• First off, you’ll that in the about “the Adventurer” section over there to the right, the employment has changed. I’m now working at my old stomping ground, Southern Methodist University, as a web specialist in the Meadows School of the Arts. (My mother worked for Algur H. Meadows a while back, which is another story for another day — but it’s further proof you never know what’ll happen after 28 years…) Drop me a line if you’re in the area and want to do lunch.
  
  And yes, I am still working for the Mavericks. Go Mavs!
  
  
• You’ll notice the Yahoo Publisher Ads are gone. I might replace them with another ad service, and I might not. I’m kind of undecided right now. Don’t be surprised if you see some experimenting in this space.
  
  
• Since I’m messing with things, you’d expect me to update the “Examining” section over there on the right that’s been there so long Idlewild has recorded and released another album in the same amount of time. You would, at least for now, be wrong.
  
  Many of you have cracked that I must be a slow reader. This hurt my feelings. But not quite enough to update that section.

• The right sidebar is just a smidge too high in IE 7. It looks right in Firefox, though. I could probably find a fix for it, but instead, I’ll just declare that for now, your best Lunar Adventures viewing experience will come in Firefox or Mozilla.

Regulars readers might also be aware of the fact that I am a member of the 9rules Network, a network of cool people who also have blogs and probably big egos. 

In a chilling example of a “perfect storm” of sorts, the lovely Lindsay is interviewing various members of the 9rules network — including yours truly.  It goes without saying that a long interview ensued, wherein I talked about… myself!  Surprise!

I’m proud to report that I currently own the record for the longest response to a single question.  And I had to edit myself to keep it at the length it’s at.

Read the interview now.  You’ll thank me later.  Or not.

But not only that, it looks like you sometimes are looking for something that you just won’t find good information on at this site.  Really, you won’t find much good information here regardless, but that’s neither here nor there.  At any rate, I kind of feel guilty when people end up here when they’re looking for something else.  So I will try to right the wrong by taking some of this week’s search queries and trying to point you in the right direction.

• “maverick roller coaster” — During the Mavericks 2005 playoff run (which ended in the second round against Phoenix), I was frustrated by their up and down performance. I try to stay pretty well connected to the Mavericks, and I haven’t heard anything about there being the potential for an actual roller coaster ride. But the fact that 9 people Googled for this (or one person Googled 9 times) leads me to believe that there’s a definite market demand for a Mavericks roller coaster ride at Six Flags or Disneyland or something.  I can picture it now — you ride around in a little car named JET, and exit from Dirk Nowitzki’s tongue-extended mouth. And why stop at a roller coaster?  There could be an entire Mavericks amusement park.  We could have a house of horrors, featuring NBA referees and Shaquille O’Neal shooting free throws.  Maybe even show video of Avery Johnson racking Josh Howard on a loop.  There could be a big tower shaped like Shawn Bradley that you parachute down from.  A big bouncy tent shaped like Erick Dampier, just because.  I know I’d visit.
• “paul mokeski” — Paul Mokeski has been popular this week.   I mentioned his scouting the Phoenix Suns in passing during a post about the Mavericks/Suns series this year.  I did a little research about Mr. Mokeski on Wikipedia, which reports that Bill Simmons, ESPN.com Page 2 columnist, sometimes refers to him as the least athletic man to ever play in the NBA.  Bill Simmons has one of the most-read articles in the world, I’ve concluded, since almost every male I know reads him — even non-sports fans.  I’ll theorize that his name is surfacing as people research the Bill Simmons name-drop.
• “stitches in tongue” – Last year, I reported that I had bitten off a chunk of my tongue while playing basketball.  Not good times.  This is one of the more popular google search queries for my site — I’m the #3 site on Google when you search for “stitches in tongue”!  I’m going to put that on my resume, for sure. At any rate, I suspect a lot of people that are visiting are either 1) weird or 2) dealing with a similar injury.  If you have a similar injury, I recommend seeing a doctor if you think it’s serious.  That sucker bled a lot, and swallowing blood is never a good thing.  It also made eating difficult, and the next day it hurt so much it was radiating pain into my head.  I ended up not needing stitches, and the tongue healed remarkably quickly and fully — I was back to normal in a week (with a weirdly shaped tongue).  Today, there’s no sign of me ever having had bitten some of it off.  Good work, tongue!  But still, see a doctor.  You might need stitches or some medication, especially if it becomes infected or something.  Why take a chance? Colgate has some good information on tongue injuries if you do have such a thing happen. But I recommend avoiding tongue injuries.
• “nba finals rigged” — I think there’s a trend — a lot of my popular hits are coming from basketball-related searches.  At any rate, I’ve thought about this a lot.  And I do not think the NBA Finals were rigged.  I just think the referees were pitiful.  Not dishonest, but pitiful. The theory that the Finals were rigged isn’t an unheard of one, though. Here’s one that talks about the Finals being rigged both from fan and player perspectives.

I hope this helps some of you.  It probably won’t, but you can’t say I didn’t try.  Let me know if you’d like to become a regular feature.  And also, I do plan on doing another Q&AK Questions and Answers session — so send me questions or post them here, if you have any.  Unless you’re already an oracle of knowledge yourself, in which case say so here or in email so I can ask you questions.  Specifically about women — they confuse me.

I use Akismet for spam filtering, and for the most part, it does a great job. Except it hates me.

Before I installed Akismet, I was dealing with literally hundreds of spam comments per day. Now, sometimes one comment slips through here and there, but no big deal. And from looking at the archive of comments it has deleted, I don’t think it’s deleting other people’s comments. Just mine.

Akismet claims to be smart, and then you unflag comments as spam and undelete them, it’ll learn from its mistakes. Which appears to be true — some comments it used to let through its filters it now correctly catches. But once again, I’ve told it literally a dozen times now that I am in fact not spamming my own blog, but it’s not listening.

My only theory is that perhaps my own blog is angry at me for some reason. Blog, if you are angry, I apologize. I know, I know, how can I be truly sorry if I don’t know what I did? Just trust me, blog. I am sorry. Please stop blocking my comments and making me go in and force them to be unblocked. It makes me feel like I don’t trust you, and like you don’t trust me. Let’s be friends again.

9rules is implementing some pretty cool new ways to browse sites on the network, and they’re adding several high quality blogs. I’m pretty stoked to be included in such a crowd, and am even more excited that there’s going to be a few more eyes reading my incoherent ramblings.

So, if you’re new here, welcome, and I hope you enjoy your stay. Please be sure to let me know if you have any comments, insults, compliments, advice, whatever. Meanwhile, if you’re not a new visitor, I still think you’re awesome, and thanks for sticking around despite my penchant for not really having anything to say.

Thus I still manage to not write everything down, including important things, thinking that, “Oh, I’ll CERTAINLY remember THAT!”

This is essentially a long-winded way of saying that I had several topics I wanted to talk about, but can’t remember what any of them are. They may or may not come back to me; if you see a flurry of posts, they did. If you don’t see said flurry, they didn’t. Vegas is currently predicting an over/under of 2 topics remembered.

But! Here’s where you come in! If you have a topic you’d like to see me cover, because you really care what I think about the subject or because you think I’m a moron and want to laugh at me as I try to hold an opinion, either leave a comment here or send me an email. Try to make your email subject lines remarkable so that I don’t get bored and so that I don’t confuse your email with spam, of which I get plenty.

If you are having trouble, please leave me a comment describing the problem. Oh, wait, no, that won’t work. Here’s a better idea — send me an email. If you are having problems posting comments, I sincerely apologize, and want you to know that I do desperately want to know what you personally think. So just email your comments, or call me or something. Thanks.

At any rate, it’s a great idea to drive traffic to your site — interview people! For each interview, there’s a good chance you’ll get linked back from that person’s site(s). Everyone loves a little exposure and a little ego stroking. I know I sure do!

Well, I’ve changed back to Yahoo.

Google did do a better job of giving me more relevant ads — a post about the Dallas Cowboys gave ads to buy Cowboy tickets and memorabelia. With Yahoo, the same post got me ads about San Diego web design (one of the comments mentioned Dallas’ opponent, the San Diego Chargers).

But the even with the lower clickthrough rates, Yahoo is bringing in more revenue. So I’ve switched back to Yahoo.

While the ads aren’t as relevant as Google’s, Yahoo’s ability to label your blog audience as being interested in specific types of ads is useful in generating different ads. My blog front page tends to see the same Yahoo ads fairly regularly — so I plan to experiment with changing my blog “focus” on occasion to see if that boosts ad variety and clickthrough rates. As my blog tends to focus on several different topics (whatever happens to be on my mind), there isn’t one single category that I feel is a significantly closer fit than any of the others.

I like Yahoo Publisher Network a lot, but I’d like to see more relevant ads. And let me know if you’re seeing any exceedingly funky ads.

I was accepted into the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program a couple of weeks ago and have been quite pleased with my experience so far. I was surprised earlier today when I got a phone call from a Yahoo! representative, asking me for any comments I might have or any issues that need resolving. The landing page for the administration panel repeatedly asks for comments and suggestions, but Yahoo! must be serious about wanting to get feedback to go to the effort of calling the beta testers.

I commented on a couple of small issues that are easily written off as “beta bumps and bruises” and made some suggestions, such as more ad block size options and other visual customization options.

Performance-wise, I’m getting similar CPC results on Yahoo! as I did on Google. All things being equal, I’m likely to stay with Yahoo!. Competition can only be good (until the market is overly saturated, and I don’t feel the contextual ad placement market is at that stage), and Yahoo! is putting together a nice service. The attention Yahoo! seems to putting on listening to their customers makes me think that they really want to get this right.

Give it a quick check, and if you think I’ve made an egregious error, feel free to leave a comment telling me what sites I am missing out on.

I struggled with the decision for quite a while. I realize I’m not going to get rich off Google AdSense, unless I’m getting millions of impressions (which I’m not). Jason Calacanis and his $1 million yearly AdSense revenue isn’t going to see much competition from me (yet!).

The main reason I decided to put some ads on my site is to familiarize myself with Google AdSense more intimately. I am working on another site that I plan to “publicize” more than this one, and would like to have more ads on. The trial run on this site allows me to look more closely at some of the positives and negatives.

The biggest negative, if you ask me, is how outlandishly ugly the ads are. I couldn’t bear to put them on the front page; rather, I hid them more internally. In addition, they’re likely to be more accurately targeted on single post pages, as the topics are single and specific on those pages.

I do wish Google would allow you to set the width of the text ads so that they would better fit into a layout. Also, I wish they would allow you to choose the font face. I cannot stand the Arial font. I really can’t. It pains me that Google ads are everywhere, staring me in the face with the Arial font face. I’d love to see even a Verdana version of them.

I have quickly learned a few lessons about Google ads, though: 1) Design the site with the ads in mind. The various ad shapes available all have specific widths: plan the site around those widths so that you can smoothly integrate the ads. I think it’s hard to design them in completely seamlessly and attractively, but you can minimize the hurt. 2) Don’t expect to be an AdSense millionaire overnight. In fact, don’t expect it at all — it’s still supplementary revenue, and that’s if you have a successful site. Small sites? Don’t get too excited about AdSense. It’s not the cureall. 3) I know what people are talking about when they say they obsessively check their Google statistics. I’m already doing it, hoping that on that particular refresh I’ll have another penny or two. I think I could actually make more by instead of obsessing hitting refresh, go outside and actually look for pennies in the street.

I hope I’m not coming across as too negative on AdSense; I really think it’s a great service. Publishers, advertisers, and Google investors all come out ahead. I just think people get lost in the hype of reading about the amazing success of sites like ProBlogger.net and the Weblogs, Inc. network.

I’ll probably continue experimenting with the AdSense placement and styling over the next several days, so don’t be too shocked if something breaks or becomes suddenly extremely ugly.

And as always, I’d love to hear your feedback on the issue. Are you using AdSense on your blog? How do you feel about the results so far? Leave a comment or email me if you prefer privacy.

Among other little odds and ends (like the top menu not quite behaving correctly, depending on where in the site you happen to be) that will be fixed soon, I’ll also be adding some Google AdSense ads here and there. I haven’t decided where they’re going to go, yet, but they’re coming. If this offends you, I am sorry. But I hope to make an extra $2.14 cents a month from it, which will almost pay for a single Power Bar from the vending machine at the gym.

I’m also weighing the merits of some new features and stuff. As always, I’ll keep you up to date of any changes, no matter how boring you’re probably going to find them.

My Flickr home: http://www.flickr.com/photos/akaufmann/
My Flickr photo sets listing (my preferred method of browsing): http://www.flickr.com/photos/akaufmann/sets/

On a technical note, I was studying the Flickr API in hopes of finding methods to integrate not just the photos and their information, but also their comment threads. I didn’t find any such methods in the API documentation — does anyone know if that’s something Flickr plans on adding to their API, or are purposely leaving out?

• Create some small graphic icons to litter around the place
• Create the “about” page
• Create the “Extras” page and populate it with stuff — places I visit, copyright information, syndication feeds
• Create sidebars for every page except the front page
• Add “recently visited” links to the front page
• Create recently visited links archive
• Create 404 page
• Add syndication information to front page

That’s all I’m thinking of right now… my to-do list on paper is in the car, and I’m too lazy to fetch it. So I might add more later.