And another period of ridiculous silence ensues…
Mostly the lack of posts is because of being back in full-time work, with the train-based commute adding another three hours of travelling to the working day.
Part of it is that most of my free time is going into the building of my new personal website, which is finally taking shape after more than two years of planning. (If you want a look, go to www.andthenhesaid.com – you may only find a 'coming soonish' notice, but if I'm testing new pages at the time you're welcome to have a browse round. Leave me a note to say what you think.)
But a sizeable reason for the silence is that I'm on the horns of an unlikely dilemma.
The new site will carry advertising, and rather than just accept random banners from some impersonal link network or banner exchange, I'm signing up to affiliate programmes with companies that sell relevant stuff. So, for example, a company selling holidays on the Norfolk Broads for the pages about the Broads and our boat. Or outdoor clothes stores for the walking pages. And so on. The first one I've signed up with is Domino Pizza, because I'm a bugger for a pizza and because I'm thinking of setting up a site about gadgets and other lads' stuff, and it seems a good advertiser for a site like that.
Trouble is, a week or so ago something happened that I want to write about. It was a rather strange and somewhat amusing encounter with a Domino delivery driver. The sort of day-to-day bizarreness that you'll know, if you're a regular reader, that I love writing about.
But I've got a total block about what to do regarding the whole advertising business.
You see, it would be daft not to take advantage of such a perfect match between advertiser and subject. But the moment the ad goes in it looks like I'm writing about it solely to run the ad (the alternative is a text link that doesn't flag itself up as an ad, but that seems dishonest to me). And any of you who have been with me for a while in this blog (including some real-world friends) deserve better treatment than becoming an audience to be sold to. But, equally, I regularly get new visitors arriving via Google for all sorts of things (for example, several when I mentioned eating a Pot Noodle a while back), so it's not that clear-cut.
All in all, it's a bit of a bugger and it's stopping me writing the post, and the ones backing up behind it.
So here's the compromise I eventually decided on: I'll write the post. I'll stick a visible Domino advert in (no secret-squirrel text link). And I'll write this post so you know when you see the other one that, if you click on it and buy something, I'll be making a few pennies out of it.
That way everyone knows what's going on. Seems fair to you?