Don't Back Down

After one year of advertising, I was seeing AdSense at about 80% of the income from the site. This month, that figure went back up a bit - to about 85% - which is not as high as it has been, but still the wrong direction. Mostly this is due to a largish return on one of the other affiliate programs, which reduced that percentage by a bit. Everything else held fairly steady for the month - traffic, income and page views were remarkably... even.

The interesting thing about this was that, even though you will find content for August at this point, it wasn't actually posted during August. As I mentioned in What Affects My Advertising Revenue? I was on a bit of a self-imposed sabbatical for the month, and that meant that I didn't really write. Well, I did write - but I didn't post the writings when they happened. Instead I hid in my cave and just sort of watched to see what happened. In reality, not much happened - traffic stayed fairly steady, and so did the income. It's almost like I didn't have to be here. Which is nice. But now I'm back (though I'm still catching up, so I'm a little behind - that will be rectified in the next couple days).

Since school has started, and my sabbatical has ended, you can now notice - assuming you read the site in a web browser, and not in an RSS reader of some kind - that there is a new site design in place. This is for any number of reasons, but one of the most important ones is that I was simply ready for a new one. The last design was done a bit on a whim, and I just felt like I needed a layout that looked a bit nicer. So here it is.

Those of you that look at such things will notice that the design is based, albeit somewhat loosely on the Ocean Mist theme. This is true. I replaced the graphic with one more to my liking (one which has nothing to do with the ocean, but I think it blends nicely), and I have switched the sidebar to the left, but other than that it's mostly intact. For those of you who think that this means I switched to Wordpress, I did not. I'm still using Movable Type, and I probably will continue to do so for quite a while. I just like it better. I simply adapted the theme to my templates.

If you missed it, I introduced another option recently that will allow you to keep up on the site, and that is email subscriptions. No longer are you required to visit the site every day, or to use an RSS reader. You can have Don't Back Down delivered to your inbox for your reading pleasure. Hopefully at least one of these options will work for you.

In honor of all the changes, I've rolled out some new advertising plans. I'm working on tweaking the plans, so you may see a few changes here and there, but I think I'm happy with where they are now, so let's see how they go. Let me know if you're interested in signing up.

Finally, I'd like to thank the sponsors who have already graciously agreed to come on board - Search Engine Guide and the United States Flag Store (who is selling North Carolina Flags). Make sure you check them out.