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So far people don’t like the ads on the site, or they are actually interfering with the viewing of letters. So I pulled almost all of them.

I like having the ads. Used to be part of the joke. Having “Hooked on Phonics” ads on a writing site tickled me, but they generated no income. Same with the “Letter from Santa” ad.

I was down to only books on Amazon by authors doing a similar thing to what I was doing, and no more than 2 google ads, but some people were saying the ads covered the letters, so I pulled them.

I’ll have to spend more time figuring that part out, or just pull the ads entirely.

My jackassletters.com site got a little write up over on the metafilter users’ blogs site.

I expect great things will happen now!

I spend a bit too much time on metafilter. $5 seems to keep out most of the jackasses (somehow I keep getting to stay though), and it’s a fun place to get questions answered, find cool things on the internet, and to figure out how dumb you are. There’s a lot of smart people on there (again, somehow I get to stay). It was nice getting the write up.

I really want to redesign the jackass site, get more letters out the door, and get more letters online. I’d really like to try to promote it (sky writing, ad buys, dancing girls) and see where it can go, but honestly, I kind of thought it would have been shut down by now. I can’t afford to fight a lawsuit, so am just lucky I haven’t gotten one yet. Who knows, maybe if this ever did happen the EFF would take my case, the ACLU would raise a stink, and Al Sharpton would organize marching in the streets. This could be the best promotion ever!

Anyway, it was a nice write-up and if you haven’t checked out metafilter or my jackassletters you really should. You’re life isn’t complete until you have (and we should all strive for a complete life)!

Kinda funny tring to type one character at a time in a tiny little text field. I’m sure the CMS I use isn’t optimized for the iPhone, and the autocorrect is messing up as much as it catches.

Still cool posting from the bus!

I won’t say I’ve run out of steam on my jackassletters site, or that I’ve given up posting here on a regular basis, or that I’ve grown bored with designing sites, or even that I’ve given up on various ideas. I will say my level of enthusiasm is waning. I have my hands in too many projects to do any of them well. I’m the worst at this, but people often have no idea what goes into creating a site or maintaining one.

Every time I set up a site I feel like I am learning everything over again. Actually, I learn new things that make things better/easier, but then I want to apply this across the sites I already control, and I control too many. What starts out as something fun and easy, ends up being a major project. This is why I am putting my jackassletters site in hiatus.

I also maybe made a mistake by joining twitter and facebook, since the last thing I really need is more places I don’t update.

I have been playing with video recently, but mostly just being stupid.

Sometimes I think about deleting all my sites, letting the URLs go away, and reclaiming the time for other things. You know, like watching TV or reading.

But then no one asked me.

Once I fired up jackassletters.com I decided I needed to come up with cheap and free ways to promote and market the site. I’m not sure what the difference is between marketing and promotion, but that last sentence sounds so much better if it seems like I am doing two things to drive traffic to the site.

I listed it with as many blog cataloging sites as I could find, put it in my signature file on all the forums I participate in, posted it to digg and reddit, and took out a full page ad in the New York Times.

Irony here is a friend put the jackassletters site in his stumbleupon.com bookmarks, and that did more to drive traffic to the site than anything I’d done. Yack!

I also created a twitter account for the site, since it seemed like a handful of people were already taking about it (I’m looking at you Joel Postman! Still don’t know why you didn’t write back. That hurts my feelings). And today I finally created a facebook profile, but mostly so I could have access to the APIs of their site to try to roll out a jackassletters web app.

I guess there’s still myspace to attack, and a lot of other ways to market and promote the site. I’ll get there eventually. Really I will. Well, unless I hit 38 years old and get too old for this shit.

Kids these days.

Full disclosure: I didn’t really take out a NYT ad.