Expanding My Interweb Empire

I'm a glutton for punishment (or, sometimes just a plain old glutton, but that's another post). I have this bad habit of telling myself that I should post a new blog entry, but being too lazy and procrastinating it. After while I run out of valid procrastinations and end up coming up with some project which invariably involves more work than just writing a stupid post. Then, of course, I invariably complain about how I'm trying to keep too many projects going at once.

This bring us me (via a painfully convoluted introduction) to Ruth's new website: RuthsFood.com. A few weeks a go I was sitting in my office feeling rather guilty about the neglect this sh*tty website suffers from, and thinking I really should do something about it. So, I got right to work and did something totally different with my time. I had made a recipe database for Ruth some years ago, but it wasn't exactly easy to use (I never really made an interface for it) and was basically just not as functional as I would have liked. We had previously discueed the idea of having all of our favorite recipes online so that we could access them when we went into town to grocery shop. Also we liked the idea of being able to share both our favorites, and all of the family recipes that we've inherited from all of my dead relatives (there're many of both). Since I already have Drupal installed (the software that runs Dan's Sh*tty Website) it was actually pretty easy to knock together a new site. This time I figured that something I did should actually have some (miniscule though it is) monetary value, so I put Google AdSense on it.

For the past couple of weeks Ruth has been busy putting new recipes on whenever she gets some free time. And as a first time for me, we've actually had some return on it, okay, so as of this writing its only a dollar-thirty-three, but thats one-hundred-thirty-three cents more than I've made by selling my photos on Zenfolio.

Overall I'm quite pleased because the site logs show that we've had a number of visitors already. The main problem though is that Google has been doing a shoddy job of serving up the ads and I've been having to do a lot of upkeep to prevent crappy "make your teeth whiter" and "how so-and-so lost x number of pounds" ads from displaying. Its something of a losing battle and if Google can't get their act together and provide better ads (more than one of them have actually violated the Terms and Conditions that advertisers are supposed to be subject to) I'll have to try to find some other revenue stream for the site. Its fun to make money on a site, but I won't tolerate a scam being marketed through my creations--one of the many reasons that I chose not to do ads on this site.

I should point out before I go the Ruth has made some money over the years with her own websites, and though I did create those sites, she is responsible for the products sold and therefore the profit. When I say that it is fun to make money on a site, I mean on one that I am more or less responsible for monetizing. She's a damn fine business woman who has been able to turn a profit on her own sites long before I ever produced one red cent.

So now I have yet another site that I'll have to find an excuse to procrastinate doing any work on.