somehow

we've made it through another year. I don't really Do resolutions but I am planning on learning more about making money online and increasing my extremely modest online living. I think I have finally figured out how to make some real money, but I am going to go slow and work at setting up some highly targeted very special interest weekly blogs that are geared to affiliate programs. I am doing a lot of research about affiliate programs and products and online marketing. Around September or October of last year I announced that I expected my site to have meaningful cash flow and I accomplished that. This coming year I am going to start actually making money. And I Promise NEVER to do a MMO blog.

Have you resolved anything to accomplish or avoid in 2009?

It feels rather as though

I am somehow still back in Boston. One of the major attractions of the Seattle area for me was the mild climate. While we are actually farther north than Massachusetts, and do have the storied endlessly gray winters, the climate is quite mild and most winters it snows at Most once or twice. No one in these parts knows how to drive in winter weather, but it's really not an issue since the metro area generally closes down at the first signs of snow, which usually melts down the drains the next day and we are back to our usual cool and gray.

This year however is one for the record books. As of this second day of winter (by the calendar anyway) we have had more than a solid week of continuing snow and Very cold temperatures. The roads are virtually impassable (snow plows are very hard to come by in these parts), the airport is jammed full of stranded passengers after our hometown airline, Alaska, went through their entire year's supply of de-icing fluid last week and canceled all service to SeaTac, all schools and government offices are closed through at least next week. Feh. This is Exactly the kind of weather I moved here from Boston to escape from. I'd love to invite the climate change deniers to come shovel out the parking lot of my apartment building, which is proving to be the most dangerous place to drive this week. I don't even own a snow shovel and don't even recall any being offered for sale around here. Yikes.

Merry Effing Christmas.

rambling thoughts

"You're going to shoot your eye out!"

An odd message to see tweeted on Twitter, but instantly recognizable to fans of the movie A Christmas Story, based on the book In God We Trust, All Other Pay Cash by Jean Sheperd. So some of my Twitter friends (egad I first typoed that as fiends) have been tweeting that line this morning, reminding me that Ron and I really want to stay home and watch that movie on TBS on Christmas day, rather than drive down to Portland to spend Christmas at my horrid cousin's house where my mother and my aunt and uncle will be visiting.

Ron initially flaly refused to go down there at all this year. I initially told my mother that we couldn't possibly come on Christmas day itself, because I have to be at work at 8am on the 26th and there is no way we would be home before midnight (my cousin's dinner is inevitably a fairly Late meal, as opposed to the early afternoon meal we always had when we were growing up). Ron eventually caved and agreed to go down with me, but I have yet to e-mail and co-ordinate a plan with Mom. (Ron says he actually Likes my mother okay, but finds my cousin as insufferable as I do, and not being related to her sees no reason to subject himself to her company.)

And the _reason_ we need to stay home and watch it when it is on is because the DVD of that movie is among the HUGE number of things that I either sold or just walked away from after Joel died, and my very old, still partially unpaid student loan prevented me from receiving any further tuition assistance to complete the one year certificate in Accounting that I was pursuing at my local community college, causing my unemployment benefits to suddenly stop, leaving me jobless, incomeless and on the verge of homelessness when, in a bit of good timing that makes me beleive in God, I met, fell in love with and moved in with Ron in a matter of days.

(If only I had been Sensible at age 19 and borrowed $2500 to blow on gambling and high living, a debt which would have long since been written off and forgotten, rather than borrowing this amount to pay for a year of college, which I never Did finish, and which, it appears will haunt me to my dying day. SIGH)

In other news here in Seattle we seem to be having very Boston type weather lately. Yesterday was our second big snow storm of the season and a third is due in a few more days. We have plenty of food and no plans to venture out in the snow and ice today. (Having lived in Boston, where weather is NEVER an excuse for being late or missing work, I do know how to drive in it but most folks in these parts have no clue, making it Much more dangerous.) It looks hellacious on tee vee.

I have also been trying for several hours, with zero success to write a post about Harry Turtledove's alternative history novel, The Gladiator, and have jumped at every possible distraction. Ah well. Here's hoping you are warm, dry and snow free today.

site is looking good

I have eliminated all of my long blogrolls, and every site that had been listed is now listed instead in one of the four RSS digests on my libdrone.com page. I just love being able to browse through everyone's headlines and read some really great blogs, and not worry about dropping all those cards. While I still have the EC widget up and will take what traffic they give me, I am going to be promoting the dotCOM page more and more going into 2009 and try to continue building a real audience. I will also be constantly on the look out for quality new blogs to add to my feed mixes and will also have to be diligent about removing the feeds of blogs that go dark or don't update.

I am thinking of this as my post Entercard (or at the very least post Turnip on Entercard) period. I am a bit scared about losing some of what was no doubt regular, consistent junk traffic, but very excited about future prospects. Now, I just have to promote libdrone.com.

chh chh chh changes

I have just about decided that when my price gets down to 2ec I will turn advertising back on, but will not make the huge effort of dropping to keep my site up in the top three anymore. I am also Finally moving forward on a long planned project to create a page that displays RSS headlines from lots and Lots and LOTS of the best book, writing, author and library blogs. I am trying something called feedinformer.com that seems to work great when I enter the feeds to be displayed and format the layout of the results, but when I put it on my site the layout looks great but it is pulling old posts from just one or two of the included blogs and I can't seem to get it to work right. Hoping I will either find someone who can show me how to get it to work or find another service for this.

UPDATE-- I think I did get it to work as intended and my feeds page is now up at http://libdrone.com

time to end Entrecard participation?

If you haven't already heard, Graham Langdon, entrecard.com's number one douchebag, banned leading blogger Turnip of Power from the Entrecard system after Turnip posted a mildly rude tweet on Twitter. The tweet intentionally Mentioned Entrecard, in order to show the apparently Clueless Langdon why it's Not such a Good Idea to post to your website Everything that Everybody tweets about you, particularly not when you have spent a lot of time pissing off a lot of people. And the reaction to that tweet, arbitrarily and immediately banning one of the site's Top Users over a silly and not very important tweet on another social network, is just so over the top arrogant that I am Utterly disgusted and find myself contemplating a departure from Entrecard.

On the one hand, I hesitate to give up the traffic. I'm certain if I stop dropping (even if I keep the widget) my traffic will drop and my Alexa will go back up and my Google page rank (4 last I checked) may go down. In terms of selling ads, I am getting decent but not spectacular results from Project Wonderful and CMF Ads. I'm not making a lot of money, but I am making money from my site and I have every hope it will grow. But after reading a couple of post (s) I forced myself to really think about whether the time I spend dropping cards (all too often on crappy blogs where my only reason for visiting is to get a drop credit and maybe inspire a return visit and drop might better be spent creating quality blog content and marketing that content through other avenues.

Much as I really have enjoyed getting to know so many great bloggers through Entrecard, I have to admit that my time would be better spent building a better blog and doing more to market it beyond a social networking web site that clearly seems to be on the wane and, much more importantly appears to be run by a meglomaniacal asshole who feels that the normal rules of courtesy and concern for ones customers somehow don't apply to him. And that is just Not the kind of company I really want to be associated with, let alone depend on for a large share of my traffic.

For now, I am leaving the widget up but am not accepting new advertisements at this time. I have nine or ten ads sold so it will be more than a week before I am in a position to pull the plug on Entrecard altogether, and I am not 100% sure if I will remove the widget or not. But my drop 300 per day days are Done and I suspect my time as an Entrecard member will soon be Done too. My sincerest thanks to all of my advertisers and visitors, many of whom I met through Entrecard. I will certainly continue to visit my blog friends and will be working on other ways of marketing the site and hope that I will continue to see you around the blogosphere and over at CMF Direct. If you haven't already go list your blog on CMF Direct. It's free and allows you to accept any kind of advertising and is a great place to find new blogs and connect with other bloggers. It may well be what comes along to Replace Entrecard once Graham drives it over the cliff, so be Sure you are listed.

this seems to be

my week for publishing about review copies. Yesterday I panned Thirteen Reasons Why, a book I wanted to like but just didn't. Tomorrow I will rave about In The Land Of Invisible Women, then on Friday I have to review Mark LaFlamme's Dirt, which I REALLY didn't like. Haven't yet decided just how negative I am going to be, but it will definitely be a Not Recommended.

Part of me worries that if I continue to pan books I've been sent free copies of the publicists will take me off their lists (which would be okay, I suppose) but it seems to me the only thing I really have to sell are my honest opinions and I am not about to recommend a book I don't actually like.

My vacation is passing all to quickly and I am painfully aware that come Friday morning it will be back to work for me. Thanksgiving was nice, though in the end we didn't prepare all of the side dishes. Then Sunday night Bob came over and spent the night and that was fun too. Now there is just Christmas to be dealt with.