We started working on Holidailies 2005 this week. For those of you who haven’t heard of this, it’s a collaborative project that I’ve been running every year since 2000, back in the days when I had an online journal and not a film blog. (This is a film blog isn’t it? Well, it was. Obviously I need to write more about film, as soon as possible.)
Holidailies started as an informal group of online journallers who pledged to update their sites every day in December. If you want a laugh, you can still see the Nibelung ring of Holidailies 2001 participants. I wonder how many of those sites are still active?
In the past couple of years, Holidailies has become spiffy and feature-rich and amazing, thanks almost entirely to The Beau, the database and code wrangler. About 120 people posted regularly to the Holidailies portal last year, plus another 50 or so who participated informally. We had a readers’ panel picking Best of Holidailies entries every day, too.
This year Holidailies will be even better. The site now has its own domain, we redecorated it with a new color scheme (I was tired of red and green), and The Beau is working on some more cool features. The new design and features haven’t gone live yet, but keep checking the site because it is going to look fabulous.
We have added Google text ads to the site, and we are going to sell non-animated banner ads to bloggers, online journallers, and other small-business people who want them during the Holidailies period (Dec. 7-Jan. 6). You wouldn’t believe the number of people who visit the site, multiple times a day, to find fresh content. With the number of participants, new material would appear on the portal every few minutes. We have an RSS feed, which is ideal for tracking the portal postings, but not everyone is comfortable with RSS yet. (I can’t do without it, personally.) So I am hoping that the ads will help cover server costs. Besides, I think the banner ad idea is rather fun; I love seeing the ads people design for their personal Web sites.
It was terribly easy to add the Google text ads to Holidailies. In fact, it was so easy that I finally decided to add them to Celluloid Eyes (as you may have noticed in the left sidebar). My working on freelance projects from home has been a key part of the decision. When I am writing from home all day long, the projects that bring in some money are the ones that usually take precedent. As a result, Celluloid Eyes languished … you can see in the archives that I published one whole entry in October. I was covering film festivals like crazy for Cinematical, but I had also hoped to write about some film-related stuff here, like the movies I watched for aGLIFF.
Holidailies is always a nice way to jump-start a neglected personal Web site, but I thought I needed a little more incentive. Putting ads on this site makes me more inclined to update often. If I have fresh new content every day or so, people will visit regularly and might even feel compelled to click the ads sometimes. (Google says I’m not supposed to ask people outright to click the ads. I agree, because it can sound tacky and I know my readers are far too intelligent to need that kind of nagging, anyway.)
And I honestly believe that my writing on this site is good enough for me to try to earn something from it. If you’re here reading this, I hope you agree.
I have an Amazon Associates account as well, which I use mainly on my Twenty Gaps on DVD: the Ongoing Updated List entry in the list of movies now available on DVD. By the way, I just updated that entry, so it’s a good time to have a look. If you click the Amazon links on that page and then buy something from Amazon, it benefits me. I may add more Amazon links on the site to see if they’ll be effective. Lots of sites have Amazon Associates accounts so I’m not sure how many people would buy stuff through mine. But it’s a good way to help if you’re not much of an ad-clicker.
I hope these changes won’t drive anyone away. It would be lovely for me to update Celluloid Eyes every day for the sheer love of writing, especially writing about film. But I promised myself that I will try to support myself right now through my writing and editing (and design, sometimes) work. If these ads buy me more time at home to work on my own writing projects, and less time in someone else’s office writing software procedures, then I will not regret putting them on the site.
Hooray!! and because you’re starting Dec. 7 I’ll miss only a couple of days at the beginning. (I’m leaving for two weeks in Kenya two weeks from today and will get home Dec. 8.)
I am tempted to start a blog just so I can join.
Why do people have to apologize for trying to earn money from their writing online?
I’m going to do Holidailies although I have to see if I can be a genuine participant instead of an ‘at home’ this year. I still can’t remember what kept me from it last time. I think it was my weird format, but I abandoned that anyway.