Retirement Information at Retire USA
Wow, I’d forgotten how hard it is to build and troubleshoot a huge website, but things are finally coming together at Retire USA, a project I’ve got going with three other partners. The plan is to showcase retirement options across all the states in the USA.
Although comments about this are welcome, you’ll find things still a bit rough and there’s lots of data (thousands of individual records) yet to be linked up to state and city pages, though some of this can be found via the Google custom search engine which will seek out Retirement information at our site, combine it with ads, and post the results.
By tonight all the state pages will be active, most with links out to city pages. Much more to come … soon!
Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida GeorgiaHawaii Idaho Indiana Illinois Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan MississippiMissouri Minnesota Montana Nebraska New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York Nevada North CarolinaNorth Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee TexasUtah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Google Custom Seach Engine = Brilliant! CSE Troubleshooting Tips
The Google Custom Search allows a simple addition of code to your site that creates a customized search engine run by Google. This is often added via your adsense account (under ads / search) and it is a brilliant way to add search to you site that helps monetize your peeps with google advertising placed next to a list of your web pages.
HOWEVER I just spent a bit too much time fixing a simple problem so I thought I’d start a list of Google Custom Search Troubleshooting tips:
ONE: It’ll only show indexed content so be sure to create a sitemap for Google. Also a good idea to place some links to your pages from other sites so Google can find them more easily.
TWO:
be sure to add *.* to the specific URLs you want to custom search. For our RetireUSA retirement custom search I needed to add this to the URLs box to make sure it picked up all of our indexed content:
http://www.retireusa.net/*.*
http://blog.retireusa.net/*.*
Check out our Retirement Search tomorrow at RetireUSA.net
You’ll probably want to ignore this post unless you are … Googlebot! Or Retired. Or a Retired Googlebot?
Retirement | Poudre Property Services | Cadence Bank | UT Medical Group | Eskaton | Palm Springs Family Care Center
OK, so this is kind of clever and kind of pathetic all at the same time. Google can take too long to index new content, but Joe Duck has good “authority” with Google (ie Google knows the blog is legitimate, regularly updated, and thus sort of assumes it’s actually read by real people who are breathing real globally warmed earthly air). Links from this blog are therefore often “indexed” by Google, which again reasonably assumes those links are not spammy junk. Often Googlebot will “follow” the links at those links in an effort to fully index and rank new content as it pours online.
We have a great new project launching any minute now called “RetireUSA.net” The idea is a database of Retirement related information, organized by about 250 popular retirement city / regions across the United States.
So Googlebot, please start indexing our thousands of records at Retire USA! Thanks Google! Any humans reading NOTE that these records will be changed and improved over the co ming weeks as I complete the templates for this project. The index or “home page” will soon have a clickable map of states from which Retirement folks can drill down to cities of interest and from there to categories of interest. We’re also enlisting quite a few folks to help with the blog portion which will feature writing about retirement issues from experts all over the country.
If you are interested in writing about Retirement issues such as travel, retirement communities, real estate, or travel please send me an email at jhunkins@gmail.com. These are NOT paid positions but fame may await you if we succeed … and you are patient …
We’ve faced many challenges
Those poor folks in the 99% who only have 8 million to their name.
After some time looking I finally found the number I’ve been after, which is the cutoff point in terms of the wealth of those elusive and mysterious ”1% people” everybody is talking about. Here’s the excellent research document:
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf
We learn that the cutoff for moving from the impoverished 99% to those nasty ONE PERCENTERS is …. wait for it …. a Net worth of $8,232,000 or more..
WoW.
So here’s the problem if you are an anti occupation person – those one percenters SURE have a LOT of money! In fact as you go into the category of the super duper rich – the top tenth of a percent, you get wealth so great it’s hard for most of us to even imagine – hundreds of millions of dollars.
HOWEVER if you are a “pro occupation” person I think you have even a bigger problem, and that’s the thing most would not even call a “problem” at all, it’s the fact that we are SO prosperous here in America that millions and millions of people who are well below the “one percent” mark are incredibly well off . Somebody with 7 million in the bank won’t make the 1% cut, but clearly they are very rich.
How moved should we be by a movement that considers millionaires to be among the disadvantaged in America?
Of course the 99% folks don’t mean it literally, rather they are concerned that a small number of elite rich folks control the whole show. It’s an important topic, yet it seems to me the concept of exploitation of the poor by the rich weakens as you examine closely the actual data as well as the procedures and power structures as well as how things work in the country’s business and political circles. Lots of redistribution is already taking place, though tax critics will reasonably note that taxes go mostly to entitlements for the middle class and the defense department. Higher taxes are not necessarily a path to “greater fairness”.
Certainly we want more even distribution of America’s massive wealth, but it’s also important to keep the production levels high so we have something to redistribute. This balance is not easy. Not easy at all.
Oregon Coast … Mobile
Good time to review a few projects I’m associated with or working on now, and thank folks (esp. FoolsGold) for the many excellent suggestions provided over the years to improve the websites.
Over at the Online Highways empire we’re working on a mobile application for travel along the Oregon Coast that will be located at OHWY.mobi and will feature a very simple mobile optimized architecture that branches out to Coastal Cites, Coastal Lodging, Coastal Attractions, and more. I’m still not convinced that .mobi websites will take off as much as many believe they will because I think smartphones will get better fast and we’ll see a lot more optimization on the fly for regular websites, but it’s a good base to cover. I’ll be trying out the dot mobi “mobi translation” routine soon which will allow me to create some .mobi sites from my Airports and Airlines information at QuickAid.com Airport Directory and and the Airport City Codes site.
Meanwhile, after failing for a very long time to find a good and inexpensive Drupal developer to finish Retire USA, a Retirement Information Database, website, blog, and more including the most followed Retirement related account on Twitter. I’m taking it on myself as an HTML project. I’ll be extracting the Drupal data to a regular database we can enhance over time, and then use HTML templates and a merge routine to get a site that will look a lot like the Drupal site we had planned. I could be wrong but I think I’ll have a simpler and faster site with almost the same functionality as Drupal.
MedicalTraveling.net is another new blog that will have a database of high quality hospitals around the world that do procedures, operations, exams, etc for lower costs than here in the great old USA. Medical Travel and Medical Tourism articles and news will also be featured.
But wait…… there’s MORE!
Retire in Oregon
Think about it. You could retire in Oregon! OregonRetirement.info is a project I’m working on with friends in Ashland, Oregon and if you are thinking of retiring in Oregon you’ll want to check out the details about the many great retirement lifestyle choices your can make here in the state. We’ve got a lot of detail about each region, from Portland Area to here in Southern Oregon, and there are thousands of links to many other categories.
Wow, how obvious is this attempt to get our site to rank well for the term “retire in oregon” [answer: obvious]. Yet this should be considered perfectly legitimate “white hat” SEO because users would really, really want to find that site if they were looking for information about a pending Oregon Retirement or if they were searching for “Retire in Oregon“. Right?
Oregon Retirement
… we interrupt the technology ramblings to bring you mildly shameless promotions of things I have some interest in. Also, of course, these blog posts help me understand how blogs are ranked for various phrases and words in search engines …
Oregon Retirement is an excellent project by some friends of mine who are very familiar with the Retirement landscape in Oregon and across the country. I’m going to partner up with them as we create a national site about retirement in the USA. We’ll be covering both as a site and as a blog many issues relating to retirement and also featuring retirement communities across the country as well as great cities in which to retire. The site will feature an extensive database of retirement places, a social network, and a blog. More about this in future posts.
Oregon Retirement
Wow, I’m doing some research for an Oregon retirement website and just learned that according to recent survey the 2004 book called “Retirement Places Rated” out of hundreds of retirement areas in the USA two of the top ten places to retire in the USA are right in my back yard – one of them actually includes my back yard because it’s the Medford / Ashland area here in Southern Oregon. The other is Florence, Oregon – number one in the survey of over 300 places. I travel there often and personally prefer this area due to much better weather and our abundant big-city amenities in a small city, but Florence Oregon is a really nice place too and it’s the home of Oregon Coast Magazine and our Online Highways websites including this great Oregon Travel section in case you are planning a trip to Oregon. Our Travel Blog is here and I’ve posted a few good Oregon travel references as a warmup to the big blog I’m starting this month that will cover the entire state of Oregon. More on that later.
Locals call this the “Rogue Valley” and historically our wonderful region does very well in national “best places to retire” and “best places to live” surveys. I’ve lived in the East, Midwest, several California cities, and here in the Rogue Valley and it’s hard to imagine a better place to raise a family or retire. The houses are relatively expensive and the economics for a wage earner are the most challenging aspect here which may be why the population remains modest, though growth in some of our areas has been dramatic.
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