The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have done a few things around the hosting space that I have not documented here. I added a comment box and reformatted the FreeBird Leather Sewing site. I also added blogs to three sites that are tied to an article distribution service. There are supposed to be articles added on a regular basis. The service does not work as well as I had hoped. There were a few articles added initially, but the follow up is slow to non-existent.

Yesterday I thought of using Gem Stones as a basis for web page backgrounds. I found several pictures of various Gems that were usable for the purpose. I made my usual symmetrical images. I finished the job this evening and uploaded the results to the Symmetrical Backgrounds site. Some of the backgrounds are very bright and happy and some of them are more subdued. All in all, the new gallery is a nice addition to the site. There are some backgrounds that would take very special pages and some that could be used more generally.

September marked a milestone. I reached the AdSense threshold for payout from Google (on the 29th or 30th). Sometime within the next couple of weeks there will be a small sum of money show up in my bank account. This will be much fun. It will also go a long way toward paying for the hosting for my little hobby sites.

The initial payment threshold is $100.00. If I recall correctly payments after the initial threshold are in $10.00 minimum increments. If that is the case I will probably get another payment or two before I need to re-up on my hosting account.

In other news, I have had four articles published by article sites. I have seen some additional traffic from these articles already and should continue to see some increase for some time to come. If any of these should get picked up by a high traffic site I could see considerable traffic, but that is a rather large ‘IF’. It is among the first real site promotion that I have tried and I can see that  it could be of value. I had two articles accepted by Ezine@rticles. The first two they had rejected, so this was a minor victory. The two articles that Ezine had rejected went one to Buzzle and one to GoArticles. Ezine@rticles has very high standards for the articles that they will publish, but that makes being published there of greater value.