I mocked this one up a while ago, but haven’t gotten around to coding it yet.

I think it’s kind of Martha Stewart meets Silence of the Lambs.

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I recently received an e-mail from a company called ZTMC, Inc., asking if I was accepting advertising on this site. I am, and thus I began corresponding with one of their marketing managers. They wanted me to place four text links on every page of my site. These ads would rotate and I would be paid each month I displayed the ads.

I ultimately rejected their offer and here’s why.

No Ad Filter

ZTMC assured me that they wouldn’t be placing any ads for porn sites or warez sites. However, there are plenty of non-porn and non-warez sites that I do not wish to advertise. Mobile phone sites, for example, or credit counseling web sites.

Every other ad program I have ever tried has given you some ability to filter out undesirable ads. Project Wonderful and Text Link Ads both give you the option of manually approving each ad before it goes live on your site while Google Adsense’s competitive ad filter lets you get rid of ads for a specific URL at any time.

This sort of filtering mechanism is really important to keep your ads reasonably targeted to your site’s audience, but ZTMC doesn’t have one.

Potential Harm

A quick Google search for ZTMC will turn up a couple discussions like this one, in which people claim that placing their ads will kill your search engine ratings and Google PageRank. Although this is hardly definitive evidence of anything, it’s enough for me to be concerned.

More concerning, however, was their code. In order for them to serve ads to my site, I was to put a PHP include of some kind on my site. Now, it’s pretty common for people to put includes on their site—the Amazon widget, the Project Wonderful ad box, and the Share This button are all driven by includes.

Javascript includes. PHP is much more powerful, and I’m disinclined to execute foreign PHP on my site without ascertaining exactly what it’s supposed to do. But that proved to be very difficult because of…

Unprofessionalism

ZTMC apparently does not require its marketing managers to be able to converse coherently with web developers. The person with whom I was communicating (and who claimed to have visited my site personally), kept insisting that my sites were HTML and that this might be a problem. This is nonsense.

1. All sites are HTML. Or XHTML. If you go to any web site on the internet and select View Source, you will get HTML. Or XHTML. If you have a problem with HTML, you have a problem with the entire internet.

2. I think that what she really meant was that the pages on my site are static HTML, except…they’re dynamic. There’s not a single page on this site that isn’t dynamically generated by Wordpress. I explained this to her and she did not understand. And given that she’d claimed to have visited my site personally, you’d think she’d have noticed the complete lack of .html extensions, but apparently not.

The other thing she kept doing was telling me that the code she was providing was an SSI. Except that in the next sentence, she’d say the code was PHP.

I used SSI back in 2000 or so, when PHP and dynamic generation of web pages weren’t standard yet. SSI and PHP have different syntax and PHP is much more powerful. The terms are not interchangeable like that.

And then when I asked her to clarify exactly what the code was, she decided that meant that I didn’t know what SSI was and explained it by plagiarizing from Wikipedia’s page on SSI.

If this is how her business is run, thanks, but no thanks.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Wow. Digital-era sweatshop. Thanks, New York Times, for the vote of confidence (last I checked, three health incidents in a population of millions did not an epidemic make)!

But it is true that blogging can be pretty stressful; the internet is littered with blog-icide detritus, people who got one too many spam comments or hecklers and took their toys and went home.

Regular blogging, particularly news blogging, is not all that compatible with a regular job. I have four active blogs right now (including this one), and I struggle to make one post a week on each. After I spend all day writing in front of a computer, going home and…writing in front of a computer…really doesn’t sound all that appealing.

Blogging is not a good path to getting rich quick. It is not even a good path to a steady, livable income. Blogging is more like the publishing industry than anything else. For every J. K. Rowling there are thousands of nameless authors, earning next-to-nothing from their writing, just trying to get their voices heard. But unlike working in an actual sweatshop, you are in control of your own working environment.

The key to a long, healthy blogging life is balance and a love of the medium. Stick to blogging what really matters to you, not just what’s hot at the moment. If you’re going to blog for money, blog for pocket money, not for a salary. I’ve been blogging (mostly) unprofitably for nearly ten years, just because I like it. These days, I’m running with the pack in terms of monthly blog earnings and well…the pack would starve if we had to rely on blogging for money.

And don’t forget to eat well and get exercise. Sitting in front of a computer day in and day out isn’t healthy, no matter what or if you blog.