Some of you may have noticed some changes on the sidebar over the past few weeks.
1. The experiment with advertising died a quiet death. Aside from anything else, the systems are set up to maximise the exposure for the advertisers and minimise the potential for actually having to pay out to the sites where the advertising is. They are gone and they won't be back.
2. Ditto for the news headlines. Seems the guy maintaining it took a vacation and never came back. I found it useful, so if he cranks up again, I'll put it back.
3. Gone as well is the TTLB ecosystem ranking. It looked cute when I first checked it out, but I found that it simply counts the number of links your site has on other sites. That hardly seems relevant to anything, so therefore, there's no point in keeping it up.
For example even though the Bond readership has grown steadily over the past 9 months and the average number of page loads (the number of pages each visitor reads) has gone up, TTLB has actually dropped the Bond Papers ranking below that of sites with significantly less readership.
In the meantime, the fish paper is still sitting there, challenging me to dare to finish it off. It is coming. As soon as I can muster the energy and find the time for the last edit.