Site changes

February 28th 2007 at 9:04 am

You might have noticed some changes. The biggest one was on the right hand sidebar. I yanked the ads. I emailed the group, Pajamas Media, that I was a part of. I felt the ads were slowing down load times and just getting in the way, sometimes they were loading funny or in various sizes.

I was making some nice money off of them, but I’m not nearly as desperate for that as I was two years ago. I have nothing in particular against PJM, in fact, I even liked irking some liberal friends by being a part of it because I’m aggressively moderate like that.

But in the end, I’m a fairly small fry in their network, and the money wasn’t enough for me to think those three bigs ads are worth having up now (under 4 digits a year). The blog is here for other reasons, and my hope is that the faster load times and more interesting things than ads will encourage people to hang out and participate without flashing blinky things on the side.

Secondly, to speed load times, I created a google calendar and took its public calendar items feed, through a plugin that does mysterious and magical things with RSS, and renders the next 6 public events I’ll be at. If you click on the links you should get take to more info. Also, the site load time should be faster and not get hung up on the drawing of the appearances list like it sometimes did previously, as it caches it’s updates from Google instead of waiting for a response.

I then added the picture thumbnails of the latest video blog posts on the right, just to make them sticky.

I may be adding a ‘reading’ list or something like that, I haven’t decided yet. But the stuff in the right hand bar will be site related and if its advertising, advertising either my friends or my own stuff.

I told someone via IM the other day, these are some tweaks from my general idea that I’m trying in life to do things that are interesting to me, not the safe route, and that I trust that money or something cool will flow from the work I put in as a result.

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