Thinking about how to reduce my own costs, track visitors, and continuing to rule the world, I wondered about how I could most effectively keep away any potential visitors to this site. The first thought was rotating blades and hot coals, but that would be difficult (if not impossible) to implement, and it would be cost prohibitive. It was when I was working on keeping the With a linkness RSS feed simple I came upon a couple of ideas:

1. FeedBurner provides a simple, easy way to keep me from having to pay for all the bandwidth I'd give up to all you interneters
2. FeedBurner provides a simple, easy way to stick ads in the feed, thus keeping daddy in penny loafers

Both of those ideas strike me as opposite of what I should be doing. If I was going to provide a full-content feed, why would I not put ads on my site? That should really be the other way around, since FeedBurner makes it relatively free to publish to the entire internet. So, why stick Google AdSense on something that cost me nothing, yet let you see the site with no ad-clutter? And there you have it.

The magic word is "see" in that sentence. I want you here. Sure, I provide a feed to the news, but (eventually), I'll unleash my evil unto the world, in the form of written stuff. There's no feed to the static content, and all I will post in the news feed is that the static content exists.

Another reason for the ads, I get absolutely no stats bounce with you reading an RSS feed. As much as I hate feeds that cut off after 40 words (also known as summary feeds), at least they get you to the site. In it's current incarnation, MacStansbury.com has no comments, forum, or much of any user interaction, other than the Trackbacks/Pingbacks. Other than looking at the pretty site design, there's little different on the RSS feed than on the site, other than one is a masterpiece of coding, and the other is whatever Yahoo! makes it look like. Or Pluck. Or BlogLines. Et cetra, et cetra.

The point being that I go to a site for the look and feel. I read stuff in the RSS Feed Reader of Legendâ„¢ because it's fast. 300-1,000 word opuses don't translate well to the form of a newspaper. Hit the site, you won't regret it.

NOTE: I stopped doing this a long time ago. No sense in wasting the effort on making the feeds mess up for almost everybody when I wasn't making that much money off them.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-11-01T04:09:54.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
custom:
  podPressPostSpecific: 'a:6:{s:15:"itunes:subtitle";s:15:"##PostExcerpt##";s:14:"itunes:summary";s:15:"##PostExcerpt##";s:15:"itunes:keywords";s:17:"##WordPressCats##";s:13:"itunes:author";s:10:"##Global##";s:15:"itunes:explicit";s:7:"Default";s:12:"itunes:block";s:7:"Default";}'
  _utw_tags_0: 'a:5:{i:0;O:8:"stdClass":1:{s:3:"tag";s:7:"adsense";}i:1;O:8:"stdClass":1:{s:3:"tag";s:11:"advertising";}i:2;O:8:"stdClass":1:{s:3:"tag";s:10:"feedburner";}i:3;O:8:"stdClass":1:{s:3:"tag";s:6:"google";}i:4;O:8:"stdClass":1:{s:3:"tag";s:3:"rss";}}'
  similarterms: feed site feedburner simple feeds stick makes keeping provide word adsense google easy news ideas cetra cost static world visitors