Monthly Reflection June

I skipped a few weeks of reflections but I’ll make up for it here in the monthly roundup.

June Final Stats

June went pretty well for me. My highlight was being viewed and linked to by an investor in Algorithmia. Reassuring to know that all these posts I’m writing are coherent and useful. See the original post. My stats for the month are below

Month	Count	Channel	Reached	Actual
May	1000	Quora	Yes	1400
June	10000	Quora	Yes	12,400
June	1	Affiliate sales	No	5 clicks
June	200	Blog views	Yes	347
June	100	Reddit Karma	No	18

I hit most of my goals and am excited to build off this for next month. Thanks to all my friends who liked my Facebook page! And who gave me feedback last month. I appreciate it.

You may be wondering how exactly I hope to make money on this and that’s a good question. I’m using this blog to become a resource in data visualization, data scraping, and sports betting. Along the way I’m planning on offering free or paid products like how to scrape any website, data for sports betting models, and tools to help sports bettors like text alerts and email.

I have an extensive collection of books I’ve really enjoyed reading and will make recommendations to buy the most useful books from Amazon using my affiliate links. Worst case scenario, I learn how to be a better writer and apply for normal jobs over the winter.

Once I hit 10,000 monthly page views I stand a chance to make this my full time job. That may seem like a lot, it is, but from what I’ve read blogging takes time. Time to have your views double and double again until you become the goto resource in your niche.

Looking ahead to July

My goals for July are a bit ambitious but that’s only because I get to use one of my favorite jokes. It’s like Christmas in July — can’t find the movie quote but it’s out there.

Channel	Count	Metric
Quora	50000	Views
Quora	100	Upvotes
Quora	5	Additional Follows
Email	10	Signups
Blog	1440	Page Views
Twitter	10	Additional Follows
Facebook	25	Additional Follows
Reddit	50	Karma
Amazon	3	Affiliate Sales
Blog	10	Posts

I’m hoping to grow my blog views to a monthly average of 2 viewers an hour and continue growing 2x-10x in different channels. I’m most excited about Reddit but can’t seem to crack the ranks of /r/dataisbeautiful. A garabge visualization that took me 5 minutes got 4 upvotes but the interactive Google travels times visualization has 0 upvotes. Outrageous in my opinion. I need to understand the type of user in that subreddit because it isn’t people who like data visualization for data visualization’s sake. Just people that want to argue about data and a simple bar chart can get 10K upvotes. I’m working on apiece for the MLB All-Star Break that should help out.

I think the best channel is email/RSS feed subscription so please do subscribe if you like what you’re reading. Any positive/negative feedback you have for me please leave a comment or email person@ergosum.co. Enough of the boring stats time for the fun miscellaneous stuff.

Colombian music is pretty good

A friend was making me feel bad for not staying in touch with Argentina and South America since I was a foreign exchange student in Buenos Aires. That got me thinking. I can hardly understand Kodak Black and Travis Scott so it doesn’t really matter what language they’re singing. I think I understand just as much of Latin American hip hop as I do rap so why limit myself to music in our native tongues. And someone has to say it. The original Despacito is way better than the Bieber version. Both are good but give the original a listen.

Some hits to get you started:

Pharell Williams even has one. Remember him, the Happy guy.

Page Rank for Youtube

This Colombian music kick has inspired me to start working on a page rank style algorithm for computing what’s popular on youtube. I already have some started code that gives video stats and related videos so I’m hoping to get it done during July.

Random Stuff

If you ever wondered how your phone started rendering images with links or how facebook creates that preview link I now know that answer. You can thank the OG, og:img. It was such a pain figuring out how to get those to work yesterday for my reddit post but I finally stumbled upon Facebook’s thumbnail tool.

Within minutes of posting on reddit yesterday some bot tried to hack my server ,
One of the mods “accidentally” deleted my post from showing up in the main reddit feed. That was cool
Insurance companies are terrible — not news to most people but news to this unemployed man
The scientific method sucks. More on that later

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Ergo Sum

Thoughts from a person