rambling insomniac thoughts

My sleep schedule is getting out of whack again. Yesterday I worked 1:30pm to 9pm. Came home. Had a medium intensity fight with my spouse. Then made up and had some excellent make up whoopie. Then, around midnight, I got on the puter and started looking at my e-mails, my Tweet Deck, etc. Proof-read a post I have scheduled to go live at 12:01 am EST tomorrow. And then I got involved in the Blog Catalog forums, the CMF forums. Ended up reading lots and lots of older posts. And next thing I know, now it is 6am and I am faced with the equally disagreeable choices of going to bed and sleeping all day or staying up and trying to accomplish what I'd planned on for today, despite running on empty. (sighs)

Several weeks ago, I decided I'd had enough of the Entrecard "drop 300 cards every day" treadmill and cut Way way back on my dropping. My traffic went down significantly, as I knew it would. (Just btw, this in reference to my primary blog The Thin Red Line, rather than the blog you are reading just now.) But I noticed something odd when I checked my stats last night. While I have gone down from an average of 300--500 unique visitors per day to about 125--150 uniques/day, my page views are way up. Where my 300--500 uniques with all the EC junk traffic (those who remember this thread on Blog Catalog will note the large serving of crow I am eating) generally produced a very similar number of page views, yesterday's 135 unique visitors racked up more than 500 page views. This suggests to me, that while I am not getting as many visitors as before, the visitors I do get are taking the time to read more than one post and explore the site. Which suggests to me that even as my Alexa has gone back up (14x,000 at the moment), I am getting more readers who are genuinely interested in the site content.

I'm also feeling just a little bit of a need to eat still More crow for this thread in which I stated emphatically that I had a plan and expected my site to produce meaningful income within two to three years. Now that we are about to that point I've cleared a total of 10 dollars on the site last year and am earning a small amount of money from my new favorite place, CMFads. Glad I didn't quit the day job. But I do genuinely enjoy writing my book reviews and I have learned so much over the past two and a half years. It remains to be seen if I will find my way into earning a real income from my writing and blogging. But I have to say that despite having learned just how hard it is to honestly earn a buck online, that I have no regrets and would do it all again in a heartbeat. I continue to meet and make new friends on CMFads and on Twitter (which Turnip bless his heart suddenly made Really useful to me by helping to understand the right way to use TweetDeck).

If you'd like to learn about CMFads and how it stacks up against other blog advertising services, be sure to visit The Thin Red Line tomorrow.

it seems as though

I am never going to be a consistent regular poster on this blog. Watching the new Obama administration with a bit of hope and the crumbling economy with a bit of fear, though down here at the bottom I honestly don't think things will get much worse for us. My work schedule has switched from Monday mornings to Monday evenings, so now Friday and every other Saturday are our only get up early days. That is nice, since we both prefer to sleep late. No news to report from these parts.

somehow

we've made it through another year. I don't really Do resolutions but I am planning on learning more about making money online and increasing my extremely modest online living. I think I have finally figured out how to make some real money, but I am going to go slow and work at setting up some highly targeted very special interest weekly blogs that are geared to affiliate programs. I am doing a lot of research about affiliate programs and products and online marketing. Around September or October of last year I announced that I expected my site to have meaningful cash flow and I accomplished that. This coming year I am going to start actually making money. And I Promise NEVER to do a MMO blog.

Have you resolved anything to accomplish or avoid in 2009?

It feels rather as though

I am somehow still back in Boston. One of the major attractions of the Seattle area for me was the mild climate. While we are actually farther north than Massachusetts, and do have the storied endlessly gray winters, the climate is quite mild and most winters it snows at Most once or twice. No one in these parts knows how to drive in winter weather, but it's really not an issue since the metro area generally closes down at the first signs of snow, which usually melts down the drains the next day and we are back to our usual cool and gray.

This year however is one for the record books. As of this second day of winter (by the calendar anyway) we have had more than a solid week of continuing snow and Very cold temperatures. The roads are virtually impassable (snow plows are very hard to come by in these parts), the airport is jammed full of stranded passengers after our hometown airline, Alaska, went through their entire year's supply of de-icing fluid last week and canceled all service to SeaTac, all schools and government offices are closed through at least next week. Feh. This is Exactly the kind of weather I moved here from Boston to escape from. I'd love to invite the climate change deniers to come shovel out the parking lot of my apartment building, which is proving to be the most dangerous place to drive this week. I don't even own a snow shovel and don't even recall any being offered for sale around here. Yikes.

Merry Effing Christmas.

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