Director's Blog

November 21, 2008
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving everyone, I am taking a vacation from November 22 - 30 and we won't be updating this site during that time. I hope that you return to this site in early December, Santa Claus and I will be bringing lots of good cheer in VersaGlobe content.

November 21, 2008
The world money markets have had a violent and volatile move recently. I believe it is an overcorrection, and that free market forces from around the globe will regain their senses. There is value in the innovation and commitment at Apple, Intel, Daimler and many others that have been unreasonably under priced recently. I find it foolish that our legislators, ratings agencies, and millions of sophisticated investors downgrade the value in our homes, downgrade the value in our entrepreneurial versatility and downgrade the value in a Variety of American goods. American individuals are neither spiteful nor lazy. I believe each of us has a unique American (or state)(or city) inspired dream. I think that by taking small, rational, and creative steps we can turn a decade of foolishness into many years of prosperity.

October 06, 2008
We have recently been having trouble with Comcast limiting our bandwidth to the point that our website and email have been unusable. So I would like to take this opportunity to personally appologize if anyone has had difficulty reaching our site. Update, Comcast has guaranteed that our internet service will be set to a reasonable level.

September 23, 2008
With the World Computer Chess Championship starting in the end of September, we've started the undertaking of developing a chess playing engine. It will be a new kind of chess software considering advance tactical moves instead of the traditional raw computaion. We hope the artificial intelligence will be strong enough to be used in other difficult games such as poker and go, and possibly market simulations.

September 08, 2008
Finally, back to business as usual. There is a new story in our news section and you can expect that it will be updated several times a week. We are adding pages to jadedhealth.com and hoping to start bringing fresh content to writtenfinancial.com. We're also considering adding custom encyclopedia, games, celebrity, and Shopping sections to the site to complement our existing content.

September 03, 2008
There have been some delays to our news updates due to technical issues. We've recently acquired several new companies including jadedhealth.com, writtenfinancial.com, and versadownloads.com.

September 02, 2008
We've made updates to our Literature, News, Forum, TV, and New York Jobs areas. An interesting bit of information, our international viewership is up 112%, likely from our Olympics coverage.

August 28, 2008
We've added a job postings section for job seekers in several major world cities. We've also bought several domains that will be tracking specific news categories specifically in the United States. Our news section will be updated, again, throughout the week starting September 1, 2008. I'de like to hear from visitors with their favorite section or article. Thanks again for your continued support.

August 12, 2008
You can find Breaking Coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics here. The Music Video section is now operational, though we've had to compromise and link to YouTube pages due to bandwidth restrictions. Maybe we'll find a collocation center and host them ourselves.

August 05, 2008
I'm happy to announce that VersaGlobe will be covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics with both textual and video content. We will give our continued support to the US athletes competing for gold medals.

We have recently added a music video section for your enjoyment. You may play the videos within our site or expand them for full screen viewing.

July 17, 2008
We added a robots.txt document to our site that should keep the crawlers from indexing our expired pages. To do this your create a text document called robots.txt and add it to the root directory of your site. www.somesite.com/robots.txt. The general format of the file is...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /dir/
Disallow: /directory/someSite.htm
Disallow: /funDir/

July 16, 2008
It seems like I've been going extra innings lately.

Last night I stayed up very late watching the MLB all star game. I'm happy that the American league won it in the bottom the 15th inning. Now if the Twins make it to the World Series they will have home field advantage.

We've translated our site into Arabic, Bulgrian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Russian. We then submitted the site to appropriate search engines in different countries. I was surprised to find that other countries use a variety of search engines, not just google.

We hope this will bring more international traffic to our site. Also, because different countries have different internet peak times, our server will be able to handle more requests in a given day. We will be carefully watching our statistics to see where our hits are coming from.

July 14, 2008
Today I submitted VersaGlobe to several web directories. While it may take some time to get listed the directories can be found at.

http://www.best-web-directories.com/free-directories.htm

I also wrote my second article today. I'll be trying to alternate writers so there isn't a lot of content from the same writer day after day. I also wrote an operating procedure for freelancers that come onboard.

Also, I applied for a loan at www.prosper.com. It's a neat community loan program where people lend to one another.

July 10, 2008
There is a new writer on the VersaGlobe team, Melissa Kaelin. Be sure to welcome her to the site by reading her article and posting on the forum.

Due to a recent restructuring of the server directory there were some dead links from our google listings. I attempted to recreate these pages as php 301 redirects, but was not successful. This lead me to a simpler solution. I recreated the pages under a similar directory structure so that google would find them and added the code...

meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.versaglobe.com"

This simple line of html refreshes the browser with the new url, effectively redirecting the page to our home page. No more broken links in our google listings.

I added a new section to the site, videos, where you can find a few videos from my previous employer Giant Medical. I will be submitting these videos to youtube.com so more people can enjoy them. I will be producing more videos on search engine optimization, tech gadgets, and weekly business reviews.

We're almost to the traffic threshold where we will begin small amounts of advertising on the site. If you know of a good advertising agency, or are a company that's interested in getting your brand out please email me at davidcoffin @ proelia . com

July 09, 2008
I've got off to a late start today updating the news content at 4:40pm CDT. Adding the content to all those networking sites must have made a difference, as we had our second busiest day yesterday. I plan to continue adding articles to Mixx.com, digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com, and propeller.com so if you sign up for any of these sites be sure to vote for the VersaGlobe articles.

I worked out a way to produce video in my office and plan to produce some low budget video content for the site. I might even submit them to www.youtube.com. So far, I plan to produce a video on search engine optimization. If you have any ideas for video content I'de like to hear them at DavidCoffin @ proelia . com

Last night I was looking for ways to build a custom search engine. But, to build a search engine from scratch takes tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and bandwidth. Maybe, as the site draws attention we'll be able to get enough advertising dollars coming in to add this feature.

July 08, 2008
I've added the site to several networking sites today. Namely, del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeler, and Stumbleupon. If you use any of these services be sure to bookmark this site. Also, notice two new writers have submitted articles Annette Coffin and David Borchardt. We hope to have many new writers come onboard. My concern with bringing on new writers is server stability and uploading the articles. This process is fairly tedious at the present and I hope to further automate it. Also, I'de like to thank those people that are contributing to the forum making this site interactive.

July 07, 2008
Hello everyone and welcome to VersaGlobe. We hope to bring you exclusive, timely, and well constructed news and literature. I've decided to start this blog to keep you informed of the business end of this website. Please email me your comments or post them on the forum.

After a long day of trying to get Debian's sites-available and sites-enabled to work with my virtual hosts, I ended up commenting out the include statement in the configuration file and working with the virtual hosts the old-fashioned way. One thing to remember when working with Apache2 is the NameVirtualHost command. This is required for Apache to find the correct virtual host. Before I added this line all my requests were being handled by the first virtual host. Here's how it should look.

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.mySite.com
ServerAdmin fullName@mySite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/mySiteDirectory
ServerAlias *.mySite.com mySite.com
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/mySite.log combined
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/mySiteError.log
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.someOtherSite.com
ServerAdmin fullName@someOtherSite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/someOtherSiteDirectory
ServerAlias *.someOtherSite.com someOtherSite.com
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/someOtherSite.log combined
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/someOtherSiteError.log
</VirtualHost>

This took me several hours to figure out. I hope this will help other webmasters struggling with it.

Also, I've been following the World Series of Poker main event. I think it's interesting that at the end of day 1d there were two players that were stalling so that they would progress to the second day. Finally another player at the table called a floorperson over to speed up the game. They were only allowed 30 seconds to make future decisions.

Finally, I've added a bunch of links to http://www.proelia.com as I haven't figured out what to do with the domain. Proelia is the parent company of VersaGlobe.