Published Mar 20, 2005

You may have noticed the changes made to this site: the ads and the (return of the) links box on the right. Nothing like blowing a little vacation on the blog!

The links box is back for a good reason: the Web is all about the links. I had a links box in the original version of this site, but had a hard time keeping it up-to-date and, besides, it was just a box of links to links. Now, it’s a spiffy scrolling box of links. And, yes, I read all of those sites regularly — at least once a week.

There’s only one catch to the links box — it’s only compatible with Firefox, IE 6+, and, probably, Safari and the latest versions of Opera. If you’re using one of the latter two browsers, please tell me of the links box is horribly broken. If you’re not using one of the abovementioned browsers, well, you should be. That includes you, Mac IE users. I used to be one of you, but now I use a browser that doesn’t suck. Coding for your browsers makes my life harder and limits the fun features that I can inlclude.

The ads were a harder choice. I want to make this a site full of, at least, moderately-engaging content. Ads can take away from that. Fortunately, Google’s AdSense program offers ads that are, at least theoretically, matched to the content on the page. Hopefully the ads will be relatively relevant and interesting; I know I’ve seen a few that have caught my eye.

Ultimately, the ads are here to make me money. As of the time of this writing, I’ve made $0.05. That averages out to… $1.50/month. That won’t quite pay for hosting but it’s actually not too far off what I’m paying. If I could make $2-$7/month, that would be great. $10 would be a small miracle. Seems achievable.

So that’s the changes. More coming someday, including:

  • Spiffy month-at-a-glance archive pages, bringing together moblog, blog, and longer entries, to make things more fun for the browser.
  • Spiffy category-at-a-glance archive pages, bringing together blog and longer entries, to make things more efficient for the information-seeker.
  • A pretty new look!

All when b-school gives me time. So, around August, then.

In the meantime, readers, I’d love to hear what you think! All three of you.