Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a new blog, just for fun. The area of focus will be on craft beer brewing and reviews. Knowing what I now know about content, content planning, and management, I started to think about how to build a site from the ground up with entertaining but valuable content. Of course, this means I need to spend time thinking about how to organize my content and what CMS will I use? If you read my last post, you’ll see that I’m back to WordPress but also evaluating Expression Engine. The reality is that WordPress is way easier when it comes to templates and since this blog will be casual, I’m not going waste time and effort with a big powerful CMS system only to have to hack together a bad looking web template. ...

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Please forgive me for my evergreen content creation and management sins. Yes, I admit I have mismanaged good content for the sake of expediency. The takeaway from this long post is this, always think about your reader first. Often I have ignored how my readers consume my evergreen content. For that, I beg for your absolution. I promise, on my CMS’s grave, not to stray from the path of good content creation and management again. Amen! ...

I recently read a great article on the Freemium model that resonated with me. It kept me thinking for several days afterwards about how some startups with freemium models “made it” and how others failed. The difference between success and failure has become a very fine line indeed. I completely get it, it’s all about how many users your product or service has. The rationale has always been that more users == more revenue and many startups created wonderful free products (i.e. Dropbox) around that idea. Free isn’t so bad if you’re trying to build a startup yourself. I know many entrepreneurs who build startups on open source or free products. Open source and free is the backbone for a vibrant startup community but there are so many companies hawking their “free/open source” stuff that I wonder how they make any money at all. ...

I was in France last week for my neice’s wedding. We had a great time and really enjoyed the French countryside. We got sample some delicious wine and food, danced, and met lots of great people. We talked and laughed but eventually all our casual conversations with the French turned toward our Presidential Election and Donald Trump. Needless to say, many French that I talked to are appalled by Donald Trump but some like his authoritative style and that bothers me. From my personal observation, especially after Brexit and now President Elect Donald Trump, there seems to be a wave of authoritarianism that’s making its way through the world. Even in my ancestral homeland, Germany, there’s a creeping movement (AfD) toward more populism. ...

Recently I imported some custom reports in Google Analytics that I found online. They have been eye opening indeed! My most favorite ones are the Profit Index and Time of Day custom reports. Google Analytics assigns a page value to each and every page you have, provided you use Goals. Without using Goals, this won’t work! In my previous post, I wrote about how I started using Goals to see how readers interacted with my site. I arbitrarily assigned a value of $1 each time the reader clicked on a tag or stayed on a post for more than 5 minutes. ...

One of my Asian friends recently posted a link to a terrifying use of Machine Learning. This is what I call the “dark side” of this field, the use of machine learning by a government to make you behave a certain way. 1984’s Big Brother China is building its own version of 1984’s Big Brother, a massive scoring system that’s probably a large scale classification algorithm most likely sitting on top of a Big Data structure like Hadoop. I call this an utter and complete abuse of machine learning. ...

This post on rebuilding a blog is continuation of my previous post. In this post I wanted to review some goals I created in Google Analytics. These goals were created to see how people are interacting with my site. ##Goals I created a total of 7 goals: Sticky Time, how many readers stay on the site for 5 minutes or more Read more that 1 post, self explanatory Click on SEO tag, how many readers click on https://www.neuralmarkettrends.com/tags/SEO Click on Tutorials tag, how many readers click on https://www.neuralmarkettrends.com/tags/Tutorials Click on All tags, this one is bunk so ignore it. Click on RSS feed, how many users click on the RSS feed link Use the search, how many readers use the search box The chart shows some interesting results. I have any amazing amount of sticky time and people read more than 1 post. This makes me think I should abandon Google Ads and sell some space on my own. ...

Last night the kids and I were across the street at another family’s house for dinner. Their kids are the same age as my daughter and son and often stay for dinner at our house. Last night after dinner we got to talking about the current state of education and how we can better educate our kids. Both the husband and wife have careers in the creative fields and are big supporters of STEM. ...

October 2016 Just a quick list of the content I’ve created some place other than this blog. This current list is 100% RapidMiner related but I’d like to branch out into guest posting. If any of my readers would like a guest post on their blog or site from me, then contact me. Tips and Tricks: How to use Python and R with Rapidminer Tips and Tricks: Different Ways to Join Data How to Use Data Science to Predict Qualifed Leads December 2018 I’m happy to announce my very first article went live on the H2O.ai blog! Writers gonna write! It’s been a long time since I contributed to my firm’s online content and it feels good to do it again. ...

Description: In this post I review how traffic in August 2016 stacked up against August 2015 This post on rebuilding a blog is continuation of my previous post. My new SEO strategy is starting to pay off and I owe it all to tweaking the Blot.IM templates. I spent time changing the templates for better metadata and tag handling, and it appears to be working. The biggest results is that my bounce rate has dropped massively. ...