Mailbox Monday

It's an exciting day over at the books blog. Lyndi at Nice2All gave The Thin Red Line a Rave Review, and I am aglow at the wonderful compliments. Meanwhile, my ad for the dot com page is running right alongside the review (Thank You CMFads) and I am feeling a great deal of satisfaction in Lyndi's advice (don't change a thing). It appears to me that I get about 100--150 regular readers per day and I definitely get feedback that these people like what they see. I am starting to feel like a successful blogger again, more so than at any time since my Entrecard-ending traffic drop.

I am really, Really, REALLY homping that CMFads will grow into what Entrecard _could_ have become, had it been managed by people I know and trust, like Ben, Stan and Turnip. A place where thoughtful and quality bloggers will feel genuinely at home and can gain meaningful notice, as opposed to a system that sadly has become largely a meaningless link exchange, where the most Popular blog , in All of Entrecard, for TWO YEARS IN A ROW (as Turnip recently broke) is a splog, run by the same scraper who maintains 5 blogs (each of which drop the required 300 per day) with all the credits gained used to advertise the "main" site. Monkey Tales? More like horseshit, imho.

I suppose it is disingenuous to keep the EC widget on this personal site, even while deploring what Entrecard has become, but some of my real blog friends still use that site and I Do like being able to leave a card and it seems only fair to have a place where they can leave cards for me. Like most serious bloggers, I am Not eager to choose sides in some kind of power struggle. I just want solutions that Work. And CMFads is delivering that in spades.

Oh, and since this is a Mailbox Monday I will note that this week's mail brough an advanced reading copy of Afraid by Jack Kilborn, a thriller that was previously published in the UK that is being released in the US in paperback in April by Hachette's Grand Central Publishing unit (Thank You Miriam Parker!) and a published copy of Lord of Corruption by Kyle Mills, which I will be giving away, probably to my one thousandth commenter on the The Thin Red Line im association with an April review date.

One final thought, today. I have been thinking of trying to organize some kind of South Puget Sound bloggers group where we could meet up face to face, like at the library meeting room maybe once a month just to talk and get to know each other and look at ways we can work together to butter All of our bread. If you are a blogger in the South Sound area and would be interested in attending a get together, please shoot an e-mail to me at drone AT libdrone DOT info.

I honestly don't know

how those bloggers with multiple blogs do it. I had been thinking of trying to make Purely Personal a weekly updated blog, though it is Friday night and tomorrow morning at 8am I am back to work another week and I just never did get around to coming up with a post to go here. On the books blog, I have posted today's and pre-posted Monday's entries and have read Wednesday's book and just need to write the review, when I can find the time.

I am getting some traffic from the ads I have placed on CMF, but my unique count is just down in the toilet and I don't know what to do about it. So many people have come in and said "wow, this place is great" but they just don't seem to generate much traffic. I have greatly expanded the number of books blogs in my RSS feeds page, libdrone.com but have not yet figured out how to promote this page. I also haven't taken any steps towards signing up for the affiliate programs and setting up special sites designed just to drive traffic to affiliate links. I seem to be somewhat ambivalent about the whole project.

Meanwhile another week has gone by. I did finally e-mail my mother, but expect she is still peeved with me for putting it off for so long. (she didn't write back as yet). Ron and I both had shrink appts on Tuesday. My meds are working and I just got another 6 months renewal, but Ron's meds were completely changed and so far he seems to be doing well on Wellbutrin and Librium. Fingers crossed. Need to go ahead and publish this and get to bed so I can be bright eyed at work tomorrow. Here's hoping your week has gone well.

a

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.