The Skull Cinema

Another eleven days and the results of the second review are back. Unfortunately the same message, ' Your blog isn't ready to show ads yet/you need to fix some things to continue ', appeared in the Blogger control panel Earnings tab. Again, I dropped into e-mail first to see what the response was there, and was met with the same cryptic message as the first time, ' our specialists have found that it does not meet our programme criteria ', but no more clues than that. However, the AdSense control panel was more straightforward, ' Low value content '. Well OK, I had sort of expected this, at least I knew it was a possible outcome of the process. But as I have already stated I'm not going to rewrite the site for the tiny amount of revenue it is likely to bring in. But let's review the four resources the AdSense message provides links to anyway; Minimum content requirements The full relevant text is; We do not allow monetisat...

I 've discussed the process of making static pages previously. What follows is only related to decisions on the content of the About, Contact and Privacy Policy pages that are needed for the Google AdSense program. Let's start with the About page. When I set up the domain I ticked the privacy option to keep my details off WHOIS . So it would seem a bit silly to splatter a load of personal information back onto the web in an About Us page. Better to keep it short and generic then. If Google would like me to have an About page what does Google's look like? Our mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful . Well that is short and to the point. I'm not aiming for quite that level of coverage but in the first post on this blog I set out what I was about. Given that information, the following is suitably anodyne , The world is too complex to be made difficult. By relying on direct experience to help make t...

Just a very small post on this topic. While I was uploading the images for the previous post I ran into an issue with uploading images from my PC to Blogger. It took me a while to work out what was happening here, which is why I am posting this. When you choose Upload from computer from the image tool dropdown. It opens a File Open dialog box. As you can see, the first three images are identical apart from their names. But when you hit Open only two of four files are displayed in the Add Images box It seems that Blogger won't allow image files starting with AdSense to be uploaded (capitalisation is disregarded). Clearing the browser cache had no effect and the images were viewable in the Blogger album archive. However adding an underscore (_) to the front of the image name solved the problem.

The result of the AdSense review is in and it's time to assess the outcome. I have described my experience of the applicant's portion of the application process for an AdSense account in more detail previously. In total the process wasn't really that complicated, although it wasn't completely plain sailing either. There was quite a lot of information spread across multiple pages that managed to be complex but not specific (as in exactly what Google expects from the website), which I found somewhat frustrating. However the process was completed and left at the review stage in which Google submits the site to an internal review against a set of not-completely-clear-to-me criteria. I finished my part of the process with an active but non-operational AdSense account. Over the next week the number of accessible tabs on the menu of the account fluctuated, but the We're reviewing your site notice remained. I assume that the steady appearance of the tabs was mo...

Well the blog is doing what it was supposed to do, as outlined in my first post . The content is quite 'blogging-about-blogging' heavy, but that topic is still interesting to me. So let's dig a little deeper into Blogger. Use of the platform is free, however the cost of hosting a domain is not. Although at £10/year it is not ruinously expensive. That said, there is no reason why part of that cost couldn't be offset by some ad revenue is there? From the outset let me state that I am not interested in a full-blown commercialisation of the blog with search engine optimisation, careful ad placement strategies and the inevitable desperate attempts to garner e-mail addresses or upsell readers. It's just too much effort. Instead, this is a curiosity-driven peek into another aspect of Blogger and the target of recouping the domain fees is just a means to this end. If you really want to get into that then there is an ocean of data, help and opinions out there. Good lu...