Frontier Airfare Discounts
If you plan on going to Denver next January, Frontier Airlines is currently running a discount on airfare through January 15th. While that wouldn't cover the flight home for the Maine/Chi/Display weekend, you can save a bit on the flight out there.
Just don't be surprised if your plans are changed on you between now and then. While Frontier is easily the best airline for getting to and from Denver, they're currently going through bankruptcy and have been known to cancel some (a.k.a. mine) flights in the past.
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Mississippi
The D4 region of the Texas drought passed up the size of Mississippi this week despite the rains that got just South enough to give a few people hope.
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Thetextresults.com Review II
Now that they got my account straightened out, I would describe the service as interesting. I'm subscribed to every state and breed and get text messages pretty frequently since most of the national junior shows are going on right now.
An example of a recent text message...
National Junior Angus Show Perry, GA - Champion Bred/Owned Bull Katy Satree, TX Reserve Jake Cunningham, IN
I'd still rather go to a website and see the full show results but the service does provide some interesting info. When writing this post, I almost replaced text message with "tweet" a few times which is telling in and of itself. As more ag people pick up the use of Twitter, this is the kind of thing that will be available through that service.
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Various Stuff
HSAs
Speaking from newly acquired experience, even if you don’t go to the doctor much at all over a few year period, the day you switch your health plan to an HSA you’ll end up in the doctor’s office numerous times over the next month.
Kit Pharo Newsletter
Evidently, Kit got bored with telling everyone they’re raising their cattle wrong and has decided to start contemplating whether they’re going to church wrong too. If you don’t already get his newsletter, go his website and subscribe to it. It’s pretty good reading for Sunday morning before you go to church on the wrong day.
Ijango
I’ve gotten asked about this stuff three times over the past week by unrelated people. I’m not going to go into it in any detail (there are plenty of places to research it) other than to say if monetizing the web were as easy as a slick looking, bankrupt, pattern dirt bag driving a Maserati makes it sound, his previous businesses would have worked.
However, you CAN learn about virtually every sleazy SEO/PR trick in the book by researching Ijango.
Twitter Follower Flush
While most ag people I’ve seen using Twitter don’t have a ton of followers, Twitter flushed out a good portion of the spammers last week. So if you noticed a drop in your followers, it wasn’t due to people unfollowing you.
Blog Links
After the relative success of the recently updated sites page, I’ve programmed another in our growing legion of bots to check blogs and list them on the right hand side of this site. Currently, we check Club Calf Paradise, Ranch House Designs, Stock Options Marketing, EDJE Blogs but will add others as time permits.
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Texas Drought
Yes, I hate hearing people whine about drought but guess what, I don't have a lawn left to mow and we're not going to ship more cows off to market until Monday so I'm going to do it any way. South and Central Texas is quickly becomming a desert. Yes, there are other dry spots but for reference, there is nowhere else in the United States that is even classified D3 other than the areas surrounding the current D4 area of South/Central Texas.
I'm going to start refering to the size of the D4 (the highest drought classification used by the Dept. of Ag) area in Texas by which state it's larger than. Last week, it was the size of Indiana. This week, it's passed up Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
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July Forum Activity Report
For the time period 6-15-09 to 7-16-09
- Ranchers.net 38.8%
- Cattle-Today 34.6%
- Steerplanet 18.8%
- 5BarX 3.3%
- Advantage Cattle Services 3.2%
- Clubcalves 0.6%
- Breedersworld 0.5%
- Showsteers 0.1%
- EDJE 0.0%
In case you didn't know, it's Summer which tends to be a down time for ag sites. Total forum activity was down another 5.1% in this time period vs May to June.
The largest percentage changes were in the smaller forums with 5BarX increasing by 48% and Clubcalves and Showsteers both decreasing by more than 70%.
- By Jeff | Comments (6)
Ivy League Behind the Scenes
There’s forgetting something for a while, having too much on your plate, getting sick, just being slow, and then there’s the amount of time it took me to get these clips up.
Joshua Ramsey (follow him on Twitter here) took a camcorder with him to Denver back in January and shot small clips of the process of displaying a bull, specifically Ivy League. It’s taken our government less time to spend a trillion dollars than it has for me to finally get that video up.
I’ve broken the videos down into very short videos so they don’t take forever to load…
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Thetextresults.com Update
The folks at Thetextresults.com got in touch with me today while I was at the Fredericksburg auction barn to figure out what the issue was. I was evidently the only customer to have paid with a bank payment that had to draft the bank account. When you do that on Paypal, it sends a notification that a payment has been sent but not finalized. A few days later, another notification is sent that the payment has cleared. Their system didn’t register the second notification and thus didn’t upgrade the account.
95%+ of my income goes through Paypal before it gets to me. We’ve processed well over a hundred thousand transactions in seven plus years. Even with that much experience, every now and then something new comes up that we hadn’t seen before. It happens and I understand their situation.
So while the payment did clear in April and I did try to contact them about it via e-mail a few times they got it taken care of after reading that post a few days ago. They’re also addressing the issue on their end to make sure nobody else gets caught up in it.
It was just their dumb luck that the only person it impacted was the schmuck that runs this site.
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June Cattle Site Traffic Report
- CattleNetwork.com 24.59%
- Cattle Today Sites 21.76%
- Beefmagazine.com 11.37% (4)
- Cattle.com 8.96% (5)
- Cattlerange.com 7.99% (3)
- Drovers.com 5.87% (New)
- Showsteers.com 4.53% (6)
- Cattlepages.com 3.79%
- Cattlegrower.com 2.79% (7)
- Clubcalves.com 1.86% (>10)
Drovers was added to the index and went into the mix of 3rd-7th that typically mixes up each month.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Thetextresults.com
It's hard to keep giving the folks at Thetextresults.com the benefit of the doubt. While a bit strange, their idea was at least somewhat unique. Claiming to be the "Official Site for Show and Sale Results" is a stretch but to be expected from a start up such as that. However, what really made me question it was the price which would require a TON of volume to make it a worthwhile venture.
With that in mind, I subscribed to the service back in April to see how well it works. Since that time the only text messages I have received have been e-mails with my password because I kept trying to retrieve it to get into my account (which I can’t even do now). I’ve sent two e-mails asking what’s going on; neither of them was replied to.
I’ve put off putting this up for at least two-weeks now in the hopes of them getting it worked out. I assumed that after the money/time spent on four-color ads, the forum spam campaign, and setting up booths at stock shows they might actually do something.
- By Jeff | Comments (1)
Special Reserve
Sired by Irish Whiskey
PHA/TH Clean
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