So I guess everyone has noticed a slightly different look around here. For one, wujimon helped me to upgrade the blog software, resulting in a slightly different look than before. Kudos to him! I may be making additional cosmetic changes in the future. Also, I have added Amazon ads to the blog. I don’t like ads personally, but blogging takes time, and time is money, or at least time away from my kids. I REFUSE to make the ads intrusive; I want you guys to enjoy what you’re reading here and I don’t want you to have to navigate around junk you don’t want just to read the content. However, let’s just say that I’m accepting some more responsibilites in my life that will require support. Hence, I need to geneate revenue whenever I can. Please try to understand.
If you plan on buying any of the books listed on the sides of the blog, PLEASE buy them through my site. I get a little kickback every time you do that. Most of those are solid books, and I’ll be reviewing them along the way. I WILL NOT direct you guys to junk books just to generate profit. I’m not interested in selling out, just trying to support the family.
Finally, please let me know if things are formatted in bizarre ways on your computers. I don’t have time to try the site on various models with various web browsers, so I have to depend on you. So just drop me a comment if something isn’t formatted correctly.
Thanks, guys.
7 responses so far ↓
1 jonathan liljeblad // Feb 25, 2007 at 12:54 am
hi:
i’m an occasional reader of your blog, and a beginning student in nejia (just started with Wutan in SoCal).
this is OT, but how did you get your Amazon ad set up so that it only displays TCMA books?
i wanted to try and do something similar for my blog, which is for Ironman triathlon (obviously, with ads for sports-type books). i’m not a very sophisticated blogger ih terms of coding software.
2 chessman71 // Feb 25, 2007 at 8:57 am
Jonathan,
I’m not very knowledgable either. I first created a space for it in my theme. My theme is editable, some aren’t. I wanted it on the side so it wouldn’t interfere with content. Then I joined Amazon Associates, searched for the content i wanted by typing in the key words “internal martial arts” which then gave me the proper html code for these kinds of books. Finally, I pasted that code in the sidebar portion of my theme code, and hit update.
It worked like a charm, as you can tell. Except when I tried to do the same for “current reading.” I haven’t yet figured out why that doesn’t work. Sigh.
Good luck with your blog!
3 jonathan liljeblad // Feb 25, 2007 at 11:29 pm
thanks for the tip!
i think that’s pretty manageable.
BTW…a topic for you to consider on your blog: the extent to which movies/tv/video games/cartoons have (or have not) distorted neijia (tai chi, bagua, xingyi, etc.). maybe even post available videos that compare how movies portray a technique, versus what the actual technique really looks like.
our Sifu raised it as a discussion, saying that media has really warped people’s views of kung fu and affected the quality of instruction–for the worse. a student replied that he never would have started with baji training if it hadn’t been for Virtual Fighter on PS2, and that media is good for raising awareness.
i think it’s an intriguing discussion.
4 chessman71 // Feb 25, 2007 at 11:55 pm
excellent question. i used to play Virtua Fighter with my choy lay fut teacher when it first came out. We loved the fact that Sega Japan had blue-suited serious martial artists from each style to perfectly map how they moved.
I played those games for years and excelled at the praying mantis guy. Later I became fascinated with aikijujitsu through Virtua Fighter 3. Using real martial arts in a game was agreat idea. I’m surprised that they could sell that idea to the higher ups. But it made for fascinating comparisons of style versus style.
Ha. You brought back lots of memories! Thanks.
5 Shang Lee // Feb 27, 2007 at 11:49 pm
for organising books, i suggest using librarything.com, which you can put your associates id as well. you can tag your books in your catalague in librarything, and choose to show a tag called “taiji” (say) on the side bar, or “current reading”, or any tags u choose. no fiddling with code at all. just copy and paste. hope that helps.
6 chessman71 // Feb 28, 2007 at 8:16 am
Shang,
that sounds good. I’ll check into it. Yeah, the code is getting annoying. Thanks for the tip!
7 wujimon » Blog Archive » Monetizing Blogs // Feb 28, 2007 at 11:36 pm
[...] of blogs. Martial Development outlines how the IRS paid him $500 to create the blog and Formosa Neijia outlines some changes to his blog that include advertisement. [...]
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