theratshack.net

I was on a smoke break at work talking to a coworker who was talking about his site. I was listening kinda half-assedly when he said that his site was making a load of money. When I asked him about it, he said that Google was doing advertising and depending on the options selected, you could make money off of advertisements on your site.

Now, the instant he said “advertising”, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I started getting concerned. I had horrible flashbacks of popups, annoying flashy add banners, Flash based advertisements (like the ones that haunt CNN, and definately did not want that mess. But as I asked questions, he told me that the advertisers that did that were all the wrong ones and that advertising on my site is as non-invasive as the typical Google Ad-words advertisements that you see in Gmail and other Google sites.

I’ve always been very skittish about the “A” word as I, like so many other millions of people do not like getting the advertising two by four across the face when browsing a site looking for information, but I have to say that I was intrigued by the thought of my site one day being able to pay for its own hosting.

I’ve thought about it and although I have remained ad-free for the last seven years, I have been wanting to see if I could at least make the $10 needed to host the sites I own so that way I could keep theratshack.net alive and running for the many years to come.

But since this is not just a simple “Let’s do it!” thing, I want to reach out to the people that actually browse the site. What do you think?

I will be testing the Google advertisements and seeing what impact they have on my site, both from a usability standpoint and from an administration standpoint. I want the advertisements to be subtle and not interfere with the site’s use. I have already come up with the following list of things I want to ensure continue as I go through this change:

With this in mind, I want you to know that this is an experiment and hopefully the results are positive and do not impede nor hinder my site’s operation, navigation or accessibility.

The only question I have is would this classify as selling out or do you think it’s a good way to make some extra cash, even if all it does is pay for the hosting (or less?)

I’m interested in your comments!

Well, the files have been moved, the SQL unpacked and just rolling out the new carpet of changes and stuff. I’m happy to say that we look to have survived the transition from the home cable server to the new shared server at HostGator.com.

Lots of changes are in the mix as I iron out the kinks and squash bugs in the site. (Granted a twenty pound sledge helps with the squashing of bugs. )

Mr. Carey’s line from “The Mask” is definitely appropriate as I try to bring this site into something that looks like it was designed in this century.

If you’re still jonesing for the old TheRatShack, you can check out this link but I can’t guarantee how long those files are going to stay up as I work to get them absorbed into my hacking/modding site, YourWarrantyIsVoid.com

So, with that in mind, bear with me as you fight with the occasional site error, or “Page Cannot Be Displayed” or whatever errors you may come up with because I’m in the background scratching my head trying to make this site work for you.