Posted by Jeremy G. on 27th, 2008
My Thoughts on Gas Prices
I wish gas prices were $6, hell, $8 a gallon. You know why? Because then companies would stop fucking around and put all their effort into inventing a car that gets 100 miles per gallon. That’s all I want, just 100. Don’t even think for a second that it can’t be done. It hasn’t been done yet because A. No company cares enough to devote 100% of their energy and resources to making it happen, and B. As gas prices rise, oil companies are reaping hundreds of billions of dollars, squeezing every last penny out of every man, woman, and child in the modern world, and I’m sure they are paying people off left and right to keep it that way.
Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Right this second there is this little robot tootling around in the dirt of Mars digging little holes and making little sand castles and analyzing soil. Think about that, it’s going on RIGHT…NOW… And you telling me that my little Saturn Ion cannot possibly go from point A to point B for less than what it costs right now? Please.
I hope gas prices hits 8 dollars per gallon, because then people will CARE enough to come up with a solution.
Posted by Jeremy G. on 27th, 2008
Well, I’ve had my site up for two and a half months now, and I think this is a good time to stop, take a look back, and reflect.
What I’ve Learned
1. It takes a lot of effort and a ton of time to create and maintain your own site. Getting a layout to be just right can be a huge bitch if you have no experience (I didn’t.) Coming up with the time and motivation to post regularly feels like a full time job sometimes, because even when you aren’t sitting down to write a post, your mind is constantly jumping around to new post ideas. Also, marketing your site takes just as much time and effort as producing the content! This aspect of being a webmaster really blew me away in the beginning. I had no idea you needed to put so much time and effort into just getting your name out there. Lesson learned :P
2. Want to make money? Don’t hold your breath. The monetary return for all my efforts has so far been pure dogshit. I’ve learned that for making money online, there are three main ways. Sell your own product or service, sell someone else’s product or service, and the easiest to set up yet lowest earning way of them all, put ads up and pray your readers click on them. For a personal blog, you don’t really have anything to sell, and you can put links up to Amazon.com items or something similar, but what are the chances someones going to click the link and buy the item? Pretty tiny. So this leaves us with number 3, put ads up and pray people click them. My “click through ratio” so far has been 0.32%. That means, for every 300 visitors, 1 clicks an ad. Mmm mmm, eat up that dogshit, oops you misses some, here ya go, enjoy! For my hundred or so hours I’ve put into making this blog a reality, I have made exactly $7.78. Looking back, maybe I should have just walked down to McDonalds, worked for 1 hour, and spend the other 99 hours learning how to knit or something.
3. Once you know what you are doing, it becomes much easier to set up second or third site. I already have about 3 more sites I’m considering putting up, and it will take me about 1/3 the time for the new ones. When you set up a self hosted web page the first time, it takes forever to figure every little detail out, but once you know how, it’s a breeze in comparison.
4. Content is King. Just because you have a blog does not mean readers will come flocking to it. Even close friends and family, let alone strangers out on the net, need a reason to come back day after day, and that reason is quality content. Be interesting. Be funny. Be inventive. Whatever it is, make sure it’s of a high quality.
Spring Cleaning
So, my To-Do list is as follows…
- Tweak layout
- Delete a few elements to make load times faster
- Change add positions, and remove them from the main page
- Rewrite most posts and optimize them for search engines
- Less stress, more fun. Post what I want to post and not worry about anything else
Remember, if you guys have any questions about Hawaii, or want me to blog about anything at all, just tell me in the comments and I’ll most likely do it. See you all next time.
Posted by Jeremy G. on 18th, 2008
My New Comment Pluggin
I just wanted to let you guys all know that today I implemented a cool new pluggin. It’s a comment related pluggin which allows you to directly reply to any comment. I bet a bunch of you are going “huh?” right now, but let me explain it like this: If a post has, say, 10 comments and I want to reply to the first one, without this pluggin my response would come as the 11th comment so it would be really hard to follow along with a conversation. But with this pluggin, the reply to someones comment will reply right below the comment itself, making it really easy to follow conversations, and make it a lot easier to interact with me and anyone else who comments on this blog.
Still confused? Just try it 
On the bottom of every comment is a “reply to this comment” button, so give it a go.
