Daniel wears Glo-Weave shirts. He shops at Safeway. He loves Weetbix for breakfast, and always includes Leggo tomato paste in his spag bol.

A while back I decided to play around with Google ads on a few pages: Here, here and on Geekrant.org.

To my utter surprise, it’s now earning US$5-9 per month. Which is hardly anything, of course. But it is almost enough to pay the hosting fees on some of those sites, which is slowly adding up to more and more money as traffic grows.

The content on toxiccustard.com needs a revamp anyway. The Guide to Australia pages still get a lot of interest, and would be very Google Adsense-friendly. I’m thinking a nice Wordpress installation, allowing comments, ads on each page, and an update every so often would do it and my wallet the world of good.

As for this site… How would I feel with ads plastered all over tastefully adorning the margins of my blog? Maybe just on the archive pages, which people coming in via Google seem to hit the most, but leaving the main page, which real readers see more often, ad-free.

A little project originally I started about two years ago — to move my entire online diary (which goes back to 1994) into Wordpress — has finally been completed. I’ll spare you the boredom of the details of trying to write programs to convert the old handwritten HTML into something I could import, and instead just give you the impressive statistic that the database now holds no less than 1,570 entries going back 12 years.

(I could also mention there’s a staggering 15,000 comments in the thing, mostly from the last two years. Yikes. Quite frankly that amount seems ludicrous, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing is lying to me. Though it could explain why the backup file is 14Mb uncompressed.)

There’s still a bunch of reader comments from 2003 missing. Some entries have text that is formatted a bit funny. And a lot of the old entries aren’t properly categorised, meaning about half of everything falls under “General”. I’ll get to all of these in due course.

But I’m quite pleased, and it’s allowed me to re-live some of my favourite diary entries.

• She…
• My previous, rather stressful house move
• Attending the Goodies convention of 2000
• My arrival for the first time in England
• Ranting about the job I had without computers. (With one of my all-time best lines ever)

Meanwhile, some of the videos I’ve shot over the years have gone onto Google Video, which makes it easier to watch them online.

• How to destroy your video
• Computer disposal
• Remembrance Day 2005

Andrew asks what blog posts have been later regretted. I’m struggling to remember, but I think there have been one or two over the years that I’ve edited, deleted, or not quite posted, after realising how cranky or stupid I sounded.

Maybe I’ll regret this post. For I have a deep dark secret.

I’m reading a Dan Brown novel. Demons and Angels. A colleague lent it to me, and while I’m the first to rant about Dan Brown’s popularist theological babble, the fact that his books were in the top ten list for a whole damn year, and that at one stage it seemed like every second person on the train was reading the Da Vinci Code, I haven’t yet thought up a good way of weaseling out and not reading it.

The main problem of course is: what if someone I know on the train spots me reading it? Solution: only read in public when sitting down, so the cover can be held out of view.

First impressions: the writing is thoroughly unchallenging; it’s like reading one of those old kids’ Choose Your Own Adventure books. It spells out everything and leaves nothing to the imagination. I’ve become used to having to think about what I read — not so with this.

The plot is mildly interesting. For now, surreptiously, I’ll keep at it.

My home internet connection has cut out. Knowing that it takes about 5 days, on Monday I requested the ADSL connection be moved. If I’d thought about it a bit more (and taken advice from friends) I would have ordered a brand-spanking new connection from somebody else, rather than relocate my Netspace one, so there’d be an overlap period, like there is with other essential services like the phone, gas, water, power etc. But hey, Netspace have been pretty good, and I get to avoid the red tape of going with a new provider.

So this morning sometime during breakfast, it got disconnected, and no doubt my new empty house now has hot running broadband.

I could use the dialup service, designed for emergencies or when on holiday. But do I even know where my old dialup modem is now? Nup.

PS. 9am Friday. Hmmm. On second thoughts, it must have been a temporary glitch, because this morning it’s working. Today I’m at home, not feeling well. Some kind of flashback to the last time I moved???

Blogging is starting to be taken seriously by product promoters. Some time back I posted (rather bitterly I admit) about the exhorbitant price of a TV theme mobile jingle I bought. Someone at the TV listing company that had linked to it (not the actual jingle company who got the money) saw that post, tracked me down and sent me a refund.

A few months ago, a company that makes a multimedia CD for teaching Australian English spotted my much-in-need-of-an-update Guide to Australia and sent me a review copy.

More recently I mentioned that well-known organic chocolate maker Green & Black’s had been bought by Cadbury. This prompted a note from the guys at Cocolo, makers of fine Swiss organic chocolate, letting me know that their product is available in Australia, and asking if I’d like to try a sample.

Would I? Ha!

There’s something about this chocolate that I can’t quite put my finger on. Something that makes it utterly delicious. It could be that unlike most brands, you get just a hint of the cocoa within, without it dominating. The Dark Chocolate Orange in particular had a rather lovely tangy aftertaste, which showed up a few seconds after I finished chewing, and left me hesistant to take another bite, lest it vanish. The other one, the Milk Chocolate, seems creamy but without being overly so, and leaves the bog standard Cadbury chocolate (which I like, mind you) for dust.

Both of them have the kind of taste that you could enjoy immensely in small doses, without wolfing the whole packet down in a hurry. This is great stuff, and I’ll be watching out for it in the shops.

Isaac’s a little unwell, so I’m at home today. I was clicking around one of the real estate web sites, when I came across this superb example of great real estate photography.

Funny angle, thumb in the way… weren’t digital cameras meant to solve these kinds of issues?

After trying to stuff the Business section into its main News pages, and apparently getting flayed for it, The Age has now tried to stuff the Metro section in there instead. They say that Metro readers were sick of looking through the Sport section to find it. That’s probably true, but will they be any happier looking through the News section to find it? Is ease of navigation really driving the change, or is the Age just trying to reduce the number of tabloid pages it produces for some reason? Will the Metro section mysteriously shrink in times of crises, as the Features so often do?

So far those who consume newspapers in their paper format are probably still in the majority. But this will change over time, and as readers move onto the web, it also changes how they read the news.

The paper version only lets you browse, of course. No keyword searching. And you get less story precis per page, because it’s not just headlines to click on, it’s all of (or most of) the story right there on that page in front of your nose.

On the web, the story that may be splashed across half the front page of the paper version is relegated to just another headline (albeit in a bigger font). Any text you spot and get interested in is unlikely to be in the body of the article, but will be the headline or precis. Pictures are there, but the text dominates.

But whereas visitors to the web site will still browse, those coming through Google News or other search sites will probably find articles by keyword searching. They’re unlikely to see anything they aren’t actively looking for (unless it’s a false search result).

Over time this will impact the old-school media more and more, and they’ll have to adapt to get their content onto the digital devices of the future. It’ll be interesting to see where it all goes. I wonder how long it’ll take before I’m on the train to work in the morning, reading a digital newspaper rather than a paper one.

Dear Daniel Davidson Bowen aged 9,

Re: your comments:

cancel this website i’m daniel bowen age nine and my birthday is pon july 21 you idiot
– Comment by daniel davidson bowen — Wed 29 June 2005 @ 18:56

i hate you i am daniel bowen
– Comment by daniel davidson bowen — Wed 29 June 2005 @ 18:57

get lost and give me this website to me iam only a kid and need MONEY so gimme
– Comment by daniel davidson bowen — Wed 29 June 2005 @ 18:59

hi its me i want this web
– Comment by daniel davidson bowen — Wed 29 June 2005 @ 19:06

Welcome to danielbowen.com.

My name is Daniel Francis Bowen.

There are lots of Daniel Bowens.

You can’t have my web site. I got here first.

Get your own, somewhere else.