Thursday, March 24, 2005

Where's my free nookie?



No self-respecting blog would be complete without a humungous side-bar, packed with masses of icons showing just how many feeble blogging directories the author has registered with in a futile attempt to drum up traffic.

Why should I be any different? I too want my blog to look like a Formula One driver's multipatched underpants.

I'm particularly taken with the latest useless hunk of sidebar java to come into my life; a cute strip of thumbnail images showing five random pictures taken from my Freebie Flickr account.

Yes, another little morsel of bandwidth sapping, dial-up punishing crud has been brought into existence for no good reason whatsoever. The five minutes I spent pasting the code into my blog template would have been better spent undertaking a simple act of kindness to another human being. The resources expending in storing and transmitting my gratuitously bloated page could be harnessed to search for extraterrestrial life or model future climate patterns. But no, I chose the Left Hand Path instead. I chose that path because I thought a Flickr sidebar looked kind of dinky.

It should be there now, a little way down on the right hand side. Go on, look at it. Some nameless arthritic granny had to carry her shopping home today unassisted to make it happen.

Revel in the novelty while it lasts. Given that I’'m too cash-strapped to upgrade my Flickr account beyond the freebie 100 images, this is going to get quite old, quite quickly

And what’'s the point anyway? Even when you do strike gold and lure some extra visitors nothing ever comes of it. For example, earlier in the week, a picture I took at the Stop the War Match last Saturday got a gushing, and thoroughly deserved ;-), plug in The Londonist Blog (a recommended read by the way):

I only joined the Londonist Flickr forum because the administrator promised that, after posting some fine pictures, '‘Fame, fortune, and offers of casual sex are bound to follow'’, which seemed like a pretty good deal to me.

I did my part ...

Still waiting

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You need to print off and redeem the Casual Sex voucher, located in their admin section - you obviously haven't done that yet.

David said...

You've done better than me- I haven't ever worked out how to put links down the right hand margin let alone pictures. And I joined blogroll thinking that may allow me to do it, but no, I joined yet another site I have no idea what it actually does. At least, like our useful flickr accounts, it didn't cost me anything.

Stef said...

Fret not - one day you shall figure it all out and you too can end up with a blog that looks like a Premiere League footballer's jim jams.

Based on close study of my sitemeter logs I can confidently conclude that with one or two exceptions these sidebar links generate virtually no trade whatsoever. Though I won't spoil your fun by telling you which ones ;-)