I am tagging all my previous blog entries. It is a long, tedious, yet rewarding process. Reading my old writings is like having time machine to the past. I am surprise by how I thought 4-5 years ago. I can tell something about me has changed and some other things never change. One thing that changes is my writing was really poor back then. I made lots of spelling mistakes. That was before Firefox comes with the spell checker feature. I guess Firefox really really helps me a lot in using the right word.
I can’t tag too many post in one day before I get bored and lost my patient. I can tag at most one month worth of blog entries a day while I am watching TV. I already finish tagging all entries newer than 2008. I am now working my way up starting form the first entry in 2005. With the current rate of tagging, it will take me a month to tag all the posts. There is no hurry to get all the posts tagged, I can take my time and enjoy the time passage to the past.
I just signed up for Google Adsense for my blog. Adsense is an service to display small online advertisement on your website. As you may see the Google ads in the column on the right hand side under the Google Adsesne.
I am very reluctant to display ads on my site for a very long time. I don’t need the extra money to maintain the site nor my blog have much traffic to give me any meaningful amount of revenue. Most important, I don’t like ads spoiling the layout of my site or interfere with visitors reading my posts. Just like Google advertisement on its own search engine, Adsense is not intrusive. It only display a few text links and it can blend in pretty well with my layout.
I don’t expect to get much from the ads. I don’t know when I will get enough clicks on the sponsored links to reach the payment threshold and receive the cheque from Google. But since I have some content with a few readers, why don’t I put them into good use. I will donate whatever I got from Adsense to the Church.
Let’s see how well Adsense works out on my site. If it works great, maybe I should persuade all my friends who has a blog sign up with Adsense and donate the ads payment to a charity. The donation amount may be very tiny, but free money is still better than no money.
Winter is over, spring has come. Time is passing fast, a quarter of the year already over. One of my new year resolution is to renovate my website. It is about time to start my spring renovation project. Just like any other project, renovating horace.org is temporary endeavor with an end time. I have to list the scope of work, a clear objective and a feasible work plan. If I do not have any plan, this project may drag on forever and never get done. Here is the first cut of my work plan:
Update wordpress to 2.7.1 – done
Install useful plugins and widgets to aid my work and enhance the presentation of the site.
Change the theme and give the website a new look. I should not repeat the mistake of creating a theme from scratch like last time. It is too time consuming, I should install a ready made theme and custom it for my taste.
Manage the categories. I will split category to have a better organization of my blog entries. I shall finally fill in the category description.
Update the links on my blog. It is very out of date.
Add tags to old articles to aid reader navigate my site.
Update the static pages in the site and finish writing the information page.
Changing the books and anime page to a database format (considering)
Install a wiki to use as a knowledge management system for my philosophy studies.
Many writers often develop writer’s block after they have been writing for a while. They found their creativity dries up, could not write even a single sentence. I have been writing blog for almost 3 years, recently I found I have a mild symptom of writer’s block. In some day, I just could not think of anything. I still write TV, anime and book reviews. Writing review is relatively easy, the theme is already there and I just have to write down what I think. Putting a topic to write is the difficult part. Well, it is not that I am less creative, rather hold myself to a have higher standard now. I don’t my writing merely repeating what others say. I want to make my own point of view that is original. The problem is that I seems to start repeating myself. What’s the point of saying the same thing of similar issues many times? Maybe I should shift the emphasis of my writing. Instead of always trying to come up with new ideas, I should be content with my old ideas and focus on refining my writing skill. The same idea can be present in many different ways, some are more efficient and elegant than others. I should explore different style of writing other random scribble. I think I have hit a plateau in my writing skill, in order to have progress, I should learn about more advance writing skills. Now, the question is where can I find those materials.
