A Pinoy Blog About Nothing

Which Trainspotting Character Are You?

La lang. A quiz that’s nine (!) years too late. Still it’s a good movie and even a better read.

Anyhoo some site news/updates. Skip if you like. Nothing to see. Move along.

Just four things:

1) Scaled back updates for the next three weeks. Ok it’s not like I update everyday. More like every other day. Okay it’s more like when I felt like it. But I’m working on something and I’ll be back after three weeks. Sporadic updates will happen every Sunday & Monday via the wonderful WP automated feature.

2) RadYo Mukha Mo on hiatus. I checked my bandwidth stats and saw some things that shouldn’t be there. I decided to be more strict with hotlinking. In doing so, I broke the radio and I couldn’t fix it (or more correctly, I don’t feel like fiddling around with permissions these days). It should be back as soon as I figure it out or I find a similar app. Send in your playlist suggestions if you like. Also if you know how to combat blog scrapers please do let me know.

3) No more ads. For now. If you’ve noticed this past month or so, I don’t have Google Ads anymore on this space. I’ve decided to experiment with Google Ads six months ago and it’s been awesome. I also found out how it works best (with targeted content). I haven’t abandoned Google Ads, I just moved it to another blog.

This space has always been my Lego blocks for web technology and I’d be remiss if I didn’t dabble in contextual ads. However, the dilemma for me was that how could I remain true to the reason for putting up this blog and not well, sell out to the pursuit of adclicks? Kaya nga Click Mo Mukha Mo eh: screw the page views. Anything goes.

The solution was that– and I don’t know if all five you regular readers have noticed– I chose to limit personal musings and instead write about stuff I read, watch, and hopefully interesting stuff on the web. It’s a blog and call me old-fashioned I still think blogs should have as much outside links as possible. IMHO, ads in any form shouldn’t belong in journal entries. Good if you have no qualms about it but it’s not for me. I even put up a separate blog for my personal rants. But that’s just me. Don’t expect me to do this. I can’t do it even if I wanted to. I’m not putting him down for doing that though. That was brave of him to do (and healthier for his own sake) but, hard it might be to believe, I guess there are just some things I won’t put online. That’s just personal preference. Besides I know you have your own stuff going on and you don’t want reading someone else’s mundane existence.

The point is, I just have an icky feeling letting people know what happened to my friend’s friend’s neighbor’s dog and asking people to click on an ad. If I was going to have ads on this site, might as well give back something worth the click right? Hopefully the readers got something out of it. Check out the discussion at Anansi Girl’s blog.

I’ll never be a professional blogger. It’s too tiring and I’m too lazy. I never got into blogging because of money. Be careful of people who do. As in the case of anyone’s main source of income, they’ll be very catty when you criticize their agenda about it. Caveat lector and all that. Be critical of what you read these days. If I go back putting up and maintaining a site for commercial concerns, it will be obviously a commercial site not one posing as a personal one.

But will I experiment on other forms of ad programs on this space? I probably will. Just to see how it works and how it differs from others. But it’s never going be a permanent fixture and like most stuff I’ve experimented on here, moved to other commercial projects. And when I do that, I will limit personal disclosures again and more hopefully substantial posts.

4) I’ve integrated my del.icio.us links. It’s right there on the middle column. It should be on the main blog column -anything that updates regularly should be in the main blog column- but I haven’t worked out enough code-fu to make it work. Told you I was lazy.

That’s it pancit. Cashew later.