The Google ads are gone on this site for the forseeable future. I did it mainly as an experiment, firstly in doing some server-side hacking on the javascript, which was later negated by them offering color choices, and secondly to see how they would do. The response was good, but the ads never seemed really relevant to my content, they slowed down page loading, and they wrote semi-invalid markup to the browser, which is violating standards but through javascript so the validator couldn’t see it. I am tempted to leave them up until I hit the $100 mark and get a check (I’m about halfway there now) but the response has been waning as I suppose my audience has gotten used to them and/or the relevancy of the ads has decreased. All of that, and I’d much rather put the Photo Matt endorsement on items I have personally reviewed and recommend, such as the two books that have returned to their place at the top of my page.

What I’ve decided to do is when I get a new CD or electronic toy that really strikes my fancy, I’ll make a small banner for it and put it at the top there. That way you get home-made “ads” of things I use myself and enjoy. This seems like a much more personal approach, and one that seems better suited to a personal site such as my own.

If you have a sharp eye you may have noticed a few changes to the site. The big change is we now have publicly accessible archives. I had removed all archive links because I didn’t (and still don’t) like the URL structure they currently use, but I was getting enough emails requesting them that they are now back up in all they’re ugly query-based glory. Besides, having a weblog without archives is a little funky.

The other biggie is that all the external links have moved to a portal page, which is currently just the same lists as before but will become brutally optimized and reorganized as I begin to use it as my home page, the most revered status any page can aspire to. Anyway I considered simply hiding the links through some sort of toggle mechanism but upon further consideration that would just give me all the added code and generation time of having the links on every page without the benefit of having the links handy. They are mostly for my personal use anyway, though Joe has mentioned to be he has used the list as a launching point on several occasions. We shall see how this works out.

Finally, the Google ads are no longer quite as ugly. Unfortunately aesthetically consistent ads seem to get less clicks. Either that or the ad’s seeming obsession with TiVo for the home page is less than effective. (Of course I probably didn’t help matters much with that juicy keyword there.)