Lost in the Blogosphere

Welcome to blogging, PenDragon. It can be a fun ride.

Do you have any specific questions? If so, please feel free to ask, although I would also suggest browsing through the threads here as we've covered a lot of ground. Especially check out the Templates, Tags, and Techie thread - we don't make eyes glaze over too too often!

Hi Lee

Love the title of your blog! Kim

I use AdSense, but I'm still undecided about it. A while ago, I was against it, but I'm poor and that changes a lot of ideas Please feel free to look at my blog and tell me if the ads are in the way or not. I'm not making a lot of money from them, so there not really important.

To keep up with how many readers you have, consider installing a sitemeter. Go here:

Site Meter

These are free, work well, and are easy to install - heck, you put in the name of your blog, its host (i.e. Blogger, Live Journal) and the site meter installs automatically. There are a number of styles you can choose from as well, and you can set the privacy level (whether or not you want readers to be able to access your stats when they click on the site meter icon on your blog).

It's a handy tool. You get all kinds of stats like total number of visitors, where they are from, which urls referred them, and projections for future blog traffic based on what you're currently getting. You can also keep Site Meter from adding your own visits to your blog into the totals (which gives a more accurate picture of your blog traffic, if you're one to check your blog for comments multiple times a day ).

Welcome, and good luck with your blog! I paid it a visit, and it looks nice.

(edited for clarity - my morning coffee is still taking effect)

Thanks Pen,

The technorati tags are used to index posts into the technorati search engine. People type in the tag in the engine and posts around the Blogosphere with that tag show up according to the most recent posts. I used a wordpress add-on to do mine by here is a handy guide to adding your own tags.

Pen, Adsense is a good thing but you should not expect too much from it. Adsense wont make you rich but if you can some visitors then it will give you some money every month. I also suggest that you get a Sitemeter as soon as you can.

Welcome PenDragon!

I agree with Razib about Adsense. It's really easy to integrate into your site and you can customize it to look like your blog, but until you have some decent traffic, you'll barely get pennies from it.

It is a way to monitor the improvement of your traffic, though. And every once in a while I have a good day (translated - $1.25 from Adsense)

And of course, folks like Dooce earn a living this way.

Welcome to the Blogger's Board, Pendragon!

It sounds like the ads you chose may be too wide? Maybe you can change the pixel width in the adsense selections. That happens to me sometimes when I put a really long link or wide pic.

I just looked at your site and the sidebar looks right on my computer. YOu could choose an ad that is the same width as your post column though. I'm not sure which one that is, but you can play around a bit. It might be one of the horizontal banner choices.

Welcome, pendragon.