I love it when the alarm on my phone goes off to wake me up but I’m already out in the woods taking pictures.

I’m surprised that the park I am in is so crowded. After a quick drive around, I saw only three available campsites. I guess this is the place to be this time of year. I spent the day looking for boondocking locations around Sedona – which, if you’ve never been here, is fantastically beautiful with the red rock formations and the gnarly pines…

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I felt it was time to leave my desert camp and move on – so now I’m sitting in Dead Horse Ranch State Park, AZ. I’ve decided to hold off on buying a solar system (not the kind with planets) in order to conserve cash until CareCause takes off. To do it right, the solar outfit would cost me anywhere between $2000 & $4000. Since it’s pretty much a luxury, I’ll be responsible and bide my time with my noisy generator for a bit.

So you think hanging out in the desert all day – writing code – is boring? Here are some treasures I’ve found around my camp.

Map legend below…

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I announced a couple days ago on my mailing list and my blog about CareCause. With only a couple of days left on the offer for a free, one year subscription to CareCause charity support websites, I thought I’d show you the results of only four days of traffic brought in by my personal CareCause sites sponsored by my blog. See the chart above.

As you see, it has over 6,500 hits in only four days. These hits are from me simply subscribing to CareCause, adding the supplied widgets to my blog, announcing it on my mailing list and letting readers copy and paste them onto their own sites. Each of those widgets, when someone clicks on them, takes the visitor directly to one of my CareCause sites branded with the “Blog of Wayne Wirs” logo.

I know it’s a little confusing, but here is a breakdown of what happens when you sign up for a CareCause site of your own:

• When you sign up, two charity support websites are automatically created for you. One which helps find missing children, and one which helps bring attention to endangered wildlife.
• If you then place the widgets that come with your new websites on your blog, business website or Myspace-type page, others will see these widgets and copy them to their own websites.
• When web surfers come across one of your widgets and click on them, they are taken to your CareCause charity support site.
• Each of your CareCause sites provides widgets, photos, your logo, your name, direct links to the charity’s newsletter and donation page, and a page of their latest news – all updated automatically.

Just today, Sandra Cruz-Francisco, an infant, was abducted from a health clinic in Plant City, FL. Her photo automatically showed up on the Blog of Wayne Wirs CareCause Missing Children site and all the missing children widgets now floating around the Internet. Later today, she was recovered, and her photo was automatically removed from the site and the widgets since she was no longer in danger.

Wouldn’t it be something if it was one of your sites or widgets that helped find one of these missing kids?

That’s what I mean by a holistic approach to charity support.

The missing children get exposure. The endangered animals get exposure. The charities get exposure. Your business or blog gets exposure. Everyone wins.

Sign up by Friday and it’s even free. See this page for details.

On my daily walks – this week, 25 minutes in each direction – I’m amazed at all the new animal tracks left in the dirt on the amber roads.

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I’ve finished with the project that I’ve been working on for the last couple of months: CareCause. CareCause is a holistic approach to helping charities by creating “branded” charity support sites for sponsors. For as little as $10 $5.00 a month, a sponsor (anyone with a blog, website, or even a Facebook page) gets two charity support websites imprinted with their name and logo (Example 1 – Example 2).

To reward my blog readers, for the next six days (deadline Friday 3/27/09), I’m giving away free 1 year memberships. Here’s how…

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A woman in Barcelona called me out on my slightly harsh wording for my “competition” the other day. I guess I should explain…

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I was THIS close to releasing a brand new version of Recently Missing Children. In fact I had planned on uploading all the changes I had been working on over the last month just this morning…

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I’ve been boondocked here for almost a month now and am getting restless. I told myself that I was going to stay put until I finished the project I am working on, and – as with most my estimates – this has taken about twice as long as I expected. I’m almost done though – at least with Phase I – so I’ll probably be headed to Quartzsite, AZ in a couple days to look at solar panels.

The last few days my camp’s been infested – infested with cows with horns. Last night, at 2 am I woke up to a big ol’ bull (not big ‘old’) who had brushed against the RV with enough force to rock it (and wake me), then proceeded to do what big ol’ bulls do at 2 am (anything they want), eat the grass under my bedroom window.

This month’s new habit: Exercise…

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What I like about Living Simply: The many Faces of Nature