I confirmed again that we are already using SEO best practices, but we do need to implement some things to continue in the vanguard of effective white-hat SEO.

The main take-aways from SEM-PDX, for SEO professionals (at least for me) were:

• Need to change the coding of the many websites for which I am responsible, from HTML 4.01 transitional (the easiest to code) and XHTML1, over to HTML 5 and CSS 3.
• Use the open graph meta information on sites—which apparently only really works well on HTML 5 sites, hence the previous item
• Start implementing the schema.org “breadcrumb” coding on sites that already have breadcrumbs in them.
• Use the “organization” and “address” tags from schema.org wherever there is an address in one of the sites. (Have to go back and put this in on all sites – it’s simple but time-consuming)
• Don’t use the “micro formats”—instead, use the schema.org coding.
• Make sure the “author” tags are in place for all sites, tying it in to the G+ author bio pages. The “Publisher” tag doesn’t work the same way, so don’t use it.
• Implement “twitter cards” on all sites that are active socially.
• Implement the “video” tags from Schema.org on all sites that have videos on them.

What’s missing from all this is an investigation into the real cause of the violence in our schools. For hundreds of years we’ve had a country with many schools, where weapons were abundant and we didn’t have any shootings like this. Now it seems as if there is a new school shooting every few months. Why?

Here’s what one psychiatrist, Dr. David Healy, says about it. Now, if you’re at all like me, you probably think psychiatrists are about as loopy as they come, and that psychiatry bears the same relationship to medicine that astrology bears to astronomy. Even so, this one seems to have his head partially screwed on right.

See also his website to report the side effects of drugs at Rxisk.org.

CCHR has been saying that psychiatric drugs were responsible for this increase in violence for about 20 years. So have I, but then I’ve been a member of CCHR since 1972.

There’s an interesting new internet “meme” about “mass murder pills” based on the many requests out there for an investigation into the relationship between psychiatric drugs and violence. Do a Google search for that term and see what’s popping up now.

It was an interesting project, but it took a long time to do. WordPress is not my favorite kind of platform for an ecommerce site (this particular site sells advertising) and it used to rank very highly for the search term “Christmas gifts” at Google. It ranked #1 for years, helped by EMD (Exact Match Domain name) and by having thousands of links to it from websites linking to the free Christmas Clipart and free Christmas music there. Several attempts to re-optimize the old site (which I built in php and mySql originally in 2003, I think) were made over the last couple of years, to no avail. Suddenly the thousands of links to the site looked like an “unnatural link profile”, although they were completely natural!

So we have completely changed the way the site works and looks, with a very nice new graphic design in the WordPress theme created by Matteo Galbiati of www.webandseoguru.com. He also found and modified some plugins so they work for our purposes. We used the Simple Ad Manager, which is kind of clunky but seems to work okay.

Matteo was a joy to work with – very responsive and he always had a solution for some fairly difficult technical issues within WordPress.

The new site is much better for shoppers now because it shows actual products and prices. It works better from an SEO perspective because visitors are not being send off to other sites through ads — they click on products and can purchase them right away. The site continues to offer great advice on what Christmas gifts to give to various kinds of people, but now you can SHOP! which is a much better user experience.

We’ve done yet another request for reconsideration at Google, and are looking forward to being back on page one of the search results for our search terms once again.

In the meantime, I have found a couple of new quotes I like and put them on my permanent “quotes” page. Enjoy.

Yoost DeValk (the hopelessly nerdy guy pictured at right) is the guy who wrote the SEO plugin for WordPress. He’s someone whose SEO advice I listen to with rapt attention.

Last week I listened to a live webinar of Yoost talking about how to actually use his SEO plugin for WordPress, and it was very informative and helpful.

The kind folks over at SEO Brain Trust who sponsored the webinar originally, have put the webinar up on a web page so anyone can listen to it now and learn the techniques Yoost recommends for optimizing a Word Press website. Here’s a link to the Yoost Devalk SEO Plugin webinar.

If you use WordPress, you’ll want to listen to it so your WordPress site can rank better.

In about the middle he talks about the epidemic of ADHD and how wrong-headed it is to be drugging children when we should be making them MORE alive, not less alive.

I only wish Sir Ken Robinson had some of their solutions to the problems he points out — his talk would have been more upbeat because there ARE solutions. Something CAN be done about it — and is being done about it on a daily basis, student by student.

Is Article Marketing for Link-Building Dead?

However, the recent Panda updates seem to have resulted in the de-indexing of the majority of all the article marketing links, as far as Google is concerned. I’m about 95% certain that that’s true.

There seems to be little point in continuing with article marketing, if the links within those articles are not being counted.

If it is true, I can’t really blame Google for de-indexing the article marketing links. They were basically paid (or unpaid) link generating schemes, being done almost entirely for the purpose of increasing the number of links Google counted, for the purpose of getting more Google PageRank and higher rankings in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

In other words, article marketing was being used to “game the system” – something Google obviously doesn’t want.

We’ve been trying to monitor the number of links that are being counted by Google (the only links that matter for the purposes of link-building!) on behalf of our clients, and we’re getting wildly different numbers from one week to the next, and different numbers depending on which source of backlink statistics we check.

How to Count Backlinks?

1. Google: using the “link:site.com” command. This tool, which has been broken at Google for 3 or 4 years now, gives a ridiculously low number of links.

   For the purpose of proving that last statement, search at Google for:

   link:www.jmblog.com

   and that tool shows that there are only 4 links to the site you’re reading now, www.jmblog.com.

   Search at Google for:

   link:www.wordsinarow.com

   (that’s my business site) and it shows that there are only 7 links, even though that site has been around for 12 years and has over ten thousand links to it, which have been gradually added and are “natural” links, not obtained through any linking scheme.

2. Google: using the command “www.site.com -site:www.site.com”, like this:

   search Google for: “www.jmblog.com” -site:www.jmblog.com

   That parcitular search command will search for all instances of www.jmblog.com found on other websites, minus any pages from www.jmblog.com itself.

   Doing that search today, Google claims there are 13,900 results — those are mentions of and links to www.jmblog.com from other websites.

   (Note: I have never done any link-building for www.jmblog.com. Those are all “natural” links, just the way Google wants them.)

   Do the same Google search for: “www.wordsinarow.com” -site:www.wordsinarow.com

   and at the top of the first page of search results, Google says there are 33,500 results. But if you click to page 10 of the search results, Google says there are 83,300 results.

   Which number should one believe?

3. Google Webmaster Zone. You will get a different number from there, and it is typically several months out of date. Google will list out a finite number of links for you.
4. Bing Webmaster area. Similar to the Google Webmaster Zone. You’ll get a different number of Backlinks from Bing than you get from Google.
5. SEOMOZ: Open Site Explorer:

   Here’s the link to click to check backlinks at SEOMOZ:

   Words in a Row Backlinks at SEOMOZ
   (this currently shows 313 links for www.wordsinarow.com, which is rather on the low side compared to the data reported by Google.)

   and JMBlog.com backlinks at SEOMOZ
   (This currently shows only 233 links – also rather low.)

So, depending on which tool you use to count them, the number of links to this site (www.jmblog.com) is somewhere between 4 and 13,900. (It’s kind of funny, but not in a good way.)

The number to which I’m paying the most attention, and graphing, and monitoring regularly, is the one I get from doing this search at Google:

search Google for: “www.jmblog.com” -site:www.jmblog.com

But lately with all the Panda updates, that number has really jumped around for some of my clients; one client’s backlinks plummeted from 55,000 to 15,000 over the course of the last month.

If one assumes that Google has de-indexed the links from the article marketing sites, then those drops in the statistics, although painful, start to make sense

See this page from Google Webmaster Central:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0ee276cbb4c93397&hl=en

Specifically, this answer from Google, where one webmaster wonders why his reported links have dropped from 19500 to 4000.
———

Could be a couple of things.

Firstly, lets start with the number of links. Obviously if someone creates a link to your site, they can also delete it. So that’s one possibility. But you have a large number of links gone all of a sudden, so to me that would suggest one of two possibilities – You had a large number of links coming from one (or a small number) of domains and this/these domains have either: 1. not paid their domain name registration fee and thus have dropped off the internet, thus you links no longer physically exist online…

or 2. Google has ‘de-indexed’ this/these domain/s for their index (could be for any number of reasons) and thus Google is not counting these backlinks anymore even though the sites physically exist in cyberspace.

(emphasis added.)

Last night we had a meeting at the Broadbent Community Church, where two officials from the regional USPS from the Eugene Office briefed the public on the possible closure, the various options of what might happen if they do close the Broadbent Post Office, and the decision-making process itself.

There were about 40 people in attendance at the meeting.

The woman briefing us was reading from a script. She did not have answers to most of the questions that were asked. She did not know exactly who would be making the decision to close (or not) the Broadbent Post Office. She did not know what would happen if they closed the Post Office. Her compatriot at the meeting was taking down names of people and their questions (by hand, in a paper notebook), so they could send them off to the people who would be making the decision.

We are in the middle of “Fly Season” in Broadbent — there are a lot of flies everywhere. The Broadbent Community Church was swarming with them, and the flies were constantly pestering the speaker throughout the meeting. I felt sorry for her until she complained about it and someone said, “Welcome to Broadbent.”

What she didn’t know, and what I’m sure the USPS executives have no clue about, is that the Post Office is the last remnant (except for the Church where the meeting was held) of a town. The Broadbent Store closed ten years ago. The last service station in town went out of business a decade before that. There’s no other service business of any kind in Broadbent, except for our Post Office.

This whole meeting (and all the meetings they are doing locally where Post Offices are up for closure) appeared to me to be solely and only an attempt by the USPS to cover its collective ass and stave off the inevitable lawsuits. Without this meeting, one could claim there was “no input from the community”. With the meeting, one could say that the community “had a place at the table” when making the decision. Even if all they do is box up the notes they took at the meeting and shelve them, after this meeting they can claim that they “listened to the local customers” before making their decision.

What I learned:

1. There is no set criteria for who will make the decision.

There’s no one individual who can be contacted or petitioned or whose duty it is to make these cuts, of which ours is just one of 3200 on which they will decide.

Some sort of committee may make the selection? She claimed they don’t know yet who will make the decision, or whether that would be a committee or an individual.

2. There’s no set criteria on which the decision will be based.

My admittedly cynical guess it that the “squeaky wheel” system will be used. The communities that have been the most vocal and threatening will get their Post Offices kept open, and the ones who meekly submit and are polite will have their post offices closed.

3. Broadbent has a large proportion of elderly/retired/disabled people in it, who depend on the Broadbent Post Office to receive their disability checks and for delivery of medicines. I didn’t realize quite how many elderly and infirm there were in our community until I saw them at the meeting.

4. Closing the Broadbent Post Office will save the USPS approximately $600,000 over ten years — which is $60k/year.

I don’t know what their total annual budget is for the Broadbent Post Office. They are in a building that is single-use — in other words it was built to be the Post Office. It has its own little (paved)parking lot. But the Post Office doesn’t own it. The owner of the building (who gets a monthly lease payment from them) was at the meeting. Of course HE wants to keep the post office open.

5. Some of the options for mail service if they close the Post Office are:

a. Setting up “community clusters” — roadside mail boxes where we have a key, and if there’s a big parcel they will put it in a big box and leave a key to the big box in your normal little mailbox. Apartment dwellers all over the US are familiar with this system.

b. Increasing delivery routes. That’s not going to help us any here on the ran ch because we’re 8 miles out at the end of a dirt road. It makes no sense to have mail delivery here — what we need is a Post Office where we get our mail.

c. Moving our post office boxes to Myrtle Point: this would require a build-out (construction) of the Myrtle Point Post Office as they have very limited space there currently and nowhere to put another bank of post office boxes.

d. An option they can’t do here is setting up a “contract office” where a local business operates under contract to the Post Office to hand out mail, sort mail into mail boxes, etc. There ARE no such businesses in Broadbent.

Of the four, the “community clusters” seems to me the least interruptive of actual service. At least we won’t have to drive any farther to pick up our regular mail.

I find I am ambivalent about whether or not they close our Broadbent Post Office, but a bit saddened about the general trend of post office closures, school closures, and the entire centralization of everything into the cities and away from the country.

A hundred years ago, there were three schools — each with its own live-in school mistress offering Grades 1 through 8, with 20 to 30 students — within 5 miles of our house. The house where we live WAS a Post Office 100 years ago, for a thriving local community of loggers, ranchers, and their familes. There were a lot more people living out here in the country then. There’s been an exodus of people from the country to the city over the last 100 years; I had thought that was over, but it’s still going on, and we’re still in the middle of it.

As a child in the mid-1950s, I attended part of my 1st grade in a 2-room schoolhouse in the country near Brownsville, Texas. One room had about 20 kids in it, and the teacher taught from the 1st to 8th grades. The other room was the high school, with about ten kids who were in the 9th through 12th grades. I knew all of the kids in the lower school by name and reputation.

When I graduated from Lincoln High School in Portland Oregon in 1970, the graduating class was over 1200 kids; I knew about a dozen of them. I don’t think that kind of impersonal, industrial education was any improvement.

The trend seems to be such that in 50 years, the only schools and the only post office and services, will be in the large cities. Will the collapsing economy of it ensure there will be nothing for us country dwellers? no post offices, no schools, no police, and no road maintenance? Will the area between the cities fall into ruin and anarchy? Hard to predict, but it seems, today, with the threatened closure of our beloved Post Office, just a little more likely.

Not a post-apocalyptic society (think “Mad Max”): a post-consolidation civilization of city-dwellers only, with everything else abandoned. Maybe Robert A. Heinlein had it right — in one book he postulated “Abandoned Areas” where there was no service at all, because it was too risky for the service providers (police, EMTs, schools, etc.) to go in there. If you ventured in, you were on your own.

We can certainly survive without our little Post Office, although it will be, just as certainly, a great inconvenience to us and our neighbors. From our house it is about 25 minutes to the Post Office, and another 5 minutes to Myrtle Point, where they would move our services if they closed it.

If it saves the USPS half a million dollars over the next ten years, that would be a good thing, if it helps the USPS get and stay solvent. But I suspect that somehow, the Post Office will go belly-up anyway.

Like God, mismanagement is everywhere; endemic, ubiquitous and omnipresent.

On the other hand — having this little Post Office (and our own Postmaster, who knows us all) has always been a great thing. Twice, over the last ten years, I’ve gotten a phone call from our Postmistress, on the morning of Christmas Eve. Here’s how the last such phone conversation went, Christmas Eve 2010:

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Irena from the Broadbent Post Office. Is that you, Jere?”

“Oh, hi, Irena. Yes, it’s me. Merry Christmas! Do I have a parcel or something?”

“Merry Christmas! No, the parcel is not for you. Your daughter has a parcel here. I think it is from her sister in Florida. I can’t get hold of her and I didn’t want her girls to miss their Christmas presents from their Auntie. I’m only here until noon today. If you come down here I’ll give it to you.”

“Thanks, Irena. I’ll be down shortly.”

It’s a story I’ve told to my friends in the city, when they ask me WHY I live out here in the sticks.

I’ll update this post when we’ve heard the decree from on high, some time in December.

I wonder if my grandchildren, who are being raised in the time of Facebook, will ever experience losing track of someone, only to reconnect later on.

How much harder is it going to be for someone to simply drop out, go away for a year, sail around the world, and then reconnect? Will someone have stolen your FB account login and be masquerading as you?

Pre-Google, it could sometimes be *very hard* to find out something you needed to know. One had to go to a library and be shushed into silence while fingering through a 3×5 card file index of books and titles in the reference section, or use a phone book (which were often not very helpful). Curiosity often had to be put on hold — every question could not always be answered immediately. Sometimes you had to ask an expert — and they could be stubbornly hard to reach.

The telephone was not a storage device for songs, or one’s constant companion and game console or alarm clock or pocket atlas — it was a fairly heavy device, kept on a desk or bedside table, or hanging on the wall in one’s kitchen. If you smacked somebody with a telephone, it was heavy enough to seriously hurt them. Your phone was physically tied, with a heavy wire, to a location. If someone was already talking on the telephone when you called them, you got a busy signal (Beep…. Beep….. Beep….) which meant you had to call them back later. You couldn’t leave a message — no one had an answering machine! It wasn’t until the 80′s that “call waiting” and “call forwarding” and “voice mail” became commonly available on phones in cities. Even today, in our rural location, we still do not have call waiting and call forwarding. If we’re on the phone, people calling us will hear a busy signal.

Today, many of the younger people who call me don’t know what a busy signal IS. I am frequently told “Something was wrong with your phone when I called you. It was making a funny noise. You should complain to the phone company.”

So if these next generations are always in touch through Facebook, will they be as appreciative of other people? Will their manners be up to the task of managing human relationships that last over 40 or 50 years? Or will their wealth of human contacts (“I have 3572 friends on Facebook!”) cause them to waste (just hit “unfriend”) anyone who is slightly troublesome?

I lost track of my old friend for 35 years because we moved to different parts of the country years ago, and our phone numbers and addresses have changed many times over the years. We were never terribly close, but I would have liked to have known about her ex-husband’s death when it happened — that’s when one needs one’s friends and acquaintances to circle the wagons against the loneliness and despair and grief that death brings to the living.

It seems like, now, that kind of slow drifting apart will be impossible. I’m thinking that’s a good thing, but I have my doubts.

I’m trying to drag my older sister into Facebook, but she doesn’t check it more than once or twice a year. Everyone in our extended family is trying to include her in the conversation they are having about life as it is happening… and they can’t get through to her. She’s too busy having fun with her grandchildren, teaching medicine, and taking care of her dog.

Not being on Facebook, it’s as if she has a “busy” signal going on in her life.

Not “Beep… Beep… Beep…”, just silence.

Our Solar-Powered Radio Internet Connection

On June 28, 2011, my internet service provider (ISP) went out of business. One minute I was surfing the web at about 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second – a fairly fast internet speed — at least it was fast enough to get work done online) and the next minute they were gone. The owner and the only technical brains of that local ISP (Rural Access Internet Company = RAIC) Guy Ralph, died in January of this year. He was a great guy, and had a vision to help people like us, who live in rural areas where we will never, ever, ever get DSL or Cable or Fios or any other fast connections to the web, through regular ISPs, because it just doesn’t make sense for them to spend hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars on equipment to service a very few people. After his untimely death, his wife decided that the company he created wasn’t worth continuing, and left their 120 or so customers — all like us, out in the sticks — high and dry. I am trying not to sound bitter; it’s hard.

RAIC had set up internet via 900 Mhz radio equipment which we were lucky enough to be able to see by line of sight from the top of our house, through a gap in the hills surrounding our home office, about five years ago. We have been very dependent on RAIC for our livelihood.

So as of June 28, we were on our backup dialup connection to the web, through Earthlink.

We were unwilling to go with Hughes.net — it just won’t work for us. Hughes.net satellite service basically, well, it sucks. It is expensive, you get very limited (“throttled”) bandwidth, and very slow even at the best of times. We snicker when we see their ads on TV for “blazingly fast downloads” — it’s a total lie. We usually burn through more bandwidth in an hour than they will let you have in 24 hours. After you burn through your bandwidth, they don’t shut you off completely, they just slow it down to dialup speeds.

3G service is not available to our home/office — we have no cell reception at our place, because we are down in a bowl, surrounded by hills.

Our house seen from the landing.

I tried contacting the company that had been providing RAIC with its fiber optic connection to the web, and seeing what they had to offer. Although they were optimistic about getting us a T1 line — which uses two pairs of regular phone lines to deliver quite a bit of bandwidth — they wanted $500 to install, and $500/month to maintain! Plus whatever Frontier would charge to put in the equipment. Expensive, yes, but if it was the only option, we would be forced to go that way. They proceeded to try to get Frontier (our local phone company) to install the equipment. Six weeks later, it was obvious that Frontier was never even going to tell us what it would cost to install a T1 line to our location, 8 miles out a dirt road and 14 miles from town (10 as the crow flies).

So we cancelled all plans for a T1 line.

A few weeks ago, David Grimes called me. We knew each other because he also does highly technical things locally and he had tackled a server project for us some years back. Dave handles server setup and security for quite a few clients in South Coastal Oregon. He is an excellent, knowledgeable technician who gets things done. He said that we were both in the same boat — he’d been a customer of RAIC and was now offline. We agreed it was an intolerable situation and that we had to handle it or we’d be out of business. He said he would be setting up modern radio equipment, something similar to what RAIC had had, but more reliable. But he didn’t plan on using that radio tower (the one visible from the top of our house) because it was expensive and unnecessary to lease space for our radios on that radio tower. We could go around them.

Dave is also a ham radio person with a deep understanding of how radios work and how computer networks work.

Dave Grimes, Dennis, and Marie
(and Sadie the Dog)
Installing Solar Panels and Radios

First he had to connect to the backbone — so he leased a 50Mbps fiber-optic line from Charter — which ends at an office in Myrtle Point. From there, he set up a radio installation using Ubiquity radios to get the signal over to a house on the south end of Myrtle point (which he can see from his office in Broadbent).

So he got his own connection to the net working a couple of weeks ago.

Immediately after that, he set up a local public Wifi for Broadbent. I helped him set up a 5.8 Ghz radio and a huge Wifi hotspot with a 30 mile line-of-sight radius, to service the Broadbent area.

The bad news is that from our house, 14 miles from Myrtle Point, and down in a bowl, we get no signal from any of those radios. However, from the landing (a flat space the loggers created when they logged this area many years ago) on the top of the hill behind our house, there’s plenty of signal — with a good pair of field glasses, you can SEE that house at the south end of in Myrtle Point, from our landing. And the 5.8 Ghz radio signal coming from that house at the south end of Myrtle Point is strong and clear.

So — how to get us signal down in our bowl? Set up a radio relay on our landing.

But there’s no power up on that landing. It was a big, but not insurmountable problem.

In the meantime it has been nearly impossible to get any web development work done over dialup. My partner Marie moved her computer to a little office in Myrtle Point so she could do actual web development for some of our clients using a connection through a Comcast connection, at about 3 Mbps.

Since you can see our house, our neighbors, and our daughter’s house from that landing, it seemed like a good location to set up a relay that would offer them internet service as well. We had to provide POWER to the landing.

We planned out a solar system and I started purchasing equipment.

Since the radios would run on 24 volt DC, we needed to have a solar/battery system that would produce 24 volts. The radios only use about half an amp (500 milliamps), total. Although that may vary under an increased load — we’re still not sure about that.

Dave found a provider of solar panels over near Grants Pass — BatteryStuff.com. I drove over (3 hours each way) and bought two 68-watt, 12-volt solar panels and hooked them up in series, so they output 24 volts. (Cost = $852)

We bought a 24-volt controller (Steca PR charge controller) from them as well. Hooking that up proved to be a breeze — we just assembled it, connected it to the batteries, and it started charging them up, with no problems whatsoever, right out of the box.

24-volt Steca power controller for solar panels and radios.

The four 6-volt deep-cycle batteries (normally you’d use these in an electric golf cart or similar vehicle) we purchased from Les Schwab, for about $375, and connected them in series, and they output 24 volts no problem.

We needed something weatherproof (we get about 120 inches of rain per year here — another way of putting that is TEN FEET of rain every year) to house the batteries and controller. So we bought a Jobox for $375 — a big metal box you’d use on a construction site to keep your blueprints and tools secure. It locks up good and tight — and I put in weatherstripping so even when the winds blow 100 MPH up on the landing, as they will when we get a good storm going through here, it should keep the water out.

We set up the two radios on a 16-foot pressure-treated six-by-six wood post that we set in a concrete pad up on the landing: one radio is a dish to communicate with the 5.8 Ghz radio mounted on the house at the south end of Myrtle Point, and the other is a “bullet” 2.4 Ghz radio to relay the signal down to our house, to our neighbors, daughter, and so on.

The radios are supplied with “Power Over Ethernet” (POE) converters that are supposed to plug into 110 AC — so we had to figure out how to connect them with our 24-volt power supply. Dave built an Ethernet cable “harness” that should have connected them if they used the standard 8-pin pin-out configuration for power over Ethernet. We plugged it all in — nothing. No lights on the radios to indicate they were receiving power from our batteries through our controller. No nothing. We had to call for tech support — turns out we needed two $8 parts (“power injectors”) to make it work, because the Ubiquity radios do not use standard ethernet cables for their Power over Ethernet devices.

We ordered the last two parts on Wednesday, 8/10/2011, two-day air, from LA. As of Friday, no delivery. Saturday they arrived. But they were mssing a fifty-cent part we couldn’t get until Monday from Radio Shack!

The $8.00 part that stymied us for a week

Finally, on Monday, 15 August 2011, we plugged everything in and got all the equipment set up, routed properly and talking to each other. We now have solar-powered internet! and so does my daughter, two miles away.

Total cost has been about $2200, including the radios. But it’s a one-time expense.

Notes on the solar: It is August now, so we’re getting plenty of sun and the system hasn’t gone below 98% charge since we plugged everything in. I went up the hill this morning and checked the charge on the battery before sunrise — the batteries were at 98% charge, after the equipment was running all night with no input from the solar panels. So I think we’re going to be good for those long winter nights, and the gray days of winter and spring. But if need be, we will set up another rank of batteries. There’s plenty of room in the Jobox (the brown box in the photos) which protects all the batteries and controller from the elements. In rural Oregon, it is best not to “leave unattended” anything out in the woods. So our Jobox is locked and bolted down to a concrete pad.

Batteries and Controller Nestled in the Jobox

It is not the prettiest thing I’ve ever built, but it is *strong* to withstand the wind, and fully functional, and we’re getting about 8 Mbps download through it right now — there is some physical bottleneck (throttle) at the relay in Myrtle Point, which will be fixed shortly and we should be able to get about 50Mbps when everything is set up correctly.

Still to do: The mounting of the solar panels will be changed out to a metal frame (instead of cedar 2×6 construction), mounted on hinges, so we can adjust the angle of the solar panels every month. It will be connected at the bottom to posts set in the ground in cement. Right now the bottom of it is being held down by a log! In the winter the best angle will be about 16 degrees from vertical because the sun is so low on the horizon here — we are almost at the 45th parallel. Right now the best angle is at about 35 degrees from vertical, in order to accumulate the most sunshine for this time of year (according to charts Marie looked up on the internet).

Kudos go to David Grimes for figuring out how to make it all work, and being willing to set all this up. He’s a genius when it comes to networking. And radios. Without him it would not have been possible — I wouldn’t have attempted it.

We plan to start offering internet service to neighbors soon — as soon as the public end of our website offering the service is up, so people can place orders without having to call Dave and make his life difficult. Anyone in line-of-sight from our landing can install a “nano” radio, point it up at the landing, and have internet in short order. Or work on Wifi if their signal is strong enough. Marie’s Motorola Xoom can connect directly to the 2.4 Hgz radio on the landing, without going through our own Dlink Wifi hotspot. So can both our laptops, which are wifi enabled. And my Kindle also sees that radio as a possible connection to the web. (It’s password protected, so we’re not connecting to it, but I believe the plan is to make it publicly available shortly, for a small fee, payable right then and there.)

When it was completed, we did a little dance and celebrated with ice cream. The relief of having a connection I can use to work again is palpable!