Well, who would have thought that trying to have a blog would wind up being not so simple?
Cookies – Not the Chocolate Chip Kind
You’ll notice that there’s now a banner at the bottom of the site about a cookie policy. Why? Wonderful question. I really don’t know the politics behind it, but it has something to do with the EU and privacy. Maybe you can do some research and let me know the details. All I know is that my site statistics tell me that I occasionally get viewers from Europe. I read about 2 articles on it and concluded that my blog most likely would require the notification under the law. In an effort to NOT land in legal trouble (highly doubtful that I would, but . . .), I added the banner through a widget that is available from Jetpack, an add-on that I use for WordPress to help manage my blog. I don’t personally use any cookie information nor do I use any other information that is stored about visitors or subscribers. If you subscribe, your email address is simply used to send notifications of posts. Wordpress uses cookies, from what I understand, to facilitate the comments login. Jetpack (which provides the site statistics) uses it for other purposes as well.
Click “Close and Accept” and it goes away. It will not reappear unless you clear your browser’s cookies or visit the website from a browser through which you have not accepted the notification.
Affiliate Accounts
I had entertained getting into the affiliate programs of companies to help bring in passive income to pay for hosting and other blog related costs. The biggest one being Amazon. The truth is, not enough traffic was driven to Amazon through the affiliate account, so Amazon closed it. I probably won’t entertain anything like that again unless I’m affiliated with something in which I truly believe. I removed all the affiliate disclosures and pages, but the original links for some products are still there and send you to the product on Amazon’s site, it just doesn’t benefit us if you make a purchase.
There you have it. Some complications to having a blog introduced by others and some by me.
I happened back to a blog that I used to read years ago. https://zenhabits.net It was one that I originally modeled the site after: simple, clean, uncluttered. As I tried to start using the blog to possibly build income, I began cluttering it up. Stupid me. I suppose I need to get back to basics. So goes the saying, “Don’t dance with the devil. You won’t change the devil, the devil will change you.”
I have to head back to work at midnight tonight. Not looking forward to that schedule change.