Seth Godin's Cat Builds No Wealth

Kind of cloudy and overcast today, so I was snooping around in Seth Godin's blog. (I reviewed his book Meatball Sundae yesterday.) I found this post, which has some cobwebs on it, but raised some issues pertinent to my CATpitalsm plan.

Briefly-- read the post, though, it has some good points. In sum, Godin destroys my hopes, my dreams, Zooey's plans for gold-dust litter and braised rat pate. He refuses to monetize his blog.

He outlines good reasons for not doing so. Among them, the fact that one of his favorite blogs changed from being a nice place to hang out and read good ideas, into the e-version of the Vegas Strip. Ads, blaring out, carnival barkers touting the dude's new book, his bloated resume (this is the blog Godin describes, not Godin himself-- his blog is elegant and clean, and ad-free), so forth, dogs & cats living together. Just awful.

So yeah, I can see his point. But-- he's also a bestselling author with fourteen-odd books out. (I don't mean his books are odd! It's just English, for pity's sake!) So he doesn't seem to need to monetize his blog-- it's a loss leader, serving as an ad for his books, his speaking, his consulting.

Zooey & I don't yet have a catsulting service together. Or a speaking/meowing tour. Perhaps we will, after doing Zooey's skills assessment. But until that day, we'll have some ads. Maybe when we're raking in more money than Mr MacMuffin ever DREAMED of we'll demonetize the blog. And the cat. But until then...

And I want to reassure you (and myself, shamefaced after reading the post) we never changed! We were all about the boodle from Day 1! Cat-Daddy, Zooey-Monetization, so never mind that we have ads! Don't forgive us, enjoy our catpitalist path! Imitate it! Golden Land of Opportunity! My cat makes money! Your cat can too!

How to Improve Blogger

As a good CATpitalist, I have selected Blogger as a free hosting platform, but I haven't taken what it's given me. It's an extremely limited system, with only a few basically identical templates (ugly) and just as few widgets. Wordpress seems much better, BUT their hosting service won't allow ads. So it was Blogger. But--

You have to stand out from the herd (of cats).

So I've started some improvements, having poked around the internet. First, I got a new template from Pam Blackstone's site "Random Bytes." It supports three-column layouts, which makes much better use of the screen space. Thanks, Pam!

Second, I simply and easily built a new logo in Photoshop Elements. That program came free with my digital camera-- that's Zooey in the header, on the hunt for money-- but you could just as easily use freeware or shareware editing programs like GIMPShop, Paint.NET (Windows), or ImageWell (Mac).

Installing the HTML for the new template-- I'm not a code head-- deleted all my custom widgets like text, Blogflux button, and GPS. So I've got a little work to do to put that stuff together, and you should be forewarned if you go to make similar changes.

This layout should allow for better integration of ads-- I didn't like the between-post style, and Blogger will make sidebar ads disappear in favor of the tweeners. Also, I can now put more stuff-- tag clouds, links, etc etc-- on the same screen. So, good stuff.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to do some restoration to my sidebars...