The Definition of "Free"

photo by Amy Claxton

When I first started this blog, I intended it as a place where I could share ideas that I thought were useful but that I didn't really know what to do with. "Free Ideas" meant ideas that I was sharing for free, without cost.

Over the years, however, I've found that while my head is as full of ideas as ever, not all of them are useful. Many of them are simply persistent, connections or stories or images that, once created, seem to want to rattle around in my brain, getting in the way of my thinking about more important stuff.

So I've decided to free these ideas trapped in my head. "Free Ideas" now means a place to set free all the thoughts clogging my mind, a place to purge my brain. For anyone reading this blog, you likely won't notice much difference except that the frequency of posting should increase.

For me, I hope that this change in focus will help me get better at turning invisible ideas into visible creations. I tend to be satisfied with the creation of a story or a song or anything else simply in my own head, and don't need (or even want, most of the time) the validation that comes with sharing it with a wider audience. However, as I get older, I've realized that I don't want everything I've created to die with me, so I need to get it out of my head somehow.

Hopefully, posting here will be a start.

Nasty Pop-ups

UPDATE:

It wasn't AdSense causing the problem. It was one of the widgets in my sidebar, "Share With Sociable." A helpful Blogger forum-dweller named Chuck pointed out my problem and the popup crisis is over.

Unfortunately, I blew away my custom blog template in an effort to purge any bad code, so now my blog looks like crap. Oh well, it needed a redesign anyway.

Original Post:

I've been using Google's AdSense on my blogs for years, but today I turned it off for this blog. One of the ads was generating nasty, deceptive pop-ups.

I discovered the problem when I went to view this blog using our old MacBook, which only has an outdated version of Safari that I guess doesn't have the pop-up blocker turned on. A big window opened up with a modal dialog box inside it, offering to fix the spyware on my Windows machine. I force-quit Safari and went into Serious Webmaster Panic Mode.

I know this site seriously needs a design overhaul, but it's still in relatively decent shape. As a web designer, this site is my face to the world, and it looks really, really bad if something unprofessional and spammy shows up on it.

I thought at first that the embedded SoundCloud player on my previous post was the culprit, so I removed it. Then I thought that my WordPress site, which is hosted on the same server, had been hacked. Then I worried that superflippy.net had gotten some kind of malware on it. But when those both turned up clean, I realized that the pop-ups might be coming from the AdSense ads on this blog.

I turned off the ads, and the pop-ups went away. I apologize to anyone who visited Free Ideas and got spammed.

You know, I never really earned very much from those ads. I think I'm going to leave them turned off. But how bad does it look for Google if I have to turn off their ad service in order to make my site look professional?

My First Blog

Nina Bargiel of The Slack Daily reposts her first-ever blog post, from 1997. Reading this made me wonder what I said in my first-ever blog post, so I dug into the superflippy.net archives to see.

It turns out that even though superflippy.net itself was created some time around 1997 or so I didn't create my first blog until 2001. When I updated the content on my original site, I just deleted whatever had been there before, so there was no time-based organization to it.

In 2001, I started a blog using the Blogger platform. It was called "Day by Day" and it was my own commentary on the Bible readings from Forward Day by Day. I kept that blog up until 2005. I never intended to quit, I just took a break and never got back to it. The format evolved from simple commentary to drawings with commentary.

You can see the list of archived Day by Day posts here. I don't think the first few are very interesting, but it gets a lot better in April 2002 when I decide to start adding drawings to my posts.

But it's not until May 2004, only a year before I stopped blogging, that I settled into the format that I think of as Day by Day's mainstay: a hand-drawn doodle coupled with a pithy reflection on the day's selected passages.

It's funny how I remember my first blog as years of nearly uninterrupted posts with the format perfect from the start. By looking back, I can see that there was a lot of trial and error, a lot of gaps and false starts.

I'm glad to discover it took me 3 years to develop that blog. It makes me wonder what Free Ideas could become next year or the year after. It makes me hopeful about the future.

Back on the Blogging Wagon

So much for posting every day during this month! But a couple of mistakes shouldn't mean abandoning the whole project. I've just got to take a deep breath and get back on the blogging wagon. After all, it's a fun place to be.