As it’s my blog and I’ll indulge if I want, a note on two changes here at the blog (likely uninteresting) and some of the reasons behind them (almost certainly uninteresting). The two changes:
1) As from now(ish, see below), no more adverts on the blog.
2) I’m looking to give the blog a long-overdue facelift.
There are several reasons behind the first change, here’s background: Over the years, I’ve noticed that when IKN has got under the skin of the nasty end of Vancouver*, one of the responses is a sudden uptick in attacks on the Adsense Ads on the blog. The typical MO is for the slighted scumbag is to make dozens of clicks on a single advert, then go onto another machine somewhere and do it again (and wowsers they get obsessive, some make hundreds of clicks on an advert for multiple hours at a time). The next day, this is the kind of auto-mail you get from Google:
In the last 24 hours:
- New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies
were found. To resolve the issues, you can either remove the violating
content and request a review, or remove the ad code from the violating
pages.
Further details on enforcements can be found in the AdSense Help Center. To learn more about our program policies, please view the AdSense Program Policies.
Result? Typically Google restricts publication of adverts on a specific post, every so often the main page ads are frozen a day. Nobody cares and the block comes off, but that only happens when I respond to the auto-mail from Google and explain the situation. Thing is, the combo of getting bored with responding to the auto-mails over the years and the limited amount of money from the adverts (approx U$200 to U$250 a month) has got too much, along with the fact that adverts aren’t that popular among readership anyway. So this morning when I got the auto-mail as seen above I decided not to respond. Instead this time I went back office, took all adverts off the blog and they’re staying off for good. As it happens, that’s not quite as easy as you’d imagine and it’ll take two or three weeks for all ads to disappear, but by September the blog should be free and clean. The money they generate isn’t enough to justify their existence any longer, as from today I turn my back on the annoying Google paperwork that hits every so often and in the process, the blog gets a little bit nicer for you.
As for the second change coming, it kind of follows on from the first but it’s been on my mind for a while. This IKN blog is stuck in a format that looked dated five years ago and though a new look and visual upgrade has never been a high priority, perhaps now is the time. More importantly, as I’m a total duffer on design I’d be willing and happy to pay a third party to create a decent website and bring IKN kicking and screaming into the Covid-19 world. So if you know or are that person, it’d be good to hear from you and I pay fair rates in real dollars.
*And Toronto, but mostly Vancouver