True to my word, I’ve been working on a few site changes. As you can see, I’ve moved the Recent Comments, Recent Posts and Subscription area to the top and added a snazzy background. I saw a similar design on someone else’s site and thought I’d incorporate it. It kind of pushes the content down, which sucks, but it’s not so far down that you can’t find it before the pagefold on 800×600 screens. Hm, actually, I guess that depends on how many toolbars you have at the top of your browser. Oh well. Let me know if you hate it.

And let me know if anything looks broken. The IE6 renderer I’m using appears a little buggy and I can’t be sure if my site is actually broken or not. I appreciate the help.

Everyone wants free money. Getting something we want with zero effort and zero commitment cannot be beat. Which is why, I think, the whole blogging for money craze took off in the first place. Everyone loves sharing their opinions. Getting paid to do something you love can’t really be called work.

Sometimes, it is.

Sometimes, you just don’t feel like writing to feed the search engine monsters. With that in mind, I can understand why people scrape feeds and repost the content as their own. At the end of the day, we money-bloggers just want people to click our ads. Wouldn’t it be nice if our Web site could just be one gigantic ad? How convenient would it be if the sole purpose of our site was to sell Adsense links? Heap Media seems to have found a way to do that with Blackle.

Blackle is the black version of Google. Actually, it is Google, just without the sidebar links and dressed in black. What Heap Media has done is taken the Adsense for Search tool (like the one I have at the top of my page) and fitted it look similar to Google’s homepage. When you search using Blackle (or my site), if you click any of the premium (above the line) links, the site you searched from gets some cash. Therefore, the whole point of Blackle is for users to search Google…in black. Blackle is just one giant Google ad unit. The site requires no updating and no maintenance. It’s everything money-bloggers are looking for!

Of course Blackle has to give you some incentive for using them over Google. If you read the About Us section, you get to read some hogwash about how CRT monitors consume less energy when displaying a dark screen. Therefore, if more people used Blackle, they could be saving the world a significant amount of wasted energy. Capitalizing off people’s good nature is awesome! I wish I had thought of it first.

The energy savings is marginal, but, “Every bit counts,” Blackle claims. Though I wonder if they’re talking about energy savings.

And I’m feeling tired.

Happy New Year everyone!

I chose to be an old fuddy duddy and stayed in (again) this year. However, that gave me ample time to work on my new layout. I’ll say it’s about 95% of the way done. Still working out some kinks, so bear with me. If you notice anything that breaks the site, please let me know. Thanks!

Just a very, very minor update tonight.

If you’re a dedicated reader, you’ll find that I’ve reverted to my old layout. It’s just temporary, turns out my 3-sidebar layout was breaking horribly in IE6 and readers were having to scroll down to get to the post. I’m going to rebuild everything into a newer layout that will hopefully be cross-browser compatible. Thankfully, Christmas is upon us and that means I’ll be getting some time off work. These 11-hour shifts plus Saturdays are killing me.

On a side note, the cheap monitor I bought about a year ago went on the blink and I had to borrow one of my Father’s old CRTs. This thing is only 17-inches, but the unit is so huge I have to place the monitor six-inches away from my face just to fit the thing on my desk. I remember when I thought LCD flat panels were completely unnecessary. Now I don’t know how I ever lived without one. Anyway, hopefully we’ll have a brand new layout that looks good for everyone by the new year.

And hopefully I’ll have a new monitor by then as well.

PS. Thank you everyone who read my post on The Notebook. It’s amazing what airing that movie on TV can do for traffic.

As dedicated bloggers, we are all looking for ways to generate more traffic to our sites. From a business standpoint, the more traffic you have to your Web site, the greater chance you have of someone clicking one of your ads. From a creative standpoint, a writer is nothing without his or her readers. Furthermore, with an estimated five million blogs floating around the Internet, we can’t simply rely on search engines to funnel visitors our way. That’s why it’s important to create your own traffic streams. One way to do that is through traffic exchange sites. While there are quite a few of this type of sites, there are more specialized sites that focus on blogs and these are the services I want to discuss here.

The way these sites work is like this: For every blog you visit through whichever service you’re using, your blog will receive a visit in return from someone else. Most of the time, it’s not a 1:1 ratio. You’re more likely to find 2:1 ratios, meaning for every two blogs you visit, your site will receive one in return. The traffic exchange site keeps track of your blog surfing through a special javascript program that runs in your browser. Once you activate the program, it automatically loads a random blog. A 30 second timer counts down and then a security question pops up to ensure you’re actually surfing and not having a bot do it for you. The timer is there to give you a chance to read the blog before moving on. The idea here is that you might find something you enjoy and now that blog has a dedicated reader. And the same goes for you when someone randomly views your blog through this system.

There are a few problems inherent with blog traffic exchange sites. The biggest problem is that the community is full of bloggers. By nature, bloggers want readers, not to become a reader. So, more often than not, you will have people landing on your blog who are just waiting for the timer to countdown so that they earn their credit. Even if this particular surfer is making a genuine effort to read blogs, you only have 30 seconds to sell them before they answer the security question to view the next blog. This problem of non-reading is further compounded by these traffic exchange sites completely randomizing their pool of blogs. It’s not surprising to run into the same blog three or four times during your surfing for credits.

Two of the more useless blog traffic exchange sites are BlogSoldiers and BlogMad. BlogSoldiers took forever to get an admin to approve my site. Once I was finally approved, any time I made an alteration to my preferences for my blog credits, it required the same interminable admin approval. Lastly, I think their community might be dead, because I’ve set my preferences to use 100 of my earned credits a day, meaning I want to have 100 visitors see my site through BlogSoldier surfing a day. Instead, I get maybe one view every two days. Last I checked, I had over 400 credits waiting to be used.

BlogMad is just as dead. While their system gives you plenty of ways to earn credits, like challenging other blogs to fights, credit lotteries and referrals, I don’t think there’s enough people using that service anymore. Once again, I only get one or two hits every two days. Sadly, they’re usually from the same few people.

The biggest, most glaring problem with these two blog traffic exchange sites is that you can permanently resize the window while you surf for credits. I was able to earn over 400 credits in one day on both sites while at work, just by keeping the surfing windows as small as possible and answering security questions every 30 seconds or so. People using those services are now truly only surfing for the credits and not for the reading.

The best bet is to stay away from traffic generating gimmicks like these altogether. They’re time consuming and don’t produce any quality visitors.