A blog by Alesh Houdek
I’m messing around with the idea of a photoblog. Just stripped down the default template to the bones and worked it up with some minimalist CSS, so it’s looking semi-presentable. Too, it’s easy to add stuff to it, so I’ll be posting images regularly at least for a little bit. All I really need is a name, if anyone has suggestions?
Why ads on this dinky little blog? While I acknowledge that they suck, in a way, for the reader, the ads do a few things that make them interesting for me: (1) At the other place, they actually brought in a little money (although a couple of orders of magnitude less then some experts would have predicted considering the readership). (2) It’s interesting to see what sort of ads Google serves up, and how it’s influenced by what’s been on the site recently. (3) It makes this technically a business, which might possibly allow me to write things off on my taxes, though I’ll have to research that a little more between now and next April. (4) It’s another way of measuring; e.g., at aforementioned Other Place, readership was growing long after ad revenue plateaued, and while I never figured out why that was, the puzzle was nagging in a good way.
In any case, it’s an experiment. If it goes nowhere, the ads will disappear just as quickly as they came, and you’ll probably be subjected to another navel-gazing post like this one. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure that if you want to advertise specifically on this site (rather then just target search terms), you can do exactly that through Google Adwords.
How to look at billboards has NOT spread like wildfire since its launch three weeks ago. It has garnered a not-so-whooping 358 page veiws from 225 distinct hosts. However, at a standard direct-marketing conversion rate of 3%, that means 6 lives have been touched by this project, and since touching even one person would have made me happy, I am SIX TIMES happy. Thank you, internet.
I could show you the paltry few sites that have linked to it, but I thought it more interesting to bring you the above graph, representing the top search phrases that brought visitors to the site. Can you guess how many clicks are represented by each slice of the pie?
I know what you’ve been thinking. “Sure, it’s all well to have this blog and everything, but why doesn’t it have a soundtrack? Wouldn’t the things typed in here make a lot more sense if there was music to like, you know, complement it?” Well, the answer is most definitely yes, and so I present you here with my very own B&F radio station.
Ok, it’s a link to a Pandora quick mix. Nothing special, actually. Unless you like things that are AWESOME. Actually, I’m not really sure how well this is going to work. My friends have been using my Pandora account almost exclusively to listen to music at their house, and they’ve added a bunch of things to it. (Double scoop of “avant garde jazz.”) And I suspect that anyone who clicks through can change the mix for everyone else, which should make this interesting. Think of it as an experiment.
Also, you have to sort of give it a chance — there’s so many different things programmed into it that it’ll take awhile to get a flavor for what you’re going to get. Eclecticism. This also seems like a good time to point out that I have another blog, a Tumblr that has lots of music on it. (Mostly, stuff goes here if it involves a significant amount of typing. The stuff on the tumblr is mostly stuff grabbed from other places. Like a scrapbook. But online, the way the kids do these days.)