Subtle changes to the blog

Despite no answers to the question whether blogger beta is any good, I went ahead and switched. So now I have tags on my post. So you can click on the "labels" at the bottom of the post, or the ones on the side bar over on the right and get other posts I have labeled with the same thing. I file boring administrative posts like this under blogging. Other people may be only interested in things I find on the side of the road under road find. You get the point.

My only issue is that with things like the cats or everpopular chinese bikes label, it will not show more than the latest 20 entries on that subject. I suppose I could get around that by putting more entries per page, but then that would impact how many entries I have displayed on the default page. Anyone know how to get around that?

Aditionally there is some evidence that blogger beta is not 100% compatible with weird browsers like safari or opera. Lemmie know if you are having trouble viewing anything. I have heard nothing yet, but my viewers are mostly firefox or IE types with a smattering of safaris in there.

Also I kind of have compacted the links and reorganized the sidebar a bit and messed around with the ads.

The links I have posted are sort of my A list blogs, the ones I check fairly often. I generally don't do link trades, unless I really like someones blog alot. As such I ditched alot of the blogs that I linked to that never updated, or kept changin their URL or got boring. Sorry folks, the blogosphere is a cruel world. I added a couple more you might or might not enjoy. I may put a B link list way down at the bottom someday, just to make my blog surfing more efficient...

On the ad front, I kind of am tending toward ditching my google ads soon. I gave myself some experimental time to see whether I am raking in the dough or if they are distracting. I like the idea of passive advertising, but am not too pleased with the revenue vs. area on my blog. I will keep playing with it a bit and see where it goes. If anyone wants to put a prominent sidebar ad on my blog, I will be glad to talk to you, my fees, you will find, are insanely reasonable.

I put some personalized what I am reading or have read links to amazon, so if you buy a book through a link I will get some small percentage of the sale. The amazon picked links I had on there before were somewhat laughable, I moved them down the page a bit just to see how they change as I add links of my own to amazon. I am not really out to make money on this, but would love to get some return at the level of the isp hosting costs i spend for the tariksaleh.com page, which also hosts all the photos and the video content on the blog. It is an ongoing experiment like I said, not a critical one to my life or livelihood, just seeing where the balance between revenue, time, effort and realestate.

I do not begrudge people advertising on their blogs, and I personally much prefer passive ads and targeted links revenue to asking directly for donations, tip jars and wish lists. We will see how it goes.

Finally I set a massive record in readership last month. I put my sitemeter stats public, so if you click the counter at the bottom of the page, you should be able to see my visitor stats if you are bored. I am now at something like a quarter Kent, I would like to get to a half-a-Kent one day, but I think my content quality would have to go up quite a bit to get there, I did put a cowbell on the cat for your entertainment though whats a guy gotta do...

As always, thanks for reading and hit me with any comments or private emails on any of the above.