Trash in Lecco:
New Collection
And More Expensive Tax
Lecco like the USA:
the 24 hour store is coming
[To which I say: yay!]
Left: Hangs himself under the railway bridge at only 24 years because he’s gay. [Yes, it happens here, too, sadly.]
Colombo trial: Gilardi names Lecco’s leading citizens.
Right: Loan-sharking: Half of Lecco trembles
Crash on motorcycle: No hope for 20-year-old Lecchese
A week or so ago I ran across this on the blog of one of my new colleagues at Sun:
To A Daughter Leaving Home
When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.
…in other words: Ross will be attending Woodstock School in India next year.
I’m so happy I’m in shock. And, at the same time… I will miss her to the marrow of my bones. Wish us all luck.
Mar, 2007 – (handwritten) Sunday [we’re] always open
[formal complaint to the police] – Too lively: the janitor insults and threatens the children
Writing and drawings defame the principal of Grassi high school
Mar, 2007 – Exhibitionist terrorizes [female] cyclists – denounced [formal complaint made to police]
Fines “Auxiliary [traffic police] [should be] more tolerant with the citizens”
Lecco, March 2007
Bread baker fired without reason – Now he’s full of debts
In Lecco a good 1,000 Alpini parade
Three climbers fall from the wall of the Medale and die
Girl raped near the Meridiana [local shopping center]
“They were absolved, but they are the murderers”
Raped in [town] center
The Sheikh in Lecco
The tragedy of San Martino [peak]: The truth in two nails [climbing pitons]
Post office: [office in] via Dante closes, but the ex-Piccolo [another location] does not open
Reader Stefano Tonti sent me this photo. The headline says “Doctor beaten with a shovel”. ata is a suffix you can add to many nouns to create a word meaning “an application of [noun]”. Badile = shovel or spade, so someone applied a shovel to this poor doctor (unfortunately, we didn’t buy the newspaper so we don’t know why). A more common construction is sassata, stoning – as in, throw rocks at – sasso = stone.
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April, 2007 – from left to right:
Usury [loan sharking]: half of Lecco trembles / Motorcycle crash – 20 year old Lecchese without hopes [of living – in fact, she died]
Abusive construction [i.e., without proper building permits] – the beach of the “Bear” [a local disco, Orsa Maggiore – Ursa Major] impounded
Old people, new center at Germanedo
ICI [property tax] and TARSU [some other tax] – The municipality on the hunt for tax evaders: wants to recover two million euros
Forza Italia [political party] at war for the presidency of the “twinnings” [?]
Falls while on motorcycle: grave [seriously hurt] girl of Lecco
The mayor: “We’re looking for the area for the new stadium.”
The case – ALER claims that Bodega [a former mayor] has the right to public housing at 28 euros a month
Soccer: The Lecco [team] goes to Biella with victory in its sights
As a quick glance around any page will show you, I’ve been fiddling with ad placement on my site since I wrote the above. I was inspired by meeting Robin Good at barCamp Roma in January, where he reported that he earns 200,000 euros a year from advertising on his site. He has been remarkably generous with advice to others on “how to be your own boss thanks to your blog”, but the first tip I took from him was more by imitation. If you look at any page on his site, such as this one with video from rItaliaCamp, you’ll see that he has the (reportedly lucrative) “large rectangle” AdSense ad prominently (indeed, obnoxiously) placed right after the article title and before the body of the article, and a smaller ad is placed further down the page. I’ve never liked this aesthetically – I find it confusing to read. But apparently it brings in the revenue.
So I decided to experiment. Given my site’s current design, the closest I could get to Robin’s layout was to put an ad, as he does, between the title area and the body of the article. I chose, for the time being, to be somewhat less obnoxious, using a 468 x 60 pixel box (which usually displays two text ads) and the same background color as the page.
Wow! My AdSense earnings tripled overnight. That gain has not been consistent, but my average daily take has gone up 50% (from $4 to $6) between February and March – and I only made this change in the middle of March. I immediately applied the change throughout the site, as part of a general clean-up and simplification of my DreamWeaver templates and overall site design. We’ll see how things go now in April.
Google’s own AdSense blog offered a case study of a site which moved an AdSense text link box from the upper right corner of the page to a long bar above the title. I followed suit; that, too, has contributed to increased Google earnings, without being visually too intrusive.
I also realized that my earnings from BlogHer are per view rather than per click, so I should maximize the number of pages viewed with BlogHer ads. The quick way to do this was to put the ads into the comments section of my site as well (I also did a makeover on that area, changing the WordPress template to a simpler, non-widgetized layout which loads noticeably faster).
I can’t measure the results of this directly because BlogHer, after an initial warm fuzzy, has become impossible to work with: I lost my login information for the tracking company they are using (24×7 Media) in my infamous January Windows reload. Repeated pleas to various sources there (including a comments form that does not work) have yet to obtain the desired response – I have no way of knowing my stats for BlogHer ads. At least they do keep paying me money – the first couple of months actually more than my AdSense earnings, but February earnings were down significantly. I can only guess that this is because the ad campaigns being run on the site were less remunerative – my traffic is steadily increasing, so the numbers of views can’t be going down.
Apr 14, 2007
Thanks to a special offer from John Chow, I was able to join a new advertising network called Kontera. If you wander around my site a bit, you’ll see the results: the new double-underlined links are automatically generated by the Kontera code now embedded in my pages. Roll over these links to pop up ads relevant to those keywords and (we hope, as the system gets to know my content) relevant to the entire page.
Now we’ll sit back and see how well this one performs…
next:Â Kontera out, booking.com in!
