As I often do when I get a little bored with the idea of blogging, I’m going to introduce a new topic in an effort to spice things up.

Money. What else did you expect to see here?

You see, I’m a regular guy with a regular job, so I spend a lot of time thinking about regular things. One of the regular things I think the most (other than various people without clothes) is money. And because I’m a regular guy with a regular job I often find myself not having much of it.

Most of these thoughts about money are just that: idle thoughts. They have absolutely no merit, no usefulness and they are mostly pretty darn stupid. Most people have the luxury of getting stupid ideas and being able to forget them a few minutes later.

But not me. I’m a blogger. As a blogger it is my pleasure, nay, moral obligation to share these stupid ideas with millions of people on the internet. I do not take this responsibility lightly.

To make sure that I have a proper forum for my stupid ideas about money I’m going make yet another category here exclusively for stupid money ideas. I think I’m going to call it “Stupid Money Ideas.” I figure I’m uniquely qualified to write a personal finance blog about money for two reasons:

1. I’m a person.
2. I have finances.

And, besides, personal finance blogs are all the rage right now with people spilling their guts about how they over spent and under saved for years and now they’re blogging about how they spend every penny in hopes of digging their way out of debt and becoming a millionaire in the next two years. These blogs are filled with fairly stupid tips about saving money like, “I never throw pennies in fountains! Instead I save them up and at the end of the year I could have an extra 12 cents! Wow!”

Fear not, this will not be that kind of personal finance blog. You don’t care how I spend my money unless I do something incredibly illegal and even then you only care if I was kind enough to post photos. Most of my posts about money will be completely useless, stupid and a general waste of time. That’s worked for this blog over the last two years, so I don’t see any reason to change now.

Remember: if you take away anything useful from this site (and, really, most of the internet) then you’re surely dumber than you think you are.

Technorati Tags: money blog, personal finance, savings

No Comments » | Email Link

This is going to be a somewhat introspective post about why I haven’t written for a while, so it will probably be about as much fun to read as is it to watch paint grow or grass dry.

When I started this blog way back in January of 2006 I felt overwhelmingly compelled to express my opinions on the following earth-shatteringly important and globally relevant topics:

1. My jerky boss.
2. My love of coffee and how it helps me deal with my jerky boss.
3. Struggling with being fat while drinking too much coffee to try to deal with a jerky boss
4. Thoughts on becoming a father for the first time.
5. My jerky boss.

Since that time I’ve expanded this blog to cover equally deserving topics like how jerky my boss really is, how to lose weight and interesting things that are kinda related to coffee. You can see how the topics have expanded (as has my butt) over the last two years.

Tom Coffee working on another blog post.

My blog posts are rarely “slice of life” ramblings about what I had for lunch or what television shows I’m watching. Instead I carefully craft each posts for my readers using talent and love. After that first sentence I usually revert back to a more appropriate fuel for writing: a hell of a lot of caffeine and blinding amounts of alcohol, often at the same time. And though a majority of my writing reads as though it is composed by a baboon defecating on a keyboard, I really do end up spending a tremendous amount of time stringing together words that brought a small smile to your face or a little bile to your throat. I’m not picky.

Eventually I began writing less and less.

I’d like to tell you the many important reasons for me not writing very much over the past couple months. Unfortunately, there really aren’t any. The truth of the matter is that I’ve been spending every waking moment playing City of Heroes, that superhero MMORPG (look it up) to the detriment of everything else in my life, including eating and sleeping. It’s actually a rather simple game that is nothing more than dice rolling behind the scenes with pretty graphics but for a casual formal comic nerd like myself it’s the video game equivalent of heroine laced crack dipped in a sweet, sweet coating of alcoholic nicotine.

I’m letting my account expire for a couple months so I can catch up on things that are slightly more important like remembering my son’s name and going to work (where I, incidentally, now work for a different and much cooler boss).

Now, if you excuse me, I need to go get some coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

Technorati Tags: baboon, coffee, city of heroes, blogging

2 Comments » | Email Link

I haven’t written for a while because I’ve been dividing my time between a number of “money making” blogs which, annoyingly, really weren’t making all that much money. Like a rat chasing that ever elusive moving piece of cheese in the maze, I was starting up new blogs based on whatever the hell caught my fancy at the time. I’d buy three or four domain names, pick one I liked, design some graphics, install Wordpress, write a few posts, slap some Google Adsense ads on them and wait for the truck load of money to pull up to my house.

My Retirement Plan…sucks.

Except it didn’t really work that way.

I simply ended up with a bunch of blogs and not enough time to write or promote any of them properly. For a few of the sites (like this one) I would have a lot of people visit the site but almost no one have any interest in the ads. With no one clicking on ads I ended being branded with a “low click through rate” which sounds like some sort of medical condition a robot might have when it needs Viagra.

When you suffer from a low click through rate Google ends up giving all your websites crappy paying ads and you end up with… yes… just about nothing in revenue. Google calls it “smart pricing” but I call it “smack pricing” because it’s pretty much a slap to your adsense account for a while. Google figures your content is crap, so your ads should be, too. In reality it’s a pretty effective way to stop spammers from putting up crappy sites just for making a quick buck. It doesn’t stop them, but it’s a good start. In addition to my low click through rate Google also went ahead and slammed a few of my blogs for not having regular posts or links and ended up squelching the Pagerank on a few of them. Low Pagerank generally means less traffic and, you guessed it, less money from ads.

So I wasn’t really creating spammy blogs, I was just lazy and unfocused, which is pretty much the story of my life.

To remedy that I’m going to start taking Speed.

Kidding!

I would never take Speed. I’m much more of a crack cocaine kind of guy. At any rate I’ve made the decision to shut down a couple of my wackier blogs and concentrate on the few that are more fun to write for and even have a chance of making me some cash at some point.

Yes, I’m keeping this one up for the moment because it is, believe it or not, one of my less wacky blogs. I’ll even, you know… write some more. Maybe. I’ve taken down most of the ads that I know exist and I even upgraded Wordpress (which I had avoided doing for about… oh… a year). I’ve also been futzing around with the theme and generally trying to get back into the “fun” part of blogging instead of just the cold, heartless money-making side of it. I ask for your patience while I play around and continue to find things that work and don’t work. I noticed the Blogroll is totally toasted and this theme still has some odd issues with the sidebars that I’ve never been able to figure out.

Now that I have the new version of Wordpress I can actually use some of the neat features like tag clouds and other plugins that I couldn’t use before. Of course, to use a tag cloud means that I’d have to go back and tag all 100+ previous entries.

And you know I’m too lazy to do that.

5 Comments » | Email Link