Category: Site News

Posts under this category will tell you about site upgrades/planned outages and the like.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen a rather large increase (roughly 5x my usual traffic) in the number of visitors to this site. 99.999999% of the extra traffic is all due to a post I wrote last November. As we move into the final hours before Congress conducts its historic vote on this issue; I’ve noticed some of the comments my old post is receiving are little more than random spewing of hate. This is one of the reason that I use comment moderation on this site. If you’ve never left a comment on this site before; your comment goes into a queue. A queue which I check when I have the time and desire to do so.

Does this site have a formal comment policy? Not really, but if you’d like to read the comment policy of a writer I admire take a look at John Scalzi’s Site Disclaimer and Comment Policy. That should give you a pretty good idea how I feel about comments and the responsibilities of those who write them.

Upgraded CoffeeBear.net to WordPress 2.7 and switched to a different theme.  I liked certain things about the old theme but most of those were developer features that I’ve never gotten around to using.  And since it was kind of ugly the way it was…  I decided to switch it up a bit.  Unfortunately I’ll have to once again customize the Now-Reading output as it’s all busted & fugly right now.

Frequent visitors to this site1 will probably notice something a bit new over in my sidebar. Today I added a new “Sponsors” section to the site. This sponsors section is will be serving up text link adverts from Text Link Ads2.

For a long time I have resisted placing any form of advertising on this site. I just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of it and I wanted to keep CoffeeBear.net “pure”. However I realize now that is something of a very silly notion and decided to give Text Link Ads a chance to make this site pay for itself.

Does this mean I’ve sold out? Well I am trying to make a small amount of money from this site now; however CoffeeBear.net will not become some advert laden monstrosity with hundreds of annoying, flashing banners. Just two little links in the sidebar. So you’re free to think what you like, but I’m not thinking this counts as selling out.

1 Readers of my RSS feed will also eventually be seeing some text link ads as well. How long it takes depends on how quickly Text Link Ads sells the advert slots.
2 All links to Text Link Ads in this post are in fact affiliate links and if you use them to go to their site to sign up, then I am supposed to get 25 smackeroos. 🙂