A few days ago I removed Google Adsense from this blog because of two reasons. The first is that Google Adsense automatic ad placement is spam like, rather than reasonable. Ads are placed too frequently, and they obstruct us from reading content. The second reason is that on a low traffic site like mine it takes years between payouts. This means that I pester readers, without getting anything in return.
As Wordpress grows and as my comfort with Hugo increases I question whether to move my blog from Infomaniak to being self-hosted on a Pi. I know that the Pi is not powerful but my site doesn’t get much traffic so I don’t think that it will be overwhelmed with traffic.
I have slightly less than three weeks to decide whether to make the leap or not. The Hugo part of my blog is easy to migrate because it’s a static site. It’s the WordPress stack that is just a little more fiddly to move. I could start the experiment this afternoon.
Recently I have been toying with the idea of removing Google Ads from my site and adding a donation option instead. This escalated, when, yesterday I was seeing ads in the admin panel of my wordpress blog. Ads are disruptive enough for users, with full screen invasive ads that require you to acknowledge the ads, as well as others that take up the lower third of the screen.
These ads bother me so much because they’re impossible to see subconsciously. They’re not passive. They’re invasive. On quite a few sites the ads are so invasive that it interrupts your browsing experience. What makes this so bad is that we choose to give free reign to place ads as Google sees fit, but rather than place discrete ads that are noticed subconsciously they want ads that stop us in our tracks.
Although it is absurd i decided to migrate the blog from https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/ to https://blog.main-vision.com/. It is absurd because the website has been at the same URL since 2004 or so, and to move it is to lose years of hyperlinks. At the same time the updated URL should be preferred by search engines.
It is also part of the fediverse now, which means that every post can be followed by people natively on the fediverse, rather tha via RSS, Jetpack and more. In theory this should make the site more visible. It will take a little time for search engines to update their links but when they do things will be back to normal.
On Saturday I converted my blog from WordPress to Hugo as an experiment and it went quite well. I downloaded the xml file and then I converted that xml with blog2md to go from xml to md pages. A page was created for every single blog post. This took a while. I now have my blog both as static pages, and as a wordpress blog.
With the decline in the value of social media so the value of blogging has come back up. By blogging, rather than using social media, for at least an hour or two I am forcing myself to think, and to elaborate on ideas that would otherwise go without conclusion. Having a thought that is shared in 140 characters is easy. Having a thought that is three hundred words long is not.
Today I started to follow a course where someone turns a static html page into a Laravel blog. I experimented with home.blade and one or two other features and I got two pages to load, and the login to work, without more than that.
What makes today’s learning and experimenting interesting is that the time I spent creating PHP arrays for my website content is now easy to transfer to json files for use with dynamic websites. What this means is that content that was stuck on individual pages is now organised by website section. I am now free to do more.
Bernie Goldbach - Mar 0, 2009
On a related front, what’s the story with your twitter account?
Deleted it because I was fatigued by my other account, was going to give up twitter for good. In the end I went back to the secondary account though. When twitter repair the restore function I may restore the old one. We’ll have to see.
Today I got round to installing friendconnect on this blog. This means that everyone that has a gmail account can log in and become part of the community sprouting from this blog. You can also comment about things in general now. There’s a new layout now, as a result information is easier to find and the whole site should load quite a bit faster.
This week should see me dropping by the Frontline Club in London for the first time in weeks. I want to see Blog Wars which could be quite interesting. “Blog Wars provides a sharp and funny look at the explosion of political blogs, which have become the loudspeakers for a new generation of activists speaking out and picking fights across the political spectrum” I’m looking forward to yet another Seesmic meetup and I’ve heard that some interesting people should be present although I haven’t seen this written on paper yet. The usual London suspects should be there so that should be a really good evening. That will be on the 17th and more details are to follow. I’m not sure whether there’s another Social Media Cafe but if there is then there’s a very good chance I’ll be present. I’ll keep you informed.