I threw in a few minor changes to the layout. The most noticeable one is probably the banner in the upper-left corner. It has the same font as my older layout only with a more neutral grayscale color palate to match the overall layout of the diary. Since I'm way too economically disadvantaged to actually front money for an image host, I just threw it in imagevenue.com. Although I wouldn't store my family pictures since they don't seem to have an indexing system, imagevenue does seem like a pretty good place to quickly host random photos for free to post on public message boards and the like.

The recent addition of Google advertisements isn't working to well with this diary. I believe part of the reason is the way diaryland is set up. Most readers who hit a diaryland blog will "land" in the index.html page which automatically takes the reader to the most recent entry. Since the "index" page is not really set to an actual static webpage, the Google spiders can't index it properly and when that happens a "free" public service ad is placed instead of a targeted paid advertisement. Since most of the people who visit this diary really only seem to visit the index page, basically none of the targeted ads will be visible to the majority of the readers.

I threw in a "search" link to help facilitate visits to other parts of my diary by enabling searches within my diary and guestbook. For example you can search my diary to see how many times the word sex comes up. Probably not too many times since the older entries haven't been fully indexed yet. ;) You can also search in all of diaryland, hell you might even see stuff from your own diary come up in the searches. Why not give it a spin? :P

I think another reason this whole Google ad campaign has not really taken off too well in its debut is simply because I let my readership slip to nothingness. I know there are still a handful of people who catch an update or two on occasion, but this baby isn't nearly as busy as it used to be. I think part of the reason is that since I lost my gold membership the cool comments box that facilitated communication for people just visiting also vanished with it, leaving the less than convenient diaryland notes and guestbook for people to show me love.

Well OK, that and my less than frequent updating. Not that I would ever consider myself having an interesting life, but I think my ability to write as interestingly as I used to is slipping. I feel like my edge is dulled to nothingness and my writing reflects that fact. It's either that or I just don't have anything to write about and it kind of sucks. I'm not really sure what to do at this point. I may have to pull in some "fluff" entries like making one of those silly "trading cards" of myself, like anyone would want to collect a card with my likeness on it. Or I can do one of those pointless quizzes to post how much I have in common with Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lector in percentage points no less. It would of course be pointless because we all know how much I like to eat someone out...

I don't know, life has been a little stagnant I guess. The only think keeping me from going over the edge recently is a steady influx of my favorite anti-depressant, Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas. There are of course side-effects to this anti-depressant, the most obvious is that it is highly addictive. Another unfortunate side-effect is that it has caused me many a sleepless night. Needless to say it's a fucking great game. I may have to throw in a review of it sometime soon. Maybe after I complete the main storyline. More "fluff" to add to the future collection I guess.

What derrick really needs is a sex life, preferably with someone who doesn't mind me writing about our sexual exploits in a public journal. It would be both juicy and delicious. Of course there may be a small handful of people who would be utterly disgusted at such an outward sexual display such an obvious exploitation of me trying to turn sex into some kind of income through the power of advertising. Those are the people I will be writing for. I want to make them feel filthy. Oh yeah baby... *ahem* Anyway, it's really fucking late so I should probably crash now.