Annoyance as a Blessing

The past week started with a healthy dose of annoyance. I author five blogs and believe me I try to do everything humanly possible to keep my readers happy. That means there is a fair amount of behind the scenes work that goes on to ensure my readers have an enjoyable experience when they visit. The end part of the week one of the advertisement widgets (Adgitizer) went down. Now that wasn't too bad at first and it was only showing an ad for their site. By Monday it was apparent the widget was not coming up and Tuesday I removed it from the blogs. Now this is both annoying and aggravating because the code has to be removed. Wednesday the site came back up so I added back the code aka more work behind the scenes. By Wednesday night it was acting up again except this time instead of their advertisement the widgets were showing service unavailable in huge, ugly bold letters. I am really particular about my blogs and quite frankly this is just not acceptable to me as far as blog design. I was annoyed to no end. This annoyance spurred me into action! That ended up being a blessing!

This annoyance caused me to take a very good look at the advertising on each blog, what was working and what wasn't working. It is important to me that I control what is being shown on my blogs. For that reason I do not like anything where someone else has the control over ads, images or widgets so am rather picky that way. I removed every advertiser that was not performing according to the blog so advertisers are now customized to each particular blog. Why should I give them a spot on my blogs when all they are doing is getting free advertising? I removed the your ad here advertising from two of my blogs and one never had it. These ads remain on two of my blogs but their days are numbered. I added some very blog specific advertising to fit the them of each blog. These are ads that I can determine content and change as desired depending on what I'm blogging about at the time so I think it will make for a nicer reader experience. Out of annoyance I have been able to define in finer detail exactly what I want as far as the blogs. I was able to tweak to what I think is a sleeker advertising design. This annoyance helped me realize that I am not willing to compromise my values as a blogger. It clearly showed me that I could be rather brutal in removing elements that I felt were not benefitting my blogs and I feel my blogs are better for this. So annoyance became a blessing!

Happy BYBS,

Garden Gnome
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