Greetings one and all. This is the Angry Systems Administrator currently working on my first pot of coffee for the day. (Yes, the percolator is working fine) However, this isn’t about coffee. After a couple of decades, I’ve finally connected the Musing of the Angry Webmaster to Google Analytics.
I’ve toyed around with it for years, but really couldn’t be bothered to fully set it up. However, we do see occasional spikes of interest in this teensey weensy little blog so I finally hooked it all in. It’s been running for a week, now, meaning it came online after the SIIC, (Senior Idiot In Charge, aka the Angry Webmaster), posted his entry on how the Amelia meme has taken Britain and now the world by storm.
Even though that was before I activated Analytics, it’s still one of the most viewed posts. In the week since I activated Analytics, I’ve been looking at who has been visiting our insignificant little blog and one thing surprised me. Most of the visitors are from Lanzhou, China. I did some research and, of course, it’s bots. I’m now working to block them.
I’ve also been looking into Google’s Adsense. We used to be a part of it, but then Google decided they didn’t like us, took the money we made and banned us. It was for an absolute load of crap, and happened almost 20 years ago. Since then, we tried other ad systems and each one eventually either failed, (Company went out of business), or didn’t actually do anything for us.
On a lark, I tried restarting Adsense. They are actually allowing us to connect. We’re seeing complaints that we have low value content. We take this to mean we aren’t Woke, DEI enabled or left wing lunatics. I seriously doubt we will get approval since this is Google and they hate us. Even if we are approved, actually setting up ads is something we will need to sit down and decide if it’s worth the trouble. We’ve been running on pretty much no ads for a long time. Even the Amazon links are minimal these days.
An addendum to Google Adsense. Believe it or not, they actually approved us and fully activated ads on this site. This happened last week. When I saw the notifications, I said “What the heck?” and flipped the switch. Then I saw how the ads were being presented, (I took the defaults), and went “Oh HELL NO!” and shut them back down.
I want something subtle and unobtrusive not blasting all over the page. I’m still working to figure out how to set this up to actually work but also not interfere with the one or two people who might visit this site. You may see the ads showing up and then going offline again as I test things out. In any case, as always, feel free to use an ad blocker. I have several running at any one time. Feel free to leave comments on the experience below. Please be gentle. We mean well. 🙂
If nothing else, Google Analytics will allow me to lock down the site from bots and scrapers. I still have a great deal to learn on how Analytics works, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. I will be honest and wish there were anything else I could use since I trust Google about as much as I trust the Taliban to honor women’s rights, but sometimes you are just plain stuck with the tools available.
Thank you for your time.
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~The Angry Systems Administrator~
