tewha.net

Back in October, I decided to run Google AdSense ads on my site. I wasn’t expecting a lot of money, but I was hoping to see enough for the site to pay for its hosting.

Unfortunately, AdSense isn’t going to do it.

I added AdSense on October 20, 2007. On November 7, 2007 it broke $1. On November 21, 2007 it broke $2. On November 24, 2007 it broke $3. On December 5, 2007 it broke $4 and hit $4.26. It hasn’t moved again since. That’s over two months.

I wondered at first if I’d broken something. I refreshed all the AdSense code, and even expanded the number of ads I was serving. Nothing. Since December 5, 2007 I haven’t seen a penny.

Oh, sure, maybe it will get better, but it isn’t going to get that much better. Maybe I could reasonably expect to see a hundred dollars by the time my boy wants higher education (he’s nine months old now), but I don’t think it’s worth looking at the ads (and their ever-decreasing quality) until then.

And so it comes time to bid AdSense farewell. It was a compromise that simply wasn’t worth it, but I’d like to think I learned something from the experience. Although other than AdSense doesn’t work, I’m not sure what that would be.

I’m seeing over and over in blogs and “news sites” how Apple’s new Xserve is the most powerful Xserve ever.

Consider:

• Hardware usually gets faster or cheaper. Sometimes both.
• The Xserve price hasn’t dropped like a stone.
• It’s been 4-5 months since the last Xserve was last updated.

Put it another way: Unless it was radically cheaper wouldn’t Apple have just left the old one on the market if the new one wasn’t faster?

I have my problems with MacWorld¹, and I think they’ve fallen some from their glory days, but incidents like this just show how far they’d need to fall to catch up with everyone else. In this case, MacWorld at least used one of Apple’s claims to quantify the increase in their headline, and even attributed it to Apple (Apple: New Xserve twice as fast as predecessor). Not so with hundreds of other news sites.

1. Chief among them their horrible new software, which in addition to being ugly ate my login to the point that I can’t create a new one. [↩]

I think spammers may be getting more clever¹. For the first time in a year, I got two pieces of spam this morning. I’ve had one more since. If this continues, I’m going to have to turn on more options than just Akimset.

Or maybe spammers just really like posts that mention Indiana Jones.

1. This is clever in the clever monkeys sense. But not more intelligent, obviously. [↩]

Here’s a few topics I started, but never quite closed the deal on:

• Hidden Mac OS X settings
• What software should learn from Mike Holmes: Always level.
• Does a duck’s quack echo? (or: Who makes up this crap, anyway?)
• How to demotivate your team using everyday office furniture.

I’d love to have my site pay for its own hosting. Failing that, a free lunch would be nice. But if I can’t do that, at least I could get a free Dr. Pepper.

So here’s how I got a free Dr. Pepper:

• Run DreamHost referral ads. This took me a few minutes to set up. It has earned me about $8 over the last few years. It would have earned me more, but I’m a secondary referral to someone who doesn’t have an account anymore.¹ Anyway, this would buy me about 16 cans of Dr. Pepper, except that it was applied to my Dreamhost bill automatically. That’s just as well — 16 cans? I’d probably go into a diabetic shock.²
• Run AdSense ads. This took me a few hours to set up. So far, I’ve earned about $0.54. I could buy a Dr. Pepper with that money, except that I need to reach $100 before I can cash out. I figure that will be some time in 2036.
• Tell stories for quarters. So far, I’ve only done this once. “Buy me a Dr. Pepper, and I will tell you a tale of government beauracratic incompetence and disorganization that spans three years.” He nodded, waved me at his horde of change, and I bought my Dr. Pepper. It took about 3.5 minutes to tell the story.³

So far, telling stories has got me the best ROI⁴. So I’m officially announcing⁵ that I will from this time forward earn my Dr. Pepper money by telling tales of woe at bus stops. Wish me luck!

Update: mx informs me that Google sends out cheques once a year. If true, that’d mean I’m probably a few months away from another free Dr. Pepper. Oh, the sweet, carbonated rapture!

1. Thanks a lot, Tim. [↩]
2. Ahem. Proudly hosted by Dreamhost. Host your dreams today! [↩]
3. To be honest, this reminded me a bit of Smaug. [↩]
4. That’s return on investment for you non-technical people. [↩]
5. As in, announcing but not doing. [↩]

Anil Dash posts a criticism about Mac OS X 10.5’s blue screen of death icon to represent PCs. He’s right, it is smug, but that isn’t the interesting part of the post.

He explains:

The disdain here isn’t for the unfortunate unwashed who have to suffer through Windows because they’re so clueless — it’s a snide shot at the other computers you own, or of your family’s other machines around the house, or of the computers of the peers you work with.

I’m with you here; I could see how someone could feel this way. I don’t; at the icon size I usually use, it’s just a blue blur. But still, I can imagine someone might feel that way. But then Anil loses me:

(Thanks to Joerg for the image.)

Why? Because if Anil couldn’t get the image on his own, it’s because he’s either not running Leopard or not running SMB servers. Either way, these aren’t his feelings, because he hasn’t actually had the experience of seeing the icon representing the computers he described. This posting isn’t based on him seeing it and being so offended by it that he had to post. No, it’s based on him going out and looking for trouble.

So who does feel that deeply, personally insulted and offended by the icon?

It wasn’t until I started hacking at this iPhone theme that I realized an odd thing about WordPress themes:

Almost everyone includes massive sidebars in their themes, filled with stuff that nobody ever uses. What do I mean? Well, as mx pointed out (though not online, I think), the sidebar is the ultimate vanity. Although he went on about this at some length with antipode, I was mostly left to think through the implications on my own.

It’s true. Most people who will read this post are either already my friends, have been linked to a post, or have found the post through a search engine because I mentioned something really obscure. The number of people who will want to see my archives is vanishingly small. So I don’t want to waste main page space.

So where do we put it? Well, I’ve noticed that the people who don’t put this stuff in a sidebar typically include a link to their archives, a link to their tag map, etc, etc. Why? If someone’s interested, why can’t I include all of that information? Isn’t that information, in a nutshell, what the blog is really about?

So instead of putting all that junk in a sidebar or in separate pages, I’ve put it in a single page. I’m not really happy with “archives” as a name for this, but it’ll do until I pinpoint exactly what this page really is. Maybe it’s just “other postings.”

A few times I’ve started with a complex theme and tried to adapt it. But it hasn’t worked for me. So instead, I’m trying a different approach: I’m starting with the simplest, clean theme I can find and adding the features I miss. I picked iWPhone, a theme for the iPhone.

This theme started with no archives, no tag map, and no search function. I’ve reintroduced archives, but that’s it for the moment. Other features will be added as I have time and learn PHP.