I am semi-”giving in” on the whole Internet advertisement thing – but not totally. If you’ve been reading my posts with any degree of regularity, you’ll know that I really, really, REALLY don’t like internet advertising, and I go through reasonable lengths to ensure that the ads I see are minimal. However, hosting services do cost money, so putting some ads on verStory seems to be the best option. I just whipped up a quick revenue sharing plugin (however the “sharing” part is still in the works, thus you’ll currently only see Google ads on my blog and not on all hosted verStory blogs). At any rate – I want the authors of the other verStory blogs to also be able to make revenue, so – once complete – the Google ads on verStory will be half verStory ads and half the ads of authors of given blogs. I also want to build in some really good positional configuration, so that users can customize the degree of ad visibility, but we’ll see how things go.

Finally, the only way that I can justify this insertion of ads, is to bring attention (again) to an excellent Firefox plugin that will completely block ads (at least the ones that will be on verStory):

Adblock Plus

Another interesting phenomenon is the monetization that seems to have occurred with WordpressMU in general. As far as I can tell, the site is pretty much useless unless you register for a “premium” account, and most authors of WordpressMU plugins have stopped hosting them and (I assume) joined the WordpressMU “premium” dev team. Whether or not I’ll look into that or simply release my plugin for free once it’s complete, I’m really still not sure.

Anyhow – again – happy New Year, and Season’s Greetings, and whatnot

I also took the time to check out the osCommerce site itself and found that they’re very close to lauching osCommerce 3.0 – that’s definitely good news. The development road map looks strikingly to my own, however, and that’s disheartening, as I’m sort of stuck on my own branch / platform at this point. It will be interesting to see the new engine, but all in all I’m not terribly worried that it will be so much better than mine as to make my past development work worthless / pointless, as open source projects are rather notoriously ragtag.

I suppose now, the next moment to look forward to is when I can compare osCommerce 3.0 to my own ecommerce platform. As far as this small step – I’ll post a working example of my heavily modified osCommerce site working once it’s launched live (probably a few weeks).

I made quite a bit of money this last trip to Macao, and this has opened up some new possibilities in my life. I had a cool Valentine’s Day, and I bought Settlers of Catan.

That’s it for now!

Will write more later but at least now there is a post on my blog for February.

Here is the answer:

From this information I have no choice to conclude that South Americans, Africans, and Russians have a hate for me

verStory Alexa Page

I’ve been and will be busy for the next while, but I’ll try to make time to post more interesting stuff up here for your viewing pleasure.

Cheers!

Now, even more of you buffoons can be enlightened.

verStory Alexa Stats

It’s a long way off from breaking 100K, but we’re getting somewhere. To those who are reading my and others’ blog, thanks for reading. The little attention whore inside me is just begging for a proverbial shag from random strangers on the internet.

I’ve got to get moving on this custom wordpress theme. I really wish that wordpress used Smarty, and I was considering integrating Smarty into it, but… well, I’ll see if someone’s already done that before considering further.

Cheers.

I didn’t even take Canada day off, but I’m taking Independence Day off; please don’t scorn me, fellow countrymen. There is a reason for this though. That reason is the Mexican buffet that is being held at the Hilton on Friday. You see, this special event only happens a couple of times a year, and being that there are no other places in Chongqing that make Mexican food, I consider this to be sufficient pretext for treason.

So yes – I’m going to be eating Mexican food on the fourth of July as apposed to poutine, bacon, and Tim Horton’s coffee on the first of July. I shall post photos in good time.

After some initial DNS issues, we’re good to go.

Barbara and Kauboy have already started some stuff up on their blogs, and I expect this site should start picking up decent traffic soon.

This stuff being set up has come at a good time, as a major emo-bomb just went off with me, and I’m sure you’ll all enjoy reading about just how emo I am. Everyone loves a good drama show.

Happy blogging.