May 2003

Recently I've been doing some website promoting, trying to get our website out in the open. Anna thinks it's a bit stupid. She says that if people want to read it, they will somehow find it. In a way that is undoubtedly true. But especially now that I've been involved in this poetry scam thing I thought it would be important that as many people as possible read about it.
And ok, maybe I have a bit of that hit-vanity, but who doesn't? Why else would you have a statistics counter on your site?
Anyway... The thing is, that some 70% of the sites that you apply your URL to require a link back. Of course that is understandable, since those sites wouldn't otherwise get any hits themselves. But I personally think that those banner pages and link pages are a pollution of one's site, no matter how nice the banners are.
I guess that if you want to be noticed you just have to do something with it.
I've also tried some of the award things, to see how easy or how difficult it would be to get them and ofcourse it IS nice to see that people appreciate what you do. But some of them have the stupidest criteria in order to get an award. I found one that wanted me to put their award on my main page, visible without scrolling. Yeah, RIGHT!
Note, though, that where there are the stupidest ones, there are most certainly also very nice ones. One award that I didn't apply for, and which I am proud of, is the one I got from Preditors and Editors, for my Poetry scam(s) writings and the ones from Fun Tyme, they are definitely something special :o)

I had an interesting discussion with someone who read this piece of text (and I edited a bit of the text afterwards, because indeed it was a bit "unclassy" as she mentioned it) and thought I could pay a bit more respect to the people who make the awards.
That was a totally misunderstood thing. The last thing I do is disrespect the people who spent their time in making the graphics for the banners and awards. Heck! I make a living in graphics myself, so I know from first hand how much time it takes to make graphics and websites.
So just to make things clear: credits to the people who spent their time in making graphics and awards and for the people who take their time to view websites for those awards.
It's just that I don't want anything drawing the attention off this site, at least not in the main page, when people are visiting it. Is that such a bad thing?

Well anyway... To live up to the requirements of all the people who have my link somewhere and who wanted a link back that could be found from the site it's placed on: this is it. And this is all it's ever going to be.
This site will never turn into an advertisement site, and if people are not pleased with it, they can drop me a mail and take the site of their list.
Following here you find the links that should do the trick. They open in pop-up windows.
Of course you can all click on the links (which would improve my statistics on the link-sites, duh!), but I couldn't care less, or better: I'd much more appreciate it, if you would just forget about those links and use that precious time to read the rest of our website.

Rings that this site is a member of, the links that I was talking about and the awards that this site has received.