Sick Leave Reflections

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Your editor has been sidelined by a quite nasty strain of either food poisoning or a stomach virus since Saturday, finally reaching that point which is best described as "over the worst of it, but not yet out of the woods." This accounts for the recent lack of blogging content, and my thanks to ehvogel and Warner Todd Huston for their timely contributions when it was all I could do to force myself to sit down at the keyboard, manage comments, and post Day by Day and Quote of the Day (even if they were published a bit later than is the norm here).

There's only one silver lining around the cloud of being ill, and that is having plenty of time to think about things. And one of the concerns which has been on my mind during these sick days is this blog, it's reason for being and what the future might hold for it. One of the comments I read was a slam at me from someone who was very unhappy with my choice of placement for the ad trumpeting the September 14 appearance by Gov. Palin at Baylor's Ferrell Center. The angry commenter demanded to know why I "insisted on" putting the ad way down at the bottom of the page where the fewest number of our readers would ever see it (you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page).

Your editor does not suffer fools gladly, even when I'm feeling at the top of my game. You can only imagine my thoughts in the midst of the misery of such illness as I've been fighting. I deleted the comment and turned off the computer. I had neither the mood nor the inclination to explain at the time the circumstances around that ad, and indeed all ads for events where the governor appears. We don't get paid for running those ads. As far as we know, we're the only blog that does this. We do so as a service to our readers and to help Gov. Palin, the latter being the entire reasoning behind this blog. Believe me, we ain't in it for the money. We have a store which sells very few items, and a tip jar which very rarely sees any tips. This blog is not only a non-profit proposition, it drives us deeper into the financial hole every month. We have spent time blogging for Gov. Palin here that could have been spent finding a paying job which would allow us to at least break even. But the choice to do this was our alone, and we blame no one but ourselves. The one thing which has kept us going has been the positive feedback from our readers. Knowing that we were making a difference for the better, at least to some out there, has made it all worth it. However, we are having to reevaluate whether we can keep going under our present circumstances, and we will have more to say about that in a later posting.

For the record, that Care Net of Central Texas ad is placed at the bottom of the page because we don't know what else to do with it. We scaled it down to a 300-px width which would make it fit in our sidebar, but that makes all the text in the ad too small to read. Needless to say, we don't have sophisticated graphic editing software, nor the time to spend playing with an ad that we are running for free. We had the same problem with the ad for Gov. Palin's appearance in Dallas a few months back, and we also put it at the bottom of the page. As the date for that event grew nearer, we put it at the top of the page and gave it some extra coverage. We had planned to do the same with the Care Net ad.

But here's the rub: Like many other mom and pop bloggers, we bust our butts blogging for Sarah Palin, and we don't respond kindly to self-righteous jerks who tell us that no matter how much we do for Gov. Plain, it's not enough. Especially when it comes to running ads for free. In our view, that's more than just a little over the top.

More to come...

- JP