I don’t think this blog has any regular readers (especially since I’m not posting very regularly), but if they would exist they would have noticed two prominent changes in the last two days:

  1. the WordPress theme for the site has changed, and
  2. this blog now has several advertisements from Google’s AdSense programme.

Obviously, the two changes are tied together. From almost the first day of this blog’s existence I had been using the Carrington theme, and although I still like it a lot (including the fact that it has two columns on the left), its appearance on mobile devices was sub-par. To fix this I looked around for a theme with “responsive design” and the current one looks quite nice both on my desktop machines and on my phone.

Changing themes had been on my list for quite some time, but the reason that I took the time to actually do it was because of my idea to play around a bit with Google’s AdSense program. Apparently, Google likes it if a site looks well on all platforms. The main reason to add ads to this blog was to experiment a bit and simply to see if this is a viable way of recouping (some of) the costs associated with hosting this blog. I’ve got a decent number of monthly views (at least I think it’s decent 🙂 and it’s definitely more than I expected when I started out) so why not give it a try. Moreover, since this is my personal, low profile site, it can also give me an idea if it’s worth having advertisements on some of the community sites that I run.

So, all in all, I think the theme change is definitely a good one, and about the ads, we’ll see. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t. All in all I hope they don’t interfere too much with normal reading of the site.

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