My RSS subscriptions are littered with blogs caught in the ether between life and death. Blogs that I loved and read religiously, and keep in my feed list in the hopes that they may one day wake up from the coma. Sometimes I’m rewarded:

Other times I wonder how long I can continue subscribing to a silent blog before I tread into Terri Schiavo territory.

Eight months? Nearly two years?

That last linked blog is one of mine, obviously meant to be the sister site to this here Faces of Yve. I have plans for reviving it, much as I resuscitated Yve at the beginning of this year, it’s just a matter of finding the time.

And its purpose.

Blogs fall by the wayside for many reasons, including but not limited to lack of time, lack of vision, and just plain lack of things to say. But occupying space on the internet means that someone has to keep paying rent. As long as the domain gets renewed and the site still exists, the odds are not too bad that one day, the blog will be back.

I mocked this one up a while ago, but haven’t gotten around to coding it yet.

I think it’s kind of Martha Stewart meets Silence of the Lambs.

This one will only be available in a 3-column, fixed-width version. If you want to know when it goes up, please subscribe to the Wordpress themes feed or the site-wide feed.

I recently received an e-mail from a company called ZTMC, Inc., asking if I was accepting advertising on this site. I am, and thus I began corresponding with one of their marketing managers. They wanted me to place four text links on every page of my site. These ads would rotate and I would be paid each month I displayed the ads.

I ultimately rejected their offer and here’s why.

No Ad Filter

ZTMC assured me that they wouldn’t be placing any ads for porn sites or warez sites. However, there are plenty of non-porn and non-warez sites that I do not wish to advertise. Mobile phone sites, for example, or credit counseling web sites.

Every other ad program I have ever tried has given you some ability to filter out undesirable ads. Project Wonderful and Text Link Ads both give you the option of manually approving each ad before it goes live on your site while Google Adsense’s competitive ad filter lets you get rid of ads for a specific URL at any time.

This sort of filtering mechanism is really important to keep your ads reasonably targeted to your site’s audience, but ZTMC doesn’t have one.

Potential Harm

A quick Google search for ZTMC will turn up a couple discussions like this one, in which people claim that placing their ads will kill your search engine ratings and Google PageRank. Although this is hardly definitive evidence of anything, it’s enough for me to be concerned.

More concerning, however, was their code. In order for them to serve ads to my site, I was to put a PHP include of some kind on my site. Now, it’s pretty common for people to put includes on their site—the Amazon widget, the Project Wonderful ad box, and the Share This button are all driven by includes.

Javascript includes. PHP is much more powerful, and I’m disinclined to execute foreign PHP on my site without ascertaining exactly what it’s supposed to do. But that proved to be very difficult because of…

Unprofessionalism

ZTMC apparently does not require its marketing managers to be able to converse coherently with web developers. The person with whom I was communicating (and who claimed to have visited my site personally), kept insisting that my sites were HTML and that this might be a problem. This is nonsense.

The other thing she kept doing was telling me that the code she was providing was an SSI. Except that in the next sentence, she’d say the code was PHP.

I used SSI back in 2000 or so, when PHP and dynamic generation of web pages weren’t standard yet. SSI and PHP have different syntax and PHP is much more powerful. The terms are not interchangeable like that.

And then when I asked her to clarify exactly what the code was, she decided that meant that I didn’t know what SSI was and explained it by plagiarizing from Wikipedia’s page on SSI.

If this is how her business is run, thanks, but no thanks.