Well I’m at Panera Bread, thinking that by having an nice Panini sandwich and watching the bustling of people around me, it would put me in a mellow enough mood to blog something up.

All I’m seeing now though is a bunch of ugly looking people who bother me just by being ugly, couples who bother me because they’re couples and have to make a point of showing the whole world that they’re couples (hold on while I go outside to let the air of the tires of said couple’s car…  yeah, let’s see how manly you are now for having a girlfriend when you have to call AAA.  Ha-Ha!)

Then there’s the schmuckaroos that stare at me like I just landed from Mars.  Yes I have a laptop, which means I probably have more money than you.  Yes, I’m by myself, which just means I was smart enough to stay single.  What the f__ is it to you?  Staring is rude, so knock it off before I decide to cram that Asiago Roast Beef sandwich you’re sucking on down your douche hole.

I know some people might interpret my behavior here as being antisocial, but that’s not true.  I just hate people, is all.  They’re rude, obnoxious, mean, and they smell bad.  In other words, they remind me of me. 

But you know what the worst thing about all this is?  Panera Bread took Crispanis off the menu.  Bastards!!!!

I’m outta here.

Got bored last weekend, so I’ve been making some tweaks here and there to improve the speed and performance of my site.  The biggest change was dropping the ad server that’s been serving my ads, and hard coding it into my blog instead.  No matter what, I could never get it to execute fast enough, which I’m guessing is partly a limitation of using a shared hosting account.  If I ever go dedicated though, I’ll probably give it another shot, but that might be a while (a dedicated account would cost me almost $200 a month!)

If you’re wondering what the flip I’m talking about, using an ad server basically allows me carte blanche control over how ads are served, so if someone outside my current ad networks wanted to book an ad, I could easily set up an account for them and then temporarily disable the ads that were already running.  Unfortunately now I won’t be able to do this, but I don’t think it will be an issue until I get far more traffic to my site, at which point I should have enough of a budget to get an ad server running again.

And what’s a dedicated account you ask?  Well right now I’m using a shared account at $10 a month, which means I’m sharing a server with a bazillion other users, and thus am only alloted a fraction of the server’s power.  If I get a dedicated account however, I’ll have a server all to myself to do as I please, which means a LOT more computing power and significantly better performance for my site as well.  It may be another year though before I can afford such a solution, if ever.  If you want to help me achieve this goal though, spread the word and link to my blog, dangit.  Bunch of stingy freeloaders, y’all. 

Anyhoo, I also darkened the background a little and dropped the MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog widgets.  Seriously, I’m fed up with both services.  It’s like I’m advertising their networks on my blog and in return I’m getting, well, nothing.  It’s nice that my blog is registered in their directories so people can find me, but I could count on one hand how much traffic I’ve gotten from either network as a result.  Not enough to justify the 1-2 second lag they were adding to my blog’s load times.   And besides, both networks are getting bogged down in spam too.  I can’t tell you how many contacts I have now that live in China.  Evidently I’m a pretty popular guy over there. 

But most disappointedly, I was hoping surfing these networks would help me find like-minded hot babes that I could play love snuggles with.  Sad to say though, I find that I am such a unique individual that it is yea nigh impossible to find someone who thinks just like me. 

But anyways, do me a favor and let me know if you’ve noticed any improvement in load times and performance.  I’ve definitely noticed a difference, but I want to make sure others are seeing it as well. 

For the first time ever, my blog has made over $100 in one month! 

Fitting that I should announce this on Labor Day too.    A few mild traffic spikes and a $10 commission from Clicky helped put me over the top, giving me a total profit of $114.63 for the month of August.

Breaking the $100 ceiling was a significant accomplishment for me, as I read a long time ago that this was the benchmark amount for determining whether your blog has the capacity to bring in a respectable income.  I have a relatively good setup going here to help me achieve that now, so the only thing I need is the traffic to help scale those profits until my goal of making $1,000 a month is finally realized.  If that day ever comes, who knows, from there I might eventually arrive at a time when I can make an actual living just from blogging/writing.  Do I dare to dream?

In the end, I have to believe that with God on my side and a little imagination, all things are possible:

Directly in Hurricane Gustav’s path, that’s where. 

Well… maybe not exactly in its path.  I don’t think I’d be that crazy, but I’d definitely be down there, volunteering wherever I could to help people get ready or escort them out of the area if possible.

And then I might just stick around near the coastline for some snapshots and video that I could upload to my blog. 

Ok maybe I am a little crazy.  I don’t really value my life that much anyway, and since I don’t have a house or a family of my own that I’d be leaving behind, who would miss me? 

Seriously though, this is what I would live for.  Without being tied down to a job or a house, I’d be a free spirit able to roam anywhere in the country, and since my income would be drawn from my blog earnings, I’d have more time to volunteer for any charity driven projects that I come across during my travels.

In fact, if my blog were already enjoying financial success, I’d probably be in Mississippi or Louisiana now, Red-Crossing my way around the states for a while and then driving down to the coastline so I can watch Gustav cross over.  After all, nothing says fun like being trapped in a category 5 hurricane. 

I’m not sure why, there’s just something about massively violent storms that truly warms the cackles of my heart.  I was actually born during a hurricane too, the lights flickering on and off in the hospital while the entire building shook and rumbled from the sheer force of the hurricane winds.  Total chaos while the doctors delivered me, the same way you might expect it to be if it was the Antichrist himself being born.    It was said that the circumstances of my birth was an omen of things to come.  Hee hee.

But seriously… 

I may not be able to achieve my financial goals with this blog anytime soon, but since I will be debt free in a few months, and my site still generates a modest income, if I can’t break free I might at least be able to extend the rope that’s been tying me down, and travel in short spurts here and there instead.  Since I regularly have four days off every other week, I’ll have the opportunity to take extended weekend road trips to wherever I want to go, and I’ll be able to blog about it all too.  For the short term that’s an entirely feasible goal for me, and if I keep paying down my debts at the rate I’m doing, by this time next year it may all become a reality.  Baby steps here, baby steps. 

In the meantime, my prayers go out to all those in the path of Gustav, and hope that the damage won’t be as extensive or as destructive as many of us originally feared.

One thing I can’t stand about the effort to drive more traffic to a site is the almost mandatory need to play suck ass to some high traffic megablog in the hopes that maybe, someday, somehow, they might acknowledge your puny existence for one microsecond and throw a fraction of their gazillion readers and visitors your way.

If I write a post I think is particularly funny, charming and relevant, I email a link to it to a couple of high profile bloggers, then pray, beg, sacrifice chickens and hope hope hopey o’ change hope that it doesn’t disappear into the darkest catacombs of that blogger’s inbox, never to be seen again.

Except that of course it does, because I am a speck of dust who can never evolve to the point that I could successfully grab their attention, though mostly I think it’s because I’m not a hot babe who blogs in her underwear (and leaves up a webcam to prove that she does in fact, blog in her underwear.)

Makes me feel like I’m in high school all over again, trying to get into an exclusive, elitist club that nobody wants me to be in, partly because they weren’t even aware of my existence, and if the time should ever come that they did become aware, then they’d rue the day I was born.  It seems that I can only inspire either indifference or sheer, unadulterated hatred.

All I can really do then is watch from the sidelines while these successful bloggers happily fondle each other and share links and traffic and readers, and yet I myself can only but trudge endlessly in the mud of Google irrelevancy.  It all seems so unfair, because really, all I’m asking for is a microcosm of acknowledgment, just a F*%&ING link or two from your millions-of-hits-a-month blog that takes all of two seconds to post, which would at least give me a fighting chance to succeed.  And I’m not even doing it for me, I’m doing it to help my sick, sick Mommy, who I can’t fully care for unless I can find a way to supplement my already heavily taxed salary.  A link for a life.  That’s all it takes, but noooooo, I’m not in your “speeeeeecial” club see, and worse yet, I’m not a half-naked chick prancing around my blog and uploading sultry looking photos of myself to Flickr either, so therefore I’m not worth the poopie poo on your shoe.

Well screw you big boy, and screw this ridiculous internet caste system we’ve made for ourselves.  A-list blogs and B-List blogs and C-list blogs and whatnot?  F&^% that.  I got my own label: the One-of-a-kind, All-night-long, I-am-your-Daddy’s-Master Blog.

And this club can only fit one member, baby:  Me. 

Having done just about all I could do to optimize my blog for banner advertising, I’m now setting my sights on contextual ad links.  There are a few networks out there for this type of advertising, but Kontera is one of the larger ones that’s been around a few years, so I signed up for them the other day.

You’ve probably seen these links before, as they are usually depicted by a double lined link, which pops up a small ad window when you hover your cursor over it.  Since I don’t use any underlines for links on my blog, the ad links here are denoted by one line instead.  That should help reduce the link clutter while still keeping the ads distinguished enough from normal links.  So far, it looks and loads pretty decently on my site, so I’m happy. 

I may continue to shop around for an alternative network though (such as Infolinks), since Kontera has a few caveats that annoy me.  For one, if you want to block certain keywords from converting into ad links, you have to email them.  If you want to block certain advertisers too, you have to email them.  If you want to limit the number of ad links that show up on a page, yep, you have to email them.  In addition, the ad links don’t always spread out evenly enough on a page, so one post might theoretically contain only one link, while another post contains over 20.  Three years they’ve been around you’d think they’d improve on this by now, but oh well.  If they pay me well enough I won’t complain, especially if I see ads like this:

Heh. 

That’s probably due to my blog not being completely analyzed yet for optimization, but still, that was funniest thing I’ve seen all day.