I was hoping that advertising might help offset some of the costs of hosting this website. I’m not paying too much to host it and it wouldn’t take that much advertising revenue to pay for it. Why not give it a try?

The Scientific Method

Being an experiment, I’d better pull out some of my 6th grade science reports to make sure I document this properly. Feel free to correct me on my methods. Especially if you are currently in elementary school and therefore have the scientific method fresh in your young sponge-like minds.

Hypothesis

I’ve always had text ads in the sidebar and recently I’ve started to see a trickling of change come in each month as a result. My very official hypothesis is the following:

Adding an additional adblock in the main content area of my site will result in more advertising revenue.

Seems like a logical assumption to me.

Procedure

I added a new advertising block to the main content column of my site. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of ads, so I tried to place the new block as discretely as possible. It slipped into the related entries block just below each article.

The block is in a good contextual location where users are likely to look after finishing an article. Ads here lead the user to content related to the page they are on and thus enhance the user experience. Like I said, I’m not a big fan of ads, so if I am going to use them, then they are going to be as un-annoying as possible. A bit of an oximoron, I know.

Observations

• Total advertising revenue from January 1st to January 29th: $0.01.
• Total articles posted from January 1st to January 29th: 0.
• Number of American presidents inaugurated from January 1st to January 29th: 1.

Conclusion

It’s been a bad month.

There are a lot of things I could blame the lack of advertising income on. The continuing global economic collapse. The fact that more Presidents have been inaugurated than I’ve posted articles this year. Either way, that extra ad block isn’t pulling its weight. And it’s annoying.

Unless there is a sudden spontaneous spike in revenue, he is going on the chopping block. Who or what will take his place? Perhaps Mr. Empty-light-blue-box will get his spot back. He certainly looked better there.

This concludes our experiment.

Up until yesterday I have lamented not being able to test my web designs on every modern browser. I don’t have the cash to shell out for a shiny Apple computer. No Apple meant no testing on Safari. My dad has an Apple at his home, so whenever I visit, I sneak into the computer room for a few minutes and madly browse all of my clients pages to see if there are any problems. Not the most effective debugging method, but it’s the best I could do.

Now, however, I can test my sites on every modern browser I need to. All this from my beat up, 5 year old desktop. Someday I would like to own my very own shiny Powerbook in all it’s overheating glory. For now Safari on Windows allows me to make sure all of my Apple compadres are seeing the designs I want them to see. I say bravo to Apple for releasing Safari to the masses. It can only lead to better designed sites for Safari users everywhere. Maybe it will also enlighten a few more souls to the knowledge that Internet Explorer is not the only browser in existence today. More competition in the browser space is always a good thing.

That’s my two cents. What’s yours?