website

I didn’t notice this last night when I was poking around with Amazon‘s A9 search engine, but Amazon has tied the search results into their Alexa website ranking tool with a little “Site Info” button at the tail end of search result. Part of what Alexa provides along with traffic ranking and site information is the ability to add reviews for the websites, in much the same way that people can post reviews of books, music, or anything else that Amazon sells.

Interesting. No reviews for me (not a surprise), but now that A9 is out and potentially sending more people towards the Alexa info pages, I may need to keep an eye out on that just to see if any pop up.

What did amuse me while looking at the info that Alexa has for Eclecticism is their graph of my traffic ranking:

Gee — can you tell when I got Slashdotted? ;)

iTunes: “Pick Up the Phone” by Swingerhead from the album Swing This, Baby! (1998, 3:07).

There’s a new addition to the site — I’ve been accepted into the Google AdSense program, so there will now be some small text advertisements on my pages.

I’d tried signing up for the AdSense program a while ago, but at that point was denied. Since then, I’d been debating the merits of trying again off and on — were the potential benefits of a little extra income (in theory, at least, if the ads generate enough clicks) worth putting a little more advertising on my site?

I’ve already had Amazon ads at the bottom of my pages for a good long while now, which (to be honest) haven’t netted me more than a few dollars — hardly enough to be noticeable. However, I’ve read of some people getting some surprisingly decent returns through the Google AdSense program, and while I doubt that I get enough traffic for it to make a major dent, I eventually decided that it was worth trying again — and surprisingly enough, this time they let me in.

I’ve tried to make the ads obvious without being terribly intrusive. You’ll see them in one of two places on the site.

As most new or returning visitors not coming in through a search engine or from an RSS reader will be hitting the main page, I didn’t want to bury the ads at the very bottom of the page as I have with the Amazon ad box, nor did I want them right at the top of the page as a standard banner — and while I briefly toyed with returning to a two-column layout that would allow me to place the ads on the edge of the page, I’m a bit too fond of the current single-column style to go quite that far.

So, for this main page, I’ve inserted the ads between the first and second posts on the page. Easily visible and likely to be seen, but not the first thing to greet a new visitor upon the initial load of the page.

For the individual archive pages I was a bit more concerned with not interrupting the flow between the post and the associated comment thread, so for those, I’ve placed the AdSense ads at the bottom of the page, just above the Amazon ad box.

Hopefully this strikes a good balance between visibility and keeping the ads as un-intrusive as possible.

And, of course, should an ad ever pop up that might be of interest, please feel free to click on it and pass a penny or two my way. It’s always appreciated!

iTunes: “Morning Will Come When I’m Not Ready” by Lionrock from the album An Instinct for Detection (1996, 3:49).

I’ve been quite amused recently at a couple of older posts that have apparently taken on something of a life of their own over the past few months.

Last August, I put up a post which was little more than a pointer to an article elsewhere on the ‘net that I thought was interesting. The post itself, titled “Why I hate George W. Bush” after the article I was linking to, sat more or less unnoticed until January, when all of a sudden it started gathering comments. Since then, it’s turned into a running political debate that doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon. Some of the comments I’ve agreed with more than others, but it’s certainly been interesting to watch the debate bounce back and forth.

Also last August, I ran across an interesting article talking about schools installing security cameras in classrooms, and put up a post titled simply “Cameras in classrooms“. Apparently, sometime within the past two weeks, one of the classes at Tequesta Trace Middle School in Florida has been assigned a report on this subject, and my post has suddenly become something of a graffiti-ridden ‘tag board’ for students who come across my page while doing research for their project. It’s been mildly entertaining to see the rather incoherent comments pop up on a daily basis.

Weird, the things that suddenly gain a life of their own.

First, read what this gentleman has to say about the appropriation of content from other weblogs:

I was reading Dawnkeyotie’s blog and she links to the story of Tequila Mockingbird and how some young punk wannbe blogger has been stealing her material.

Now I’ll admit to being influenced by other sites, like my About This Site page borrows rather heavily from the About page at Ani Moller’s site, but stealing word for word… Just not cool.

Etiquette is the name of the game… If you want to use text, at least give proper credit, or a trackback if possible.

If you want to steal my life, go ahead, I dare you… I Double Dog Dare You™ Mofo! I may not display a copyright notice, but it’s in the source of every page on this site.

Now, with that firmly in mind, head on over and check out his site design.

Look familiar? It looks awfully familiar to me. Funny, there’s no credit given, and he’s replaced the copyright notice in my code with one of his own, implying that the design work is his.

According to his about page, the last major redesign to his site went live on Monday, Feb. 2nd of 2004. Checking his archives, here’s what we find for the redesign announcement…

You like?

I though I’d lost this new look, but luckily a few files were still on my server so for the last 12 hours I went through everything with the virtual equivalent of a fine tooth comb and cleaned it all up and finally finished what I started some 2 weeks ago.

I think it’s much nicer, but then anything is much nicer than the old b2 default template, so it makes this place my own at last.

Before you ask, yes, it looks a bit unaligned in Internet Explorer, but it looks great in Mozilla Firebird and seeing as that’s the browser I use mostly, get used to it. If I can find a way to realign in IE I will, but until then it’s just cosmetic differences.

Yes — he definitely made this place his own — as long as “his own” is rather loosely defined as “blatantly stolen from someone else”.

Sigh.

The really ridiculous thing about this, though, is that I actually do like the way my design translates to a two-column layout. Considering I occasionally toy with the idea of going back to a two-column design rather than this single-column design, if I used the same base overall look, I’d end up looking nearly exactly how he does now. Would I then have to turn around and give him credit for inspiring some of the design?

Again — oh, the irony.

(Many thanks to Firas for the tip-off.)

Update: All’s well that ends well.