Fleeing The Social Scene

So more and more often I’m seeing the plugin for paypal donations. The one that says “If you liked this post, buy me (insert food item here)”. Now I’ve heard people loving the plugin, and others hating it. If you sit and think about this plugin, it could easily be a great tool for “low money earners,” but you need to use it correctly. The only way this plugin will work is if you are generating high quality content. Yes, the content needs to draw traffic but also it needs to engage the reader and make them feel compelled to do something. Comments are free. Anyone can read your blog and post a comment.

If you want your readers to buy you a beer, or lunch, or a coffee or whatever, you need to go the extra mile. It’s quite obvious because of two reasons:

• Your content has to be good enough that your reader is willing to leave your site, go to a PayPal page and pay you.
• You have to trust that your content was so good once your reader has left your site, they will pay you at that PayPal page, and come back to your site!

Now for low earners this helps because well every penny counts, lets be honest. Something that readers need to realize is that if they’ve gotten to that PayPal page more often than not (unless the blogger has set prices for his beer) the amount of money you give is left blank. That’s for the giver to fill in. Let’s not be stingy, if you’ve made it to someone’s PayPal page you’ve at least half committed to giving them something, now do you have any cash laying around in your PayPal account? It may not be much, but if more people see a great post, and the blogger offers that buy them something and you’ve got a space 79 cents in your PayPal account, or $1.38, why not give it away? After all with your payment of (you filled that one in) , you are helping to feed some blogger in the blogosphere.

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My previous assumption was that if you’ve been alive for say about the past 10 years now you know what a website is. To be nice I’ll not leave anyone guessing. To best describe a website using official definitions, I would like to use both of these definitions from dictionary.com

“a document connected to the World Wide Web and viewable by anyone connected to the internet who has a web browser “

“A document on the World Wide Web, consisting of an HTML file and any related files for scripts and graphics, and often hyperlinked to other documents on the Web. The content of webpages is normally accessed by using a browser. “

Now that we’ve done a bit of preemptive fact checking let’s go over to Wired Magazine’s website and read an article on a U.K. Terrorism-Trial Judge who seems more than a little confused by specifics. Judge Peter Openshaw was trying to hear a case on how a suspect had aided sending terrorist messages through the internet. At that point in time things apparently got a little sketchy.

“The trouble is, I don’t understand the language,” the judge said.

“Can I help?” Ellison offered.

Answered Openshaw, “I do not really understand what a Web site is.”

At this point I skimmed over the rest of the article after a chuckle. It scares me to think that politicians describe the Internet as a series of tubes, and those who uphold laws are unclear as to what exactly a website is. This piece of technology isn’t quite new. Someone needs to clear up this confusion.

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So this change has been some time in the making. I’d been working on a new theme of one type or another for a few months now, and had the prototypes of this one going about as far back as late May. My initial idea was to try to get away from the layout designs which have been coming so much of a standard. All these blogs with a main body portion, and one or two sidebars seemed a bit old.

I started playing with different designs then decided to try to work with something similar to the layout of a comic book page. It was that type of layout that made me think of using the same ideas of one large “block” and smaller “blocks” for recent posts. Also toward the bottom we’ve got a block for TLA, and one for RSS. Below that is the somewhat standard bottom columns for blogroll, categories, admin and search.

Hopefully this new theme is well received and works out well for me. Feel free to leave a note and let me know what you think!

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Back in July, I’d been researching advertising and making money on this site. I’d also been trying to design the new layout. As I’m not a big fan of giant ads, or having a million different things going on, I was a bit picky in choosing what I use. Finally after the new layout is said an created, I finally know how I want to run this monetization stuff, and hopefully it will work for me. Here’s the breakdown:

• Adsense: Some hate it, others love it. This one was an easy choice. As I don’t expect to make a killing I will go with the attitude that every penny counts. I’ve decided that I will use only one Ad Block per post.
• Buy Me A Beer: From what I can tell this one also works with mixed results. I’ve heard this one only works if you have a high-traffic blog, well I’m working on that!� Also I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve as to how to make this one a gem.
• Text-Link-Ads: I’ve also got one banner spot on the bottom of the page (either just above or below the fold depending on your monitor size) While it may not be an optimal position, I still feel that given the layout this may help me score to money from TLA ads or referrals.

I may modify this a bit maybe add something if i can think of it. Hopefully this new layout will go over well

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I’ll make it short today. I’ve got a new design coming up on Monday. I’ve been working on it for a while, I’ll post the long story about it when the theme goes live Monday. Long story short, I had it made, wanted to have it go live on September 1st, then realized that there’s the Labor Day holiday in the US. Yep, so I’ll shove the posting of the redesign up a week. Oh, and everyone else is doing it!� ProBlogger, John Chow. Why not me too?

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So for about the last 18 hours I’ve been unable to login to post. Quite unfortunate actually. Here was the issue as I stated it on the Site5 Support ticket:

“As of last night I cannot login to any of the Wordpress accounts I’ve created for my websites. I’ve checked the MD5 hashes for the passwords and those appear to be unchanged. As this issue is spanning 3 databases and 3 domains I’m wondering if this is a technical issue?“

In the end it came down to one thing….

“Hello,

I just had to remove the php5 support and it started working. Can you please check from your side?”

WHAT!?!!?�? Anyways, now back to my regularly scheduled postings.

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