Changes

I have made several changes to this blog over the course of the past 2 days and at this point I am looking for some feedback as well as suggestions for more changes. To facilitate more changes I have created a contest which will hopefully get me some really great ideas!

Demonitizing 1 - Google

Clearly I am not actually demonitizing this blog, but I decided to try and work at making it a little less invasive for my readers. If you’ve been on this site before you’ll (hopefully) notice I have done away with Google Adsense altogether as well as Kontera in-text links. The former I did away with for a couple of reasons. First and foremost it wasn’t performing. At all. My click per 1,000 impressions was abysmal. I can’t give exact numbers but suffice to say there was no good reason to keep it up any longer. Secondly my layout doesn’t really lend itself to a chunk of real estate being siphoned away by the Google machine.

Demonitizing 2 - Kontera

I canned Kontera first because like adsense it simply hasn’t been performing. Further I got rid of it after reading an article about designed annoyance over at Blogging Tips. At this point I don’t know if I agree that in-text ads are an annoyance as I hardly even notice them. That could be just because I’ve acclimated myself to them and have built of a psychological tolerance. Since I don’t deny that possiblity I will leave them off the site for a few weeks (read 3-4) and get some feedback from you folks who are reading it. After that time I will make a decision if I want to continue with in-link ads or not. Though if I do go back chances are that I would not be using Kontera.

A plea for help

I had planned on using Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin to nest my comments and thus make it a little easier to have a “conversation”. Unfortunately after several tries I was unable to edit the background color. The default background color on the plugin is an off-white which unfortunately matches up nearly perfectly with the text color of the blog. If anyone knows how to change the background color of that plugin please either send me an email at ablogaboutnothing (at) gmail dot com or post a comment to this article. I just want to make the background color #e5e5e5 for both the odd and the even comments.

Trackback is now active

I have also placed a link for trackback purposes. By no means do you have to, but if you are going to link to a particular article on this blog I would appreciate it if you would take an extra second or two and use the trackback link. This site will tell you how to use a trackback if you don’t already know how. It is really very simple and from what I can tell beneficial to all involved.

Plugin nightmare, or not

Like any other Word Press blogger I like plugins. Some I’ve found absolutely no use for, actually there are a couple that fall into the useless category. At least for me they have proven to be useless, but I’m still linking to them because they aren’t really “bad”, just not useful in my situation. One plugin that I’ve found recently and actually like the looks of is called Lucia’s Link Love. I’ll let you read the details of it on the site itself, but I’m fairly impressed by its pedigree. Only time will tell if it will work for my purposes.

That’s great but what about the contest you mentioned?

In addition to the changes mentioned above I am considering more stream lining. For example perhaps getting rid of some widgets (ie; mybloglog, blogcatalog, and bumpzee). I’ve noticed some page loading issues with all three of those widgets where it is taking an abnormally long amount of time to load the page while the server retrieves some undoubtly important information from one if not all of those widgets. Beyond removing those things I am seeking out other methods to streamline your experience while enjoying this blog. To that end I’ve decided to hold a little contest of sorts.

In order to enter this contest you only need to do two very simple things.

• First write a post on your own blog listing 3 items I should change on this blog and why
• Second trackback to this article in the article you explain why what changes and why

On August 22 sometime around 9 or 10 pm I will pick a total of three changes to make to this blog from all of the enteries. I might pick one change from three people, two from one person and a third from another, three from three different people… However it works out I will make those three changes.

And the prize will be…

15 guest blogging spots per chosen entery. In other words for each of your suggested changes I make to my site I will give you 15 opportunities to post your own article on this blog. I won’t say there is no content I won’t accept, but there’s not much. If you’ve read this blog at all you should know by now that a niche is something I have managed to avoid. I only ask that the conent not be illegal, pornographic in nature, slanderous, offensive, racist, nor anything along those lines. Aside from that you will be welcome to post whatever you wish to post. As an aside should I choose not to make any of the suggested changes I will still be awarding three random people the same prize mentioned here.

There you have it. A couple of changes I have made recently and a plea for more suggestions in the form of a contest. Hopefully these things will make this blog more enjoyable by those who are reading it.

Edit: As you might be able to see I have gone ahead and disabled the “widgets” I had mentioned above. I don’t see any real advantage to having them on the site. If you disagree let me know!

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