the aj blog

The traffic on theajblog.com and aj-software.net since January 1. The spike is the result of being featured on hackszine.com.

What?

You heard me right. Due to time constraints, just to name one of many factors, I have decided that it is in the best interest of my own health to discontinue the frequent use of my blog. I may still blog occasionally, but not anywhere near the every-other-day it has been. To my understanding, there are currently 13 readers who have subscribed to my RSS feedburner feed. To them, I say this: thank you. Thank you for taking part of your valuable time to read what I have to say and my opinion in this world.  Thank you for listening. Each and every one of those 13, you encouraged me. Much appreciated. And to the 1.2 thousand visitors since the beginning of the year, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I intended.

The Previous Saga

So, there’s a story behind everything that’s happened so far. Almost three months ago, I began to read the book How to Make Money With Your Blog (ISBN 0071508570). One of the most critical factors there, along with getting good links in, was to blog frequently. I decided to do an experiment, and post every other day, monitoring visitors with Google Analytics. Extremely little change for about a month. One day, of course in the shower, I imagined a relatively wonderful idea for watermarking. So, I wrote about it, and then, I submitted it to hackszine.com. They were very nice. I was up there, and got almost 500 people to click through to my blog from the example provided. The sad part, however, is that that resulted in very little. As my page fell further and further down into the archives, so did my traffic. Right now it hovers around 30 peeps/day. Worst of all, I have made not a single cent off anything on this blog. Sure, someone clicked an ad, but it never accumulated to the minimum $100 payout. In the last week, my mind has been very stressed on ideas. I’m actually planning to work on a rather large other website project, hosted somewhere secretive right now.

The Future

I may blog occasionally. But for me, money from my blog is impossible. It’s no longer fun, and I spend important time writing for this when I could be doing other things. This new project is huge. It will eat my life. I’ll do it, but I can’t do it and this simultaneously. It’s like rubbing your stomach, patting your head, and playing a piano. At once.

Sorry, 13 readers. Sorry 1.2 thousand visitors. Sorry friends.

It was nice while it lasted.

An Ubuntu console, with an ICMPTX client running.

ICMPTX?

ICMPTX is a mostly linux software project to permit tunneling IP packets across ICMP pings. Why do this? To bypass restrictions. Ever go to a seemingly free hotspot, only to open your browser and discover the hotspot owner’s site, rather than your target? You can get around this if, like almost all hotspots, pings are permitted. Your computer, with the help of the software, will redirect all your internet traffic through the ping port in the form of a ping, and the server at the other end will return everything you requested. The biggest problem in my case with this was my OS and a server. One of my nicer, shared hosting plans had some decent control, but of course, I couldn’t superuser it. That doesn’t work. So, I had to go to a home-hosted server concept. I would simply install Ubuntu or something onto an old box, get ICMPTX going, maybe some router tweaks, but it would be simple. Wrong! Ubuntu on its own took me well over an hour to get going. Then, I still haven’t been able to properly configure the tunnel. I think there may be some issues further down the pipe, along with my own already. So, there I was, spending hours on hours trying to get a really cool thing working when I probably should’ve been studying for a test. Oh well! Trial and error.