Graphic Source: Clipart.com

Trying to figure out what to write about every day can be quite a task. I am certainly not saying that I am the best writer in the world, believe me, I know my limitations, but I always seem to be able to come up with an article. In the beginning I thought that I might have a problem doing this after awhile, but here I am about 3 1/2 years later and still going strong. I guess that I have a very active mind. Where do most ideas for articles come from? When I first started out, I was determined to write about things that interested me, in the hope that others would be interested in the same things. I didn't know if a lot of people felt the way I did or only a few. I still don't know the answer to that particular question. You might be wondering how I can say that after having the site up all this time, but you have to remember that this site receives no advertising and can only be spread by word of mouth. It is true that I am in thousands of search engines now, but I am nowhere near the top of any page unless you just type in my url address.

Unless you are one of the big guys, it is very hard to get noticed. At one point I had thousands of entries on Google and I was getting about 3,000 visitors some days in March 2006, this can be verified by checking the site statistics. Then something happened. I don't know if Google changed the way they list sites or my site listing software changed the way it worked, but there was a large drop and I noticed that I lost thousands of listings on Google, but I still had quite a few. This seemed to effect the amount of new visitors I got. Oh I still do quite well for a personal site with well over a thousand people a day coming over and reading articles and the trend seems to be slightly up right now. So that is why I still can't figure out the tastes of many people, it is because most people don't even know that the site exists.

We were talking about where ideas for articles come from. A while back I thought that it might be a good idea to monitor the key words in searches made on my site and this would give me an idea of what people were looking for and that way I could write articles about it. I remember looking at the list of words and laughing. How do you write an article on "Binary"? That had been one of the top search words for the month. I could write an article on binary math or binary numbers, but who would want to read it? I certainly didn't want to bore people out of their skulls. In November 2005 I had almost 600 requests for it. Javascript is another popular search term. I didn't think that an article on this would be too interesting to most people, although there is a core of people that want to know how to use javascript on their websites. I abandoned the idea of using the search string list and decided to pursue another avenue.

I found a piece of free software that allowed me to do a large search across search engines, almost like the meta searches available on the internet, but much more efficient. When ever I get an idea in my head, I type it into this software and it returns a list of hundreds of sites and reference works on the subject. I can then go through them and I usually find more than I need to come up with an article. Isn't the computer age wonderful? This software can even generate topics if I type in generic terms such as "interesting", "secret" or something of that nature. What I mean by generating topics is that information comes up that uses these words and reading it sometimes suggests a topic to me that I can research. There is another method that can be used to get an article, but I have only used it once or twice. That method is to take a pre written article that I am allowed to republish and post it. I have to find the article very interesting to do this.

Graphic Source: Clipart.com

People send in articles on a very occasional basis. If they meet my criteria, I will publish them on the site. I think I have two or three there now. Sometimes I might have to rewrite the article, but I always give credit to the original author. If there is anyone out there that would like to submit an article to me, just go to my home page and click on Site Info at the top for details on how to do this. I had hoped that more people would submit articles, but most people are shy and they would rather read them than write them. I can understand that. I tried my hand at writing in the past and had a famous tv show steal one of my scripts and put it on the air. I was a very foolish young man and sent it to them without copyrighting it. I did have what was know as a poor man's copyright, that is where you mail the script to yourself and keep it unopened with the date stamp on the envelope. I didn't have any money at the time, so I couldn't hire a lawyer. I learned my lesson well and never did that again. I also won second prize in an astronomy contest where you had to use the letters that represent the different types of stars to write a rhyme. Yes there are letters that represent different types of stars, they represent the classification of each star. My great prize was 100 astronomical bumper stickers.

One of the hardest things to do is find graphics and photos that I am allowed to use. I used to belong to a service that I got for free from buying disks full of graphics. You would buy a disk and get a year of free service on a graphics site that had millions of photos and clip art. After about two years, I could find no more disks from the company and if I wanted to renew the service it was hundreds of dollars so I dropped it. I do have a lot of photos on cds from different companies that I have purchased and there are some places offering photos and graphics for free but it never seems to be enough. It is sometimes very hard to come up with an appropriate graphic that fits the article that was written. Sometimes, the owner of a photo posted on another site will let me use it, you will see a few of these scattered throughout my articles.

It certainly is not easy to maintain my site, but it is worth it, if just for the fact of the people I have met. I personally believe that some of the nicest people pass through About Facts Net. The mail I get seems to indicate that many people are enjoying the site and this too makes it all worth while.