Comments cleanup

Since I made this blog my position around comments has been that everything is allowed as long as it's not obvious spam (shady links and/or hate-language). Because I didn't feel like moderating what others may consider free speech.

You wanted to write your own name? Go for it. Your email/phone? I don't care. A random strings of characters? As long as it didn't have hidden links or words they were ok.

 

But no more.

I now realize that allowing all comments were damaging this blog, even if it's just new app updates of some random guy. As of now all new comments will be moderated, and all existing ones that weren't made by real humans were deleted (more than 80%). On doubt I deleted it, so if you think your comment was incorrectly deleted just send me a message.

I'll still keep new comments open for anonymous accounts, but I'll consider requiring login if moderation becomes an issue.

No more 'secret messages' or the same repeated words. If you want to paste random things go to 4chan or somewhere else.

Blog improvements

Over the past few weeks I've been improving and adding some things here in this blog. Each of them is a minor script/change, so I didn't found necessary to create a post for that, but now that the number of changes is moderate I felt like writing about them.

'Usefulness' page form

There is now a small form at the bottom of the page (left bar in desktop mode) so you can say whether you found a page useful or not, with an optional comment. It is as easy as pressing a button, and the answer is sent through google forms (google forms has a feature that allows anyone to send a response simply by visiting a page, so when you press a button that petition is performed in the background via a fetch command). It even works anywhere in the blog, even in search pages!

As of now I received 76 'yes' and 28 'no', most of them on the click to chat addon page. I may post in the future more statistics (tell me if you would like that).

Collapsible comments

This was something I personally wanted, the comment section at the bottom is as long as the amount of comments, and some pages have a loooot of them. This made very long pages and hard to scroll all the way to the bottom, and I'm sure people didn't even know there is some info there. When I added the usefulness form this was even more noticeable. So I simply made the comments element hidden, with a toggle button at the top. It is collapsed by default, press the button and the comments will be shown, press again to hide.

Filters in menu

A few years ago I had some of the important apps in the blog menu (the horizontal bar at the top with an arrow at the right, or the top bar with buttons in desktop mode) however I needed to add manually new apps there, and it was boring.

Then I found that there is a blogger widget that shows a list of all the tags in the blog, and when clicked it shows only the posts with that tag. I tag every post with the app it represents (with the exception of the blog tag, for posts like this) so this is a very useful way to display the apps I published (not all, but those I actively develop) and it's even sorted!

The issue is that this list is shown as a separate element, at the bottom (left in desktop) and I didn't like that. So I made a script that converts the automatically populated widget list to entries in the bar menu.

Now you can quickly see all posts of a specific app simply by selecting that filter from the menu, and it will be automatically updated with new apps/tags so I don't need to do anything! 

Fixed date on top of menu

Just a quick fix, but worth mentioning. In the mobile mode, when viewing a single post, the date at the top was displayed above the menu entry and it looked bad. I found the culprit css and patched it.

Pro-adblock message

This blog has a 'you should use an adblock' message at the top, which should not be visible if you use one. However, even if you do, you may have seen it in the past. The way this message works is by simply 'look' like an ad (which adblocks remove) however the list of ads they block is not static and changes over time, so I need to update it when the current method no longer works.

Arc-io

Arc-io is a service that 'helps build a faster internet with fewer ads'. It acts as a distributed CDN (content delivery network) in which users visiting the page can get page elements (images, scripts, css,...) by other users, instead of all from a centralized server. And it only ads a blue circle at the bottom left, no ads, no banners, nothing else. At first I was like 'using your bandwidth to share code to other users? no way' but after some checking and investigation I found its not as bad as it looks, and 'apparently' it only works with desktop users or under wifi. In any case, if you don't like that service it is automatically removed with adblocks (that you should have) but if for some reason it is still show for you and you want to disable it you can from the 'opt-out' link after pressing the blue icon, which redirects to here.

And what do I earn? The service pays you for the traffic (because companies pays them for the faster internet). Note that it is a very low revenue, 4$/month more or less, and I keep it because of the no-ads alternative it represents.

Another interesting fact is that this service requires you to set a specific file in the root of the site. Blogger don't allow that, however I discovered that you can embed an iframe with the arc-io widget from another site, and it will work! I currently have arc-io on my personal trianguloy.github.io page, and that's why when pressing the circle it says 'github.io gets a boost' instead of 'blogspot.com gets a boost'.

About monetization

I've been researching lately about the ad-revenue world and the different services. I've learn that not only you need to provide a lot of personal information, which I'm reticent to provide, but that almost all services have bad reputation, or require a paid domain, or other requirements that rejects your application. This sure is a difficult world, and I'm not the right person to enter it yet unless I find something that I find acceptable.

I also tried donation services to provide an alternative link to give me donations, but again the amount of personal details you need to provide is just crazy, and although I understand why they need it, the information is often confusing or misleading (ok, here is my address, will you show it publicly? Yes? No? Please answer me). I still have the donation app I published some months ago, and it wasn't that bad to set up, but if you are looking for alternatives I can not think of other than send me a steam or e-shop keycode for a video game (it's a joke but...not a bad idea. I like puzzle, rhythm and adventure games, just saying).

The worst of all is that, although this research teaches you a lot and I recommend anyone on a similar situation to try, it is keeping me from doing what I like most: programming useful apps and tools.
So from now I'll forget about all this monetization and go back to programming, while researching from time to time, even if I earn nothing from it (at least until I really start needing the money). Perhaps in the future you see ads in this blog or perhaps I find a good way to accept donations, but I'm sure that the next post (I hope posts) will be about apps, and not the blog.

Also, if you want to give me a suggestion, tip or something you think that can help me, my email is at the bottom.

Unmonetized blog

That was fast!
Apparently AdSense doesn't like my traffic, it seems they prefer more ad-intrusive blogs, so ads are disabled.

I activated the ads to learn, to see first hand the world of ad-revenue, and I do learned a lot. I learned that AdSense is not a good option for small developers like me, so now I need to learn where to find another alternative more suitable for my situation (also, if you are planning to use AdSense with Blogger, perhaps you should reconsider and/or change every setting you can. Default options are not a good idea!). I also learned some useful things about internet traffic that I'm sure will help me in the future. But most importantly I learned that being humble and polite doesn't help you, instead it seems to do the opposite.
Still, I won't let this let down me (Or is it "I won't let down me this"? Maybe "I won't this let down me"? Ouch, this sentence is a tricky one! ). I still have a lot to learn and I'll always be humble, polite and considered. I just need to find a place where those characteristics are important and not a handicap.

Soooo it's research time! (Which means less time for app updates unfortunately, but don't worry. I won't abandon them :)

Monetized blog

As you probably notice, now this blog is monetized (with AdSense). Blogger has a 'press here to place ads' button, which is pretty handy, and so I clicked it a few months ago. They are not enabled immediately, AdSense need to review the site first, and since it has some requirements (an important one is that the site must be 6 months old or more) they weren't active until now.

What does this mean for you? Well...now you will see ads here, and so I'll earn a bit of money for my developer work, which is fine. I hope they are not very intrusive. In fact, although almost all settings are set to the default ones (so I guess they are ok), I changed some of them because they were awfully obtrusive:

- By default, ads are shown on the lateral bar (top and bottom of the page in mobile) and also between posts. The lateral bar is fine in my opinion, they don't distract (and in mobile they disappear as soon as you start scrolling). But placing them between posts is, again in my opinion, an awful decision because you can mistakenly think an ad is a post, and that should never happen (if you click on an ad you should know you are clicking on an ad). That's the reason I changed it to shown on the lateral bar only.

- The other recommended setting is to place 'dynamic size' ads, which means that 'the ad size will be adapted to the screen size'. This sounds like the better option, if you have a big screen a small ad can be missed, and if you have a small screen a big ad is just wrong. So dynamic size seems fine...except it is not. I discovered that the ads were shown almost always in the 'big' size, and although in desktop mode (lateral bar) it doesn't really matter, while browsing on a mobile device the ads occupied around 40% of the screen size! Inconceivable. I quickly changed them to the minimum-height one in the horizontal types (half banner 234x60), I hope they are not very small on big screens.

And that is all. Ads are an important part of the internet life nowadays, but they are often used wrong. My opinion on ads is: Ads are useful, they allow you to discover new and interesting things that otherwise will probably be unnoticed, however they must follow three rules:
1) You need to know what is an ad and what is not.
2) They can't interfere in the normal use of the service you are using.
3) If you click on an ad is because you decided to click the ad by yourself (because you found it useful) and not because you 'missed the X button', clicked on another unrelated thing, or anything else.

I know my decisions will probably reduce the amount of money I'll get, but I'm ok if that means I'm providing a better service.

Any questions/concerns/suggestions about this? You can say so in the comments or send me an email.

Blog active

Lets see how it goes.