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.

vacation

was a long, super busy week at work, but I have made it through and am now off for a bit of vaca. I do not have to return to work until Friday December 5th. Ron and I had seriously considered driving over to Boise to spend Thanksgiving with Staci and Clint but at length our worries about our 10 year old car going through the passes in winter, combined with our own tight finances caused us to cancel. But I am taking my personal holiday the Sunday after Thanksgiving and a vacation day the Monday after. Since we are closed for paid holiday Thursday and Friday I have a full week of paid time off.

I am hoping to get some rest and to get caught up and posted ahead on the books blog. I have read three books that I need to blog about, including one from a publisher that I have to post about on December 5th as part of a publicity campaign. my blog earnings are still quite small but they are real and are growing. And now with a year and a half of book reviews published I am starting to be taken more seriously as a reviewer and receive free reading copies from publishers and their publicists. It's a nice perk, and I still enjoy publishing the site most of the time, though it is really hard on work days and particularly if work is really busy.

Our friend Bob is coming over for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. I got a 20lb turkey from Safeway, though we will need to make another grocery run tomorrow. Tonight I am just chilling and unwinding and will try to get into publisher and writer modes tomorrow.

the blog gods and godesses...

....seem to have it in for me this week. I did not manage to post on Monday because work was hellishly busy, then we had company all evening. Tuesday, I managed to write a clever book post, even working in a bookish meme I was tagged with. I put in lots of links, proof read and checked everything twice. I clicked publish and Shazaam-- an Earthlink configurator screen. moved back in my browser and found a completely blank Compose New Post form. Feh. Today I managed to get up a great post about an extraordinary new book, and the post looks great on the front page. But if you try to visit the full post page it somehow is Not There. No clue at all what's up with that or how to fix it. I suppose I'm going to have to ask for help but I sure don't Want to.

with being more or less offline and not dropping for several days, I am back down to number three in Books. I stayed up all night and dropped cards from the time Earthlink came back online around 2 am until nearly 7:30 am. My connection is sooooo sloow it took me that long to drop 300 cards. Yikes. I have read and am ready to post about Thursday's and Friday's books, but am almost afraid to try at this point.