I never cared to have display ads on my website, as it doesn’t cost very much in server power and mostly serves as my own personal archive. Also, I only get a few thousand page views a month. That’s more than I would guess an inconsistent blog with no target audience would get, but certainly not enough to make much money on ads. I’m going to try it out, though, mostly just to see how many pennies it yields.

I installed Google AdSense ads on my blog." class="mt-image-none" height="1389

I didn’t want to be super obnoxious with the ads, as I am still not sure I even want them there even if they make money. Certainly if they make less than my server costs, I’ll just nix them. But perhaps I could bear with them if they at least pay for the ongoing expense. One can hope! Anyway, that experiment is now running.

Late last year I installed a little Amazon Associates widget below my blog entries featuring products I mention in the entries. This arose mostly out of my noticing how addicted to Amazon I am and how often I get the urge to write entries about products I’ve purchased. The referral commission is several percent depending on volume, so it seemed potentially worthwhile. At the very least, it fit in with my political campaign theme, for I could frame it as supporting my candidacy! More often than not, though, I never find the time to write those entries, but I did manage to throw some code together to make it easy when I do.

Amazon Associates widget below my blog entries" class="mt-image-none" height="892

So far that’s only amounted to several dollars, but maybe one day I’ll be a serious blogger and actually try to get traffic. But eh, who has time for that?!

Anyway, the original point of this entry was just to post a silly screenshot from the other day when I was curious if Google had indexed a recent post yet. I did a search for site:votecharlie.com microscope and was at first stunned to see how many results there were. But then I realized there were in fact only two results, hidden among seven ads! That seems a little excessive, but who am I to question Google’s algorithms…

google-search-results-ads.png" class="mt-image-none" height="1282

I’m still not sure how I should post such images. Usually I might post something like that on Twitter, but I really want everything all together on my website and not scattered across random services that will likely not be around forever. But I don’t want my blog riddled with random photos and a couple sentences of comment. I considered making a separate blog to hold those, or at least a new category, but I don’t know. I already have a couple of categories that I hide from the main listing pages since they are personal journal entries that I am not exactly trying to feature publicly. I want them online, though, for archival reasons and in cases where I send links to friends and family. I guess I should start posting the smaller comment entries and see how it goes.