A Dixie Carpetbagger

Okay, so everything should be rolled out and functional, including the tip jar (using GunPal/GPal), the gun death counter, an Amazon widget and a nice banner.

The blogroll has been updated, too… and it’s no longer on a side page, it’s on the sidebar to the right.  Some major additions include the IMFDB (Internet Movie Firearms Database), Where Angels Fear To Tread, Billy Beck’s Two–Four, Nikki Goeser’s blog*, and the Holster Site.

The majority of the work getting all these things to work has been the setup.  Getting all the accounts (GPal, Amazon, Site Meter, Project Wonderful, PayPal) going has taken a while.  For instance, Project Wonderful and Amazon have to approve your application– which takes time– and neither uses GPal, so I had to sign up for PayPal… which needs to be verified… which takes time.

Then there was the banner setup.  Turns out that the theme that I use (Journalist) has a “tagline” (the quote bubble that used to be in the header) that cannot be turned off.  This, of course, was conveniently not mentioned by the writer who gave a how-to about creating a banner for this theme.  So, if you delete the tagline text, it leaves a small one-character tagline bubble.  The workaround?  Replace the left and right halves of the bubble with a square JPEG that matches the background.  (Next time you load the page, if you look very closely, you’ll see the two small squares flash into existence a split instant before the main banner.)

So, now I can (hopefully) make a little coin, which will ease the pain in my wallet come site renewal time.

*For those of you don’t know who Mrs. Goeser, the basic outline of her story is here.  Highlights two things– one, why “gun free zones” make no sense, and two, why I dislike my information being out there.