On Monday I had a break in at my house. The punk ass thief took some pocket change, my 15 year old Mountain bike and my Xbox 360. I’m going to miss my bike and the Xbox. Damn it, I had so much time invested in trying to finish SKATE. I guess I’ll have to start all over. Oh well.

So, on Monday, I went to a friends house, to dog/house sit for a few days but before I left, I set up my web cam and started broadcasting on Justin.tv. I had never done this before but for some strange reason I set it up. Never-the-less, I checked in on Justin.tv a few times but never really got a good view and for some reason it said it wasn’t broadcasting. So, I went to check in on my house today (2 days later) to discover my back bedroom window busted out and my stuff scattered about in the hall.  I called the cops, they came out and finger printed and assured me that a case like mine usually takes months. They left, and then I remembered that I had been broadcasting on Justin.tv. Sure enough, after about an hour of sorting through the archives, I hit the jackpot. The mother fucker broke my glass at about 10:35 pm and then the video captured the following:

1. he waited about a minute and then broke out the rest of the glass (4:42 on the video)
2. walked down the hall and came into my office, taking a few dollars (4:05 on the video)
3. left my office and explored the house, probably taking my Xbox, controller and games. Bastard!
4. comes back down the hall and starts flipping on bedroom lights, grabs my bike. (1:44 on video)
5. then he goes back into my office where he finds the change bowl and other small items. This is where you get a good look at his face (1:22 on the video)
6. leaves the office and goes back to turning on lights and checking everything out, takes my bike and then goes out the front door.

Watch live video from Playing work ain’t easy on Justin.tv

You can see a larger version of the video here.

If anyone recognizes the piece of shit in the video, please contact me. Thank you justin.tv, you made my day.

It’s been a few months since I’ve posted here, as you might have noticed. The last quarter of 2007 was crazy busy for me, so I neglected blogging. I hope to make more time to blog in 2008. There is so much stuff to blog about. Stay tuned.

Ok, this is a shameless plug but it’s a pretty big deal around here. We launched Bonza.com tonight. It’s a blog that will be featuring news and info on skateboard products, street wear, sneakers, tattoos, art and music. I know it’s a lot of stuff to cover but it’s stuff that we’re interested in. Also, Bonza.com is kinda special becasue it was the first e-commerce site that we launched in 1998. You can read the story here. So, go on over to Bonza.com and check it out. By the way, we’re looking for people who would be interested in writing up some content for either this site or Bonza. Contact me if your interested.

In commemoration of Blogging’s tenth anniversary, Mashable has a post asking people for a list of their top ten blogs. So here’s mine, not in any particular order.

1. Techcrunch.com
2. Joshspear.com
3. mashable.com
4. Highsnobiety.com
5. Gigaom.com
6. skateboardworks.com
7. The Last Ten Days
8. Web Worker Daily
9. OnStartUps
10. Read/Write Web

I have to start by saying that I don’t do a lot of marketing for this site. I write this blog as a way of collecting things that I think are cool. If other people read it, then it’s a bonus. Next month allthatscool will be 2 years old. In the beginning I was more diligent about adding content more frequently, and participating in conversations on other blogs. After a few months of doing allthatscool, I was averaging close to 500 uniques a day. Additionally, when some of my posts (Why you should start an internet company) got on digg and del.icio.us, traffic spiked as high as 10k uniques in a day. Then I end up with a consulting gig that took up a lot of my time and I kind of let the blog slip. Now I’m back with more frequent updates and have more time to read other blogs and comment here and there. So, that brings me to the point of this post: with one comment on Mashable earlier this week, my traffic spiked to more than double my average. I’ve been averaging around 200 daily uniques and when I left a comment on Mashable, in the number 3 spot, my traffic shot up to where it was when I first started this site. I’ve commented on many blogs in the past and have seen curiosity clickers visiting my site as a result. But, I’ve never had a spike such as the one that I received from Mashable. I’m not sure if that’s a testament to the Power of Mashable or if it’s something else. Either way, the moral of this story is, if you have some thing relative to add to a conversation on another blog, by all means, do, but make sure you get your comment in the first 10 or less. That way you’ll get maximum exposure. Below is stats from the last 30 days. The first spike is from Stumbleupon and the other is Mashable.

We have our 2 year anniversary coming up in July and realized that there hasn’t been any significant change to the look of the site since it’s inception. So, we did a redesign and moved from the Movable Type platform we were using to a much better Wordpress platform. I’m glad to be moving away from MT as it was beginning to be impractical work with. I originally chose the MT platform because it only requires one installation for running multiple blogs. However, I should have started with Wordpress from the beginning and just dealt with the multiple installations and logins. Wordpress is an awesome tool. And because the community is so active, there are plugins for just about anything you want. Now that we have a new look site, we’ll need to keep the cool content coming. Keep a look out for more regular postings and some other cool features to be added soon. Thanks to everyone who has supported this blog thus far.

I apologize for the lack of posts lately. I started a new position a few weeks ago and have been trying to get up to speed. Additionally, I’ve had house guests for the last two weeks. I’m slowly but surely getting back into the swing of things. So, keep a look out for posts to come. I have lots of stuff to talk write about.

I did a little research over the weekend to try and figure out what Allthatscool.com’s most popular post have been since launching last year. I’m not surprised by the the #1 and #2 posts but am pretty surprised by the rest. The reason I’m surprised, is that almost all of the traffic for #3-6 came from Google and not from Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit or Technorati like the top two did. Additionally, I made almost 90% of all of my adsense revenue from the Google traffic. I would say that it pays to be listed in Google, lietraly. The Diggs of the world send a bunch of traffic, but that traffic almost always exits from the same page that they enter on (no pageviews) and rarely ever click on ads. Funny how that works. The audience that costs the most in bandwidth, actually contributes less than our organic web traffic. Is this a pretty common scenario?

Top 6 visited pages

1. Why you should start an Internet Company today
2. My Startup Tool Kit
3. Watch any World Cup game via ESPN 360
4. Miller Beer Run Game
5. Zilliow is making a impact
6. Virtual Stripper from the Gap

Ok, it’s actually the alcohol that goes with the World Cup, that has prevented from doing some proper posts. I should be back at it tomorrow.

regards,
Lone Star in the bottle

It’s official, we’re now a member of the Alexa 100k club. Okay, it’s not really a club and it’s not really that big of a deal to most people. But, it’s pretty cool that we’re ranked 99,560 . Actually, it’s real good considering this site has no real focus and is not updated everyday. Our traffic has grown month over month since launching back in July of last year. So for all of you out there that actually checks out allthatscool.com on a regular basis; thanks.

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