The Advertising Dilemma

If you’ve come and gone a few times over the past couple weeks or taken a look at my changelog, you may have noticed various ads popping up in random spots across the site. I’ve been trying out some of the more popular affiliate programs from the likes of Google and Amazon. If you take a look around now, you won’t see any of them. I simply cannot live with advertising on my site. I worked for a company whose soul purpose was to sell advertising. The ads out-weighed the content visually, there was every kind of intrusive/annoying ad you could think of and even ads disguised as content. Worst!

I was thinking it would be nice to get some sort of financial return for all the time and effort I put into this site and thought some simple ads would do the trick. I sold myself on the idea by deciding to only display targeted ads specific to the content or subject matter.

Making Sense Of Stats

At first glance they’re just a bunch of numbers. But then one relates to another and all of the sudden it all makes perfect sense.

It’s amazing how much you can find out about your visitors by analyzing stats. It’s only been a couple weeks since I installed Mint and I’m already seeing a direct relation between user agent (browser and platform info.) and search referrals.

I grew a little more distraught each day when I’d check my stats to find Internet Explorer’s usage rising continuously over Firefox. Then I started paying…

Google Map Fun – My Work

I’m sure you’ve all played around with Google’s latest toy – Google Maps. Pretty rad stuff! I tried it out a few weeks ago before the satellite image feature was added and wasn’t nearly as impressed. Now, this is just plain cool! The satellite image of downtown Toronto – the surrounding area of my work is pretty killer. The shadows cast from the taller buildings and the CN Tower look awesome. I wish I could view the city from this angle every day. It’s a lot harder to make out the douche bags and…