(There will be very little techical content here; if that’s what you are looking for, move along)

So, I updated Blaag to use Genshi for templating (still in it’s own branch), which was a pretty pleasant experience; I cleared out some of the worst code from blaag.py and ended up with a single html template instead of a host of snippets.

I also added a left column to the template (should probably make it optional) so that only blog links live in the right column. This made me go over the 960px with that I used to have, but a quick look at my visitor statistics claim that most of the visitors won’t be adversly affected by that – I still intend to add a lite/mobile alternate style, since I do want anyone to be able to read the blog.

On the topic of visitors, you are a curious bunch, but perhaps what could be expected of readers of a tech blog: 50% use Chrome, 21% Firefox, 12% Safari, 6% Android browser, 6% ’Mozilla Compatible’, 2% Opera, 1.5% IE, and then a gaggle of uncommon browsers. 31% use Windows, 30% OSX, 18% Linux of some sort, and the rest are mainly mobile OSes. About 10% of users block Google Analytics, accoring to the server logs.

Also on the topic of visitors, I thought that hey, I have a lot of visiors, I should be able to get some cash out of the hours spent and maybe make hosting break-even (rather, move haard.se to a host of it’s own)! I figure that any readers that take offense at ads are in the 10% that block Analytics, and will block the ads, so nothing is stopping me.

Well, I tried to read up a bit on ad programs and ads on tech blogs, but there’s not a whole lot of signal in all the noise that turns up; mainly it advertising for ad programs, and ’this works/does not work, because I say so’. Figures, or even mildly solid-looking arguments are missing. Right now I tossed a AdSense add there just because it was quick and I could force a look and feel; I suspect it will attract about zero clicks. I could allow a banner, but AFAIK I cannot then preemtively block ugly, animated or just wrong ads. In addition, it seems that the AdSense ads are synchronous, slowing down the site to show ads which is wrong in itself.; nobody visits the site to view ads, after all.

So, I’ll probably have to look for another program (or just not have ads), but I have no idea what that would be, since everyone is so damn secret about their figures. Right now belive I have about 50K visitors a month who does not block javascript in general or Google in particular (50K since 8th of february, when the blog went live for ’real’), but I have no idea whatsovever where that puts me in the great scheme of things since people don’t seem to talk about their visitor numbers, and I have no idea where I should look for ads that a) are at least somewhat interesting to developers b) does not slow down page loading c) Pays enough to make it worth the overhead of maintaining them for a non-webmaster.

Meh.