The abuse thread

I am so bogged down in work…I’m clinging on to the faint hope of liberation as all my deadlines are past next Tuesday (and they will be met! They must!), but until then, I’m thoroughly tied up and sweating over a gazillion things that have to be finished right now. So blogging will be light for a bit.

Until I’ve leapt past the work essentials though, I’d like to keep you occupied, so I’m open for insults. Vent over my failures and laziness by calling me names in the thread below. Try to be creative; zoological insults are particularly appreciated, and please avoid trite scatology.

I’m going back to the word processor, so the time to start is…NOW.

(Also on Sb)

Ed explains everything

Have you been wondering what the deal is with the advertising here? Ed Brayton summarizes the situation.

Also, several people have suggested putting up a PayPal donation button or something here. I’m a little reluctant: there has also been talk of using donations to replace the ads, and I don’t think that is easily done — let’s not add any headaches to the process by trying to get some kind of variable approach to ad revenues. I can’t say that you’d be able to donate and I’d make the ads magically disappear for you. Also, one of the ways that we’d like to get better, targeted ads that would benefit the whole of the network is to be able to use the overall traffic as a draw…and if the single biggest traffic generator finds a way to cut himself out of the ad cycle, that would hurt everyone else.

It’s weird. I’m taking a socialist perspective to advertising.

Please stop

Every day, I get a few dozen emails telling me that there are inappropriate ads splattered on the site: people love to send me screencaps of that “Christian singles” ad.

I know.

You can stop telling me now.

They’re bad ads, we all know. Setting up this network wasn’t cheap: it took investment in a server, and most of all, paying out money to people who knew what they were doing in order to set it up. We’re currently in a small financial hole and Ed Brayton is scrambling to get us out of it as quickly as possible, so we can be at least a little bit profitable. We got what we could to bring us some return, while Ed is off shopping the network as a platform for more appropriate advertising. We’ve only been live for a bit more than a month! Be patient. Tolerate (or better yet, ignore) the noise on the sidebar as we try to grow.

But you can stop telling me what I already know, OK?

Did you notice my new haircut?

Yes, I got one the other day, and several observant students noted that I was less shaggy and bear-like.

But did you notice the FtB site revamp? Various things got juggled around, partly in preparation for a new ad service that will be stepping in soon (hopefully, with more appropriate ads), but also to make everyone else’s site almost as pretty as mine. I’ll be tinkering further with the site appearance in the future, but it’s got to wait a while — I’m neck-deep in teaching and also a major grant proposal that has to be done before the end of the month.