Sorry for the interruption but I was out of town for most of the holiday (we left the 26th for Chicago, but thats a whole post on its own!). I did however, want to brag about some of the Christmas Gifts that blessed our house this season though.

Amy’s big gift this year is to have the Master Bath and Bedroom repainted. When we bought the house from her parents, we inherited the DEEP red color of the bath and bed room. Its a dark red (think maroon) that is hard to match colors with. Now we’re going for a lighter, beachier look and are painting them Beachnut (its a lowes color). The master bath is done (Amy found some Votive candle holders at a store in Nashville), next on to the bedroom!

Grace had a very Hannah Montanna Christmas. She got a Hannah Montanna Guitar Game (like Guitar Hero) that plugs in to the tv, a Hannah Costume, and doll. Its pretty cool and she likes pretending to be a rockstar. Maybe someday. I like playing her game (since I haven’t bought Guitar HEro World Tour yet) and she’s getting better at it.

Mose got a Trampoline. One of her favorite things to do is jump. We’d wake on Saturday mornings to the heavy thud of emma jumping up and down in our door way. Now she can do it all she wants and it doesn’t make the house shake. Its pretty cool and Grace and Emma take turns on it. Amy wanted to try it out, but its for people under 80 pounds (and neither of us meet that requirement!

The girls also got some tinkertoys, and some other little odds and ends that they like to play with, but the coolest by far is my Ultimate Wall-E Robot.

We saw the movie in the theaters and we’re big fans (mose loves him). We had seen the Ultimate Wall-e at the Disney Store but we weren’t going to get him because of the price tag. Needless to say, Santa found him on Sale and he was wrapped and under the tree for me on Christmas morning. He has fun dancing, chasing the dogs around and just exploring on his own. If you haven’t seen one yet, I’ll work on some video and see if I can get anything posted. Its pretty cool though and the way he can respond to voice commands or find his own way around the room is fairly smooth.

Was there one gift that you prized more than the others??

With all the brouhaha over the google bitchslap that took place towards the end of 2007 (in case you didn’t know, google penalized sites who posted links with out nofollow for payment) something was bound to step up and take its place. The question is can a new comer survive in the shark eat shark world of SEO and Page ranking? IZEA (payperpost’s daddy) hopes so and it thinks it has a winning product with RealRank.

RealRank (RR) is Izea’s answer for its affiliates on how to retain a ranking system that doesn’t care how or what you link to so much as traffic quantity and quality to your site. The idea is that the realrank weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK (Izea tool Kit). While the idea was just released to the public, Izea and the PPP crowd have been using this since December ‘07 as a way to rank websites in order to maintain the level of advertising as before. From where I sit, the only down side is that advertisers have been slow on the uptake of the new ranking system, prefering PageRank still despite the fact that anyone who would even consider posting about their products has virtually no PR at the present time.

The realrank system is a pretty nice system with some nice looking graphs. According to the ranking, Delusions of Grandeur is some where around 452 for the day with a weekly average of somewhere around 588. Not bad when you consider the 100,000 blogs that Izea/PPP is potentially already tracking. A nice feature about RealRank is the ability to keep the stats private. While I personally do not mind if others see how successful I am, it might not behoove a smaller site to have its stats public until they’ve built up a good base.

According to the realrank site:

RealRank is a more accurate ranking than Alexa and Google PageRank because it isn’t based on a small sample of a site’s visitors or on a censored link-weighting algorithm. It’s based on real traffic.

One of the other cool things is that they have an open api so anyone can develop for it with out any penalty. Already, there’s a rank badge available and its only a matter of time before there are more and more things developed.

We’ll have to see if RR makes a difference. If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit IzeaRanks to check out your blog, create an account and get the tracking code for your site. It could help boost your traffic!