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It looks like I'll not be updating this site for the rest of the year. I'm taking some holiday time away from work and my computer both, off playing in the Florida winter sun with friends. Fortunately there's a handful of other admins out there that are able to update the site and promote stories to the front page, so hopefully new stories will continue to appear.
In any case, there's a lot planned for KernelTrap next year... If interested, read on.
Secondly, I'll be upgrading the physical server that hosts KernelTrap, moving these pages to a colocation site that will be kindly donating the bandwidth. Thanks to all of you, the popularity of this site continues to grow, and this is a major step to keep up with the demand. I will have full control over the new server, and intend to finally optimize KernelTrap to withstand a Slashdotting without cringing. More detail on this move later.
Following the server and site upgrades, I am considering the addition of banner and text ads, something I've long cringed away from. I'd be interested in feedback on this decision, so let me know what you think. But before you decide, hear out my idea. The money raised from the ads will go directly back into KernelTrap. I hope to raise enough money monthly to start soliciting original articles, such as any magazine does.
Finally, I've got a list of interesting interviews planned for the upcoming months. Sorry, no hints as to who's lined up, but do check back and find out for yourself...
Thanks to all for stopping by. Enjoy your holidays. See you next year.
Adverts...
I have no objection to adverts per se. After all running the site costs time and effort and I wouldn't begrudge the site getting some payback. However can I suggest you go for the subtle non-instrusive style text box adds like LWN rather than graphics intensive districating banner adds?
Alex
re: Adverts...
I am looking into text, graphical block and banner ads. I may use any or all of these methods, I've not decided. In any case, I will not allow animated banners, or anything too annoying - I don't much like these things myself.
The money is not for "payback". Everything required to keep this site running is donated - I'm not trying to make a profit. The money will be used to bring in original magazine-quality articles. Who knows, maybe all that will be afforded is one original article a month, but it's a start...
static ads, thank you.
i support your stance of not allowing animated banners. penny arcade does the same thing, and it makes them stand out.
you might want to chat with the kuro5hin guys, and see how their text ads are working.
i look forward to the new features.
happy holidays.
merry christmas
Have a nice one Jeremy.
As for ads, I would much pref. to pay 2.5 bucks as I do on lwn.net, but I think user donations would be tough to get on this site, after all our userbase might not be as large as lwn's
So as long as you make a promise to keep this site pop up free, I have no problem with it.
re: merry christmas
I do not intend to go the subscription route.
There will be no popup ads. Nor will there be animated gifs.
Ad experiments
Subscriptions aside, there are a couple of interesting things one could experiment with. Imagine that people could earn an ad-free KT when perceived as a valuable contributor; be it by having one or more of his/her stories approved or by using some other form of metric. It might encourage people to contribute and it offers ad-haters an alternative.
Or - and I'm just thinking up loud - remove the ad associated with a story when it generated its share of money. Like that, people could click the ad to have it removed. It is special things like that which makes ads glide down the gullet far more easily.
cool
So you keep submitting good news and kerneltrap is kept adfree for you, nice idea.
re: Ad experiments
Interesting idea... I'll give this more thought, and keep the approach in mind when developing an ad module. I like the concept very much.
The problem here is I do not intend to tie any given ad to any given story. Thus should an ad expire for any reason (# of click throughs, end of month, etc) sure, it will no longer be displayed, however another ad in the queue will take its place...
Absolutely. I like the way you're thinking, and I'm certainly willing to consider other creative ideas...
The end goal of adding these ads is to make KernelTrap better, not more annoying. :)
banners and pop-ups
i second the comment on the pop-ups. text ads may not sell well (don't really know), but i'd prefer the ads to be comparatively smallish and uniform in size. sounds odd, but the thing that annoys me most about /.'s ads is that the banner size changes from request to request, making it slightly less easy to see whether the content has updated.
large banners also increase the amount you have to scroll the page, so a 'standard' banner size of 468x60 pixels would be much appreciated.
another thing not to do is using java or flash ads. or anything relying on external plug-ins. mozilla's pop-up asking me to update my plugi-ins is more annoying than the most annoying of pop-up ads, imho.
apart from that: go on, i'd prefer to see ads than pay. and, yeah, i see the financial problem of maintaining a site like this.
have a nice holiday!
re: banners and pop-ups
Any graphical ads will be of a uniform, smallish size. They will be static, not requiring plugins.
Again, this is not to pay for maintaining the site, or bandwidth, or anything like that. That's all donated. This is merely to try and bring in more original content...
OT: Disabling Mozilla's plug-in prompt
Remove /usr/{lib,local,whatever}/mozilla/plugins/libnullplugin.so to disable this prompt.
-- Miciah <miciah@myrealbox.com>
Please No Flash based advertising
As a fairly new visitor to KT, I'm not adverse to banner advertising but PLEASE no flash advertising. As a long time linux user (4 years), I simply flat refuse to install a flash plugin and avoid sites that use them like the plague! Just my .2cents worth.
Gord
Thoughts on the future of KT
What you have planned seems good, Jeremy. To add my thoughts to the rest, as far as ADs go the text AD boxes used by LWN and Google interest me the most. The ones I've seen often convey better information to me than graphical ones, in other words I am more likely to click a text AD rather than a graphical one.
Using the AD revenue to obtain more content is great. What about making available a system whereby site regulars could donate toward specific articles/interviews? This rather reminds me of a voting system, done by donation rather than a traditional poll.
holidays, upgrades and more
Jeremy, I would firstly like to say thank you for the effort you put into this, I read kerneltrap regulary and enjoy it. So enjoy your holiday you have earnt it :)
I support the use of banner ads, I know that they can get annoying, but you get use to them. If you need $$ to pay for extra services, then you have to do what will provide with that.
Anyway just my 2cents on that, Merry Christmas and all the rest, enjoy yourself and be safe.
Regards
Soliciting original articles
I'm not sure what kind of articles you are thinking of buying, but I find your interviews with kernel hackers to be the best (kernel) articles on the internet already. It's great to get unedited interviews with the all the top programmers.
Thanks for the work you do with KT
cheers,
bjun
About ads on kerneltrap
As long as there is a way to filter the ads out, like slashdot's ads, ads will be okay, I guess.
If the ad image is called something like /ads/foo.gif or /foo/bar/adv.gif it will be caught by junkbuster (ad-filtering proxy)
and likes, and I'll be happy :)
I find banner ads less frustrating when they are about something I'm interested in (not that I click them anyway, they just feel "less bad").
As long as they don't blink...
Personally, I wouldn't mind the adds at all, as long as they don't animate, flash, blink, move, beep or otherwise actively seek to distract my attention from what I came to see. I'll look around the screen and notice the ads in due course. If they annoy me in order to get my attention, they've put me in a negative mood and will be received as such. If they're passive and I happen to notice them, it was because I was in a receptive mode anyway, and will be much more likely to treat the ad in a positive light.
For instance, I was going to sign up with Yahoo! Games and play chess online, but I couldn't tolerate the blinking ad banners in the pop-up window that held the chess client. I felt like I'd be playing chess in Las Vegas. Therefore, no Yahoo! Games chess for me. I'll just play against the computer instead, playing FreeChess downloaded from Tucows.
From what I've seen in Jeremy's comments above, there won't be any animated/flashing/blinking/pulsating ads, so it should be all good.
Font sizes
Are they any plans to update your stylesheet to set the font sizes to be relative rather than fixed? Right now they are hardcoded at 10pt and 12pt which doesn't respect my browser default font size settings (20pt rather than 12pt). If you set these to 1em rather than 12pt and 0.8em rather than 10pt, it will scale relative the user's font size. 1em being 100% of the current font size.
Without this change Kernel Trap is very difficult to read on my laptop.
Text-based browsers
I'd recommend text-based ads for people like me who use text-based browsers (I use ELinks) or use graphical browsers but with image-loading disabled.
-- Miciah <miciah@myrealbox.com>
Plans
First of all I wish to congratulate on a job well done! KT is one of the better sites around. It's clean, it has great stories and (for a change) interesting discussions.
I'm very interested in the forms, I hope for some more great discussions there :)
Anyway, ads are okay, (see all previous comments), but it would be nice if they were more or less related to KT news, or at least open source development. Those are sometimes just as interesting to read.
I presume you had that in mind, but it's my 2cents ;)