A nice Monday for a change

Image by justmakeit

You all know what day is today. It's Monday. And like any other Monday, I expected this one to be yet another boring and exhausting one. But, fortunately, I was wrong. It proved to be a pretty interesting day. And because The Yoboo is now a personal blog where I have the opportunity to bore everyone with my tales.

So I got to work like any other workday. It took a while to get comfortable, to fully wake up, and other things I do so I don't have to start working just yet. But all those things were in vain for, you see, there was no work to be done!!! That was the first thing that made me thing that probably today was going to be a nice day after all. As the time passed and I surfed from one website to another, the boss left who knows where. So questions like "have you finished that?" or "can you improve that?", minimal chores just so I don't sit around doing nothing, were out of the equation. You could almost say I had a day off, but I had to spend it in the office. It's not that bad as long as I have a computer with an Internet connection.

After that I played a few small flash games, browsed a few more pages, checked on my favorite "to be released" game, "Starcraft 2". With this occasion I found out (I'm probably the last one) that Blizzard Entertainment will release "someday" a new game, "Diablo III". Upon finding out something like that, I almost fell off my chair, Diablo being my all time favorite RPG (maybe the first one I've ever played, from what I recall). The game is currently in development and a release date has not been set yet. You can check out their website at www.blizzard.com/diablo3/ for more information and updates. Looks like Blizzard finally realized that there is a lot more to gaming that World of Warcraft, even if that has a huge base of fans. Ignoring the rest would be a mistake.

Drawing the line to make the total of the day, this Monday was something special. I could really use more days like this one. But I'm pretty sure that what I expected to happen today, will happen tomorrow, and probably even more. I need a vacation soon.

This is getting stupid!

Image by bunnyandcoco

My last post stated that The Yoboo will be reborn and that I will dedicate more time to keeping it alive. Or something like that. That was a lot of bull. I've said that so long ago and I realize now that I've made nothing to accomplish that goal. The Yoboo is still alone and ignored in his forgotten corner of the Internet.

Besides the fact that this ashames me (I'm almost sure that's not the way you spell ashamed at first person, but I was never very good with English grammar or spelling), it also irritates me. I hate when I say one thing and for one reason or another, or simply because of the lack of the necessary mood, I fail to accomplish what I plan.

The fact is that I have not forgotten about The Yoboo. In fact I kept on visiting the front page over and over again and there were times when I was almost ready to write something. But either I lacked the necessary mood, either something else came up (boss came with an "urgent" matter to attend to, a nice movie was on the TV, a friend wanted to hang out, and other stuff like that). But if I were to make up excuses, it would take you about 3 days to finish reading this :). And the only thing I would accomplish would be to make myself look like a jackass.

But still, something still remains. I recall I've said it before: I have no idea what The Yoboo is about. In it's early stages I was very sure The Yoboo would be a blog where I write about all sorts of graphics (drawing methods, nice tutorials and effects, cool photography, special drawing methods, and other things that would involve a visual graphical result). Soon after I've realized that there are other things I want to write about. Stuff like making money online, which I was (and still am) a beginner at, so I was to write about my experience. Soon after that, although the subject is very attracting and interests me very much, I guess I got bored or maybe realized that the expression "make money online" is in most cases associated with viral networking pages. I say in most cases because there are websites/blogs out there that really help you on the matter and offer really helpful tips.

After noticing that making money online is not what I want to be associated with, I can't even remember what I started to write about. It's been so long ago. The main idea though is that I almost figured out what I want to do with The Yoboo: nothing in particular. That's wright. Absolutely nothing in particular. It's not that I will abandon it. It's just that unlike most other blogs, The Yoboo will not have one theme of interest. As I remember saying before (maybe here, I'm not sure), I don't have only one hobby or area of interest. With that in mind, if you subscribe to the RSS feed or keep on visiting this blog often (although I doubt it) expect to see here anything from web design, Photoshop tutorials, CSS tips and tricks, PHP scripts, electronic gadgets, thoughts of the day to online or offline games and probably a lot more.

Basically, with these being said, I now declare The Yoboo a 100% pure personal blog, a mash of everything and anything that crosses my mind, a place of "pointless ramblings in the pursuit of something that is always just out of reach".

The new Yoboo

It's been a while since I posted here. It feels like I'm starting all over again. And I am, to some extent. One of the things that I have decided to change was the old design. I think this is the fourth time that I've done this since I gave birth to The Yoboo. Some might say that it's little too often seeing as this blog barely has 6 months. But I was just not happy with it's overall look and feel. So I decided to go for a design that someone else created. And this is it.

Aside from the layout, other things have been changed as well. Most of them involve removal of a lot of elements the former Yoboo had. Here's a list of the changes:

• First of all, the design change. I looked around for a nice looking Blogger template, but I couldn't find one that would be as pleasing as this one. It's called Minyx and you can get it here. I like the fact that it's clean, not overcrowded. At least that's my opinion.
• Removal of a lot of the elements that were present on the old blog:
  • Kontera In-Text Advertising - it just didn't work for me. I didn't earn a single dollar from that. I guess it's aimed at high traffic web sites. Hence, useless for The Yoboo. On top of that, even I find it intrusive.
  • BlogRush - I don't think I've received any visitors that would be interested in anything that's posted on this blog. Maybe I don't know how to make use of link-baiting. Or maybe people are just too used to seeing that widget and don't pay attention to it anymore.
  • Sphere - "connects your current articles to contextually relevant content from your archives as well as from Blog Posts, Media Articles, Video, Photos, and Ads from across the Web" - that may be so, but I never used it on other blogs. I didn't even see it on that many web sites. The idea behind it is nice and I might even go back to it some day.
  • Entrecard - I guess I don't have to tell you what this is. As I already said in an older post, the bounce rate is indeed huge from this. You might even get a visitor that's not in such a hurry to "drop and go" once in a while. But that wouldn't happen very often. It seems it has worked out for others, but you have to put a lot of effort into promoting yourself through their system. And I just don't have the time to do that. So I decided to quit and removed the widget.
  • Statcounter - a nice analytics tool. One of the first ones I've tried and it works out great. Unfortunately, I'm addicted to Google and I'll stick to Google Analytics. For a while I had both of them running at the same time. Pointless, I know.
• Change in ad positions - I decided to do a little more research, but I didn't overdo it. I found out that the highest paying AdSense are the 300x250 boxes so I changed the one I had with one that can fit this new template. I have also added a big bottom banner, so it wouldn't bother anyone. And a post footer via FeedBurner, just to cover the maximum of 3 ad boxes possible on a single page.

These changes were made because of several reasons. One of them is the fact that The Yoboo is my first project that I tried to make it work this hard. So I guess I owe it to myself to keep going. Another reason was the fact that I ran the old layout through a test at websiteoptimization.com and I was not at all happy with the result. Even in this time of high speed Internet connections, we still need to consider the optimization of a web site. And with this new template, I'm happy to say that things are looking better. They're far from perfect but we still need to consider looks. But at least I've noticed a drop in the amount of requests needed to display the page, the size and number of the scripts and the total page size the user needs to download. I'm sure I can tweak those a little more if I try, without affecting quality. But it's pretty good for now.

I said in the beginning on this post that it feels for me that it's a new start. It could be because it's spring. But I decided to grant this project a little more attention. That's going to be a little harder since I already started another blog, Fresh IT News. But I hope I'll manage to keep both of them as active as I possibly can.

That's about it for now. I'm going to make sure I haven't messed up tot many thing when I changed the template. See you soon.