An inauspicious event

I’ve scheduled a post to go Live on Altneuland on Saturday night (i.e. after Shabbat). What’s the big deal? It will be the 100th post there since I started. It’s also almost exactly one month to go until the 1st anniversary of my leaving the corporate world to write full time (15 June 2007).

So where am I?

On the positive side, the blog has stabilised, I’m posting regularly (usually 3 times a week), reading lots, got into quite a good discipline. Visitor and page numbers are creeping up steadily. Very positive feedback from guys like Joel Katz (Religion and State in Israel) and a couple of others (thanks Mom).

On the negative side, I’m bogged down with trying to keep up with my reading, haven’t caught up my backlog of admin and capture. Spending too little time on actual writing and research. I feel totally ignorant about much of the technology I’m using and still have so much to learn about many of the things I’m writing about. I’m battling to break through the 10 hits a day ceiling, still nowhere near $10 each in revenue from AdSense and Amazon. Still very few comments. Still battling to achieve some visibility and recognition. The J-Blogosphere mostly sucks.

I’m by no means ready to give up (in fact I feel like I’ve just started), but the whole process is more difficult and taking a whole lot longer than I ever imagined. I estimated 6-12 months to achieve a breakthrough. Yeah, right…

Well, here’s to the next 100 posts and 12 months. I really believe I’m strongly placed to grow from here. Some routines will have to change, and I still have a steep learning curve ahead, but I’ll get there!

Also, I could never go back to where I was, in any sense.

Day notes (14 April 2008)

The J-Blogosphere is closed: Go get your own

At first I thought it was my imagination, but I’m definitely finding the J-Blogosphere (Jewish blogging community) to be something of a closed shop. Despite filling in all the right online forms and sending e-mail messages to the right addresses weeks ago, I haven’t been added to at least two aggregators/directories:

JewishBlogging.com - the home of Jewish blogs, Israeli blogs and all blogs of Jewish interest

J-Blogosphere (Jewish blogging) community on The Truth Laid Bear (TTLB)

The Truth Laid Bear

Also no acknowledgement yet from Bluish Joggers, but I know they’re dealing with a backlog.

Bluish Joggers

I don’t want to come across as a conspiracy theorist, but I can’t help thinking that the exclusion is deliberate and has to do with my not being on the political/religious right, whose adherents appear to dominate the J-Blogosphere currently.

We’ll see; I haven’t totally given up yet.

Damn, I'm good!

While capturing one of my old notebooks into OneNote, I came across this note written in December 2006/January 2007, i.e. a good 15 months before the latest crisis in JAFI's Aliya Dept.:

I think I'm correct in asserting that almost all remaining Diaspora communities are now in Western-style democracies. Unless these societies collapse under the weight of Islamism, illegal immigration (indigestible) and the reaction (including anti-Semitism), no more significant Aliya is likely to take place.

Code of conduct for the territories?

Because I live in the Diaspora, I'm not always going to understand what works and what doesn't work in Israel, so this is just a suggestion. What about a voluntary code of conduct/petition undertaking not to live in territories occupied but not annexed by Israel, as well as calling on the government to either annex or withdraw all civilians and their infrastructure from those areas?

SA Jewish Report subscription

I am probably one of the few people in the country who actually subscribes to the SA Jewish Report, which is otherwise distributed free. This is a hangover from our time in the South of JHB (where no distribution takes place), and also to ensure reliable delivery of the paper. Yeah, right. There have been a few problems in the past, but normally quickly resolved. This time around, delivery hasn't happened for the last month at least. I've made a couple of calls to Johnnic (now Avusa Publishing?), and each time receive assurance that the problem will be resolved and I will be credited for the missing issues. Still no delivery. I fully expect, however, to receive a call from their call centre when the time comes, asking if I'd like to renew my subscription!

(Avusa Publishing? I guess everyone has to have a politically correct ethnic name to trade under in SA these days.)

Alexa Site Information

In the interests of quicker page loading, I’m getting rid of the Alexa code/widget on Altneuland, for now anyway. It’s not reflecting any meaningful stats, and my ranking is nothing to brag about (yet).

altneuland.info - Site Information from Alexa

Anything that doesn’t add value to the blog needs to go, so more are likely to follow.

Google AdSense advert placement

I just spent a couple of hours (mainly because of my slow connection) tuning my Google AdSense ad placement and more or less standardising across my blogs. These were my guidelines:

• No Google ads in Sidebar. From what I can gather, this is the least successful spot for ad placement. I can rather use this valuable real estate for other affiliate and other widgets.
• Header. Try a text link ad for now, maybe change to a banner ad.
• Posts. Main advertisements will be in the form of adverts between posts. Set to every 3rd post, so that ads are evenly spread over Home Page (9 posts).
• Footer. Text link ad after last/only post on page.
• Referral ad for Google and related products only in e-commerce section of sidebar.

Given the Google AdSense three item per page limit, all ads will show on individual post pages, but only three (header and two post adverts?) for Home Page and other combined views.

Common widget for all Google Referral ads

As usual when it comes to Blogger, I’m struggling to find the right (or any) place to log a bug report, request or suggestion. What I’d like to suggest is that they make available an ad format common to all the Google Referral products. As things stand at the moment, there’s one set of advert formats for these products:

• Firefox plus Google Toolbar; Google AdSense; Google AdWords; Google Pack

And another set for these:

• Google Apps; Google Checkout

They’re mutually exclusive; there’s no one size fits all. I can only guess it’s because they have different markets…

Blogger Separator Widget

Something else I’d like to get onto Blogger’s wishlist; a widget to use as a separator between groups of items in the sidebar. Basically a text widget, but with a Title field only.

(These were originally intended to be separate postings (or the outlines of separate postings).  Right now we're dealing with another Eskom blackout, so they'll have to go in as one set of day notes.)

More adventures on the J-Blogosphere

JewishBlogging.com

I’ve just had another go at adding Altneuland to the JewishBlogging.com blog aggregator site. This is probably about the 4th and final time I’ll attempt to get listed. As on the previous occasions, I was given an acknowledgement saying:

Blog Added Successfully.

Your blog has been submitted successfully. We will process it and publish it if eligible as soon as possible. Thank you.

This is what it says in their FAQ:

JewishBlogging.com FAQ

How do I add my Jewish blog or Jewish news service?

It's very easy to add your Jewish blog or related Jewish news service to Jewishblogging.com - just click on the link at the top of the page that says Add A Blog. Fill in your details and then we will review your submission. We aim to include new blogs within 48 hours of being notified of them. Of course, submitting a blog to Jewishblogging.com does not mean we will include it. If your blog is full of hate for example, then we will not include it.

Based on that, I’m not really sure what’s disqualifying me from making it through the process. Altneuland is not “full of hate”, unless you count my justifiable broadsides against Orthodoxy, and is now included on all other J-Blog aggregator sites.

I see there is a Contact Us page, so that will be my last stop before writing them off.

JewishBlogging.com - the home of Jewish blogs, Israeli blogs and all blogs of Jewish interest

The Truth Laid Bear

Also finally got around to querying why my posts as reflected on The Truth Laid Bear are only up to the end of February. I’m sure it has something to do with my Site Meter stuff. (I can’t figure out from the TTLB site whether or not I should include my ID or allow them to detect it. I’ve tried both.) Anyhow, I’ve now logged a formal “support ticket” for the problem.

One last “also finally”. I sent an e-mail message to the Community Administrator (Ezzie of SerandEz) of the J-Blogosphere Jewish blogging community on The Truth Laid Bear, asking for Altneuland to be included there as well.

Documentation

I was going to say more about documenting the code snippets and widgets for Altneuland, in preparation for implementing a version of the 3-column Garland Theme Blogger Template.

I’ll have to pick this up again tomorrow; my eyes are starting to take strain.

Pimp my Blog: J-Blogosphere

Israelated - English Israel blogs | Israel Related - An English blogging community on Israel and Israeli culture

If I recall correctly, this was the first Blog Aggregator (is that the correct term?) I added Altneuland to. Although I wasn’t too sure about some of the input being requested, it worked. My subsequent attempts to add myself to the rest of the J-Blogosphere were a lot less successful; I hope to take up that quest again shortly.

In checking back on the site, I noticed that none of my posts since early September 2007 were reflected. It seems that converting to FeedBurner broke my feed to Israelated, although I understood that that wasn’t supposed to happen. I updated the feed details and my later posts are now reflected. Pity about that; my modest “counter” of 229 reads (across all postings) might have been considerably higher.

I also subscribed to the “Feed for comments on this post”, but it looks as if it will only give me comments for Altneuland as a whole, not for the individual postings.

Overall, being on Israelated has been good for me. I’m listed here:

Altneuland | Israelated - English Israel blogs

My rating? 9/10. My only criticism is the slightly confusing interface.