Today I paid US$30 to stop WordPress showing random ads on my site. They didn’t show up often and the ads WordPress displays – to my knowledge – were never offensive.
However some were inappropriate to my content. They added nothing for readers. Getting rid of them makes the site cleaner – which is a good thing. It was something I intended to do for some time now, but Ed Bott’s No more ads, no more trackers reminded me.
From today my posts will feature on the Tech page at AllTop. You’ll need to scroll down a tad to find me.
If you haven’t used the service, it’s a smart directory that provides a quicker way of drilling down to find relevant stories and news items.
One reason why I host my site at WordPress.com
John Kirk makes interesting points in Apple In Perspective at Tech.pinions when he says investors and those who watch the stock market put too much emphasis on quarterly reporting.
His point is if you look at Apple’s numbers for the recently announced quarter, you might think you’re looking at a company in decline. But year-on-year numbers show anything but a decline.
Sales of iPhones and iPads continue to grow at a healthy clip. And profits of US$9.5 billion on revenue of US$43.6 billion is an outstanding result by the standards of any other company in the world.
We’re all used to technology buzzwords crossing over into the general business world. If someone talks about their personal bandwidth it may be clumsy, but we know roughly what they mean.
But spare me from large, unbending monolithic companies who wake up one morning and decide to describe themselves as ‘agile’. They may do this because a few people have just started holding quick meetings where staff stay on their feet or they want to tell the world they respond quickly to changing circumstances.
Agile software development is a set of methods that encourages a fast and responsive approach so that customer needs are quickly attended to. Agile was formally defined in a manifesto more than a decade ago but its ideas are now reaching the management suite.
Some bosses like what they hear and want to ride the agile wave. Or at least use the name to make themselves look smarter. It doesn’t work.
Today the comments folder in my the WordPress dashboard has 1500 spam comments. That’s 1500 spam comments in 24 hours. I often get more spam comments than page views.
WordPress uses something called Akismet which does a fine job of trapping spam. Even so, there are days when dozens of cleverly constructed spam comments slide past Akismet.
When that happens I have to manually find them and delete.
My question is this, does my site need comments? Would we be better discussing the ideas and stories on Google+ or somewhere else online?
