This website is receiving some long overdue attention, but all on the back end and non-visible. I've added some anaylitics code to the theme so that I can better track what is working and what is not. I'm using both Google Analyitics and Piwik (which is an open source project). I'll try to settle on one in the coming months.
But, while I was at Google I thought I'd take a look at my Google Adsense account and see how I'm doing. Everything looks to be on track. It took approx 2 years for me to get the volume and clicks on the Google ads to trigger the magic number of more than $100 US. This is when Google cuts a cheque and sends it out. So yes, this blog has earned me $100 ! It was impressive to receive a cheque out of the blue from Google.
The records show me that since I received that last cheque (approx) one year ago, I am about half way to another. So, it would appear that my random mutterings, and tech postings are worth about $50 per year. Maybe the analytics will help me decide if/where to make changes and improve that, but this blog is NOT intended to be an income generation tool. It is supposed to be my way of contributing info back to the communities that help ME so much.
Regardless, sometimes idle speculation can be fun. Watch for a post in about a year where I jump for joy over receiving my second cheque. :)
Update: It has been 12+ hours since I added the analytics code to this site. Piwik has already given me some interesting feedback. Specifically that I should revive one of the old projects I thought I had abandoned. jQuery.dates seems to be getting a lot of traffic. Google Analytics still has NO data for me. But they did mention I should allow 24 hours before looking for data. This probably has more to do with Google's scheduling of various tasks, and Piwik being an internal resource to my network. So, we'll see how things look over the next few days. If there is any unexpected or surprising results, I be sure to post my findings.