OGIF

oh gawd it's friday and work was hellacious. I was Hot and VERY sweaty all darned day, which seemed to go on forever and ever. Thrilled to be home and just surfing the web and catching up on this, that and the other. Ron is cooking beef stew for supper. It smells good and I am Hungry. I finally got around to going to the American Library Association site to confirm that this year Banned Books Week is September 27th-- October 4th. I found that I have never read six of the top ten most frequently banned books in 2007, so I have placed holds for all of them and will plan to write up the ALA list again this year.

The reason I got to thinking about this is because at work today I happened upon a copy of Something of Value by Robert Ruark, which I think is the book my friend Ron (as opposed to my partner Ron) recommended for Banned Books Week last year. I will have to go back to the old blog post to confirm that. I did bring home the book and will try to read and write about it. Back to work tomorrow and Sunday for two more no doubt equally stupefying days. For those of you who are off, hope it's a great weekend.

thursday afternoon feels

like Sunday night. Back to work at 8am tomorrow and I am So not looking forward to it. At least it will be a short week since we are closed Monday. Then Tuesday Sam arrives from Baltimore. I am thinking I will try to get a week's worth of posts up on TRL on my holiday Monday, since I probably will not have as much time with Sam being here. I finished a wonderful book last night, Dirty Martini by JA Konrath. I will probably blog that one for Monday's post and I am currently reading a few other books so hopefully by Monday I will have a week's worth ready to write about.

I was not able to get to sleep until around 5am, then slept til 1pm so I know it will be a bear getting to sleep tonight and getting up at 6am tomorrow for work. The only thing besides blog stuff I really did this weekend was to drive over to the South Hill library branch and browse and borrow from a different collection. On the way back from there we found a Really great barbecue place and had a wonderful late lunch. We will definitely want to go back there while Sam is here.

recovering

I have re-gained the number three spot in Books on entrecard and my traffic and drops from there are back up nicely, thankyewverymuch. Ron is channel surfing and landed on the DNC for a few minutes. Personally, I am very glad Not to be in that loud crowded hall. And politicsNPR is twittering the vote state by state so I am following it as I browse and compose. I find myself hoping that now having been able to go ahead and vote for her at the convention, Hillary's most die hard supporters will go on to support Obama. (Was appalled to read the other day that some of them are announcing they will support McLame rather than vote for Obama.) Mostly, though I am managing to just ignore politics these days.

I need to do another round of power dropping today and again tomorrow to firm up my hold on the number three spot. Then Friday-Saturday-Sunday I am back to work. We are blessedly closed so Monday is a paid day off, Yay! Bad news is after staying up all night Monday and then staying up all day yesterday I slept Forever and did not get up until one something this afternoon. I fear I will _never_ get myself back on a regular sleep schedule. Here's hoping your hump day Wednesday is going well and I will hopefully be back again tomorrow just to say hey.

been stumbled

Well, I finally got around to looking at my stats and figuring out why my traffic is Up Nicely even though my Entrecard visitors are way down. And the answer is, the Monday post about Edward Hasbrouck's The Practical Nomad has been Stumbled Upon. Barely more than twelve hours since publication and that full post page has already been viewed 262 times, hence the high traffic numbers. It's definitely not steady traffic and probably not very sticky traffic either, but Stumble Upon is great for getting a bunch of people to visit your post. Mystery Solved.

back on the chain gang

So after ignoring my books blog for almost a full week, I have published Monday and Tuesday posts, dropped about 500 entrecards (over two days) and am trying to get back into the swing of things. Bad news is I dropped down from third to sixth in the Books category, which will really hurt my organic clicks. The slightly better news is that I am less than 100 points behind the third place blog and I've a feeling I will get back up in the top three over my three day Tues-Wed-Thurs weekend. The even better news is that even though my EC traffic and drops are way down, my total visitors is actually up a bit, though I haven't dug into the stats to figure out just why. Meanwhile I have Wed-Thurs-Fri books picked out and mostly read so I will publish a full Monday--Friday week for the first time in ages.

I am contemplating formally declaring myself on vacation for all or part of next month and just letting the blog slide. (Though I shudder to think of how much work it will be to climb back up if I do.) OTOH, our friend Sam is coming out from Baltimore and will be staying with us Sept 2nd-- Oct 4th (and may decide to move in with us permanently -- YAY!!) and it would be nice to be free of the blog stuff so that I can have more time to visit. Have to contemplate that some more.

regarding blog ads

Yesterday's post drew a strong agreement from Cardiogirl in the comments. Having earned about forty dollars in the program, she feels compelled to stay until she gets the hundred, despite having learned that there are other, much more small publisher friendly advertising networks. On The Thin Red Line I am showing Project Wonderful ads at the top of the page, and while they are not making me rich, they do supply a steady cash flow that can be immediately used to purchase advertising or withdrawn in any amount above ten dollars. Many, many, many months ago I invested $15 and bought at ton of advertising with it. I've since taken out $10.01 and have a bit under 5 dollars on account.

When I remember to insert the ad code at the bottom of my posts, I have Adsense ads at the bottom of the full post page. I also have a small Adsense block in my sidebar, though you have to scroll down some before it becomes visible so it does not get the impressions the PW ads do up top. With only ten dollars earned I don't particularly feel compelled to stick around to get over 100 and get paid, though I can appreciate CG's point of view. I would definitely recommend to any new bloggers to Not get involved with Adsense.