Yay! I have finally got Gravatars on my comments. Now to some of you that first statement sounded like some Josh H. gibberish. Allow me to explain.

An avatar is a small picture or image that forum and blog users have that displays beside their names whenever they post a comment or a forum thread. It serves no real purpose other than just being a nifty custom identifier. Some people use actual photos of themselves, some have pictures of their pets or kids and some have avatars featuring their favorite band.

Let me be the first to tell you about a new website. It has a clever name that recalls one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films. The content is interesting and the topics are well thought out. I am talking about Rear Window Ethics. The design of the site is also really intriguing (almost as good as the writing). Oh and did I mention the author and administrator of this wonderful new site? Why, it is none other than my wife Lyndsay Horne. So check out her new blog, at RWE to your blogrolls and comment, comment, comment!

Josh H.

I am by no means a hypochondriac but something’s up.

I decided back in August that I would begin writing some blog posts for money. Then I got the bright idea to save up this money to purchase a new Macbook laptop. My goal was for the money I make blogging and some money I have from “other sources” to add up to enough to purchase a laptop by April 2008. In order for this to happen I would have to submit at least 5 posts to Associated Content. This would be assuming of course that all of those would be accepted. Well the funny thing is for the first 2 and half months it worked. I constantly had new material and I had a pretty good acceptance rate. I made $100 in the first two months from blogging alone.

However something has happened. I have submitted two (count ‘em), two articles to AC in the past three weeks. Actually, make that four weeks. I can not come up with a single good idea. The problem is AC is very particular about the type of content they accept and I have learned what they like. The problem is I simply can not come up with anything that might be AC worthy. And I have tried tapping into my other sources of blogging income, payperpost and bloggerwave. Those have proven to be dead ends. There’s only one conclusion: my awesomeness is running out.

I am not sure how to handle this because in my almost 29 years on this earth this has never happened to me. I mean, I have always had enough awesomeness for most any occasion. For heaven’s sake, I was in a rock band for four years! Do you realize how awesome you have to be to play lead guitar? But perhaps that is what has happened. I have heard of guys who lived the rock n’ roll life in their younger days and then they experience negative effects later. Those who do drugs I have memory or nerve problems later. Those who drink too much have liver trouble. Those who played music too loud having hearing issues. Now granted, I was in a Christian rock band so we didn’t experiment with drugs or hit the bottle after shows. But still, maybe there is another post-band ailment that haunts even Christian rockers: awesomeness loss.

Josh H.

I recently had a sort of silent battle with Associated Content, the user supported content provider of which I am a member. You see I submitted for payment the article you saw here about the RockMyTeeth iPod teeth whitening product. The article I submitted to AC was pretty much the exact same as the one published here at The Smoak House. When submitting it I categorized it as humor and technology. Well the editors and submission reviewers declined it stating that they do not offer payment for humor pieces. But really I did not mean for this to be a purely humor piece so I resubmitted it changing the humor categorization to health. Well they declined the thing again, and again their comments suggested that they did not quite get that I was not trying to be funny. So I changed some of the wording and submitted it again. This time their comments were priceless:

“Sorry for the humor decline. The ridiculousness of this product fooled us at first, but lo and behold, this thing is real.”

They also paid me five bucks for it. It pays to be persistent.

Josh H.

I am not the type of person who likes to “theme hop”. I like to choose one style and stick with it. But here I am and I have changed my theme twice this year. However my previous theme (the blue one) never was quite what I needed it to be. For one thing it did not support widgets. If you are a Wordpress user you know how frustrating that could be. If you wanted the sidebar to change you have to dive into the code and I know enough CSS and HTML to be dangerous, but not much more than that. Also the “blue theme” just was not interesting enough for my taste. I don’t feel like it reflected my personality at all, but with this new look uses colors and patterns that I like (ok, let’s change topics before I start sounding like HGTV).

Speaking of CSS, HTML and being dangerous, I want to once again thank my good friend Ray Williams for his assistance. He was instrumental my being able to transfer my logo (which he designed) over to this new theme. “Don’t tase me, bro!”

Finally, many of you have read my posts dealing with blog monetization (i.e. gettin’ paid fer writin’ stuff). To this point this has mostly consisted of posts here and on my Content Producer page at Associated Content. Well I have also sought out ways to monetize the actual blog itself. But at the same time I wanted any ads or other tools that I feature here to be ones that are useful to you and not random ads or other things that may get in your way. That being said, I have chosen to become an Amazon Associate because Amazon is a trustworthy company that many of us know and use. So for starters I have included an Amazon search box here at The Smoak House. Whenever you use this to search to link to Amazon and then subsequently purchase something, I will receive a referral fee. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, I am raising money for a very good cause: the Me Want Macbook Foundation. Yes, you will be helping me to purchase a new laptop. And allow me digress for a moment. I would encourage anyone to use some of the blog monetizing tools out there like Amazon, Associated Content and PayPerPost. It’s an easy way to make money on something you would do anyway. So if you’re going to be making Amazon purchases for Christmas or otherwise, I would greatly appreciate your using the Amazon search function here. Once you see the results you search for you can click them to go view them on Amazon. So hook me up with some H.B.O. (help a brother out).

Josh H.