I’m currently moving a few things around this blog and changing things as I grow more comfortable with it.
In parallel, Graham is hacking me a new swanky theme and I’ll switch to it as soon as everything is done (and you’ll finally see the new banner).
So while we wait here are a few things I changed recently or plan to change soon:
Ads
With the new theme, I’m going to have ads again. I signed up with Project Wonderful as they look to be a cool outfit. Now I know some of you feel pretty strongly about this. However, the fact remains that this blog has cost me about 300$ (and some swag) so far, for which I thank my wife for being so generous with her share of the family slush fund. I believe I need the blog to become at least self-sustained to see it grow further (and I owe Graham an xBox 360 for his work!).
While this is and remains a labor of geeky RPG love first and foremost, I can’t ignore the business potential generated by the growing traffic. If I ever generate a profit, I’ll make cool things for the blog with the money (Contests, swag, charity drives).
Project Wonderful has the apparent benefit of not caring for clicks and feature a more flexible and generous approach than Google has. Hopefully some advertisers will hop on board. Ads are going to start at 0$ as a ‘try it free’…
I plan on having one square ad on top of a sidebar and a Skyscrapper one at the bottom of another (since my post run for a long way down, this will occupy more space).
Lijit
While the reaction for this search tool has been mixed, I like it because it searches for the post title 1st and allows me to find stuff I link to internally. I’ll probably clean it up further and remove the My content links to make it shorter.
Speaking of Lijit, here’s a little picture of you dear reader minions…
We seem to have a globe spanning empire! I find this so cool… it’s like I’d post about going to Japan, Finland, Australia or South Africa and I’m willing to bet that someone would offer to have lunch with me. I love the Internet!
Categories
I’ve cleaned up my 39-strong categories list and transfered a lot in sub categories (much to the annoyance of Graham who is much more of the Keep it simple school than I am). We’ve added a collapsible plugin to make it as short as possible. Consider it in ‘playtest’ right now and will look better in the new theme.
Edit: I moved all but the major subcategories to tags. So now it’s a lot shorter and cleaner.
Subscriptions
It’s not a change but I noticed that about 10-15 peopled registered to the blog using the register button. Well I just wanted to tell you that apart from saving you from entering your emails every time you post, registration does nothing else (I don’t require registration for comments).
If you are looking to subscribe to the post’s feed you can find the blog’s feed here and the comment’s feed here (I should burn comments to a Feedburner feed, I’m just lazy).
That’s about it for that!
Do wait till this year’s Ropecon before coming to Finland, as you just practically promised to do.
Lol, I have a buddy in Sweden that has invited us to come for some time… so Scadinavia is definitively on the ‘visit soon’ list…
🙂
Pity I don’t have an international job like I used to… 🙂
Woot! Go me!
Also, I was only joking about the xBox, of course, but don’t let that stop you! I want me some Rock Band!
In seriousness, though, don’t burn the comments feed to feedburner. I did for my blog, and changed it back quickly. See, when you make a new post, your blog notifies feedburner of the update. But it doesn’t do that when a new comment gets posted.
So you end up having to wait for feedburner to check for updates itself, which is (at most) once every half hour or so.
The stats you gain from feedburner aren’t so useful for the comments feed anyways, so just leave it as it is, and we can see your comments feed without delays.
Wow?!? $300 on your blog?
I’ve spent $20 on mine, and that’s entirely for the two domains.
Although, to be fair, I already pay for webhosting for my ne’er-used vanity page, Asmor.com, and the blog is just piggybacked on that.
Actually, at this point, it’s probably more accurate to say that my vanity page is piggybacked on the blog, since that sees way more traffic than Asmor.com.
But still, even my hosting only costs me around $120 a year.
Anyways, I’m rambling. Good luck with the adverts, man. For what it’s worth, I don’t mind advertisements, I just ignore them. I don’t use any adblockers, either (though I do block all flash, which tends to catch a lot of ads, but that’s not why I block it).
My web hosting costs about the same as yours but I had to pay 2 year in advance.
I also paid the artist (Veronica Pare) who did my banner and Avatar.
It is a somewhat expensive hobby but ohhh so rewarding!
Lookin’ good so far, C 🙂
Oh, groovy.
I’ve considered paying someone to make a banner for me. Someone on my LJ friends list promised to draw me something, but never came through with it.
You need to find an artist whose style you like and then join them at the email on their art site.
Veronica Pare was the artist behind the ‘Home on the Strange’ webcomic and I love the cartoon style she developed for that one…
see her stuff a veronicapare.com
I’ll pimp her to the aces once the new blog theme goes live