My server is having a temper tantrum here, so if you’re subscribing to my feed you may have seen a few duplicate and wonky posts lately. Sorry about that. Stupid stupid stupid WordPress. It’s like my own blog is conspiring to keep me from blogging here.

Until recently I never really understood the concept of how a wiki based site worked, but after playing around with Wetpaint today I’m finally beginning to understand its appeal. Wetpaint allows you to build a free website based on a wiki platform, (similar to Wikipedia), only the difference here is that it’s more socially oriented, and you can build your own personal community around any niche you’re particularly passionate about.

Creating a new wiki on Wetpaint is absurdly easy, and if I wanted to, I could create a new wiki for dating and promptly declare myself the supreme lovemaster who holds all the inner secrets to having a successful relationship. Of course, if I allow my page to be edited by other wiki members, they’ll probably do their best to keep me on the straight and narrow (such as correcting the somewhat misleading claim that Jessica Alba never was pregnant and in fact left her skanky male ho of a boyfriend to move in with me instead.)

On second thought, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all.

The good news though is that I can modify my settings to prevent any wiki page I make from being mass edited, leaving my claims unchallenged and untouched by those wiki weenies who aspire to keep Wetpaint created pages “accurate” and “truthful.” Pffttttt.

In any event, Wetpaint does seem good for a few hours of fun, especially if you want to get a good feel for how wiki based communities operate, so go check it out.

Well maybe.

It all depends on how the upgrades go tomorrow. My hosting provider (Hostgator) is upgrading all their servers to PHP5 and MySQL5, meaning one of two things could happen: either I’m fretting over nothing and the upgrades will go smoothly, leaving my precious blog relatively unscathed. Or…

There’s no telling how all the components of my site is going to react, but needless to say I’m a little nervous. I’ve backed up all my files, but if some major part of my blog is not compatible with the new server, then I am totally up poo-poo creek without a paddle.

Honestly, I just don’t have the strength or patience anymore to deal with a major meltdown. I’ve exhausted all my energy trying to keep my blog running as smoothly as possible, and if it all goes to crap because of this upgrade, that might just be the end of this site as we know it.

So, should the worst happen, I bid you all farewell. Goodbye, you cruel, cruel Internet! You’ve taken a once young promising lad and reduced him to a shriveled up ball of insanity, bitterness and despair. Damn you!!!! Damn you all to the fiery flames of LOLcats hell!

Based on my observations on how people make money online, one of the largest streams of income tend to come from affiliate marketing. I figured if I was ever going to make a living off the Internet myself, most of my attention and efforts would have to focus on generating commissions for affiliate programs I participate in.

After dabbling in this industry on and off for the past few months, I have come to this conclusion: I F*&%ING HATE AFFILIATE MARKETING.

The truth is, I’m not a salesman. In fact I utterly hate and despise everything about the business field, partly because it generally requires that you be a bottom feeding scum sucking scumbag in order to be successful. Not that everyone in this field is, but there’s a temptation to debase yourself and lie your fat baboon’s heinie off to rope naive consumers into buying the products you hawk. How anyone can do this on a full time basis is beyond me, but I guess the dollar signs in their eyes are enough to keep them going.

I tried to understand all the fine nuances of effective affiliate marketing, from running PPC campaigns to creating effective landing pages to formulating effective bidding strategies for high converting keywords, and on and on and on. My brain furiously protested this infusion of insane information, mostly by constipating itself and spiting me by making me forget what I apartment I lived in every time I went out to get the mail. And when I still continued to persist, my brain launched an all out attack by giving me nightmares of a naked Barbra Streisand chasing after me with a bullwhip and a bottle of suntan lotion. Eventually, I got the message.

The thing was, I wasn’t being true to myself. I was trying to learn something I had no passion or love for, and I did it only because that’s where the money seemed to be.

But I’m not a businessman. What I am, is a romantic. Someone who loves to take pictures, tell stories, sing songs, and dance and twirl in the summer rain to the tune of Air Supply. I wanted to celebrate life, not milk it. Affiliate marketing ran contrary not only to my moral structure, but also to who I was as a person. The more I tried to persist in learning all the tricks of the trade, the more miserable I became. It’s not worth it.

In the end I decided to limit any affiliated related marketing I do in the future to products I actually use myself. If people decide to buy through my affiliate links, great, and if they don’t, the sun will still come up tomorrow.

I’ll just have to find nontraditional ways to generate income online, which is fine by me. Whatever sets me apart from the rest, it’s all for the best, and even if I don’t know how I’ll do it, I believe I can make success…

….out of nothing at all.

Out of nothing at alllllll….

Out of nothing at alllllllllllllll….

Recently I emailed some feedback to Jimmy Kukral (the developer of Scratchback) after testing out his widget on my site. When it comes to using widgets I like to use IFrames whenever I can in order to prevent them from bogging my site down, just in case the servers running the widgets crap out for whatever reason. Anyone who’s ever used a Twitter widget knows exactly what I’m talking about too.

Only problem was, clicking on a link in the Scratchback widget opened it up within the IFrame instead of loading a new page altogether. So I made the suggestion of including a target that directed the link outside the frame in order to resolve this minor issue.

And what happens? I get this snippy response from Jimmy:

That violates our terms of service. Can you stop doing that? If not, please stop using the widget. We have to maintain a consistent user experience.

Never mind the fact that there’s no direct link to the terms of service on his site, (I had to pretend to register again in order to locate it), but there’s no visual difference between me adding the widget directly into the source code or enclosing it within an IFrame instead. So I’d be changing the user experience… how again?

I emailed Jimmy back again asking for clarification, since there was certainly nothing on the Scratchback site itself that addressed the use of IFrames. I got this response:

It’s in there in so many words. You’re modifying the pre determined user experience by putting our code in an iframe.

Ah, it’s there in so many WORDS. Well that certainly clears it up.

I don’t think any thought may have been given to the possibility that some users may opt to use IFrames in order to offload potentially slow loading widgets from the main source code, that way it doesn’t interfere with the page’s load time. That this would be considered a nefarious act on my part and a violation of Jimmy’s sacred TOS kinda cheesed me off.

Look, it’s not a huge deal, and I don’t really want to even worry about it. I’m just asking you don’t do it.

Oh don’t you worry your pretty big head about it honey pie, I’ve permanently taken the widget off. You can sleep easy now knowing us evil bloggers will not be changing the “user experience” of your precious widgets.

You know, it was just an innocent suggestion too. If I thought the way I used IFrames would significantly change how the Scratchback widget operated on my site, would I have emailed the DEVELOPER about it so he’d know exactly what I was doing??? Idiot.

Ah well, it’s one less widget I need to worry about. Next time I’ll be more careful before getting into those types of arrangements where I’m expected the shave the backs of those who scratches mine.

Phil from the Advertising Blogger recently wrote up a complimentary post about me and my advertising page, so in exchange for scratching my back I guess I’ll take some time to shave his.

I actually know of Phil via one of his other blogs called the Romance Tracker, which has been on my list of feed subscriptions for quite some time now, even though the info still hasn’t helped me manage to get a date. Damn you Phil! Damn you and your little blogs too!!!!!!!!

But, *ahem*, back to the advertising discussion…

Ironically enough I spent all of last weekend actually cleaning up my advertising page some more, as well as adding a few more ad blocks for sponsors to choose from. (You may have noticed the new HUGE 300×250 block that I’m throwing in your faces now.)

I also decided to drop the peel away ad as it really didn’t fit my site too well, and the clickthrough ratios were actually worse than any of my ad blocks put together. Forget that then. I am however going to offer stripe ads instead, which I think will be more effective (and far less annoying) than the peel away ad.

Since I’m using Openads, (oh I’m sorry, I mean OpenX… stupid developers and their branding identity crisis,) I was able to recode most of the ad zones using IFrames instead, that way if there’s ever a problem with an ad loading, it won’t affect the load time for the rest of the page. I’m already noticing a speed difference too. This new setup also allows me to experiment with different advertising networks with relative ease. Previously I had Adbrite ads being delivered. Now I’m trying my hand with Project Wonderful instead to see how that performs, and then if that doesn’t do well, I’ll try something else. Sooner or later I’ll stumble onto a winning combination that will make me gobs of money and win me fame, prestige and an ocean of hot babes.

Ok, maybe just one hot babe. At least one please? Please?

And now that I’ve lost all credibility, this would be a great time to make a plug for advertising on my blog! Remember, if you don’t garner a clickthrough rate of at least 1 percent, I’ll refund 25 percent of the costs. So please sponsor me today!

Really, please sponsor me, I’m really getting tired of all these calls from my bill collectors. They’re always so mean and nasty too.