulge myself with a complete viewing of the web site. Finding designer's web sites can sometimes be tedious because even though there may be lengthy runway videos the designer's link is not given. And designers, when they even have sites, seldom rank well in search engines even for their own names. Often the designer's site is a work of flash art with little or no actual text that a search engine can index.

On the bright side of this my work in finding their sites can be appreciated by others who are also looking.

Google 'Metaverse'

This would be exciting because...

...the speculation being that Google will use real-world data gathered from their existing enterprises to craft an alternate reality platform online.

People (me included) will check in just to see how their own data is showing up, seems like a winner to me.

On the AndiFashion front I've updated Formal Wear, Shoes, and Size (Petite, Tall, Plus, Maternity, Children's) and will be doing the general shopping pages next.

Slow menus...

I had the new menus on my home page for one day and the traffic was down 30%, I can only assume that a lot of people bailed before the menus loaded. I can't afford to take that kind of a hit on the rest of the pages so the menu idea was just a waste of a few days time. Live and learn. Fortunately I hadn't purchased the license for the menus yet, it was just a trial. The menus worked beautifully though.

So now I'll finish updating the cosmetics pages, Bath and Body is complete, I'm very pleased with how these turned out.

Beauty Products

The new menus are ready but only installed on the Andilinks Home Page so far, they need a little tweaking. I'm going to install them on the rest of the pages as I do updates.

As indicated in the headline I'm updating the Beauty Products section now. There is a new category, Body and Bath, which will take two pages and should be uploaded in a day or two.

Wedding Pages, new menus

A wedding section that goes beyond dresses and formal wear is a bigger task than I'm willing to take on at the moment so I'm just updating Checklists and Gift Registries for now.

I would begin this larger Wedding project right away but I've decided to provide new javascript menus for the apparel pages first. The new Wedding section will be up and running in part I hope before February first because the wedding planning season has already begun.

Spring Weddings

This wedding section, along with formal wear will be getting a lot of my attention this coming week. I finished the Men's Clothing page by adding twelve new links and deleting one dead one. Not as ambitious as my first thoughts, I'll get this next time.

I do want to maintain the six to eight week updating schedule and with every update there is improvement beyond just removing dead links.

Coldwater Creek has me upset today, fortunately I have other positions doing well...

Men's Clothing

I finished the Jewelry pages without integrating them with the Vintage Jewelry database tables, I'll do that when I update the Vintage clothing pages...

Now the Men's clothing page is undergoing an update and I do think I should be able to find enough new entries to expand this page into several categories. If I can have fifty pages of women's clothing I think I can have four or five pages of men's clothing. Likewise I will be trying to expand the children's clothing pages as well.

Jewelry pages continued...

The heavy lifting is done on the jewelry pages, that is all the thumbnails have been updated and the dead links (surprisingly few) have been removed. I have created two new pages Handcrafted Jewelry and Costume Jewelry. Today I will be adding locations and phone numbers to the new pages and updating internal menus to include links to these pages.

The Fine Jewelry pages are still too large and I haven't yet separated out "Fine Art Jewelry." This will be a difficult task because although there are a few sites that specifically label themselves "fine art," most fine jewelry is fine art or very close at least.

I have yet to include the database tables for Vintage Jewelry with these and this too will be a difficult task.

As difficult as making all these decisions is, I do really enjoy working in the jewelry section and may stay here all week. :)

Jewelry Pages

After a short distraction with a dozen new fashion blogs I am finally revamping the jewelry pages. Several changes and new pages are coming since the Fine Jewelry pages are already too large and some classifications need to be broken out. There will probably be Fine Art Jewelry and Handcrafted Jewelry pages.

The Vintage Jewelry pages are currently grouped with Vintage Clothing in my database and this linkage works well but I also need to group Vintage Jewelry with Fine Jewelry so I will be doing some database designing this week too...

That will keep me busy this week, along with my regular tasks defining the nature of reality and controlling the weather.

The iPhone name fight.

The value of the free publicity generated by this fight, measured according to what the equivalent ad time/space would cost will exceed the amount paid by both companies in the legal fight.

And "iPhone" will be much more of a household mega-name no matter the outcome. They should begin acting like Rosie and the Donald to get a free segment on every celebnewsfotainment show. A food fight in the company cafeteria would work, rig up the security cameras just right for the opposing lawyer/actors.

More fashion, more apparel.

I have just added a link to this blog on all of the AndiFashion pages and I plan to use this blog to report news about the progress of the fashion directory. There has been a spurt of new traffic which seems to be just an artifact of internal changes in the Google algorithm but whatever the cause it is very welcome and certainly a reminder of what is my primary job. I am glad that I spent the last several months researching the stock market. It hasn't yeilded much but it has taught me a great deal about business and I can use that knowledge to improve this directory.

I have subscribed to several financial services which all report on companies in the apparel sector and I will be using these analyses to improve the fashion directory.

I have instituted a system which makes it easy for me to review every link in every fashion category every six to eight weeks. I had hoped to do it every thirty days and maybe will get it down to that interval over the next year.

I want to add more categories but all the main apparel categories are covered so I will be looking to add greater detail in the coverage.

These next few days I will be working on the Jewelry categories and hope to post a few gems about that.

Socialists on the Verizon

So the price of C.A. Nac. Telefonos de Venezuela rose a bit this morning on the news that Hugo Chavez will compensate stockholders when he nationalizes the company. One has to wonder who is buying this stock on such a promise. Is he nationalizing the phone service so he may more easily spy on his enemies? Does he really think he can provide better phone service after alienating those outside Venezuela who are on the cutting edge of the technology?

Chavez is hurting all of Latin America with this. I have heard several commentators, notably among them Jim Cramer, say that any Latin American exposure is riskier now. I know I just sold stock in one company that has Latin American holdings--why risk it when there are so many other options? And so wealth flees all of Latin America, poverty deepens there and of course America is blamed. The cycle then continues, with poverty deepening other dictators are more inclined to grab their phone companies.

My happiest Apple day since 1985.

I think the inflection point has finally arrived, Apple is a triple threat, music, phone and computer. I never thought it would take 22 years... I havn't been this excited since I first saw it on a 9" B&W screen.

With Leopard getting better reviews than Vista, Zune not even in the running and RIM stock dropping on news of the iPhone the planets have never been lined up like this before.

The all-time high stock price is just an indication that the world agrees. As it happens I got out at 88, should I wait for a lull to get back in or is this it?

Yahoo buys MyBlogLog

Could be good, maybe not. I'm not convinced that Yahoo is competent enough to exploit this powerful thing... I don't think del.icio.us has done much since being acquired, that has really disappointed me.

Could the tail wag the dog? Could Eric and Scott turn Yahoo around? That seems a stretch. I'd have much prefered they had waited for an offer from Google or toughed it out alone for a while longer. :: sigh ::

About Blogging

In the day since I decided to begin blogging again I have run up against all the reasons that I stopped blogging in the past. Mostly it is the pressure. If I post on a regular basis and develop a following for my random thoughts there will be a lot of pressure to post every day and I don't want the blog to become a ball and chain.

I have been directing my creative energies toward andilinks.com the site and posting to Andilinks the blog will draw off some of that energy. On the other hand if I post mostly about the directory my thoughts will necessarily be more organized and the effect will be positive. That will be a dull blog and certainly won't develop the kind of following that will put any pressure on me.

But I have a lot of opinions about other topics that I need to express, so I will just try to ignore any pressure (or perceived pressure) and just post my ideas when they occur. People who return here for that will just have to accept that I will not post anything at all if I am not moved by some story, posting or site that I've found interesting.

I don't think I want to talk much about my personal life though that may happen from time to time. Mostly my topics will be politics, world events, media, technology, and technology business. I don't want this to be a fashion blog but I probably will occasionally blog about art, pop culture and fashion too.

Blogging again, switching to Mac now...

It may stick this time, I'm more motivated to blog. The Andilinks directory is doing very well and I'm visiting more blogs myself because of the MyBlogLog network. I have always been enthusiastic about journaling and writing but somewhat reticent while blogging. Perhaps I can turn that around.

My current big project is a switch to Macintosh, something I've been longing to do since I began using Windows in 1996. I began using a Mac in 1985 after struggling with DOS... I did get proficient with DOS and dbase but Macintosh was like sweeping a curtain away and seeing the world anew. My first glimpse of cyberspace was through the 9" B&W screen of a Mac SE...

I expect the reconversion to take some time, I won't buy a Mac until Leopard is released and I have just massively upgraded my PC system so I will have absolute redundancy during the switch.