I’m not under the illusion that putting ads on my blog is going to let me quit my day job. I did it more as an experiment. And if I can make enough money to pay for an extra night at the movies every couple of months, why not?

If you want to follow in my footsteps and “monetize” your own blog, here’s what you have to do:

1. Create a blog (or other web site) with plenty of content. You’ll have a hard time getting ads on a site that’s under construction.
2. Sign up for an account at Google AdSense. There are other ways to place ads on your site, but AdSense is a pretty good way to get started.
3. If you’re a blogger, find an AdSense-ready theme. There are dozens available for WordPress. I chose Ad Flex Blog, which was the first one mentioned on this list of AdSense Ready WordPress themes. As of this writing (August 9, 2008) I’m using mostly default settings, so my blog looks pretty generic. As I have time, I’ll fiddle with the 100+ options in the theme settings to personalize it.
4. Figure out where in the theme you  have to insert the code that’s generated for the ad blocks you create in AdSense. (You don’t tell AdSense what ads to put on your site. You provide the equivalent of an empty billboard, and you let AdSense know that your space is available for rent.) For example, in the Ad Flex Blog settings within the WordPress admin console, there’s a field called “Ad Banner Link Unit Code.” That’s where I pasted the javascript code for my 728 x 15 pixel billboard. That’s the thin strip that says “Ads by Google” right above “The Schlog.” At the moment I have two other billboards, at the top and bottom of each page.

That’s pretty much it. After that, you just log into AdSense now and then to see how much money you’ve made. In the first week, I’ve made a whopping $5.67 from a total of 4 clicks on ads I’ve displayed. Like I said, I’m not quitting my day job.

Despite Google’s product name, some of the ads make no sense at all. For example, there are a lot of references in my blog to my own name, David Schrag. As a result, I’m seeing ads in the link for “David Hasselhoff,” “David Beckham Pictures,” and “David Bay” (whoever he is). And now that I’ve mentioned their names again, I’ll probably see even more ads. But I’m also seen an ad for a company that will be offering SharePoint training in Boston, and that’s something my readers might actually be interested in.

So what do you think? Are you impressed? Aghast? Dismayed but resigned to the creeping commercialization of the web? Have no problem with the ads but think the new theme is butt-ugly? Remember, feedback no longer requires registration, so let’s hear it.

The problem was that the Pages value was set to No. I clicked on Update Account Configuration and stepped through the wizard without changing any settings. My blog’s capabilities were downloaded into WLW and I can now create pages, add categories on the fly, see my category list hierarchically, and probably do many other things I haven’t discovered yet. I had to repeat this step for my "personal" blog, The Schrug.

Anyway, you can read about the new features and download it here. Be sure to read about known issues here. And here’s a picture of the new GUI:

Can’t comment on how it actually works yet. This is the first post I’ve created with it.

Network Connection Error
Error attempting to connect to weblog at:

http://davidschrag.com/schlog/xmlrpc.php

The remote server returned an error: (406) Not Acceptable.

I did some research and found this suggestion at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/121259?replies=4:

create an empty text file.

put this in it:

IfModule mod_security.c
SecFilterEngine Off
/IfModule

[Ed. note: The first and third lines are supposed to be contained in code brackets, but my HTML coding skills are too rusty to remember how to get the greater than / less than symbols to appear as text in this post rather than being interpreted as code.]

Save the file and upload it to your wp-admin/ directory. Rename it to .htaccess (with the .)

See if that helps.

It didn’t. So I added that code to the end of the .htaccess file in my /public_html/ directory. That did the trick.

The most recent site outage was caused by a complete server crash — one that required ANHosting to move my site (and many others) to a new hard drive. When it came back up, I noticed that at least one recent Schlog post and the entire contents of The Schrug were missing. I contacted tech support to find out what was wrong. They said:

The backup of your account was done two weeks ago. Sorry, but the latest backup update failed, so the recent updates you made weren’t backed up

Thank you for your understanding

Are you friggin’ kidding me? You back up your servers every two weeks? And when a backup fails, you don’t immediately re-run it?

Fortunately, because I use an off-line editor (Windows Live Writer) to compose my blog posts, I had local copies of everything. (Hey, DR conference folks — do I get some props for that?) Still, I was more than a little ticked off, so just moving to another host wasn’t going to satisfy me.

ANHosting has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. It seemed at first blush that they had certainly failed to deliver on their promise. But as I thought about and researched it more, I realized that I didn’t really know what a 99.9% uptime guarantee really means to a web hosting company. I sent the following e-mail to their sales department (not letting on that I was already a customer):

You say you have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, yet your terms of service say you do not promise uninterrupted service. Can you explain precisely how your guarantee works? What exactly are you guaranteeing, and what is the remedy if you fail to deliver on your promise?

They replied:

Yes, we do guarantee 99.9% uptime, the clause in the TOS covers that .1%

That said, things do happen, such as hardware failures, etc that can take your site down for more than .1% of the time and if that does happen your account will be credited based on the downtime that you experience, that is how the guarantee works. Before I finish sending you this E-mail, I thought I would write a little about who midPhase is and why you should host your website with us.

Then they added a bunch of information about their experience, awards, yadda yadda yadda.

I wrote back:

I should have been more specific. Uptime is guaranteed as 99.9% of what? A day? A month? A year? For example, if you say you will be up 99.9% of the year, you could still be down for an entire business day, as long as you were up the rest of the year. On the other hand, if you promise to be up 99.9% of every day, then that’s only 1.5 minutes of downtime allowed per day. At what interval are your statistics calculated?

And are you saying that the credit is based on the amount of downtime and on the standard monthly fee? For example, suppose my site is down for three hours, or 12.5% of one day. And let’s say that’s enough to trigger the guarantee provision. Do I understand that I would get a credit equal to the monthly fee times the percentage of the month that I was down? So that would be 12.5% of one day divided by 30 days times $6.95, or 2.8 cents. Is that right? If my site is down for three hours, you’ll give me a credit of 2.8 cents? And if my site is down for an entire day, I get a refund of 23 cents?

I love being snarky. By this time, though, they figured out that I was already a customer. So in an attempt to save my business, they wrote:

The uptime guarantee is measured on a monthly basis, and resets each month. I have applied a free month credit to your account which will automatically be applied to your next invoice.

Sorry, midPhase. That $6.95 credit is too little, too late. I’ve already signed up with HostICan, another WordPress-endorsed hosting site that basically gives me the same thing for the same money.

The transfer process was a little trickier than I anticipated. I got some conflicting opinions from a couple different folks at HostICan tech support about how to do it. Options included using the WordPress export/import feature, an FTP transfer of the desired directories, and a third that I don’t recall. I tried a couple times and it didn’t work. Fortunately, HostICan tech support also gave me the option of letting them do all the work for me, and I took them up on it. I had to give them my username and password, but there was nothing at the davidschrag.com site at midPhase that was confidential, and I didn’t use the same username and password at any other site. So there was really no risk in letting HostICan handle it.

There was still a hiccup or two left after they transferred the data. In theory I should have been able to view the new site using an IP address before changing the DNS record hosting for davidschrag.com from midPhase to HostICan. But in practice I had to move the DNS records first and then refer back to the old midPhase site by IP address to pick up a few straggling bits of code.

At this point, though, I seem to be fully up and running at HostICan, and I thank Ted David at HostICan support for working with me on this over the weekend.

If you notice a problem with either blog, please let me know right away. It’s quite possible that something was lost in the shuffle.

• Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader version 7 need patches
• Review of 5 blogging platforms, including WordPress (which runs The Schlog)
• Review of teeny, tiny Fujitsu notebook
• “35 Things Every PC User Should Know,” most importantly:
• How to secure your wireless network
• Learning to use the Event Viewer
• Troubleshooting wireless connectivity failures
• Advanced utilities for do-it-yourself PC troubleshooters
• Alternatives to e-mail for sending large files (and see also SendThisFile)
• Internet Browser Add-ons (use at your own risk; there are so many unhelpful browser add-ons out there that I am somewhat reluctant to advocate any supplements to IE or Firefox)

That’s about it, unless you’re using your PC for music, photography, and video.

Turns out that when a series of posts are rendered on a single browser page, you can’t expect each new post to start off with a new font tag in HTML. It just continues displaying in whatever font the previous post last used, unless the previous post took care to turn its font off at the end. Somehow, either through human or software error, one of the posts was missing the HTML code to turn the small font off.

For a better idea of what I’m talking about, see the WordPress FAQ.

Example: This post includes a link to a file that’s available for public download: SCHRAG’s Five P’s of Computer Network Management