It turns out that I am not blocked by China’s firewall. China, as always, welcome to rockstarpoet.ca.
Update: China has now blocked me. Thanks for nothing, China. :flush_tb:

Times, they are a changing. I can’t go a week without changing something around here. But that’s just the way the internet and I go. It’s a big digital world and I want to try it all out. So, what’s with going all corporate Rhett? I have added Text Link Ads (TLA) to the side of my page which hopefully will have some actual ads in a couple days. However, they won’t be flashing or pop-ups but simple text links. Whether or not to have ads on my site or any site has always been a struggle for me and has been a bit of a hot topic recently ((Here, here and here.)). My major problem is that generally no matter how much you customize them they still stick out like a sore thumb. I’m not against the idea of ads, but if they take away for the design and look of the site then I have a problem. However, TLA are just links and don’t necessarily stick out. The other fact at hand is that it costs a fair bit to run a site like this. Thankfully, I have a great host. At this point in life, it costs more than what I have to spend on a webpage and this should offset that and possibly pay for Leah’s ridiculous coffee needs—this is what she looks like on coffee: :jittery_tb:.

Also, if you haven’t already noticed, I have added a few fun things. The emoticons before were sort of dull. Now, you don’t need to know how to code anything when you comment there are handy buttons. You can bold and italics and whatever else you like, plus all these super cool emoticons. Awesome. Oh, and I added a disclaimer thinger to the button of the comment form. I haven’t had any troubles with comments but I want to be prepared. It is the internet, you know.

Update: Bill Maher is an interesting fellow. I haven’t followed his career very closely, but I think from time-to-time he’s probably been funny. Recently Matt Good posted a couple of videos by him. This one is particularly good: