• I really should redo my sidebar. I haven’t updated it to change the Divinitas link into a link to my main TCG page even though Divinitas has been dead for months and I’ve joined a couple of others. There’s also just random junk in there I can get rid of.
• I need to wash my Qbee quilt.
• I have found that, as I was told by a Google staffer, Google Analytics is indeed chugging right along despite it thinking it’s not properly installed on my site. It doesn’t really tell me anything useful, though, so I am hoping to get a Measure Map invitation soon. Also, I clearly have smart readers, because 48.4% are using Firefox and only 46.6% are using IE!
• I have earned upwards of $15 from the Mechanical Turk; I think I will get all the way to $25 (free shipping) before redeeming anything into my Amazon account.
• I’m not sure why I’m posting this in my journal and not in my lovely self-hosted installation of Tasks.

To my great astonishment, Neil mentioned that he earned over $300 in Google AdSense revenue…in a month. I used to say I would never put ads on my page, but damn that is a lot of money. I’ve added a single Google text ad to all of the skins on my site, just to see what happens. I have pretty decent Google PageRank (I think around a 6?) so maybe I will make more than a couple of pennies from this, too. I recently installed two stats programs onto my site, TraceWatch and i-Stats, and I get several hundred unique visitors per day. (My host does provide Webalizer and AW-Stats stats, but they’re both accessed through Cpanel and I have no way to view them at work because Cpanel is on a funky port number.) So we’ll see if I actually get anything from this; I will probably give it a month trial and decide what to do after I’ve seen those results.

I seem to actually get pretty good results from my BlogSnob ads. I use RE_INVIGORATE for quick-and-easy checking of my referrers, and there are frequently a number of URLs in there I don’t recognize. When I check them out, they almost always have no connection to me…but they do have BlogSnob ads. And just to return the favor, here are a few sites that have provides visits to my site:

• Fluttergirl
• Anti-Kanye writing contest
• Illusions Etc…
• The O’EO Cookie
• Jamshed Velayuda Rajan’s Funny Blog
• Picture Fish (hi, Kymberlie! )
• The Cranky Liberal Pages

And two more interesting referrers that aren’t BlogSnob-related are Creative Writing Links (I’m “Amanita Writing Prompts”) and a commenter in HispaLibertas. I have no idea what the latter is about, because it’s entirely in Spanish! Comment #13 on that page links to a posting I made about Adobe patents.

PubSub, a service I have yet to sign up for, has a new feature called LinkRanks. It’s supposed to measure the “strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in weblogs.” As near as I can figure out, it’s another popularity contest. It claims to use only links actually within weblog entries, not in blogrolls or sidebars. It also claims to be different from Google PageRank, although LinkRanks also uses a mathematical formula that’s beyond my comprehension. For some reason it asks bloggers who mention the system to include this URN: http://psi.pubsub.com/20040413:linkranks:1 …I have no idea what that’s for, or why it’s a URN and not a URI or URL…but whatever! Anyway, I’ll probably check back at some point to see how the LinkRanks concept is developing. And hey, check out the LinkRanks for amanita.net and journal.amanita.net! [via weblog tools collection]

I took a look at some of my website stats. It amuses me just how people get to my site. Here are some searches:

Also, somebody from Muskegon Community College wants to know what soda does to the body, while a K-12 student in New Jersey is interested in finding out what does soda do to your bones. Somebody from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida was surfing BlogExplosion. A Road Runner customer in NYC searched for livejournal icon making tutorial and then surfed around my site for about seven minutes. Someone at Michigan State University (the IP address contained a userID, actually) was looking for anorexic video clips…who knows why. Then again, a DSL user in Finland is looking for sexy hot anorexia xxx porno. A customer of Deutsche Telekom’s dial-up service searched for lesbians riding on horse. Somebody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense is looking up information on DIET SODA.

I just won 50 credits while surfing BlogExplosion! The most I’d won in any one moment previously was 10, and at the moment I have 60 credits for my site (I auto-assign 85% of my credits and then sometimes I use the rest for banners, or I manually assign). I don’t know how I managed it - I blame aldon, actually - but I have gotten pretty hooked on BlogExplosion. I try to leave comments on blogs that I actually read (which is usually the ones with eye-catching designs), and I’ve blogmarked quite a few sites so far. I had originally hoped to use it to send traffic to CyDy Blog, which is hurting for traffic much more than my own site, but they don’t allow adult sites to be listed in the BlogExplosion system. I’ve received more than 475 visits (202 unique visitors) to my site through BE, and after three votes I have a rating of 7.67. I’ve been blogmarked five times!

If you’ve never heard of BlogExplosion (also called BE or BLEX), and you’d like to sign up, please consider doing so through me!