Posted by Bone at August 29th, 2006

I’ve had sponsors running ads on HYA for many months now, some of them are affiliate links (if someone buys something through the ad I get a cut) and some of them are just regular ads like you’d see in any media publication.

The problem is that I haven’t actually earnt anything back from these ads (except for the occasional free tee), because if someone asks for my ad rates I tell them that the ad software isn’t working properly at the moment so I’ll just let them advertise for free. They all love this of course, and it gives my blog a good reputation, but it does still mean that I’m not getting back what I paid for on hosting (even though me and Tigg got a great deal thanks to the guy that runs Teees, and I am properly unemployed now, so I figured it was about time I got my hands dirty and started trying to fix the software.

*WARNING: IT GETS SLIGHTLY NERDY*

And my God, is this stuff tough! Have you ever used Shell access? It looks like MS-DOS, and that scares me. I spent a few hours working on it last night, then another few hours today, and I *think* that I might have saved something, which might cause something to work, but I think it might take a few hours for it to propagate. Basically I wrote a crontab, but I also have to change some lines on an INI file, and even then it probably won’t work, since I’m in way over my head and don’t really understand any of the stuff I’m doing, since I’m just working from anecdotes in forum threads rather than any kind of documentation.

Still, it should be worth it if I can start getting in a few quid to cover hosting (and eventually an iPod or something unnecessary like that).