I spent a good amount of time this weekend trying to discover why my website was crashing with a 500 error. I was attempting to edit a previous post and was presented with a message telling me it was not responding. That proved to be an understatement My Strange Life was comatose.

I contacted support and spent a good amount of time sending them screen shots of various settings. The technician determined that the popular wordpress plugin JetPack had thrown the exception and he disabled it. The only problem with that was that JetPack is the swiss army knife of plugins and I had built an entire infrastructure of pages of birthday photos that get shared to the family on a regular schedule,

The next morning one of the birthdays albums failed to load. I spent today working on an alternative delivery system, which I am happy to report seems to work fairly well. Still I will need to redo nine months of photos which were impacted.

No more advertising

While I was poking around the infrastructure, I began to have second thoughts about AdSense. Adsense is a Google product that inserts advertisements into websites. Vendors bid for space and pay for placement of their ads. I receive a small amount of money for clicks on the ads. The operative word is SMALL, in pennies. I do get a lot of reports, tables and charts but very little money.

The Ads are annoying

The vendors ads float around my postings and sometimes block the photos. It annoys me and I suspect it annoys my readers. I implemented Adsense because I was looking for a way to pay for some of my hosting fees for this site. However seventeen cents a day isn’t going to make much of a difference to the bottom line. Maybe it is profitable to a site with a large readership. I don’t know.

Should I ask for donations?

Originally I was hoping that this site was going to be self-sustaining, and that was almost the case when I was an Amazon Affiliate, receiving s percentage of sales when folks used links that I provided, Unfortunately I ran afoul of Amazon Affliliate’s terms of service and was banned for life. I have other affiliate partnerships (pet supplies) but no one ever uses them, It is a lot easier just to ask for money, Not much, just more than seventeen cents, it adds up.Think of it as becoming a patron of the arts.