Epilepsy & Other Related Stuff + Other Thoughts

Just finished scanning another set of long notes. Had a lot of trouble scanning these notes.

1. I always add some water to my fountain pens to prevent them drying out in the Malaysian climate. It seems that I’ve added too much water as the brown and grey colors become too light when scanned. Sorry for that.

2. I’ve finally installed MacOS Big Sur on my working laptop (my previous Retina 2012 MacBook Pro, acting as a home server, can’t have it installed). Since I’m on the Developer Program, it’s on the 11.1 version. However, there are still some significant bugs. It seems that the drivers for my dedicated scanner, the many years old HP Deskjet 46460 (that produces the best scans I’ve seen), has gotten screwed. All shading from fountain pen inks become lost as my writing become something like pastel ink. In the same line a green ink suddenly becomes black. Apparently many also have the same problem, on both HP and Apple forums; I don’t know who is responsible. As a workaround, I used my “server” laptop to scan the new set of notes.

3. It’s the time of year again when I get my email notifying that Squarespace is going to charge me again for hosting this website. This website has been running at a loss since its beginning. As much as those occasional thanks and compliments motivate me, this website has not been financially sustainable, and I’ve always searched for ways to make some money to pay off at least the bills for hosting this. Recently Squarespace has introduced Member Areas, and is along many measures I’m thinking about. Maybe an ad-free site for a fee? In the meantime, I’ve added a PayPal link if you’re interested in giving donations. Much thanks.

Time to Change the Interface of This Blog

I think my blog has too much content in regards to my notes (despite the vastness of topics not covered), and I think the time has come to restructure it.

When I first made this site, it was with the idea of sharing my notes, then sprinkle some other stuff in, like my training log. So I made the headlines of the site resemble all of the various subtopics and topics of notes I scanned & uploaded. With few notes in the beginning, this was not a problem. But as the number of those grew, the interface is no longer optimal. And along with my training log, the site has become a site where I upload a lot of “other things” (also known as my manic projects of the day/month/period).

A barely exhaustive list of sections for the notes on both desktop and mobile

A very long scroll in the “Other” section on the desktop

On mobile the whole menu heirarchy is expanded and displayed on tapping, making the navigation very dissatisfying with a lit of scrolling and not knowing where you are

In the future, I will probably reorganize the headlines and have the notes be accessible only via the current “Index” page, renaming it to “Notes”. And maybe I need to look into another template altogether (though I do like the simplicity of this one). Accessing specific notes from the front page will no longer be possible, but the interface will be much cleaner.

On Monetizing

When I decided to make a website to share my notes (which may or may not be useful for others), I hoped to monetize it by having a few people willing to buy the highest resolution scans and use them however they see fit. I don’t want to upload the highest resolution scans for free as I think it’s overkill over the web; visitors’ mobile bandwidth will be annihilated. As someone who himself believes in FOAM (Free Open Access Meducation – Medical education for anyone, anywhere, anytime), I was prepared for not having many people buy my notes. But I wasn’t for the number being zero.

The bills (including hosting this website) still need to be paid. Or else I’ll have to close down the website. Web hosting is still expensive for us in the third world doing it alone.

As an alternative, I've decided to put web ads on the site, despite the fact that I love clean, easy to load websites. Initially I tried to use AdSense, but for some reason, I just couldn't get it to work with my site, saying that it's not constructed well enough, too many images (well there are a lot of scans, duh), etc. I've decided to move on to another agency.

So now I've just started trying out Chitika. So far I've been able to put their ad codes into the website, but I don't know 1) what's the optimal number and placement of ads, and 2) how to make the desktop and mobile experiences both consistently a win-win setup. Now I do realize that a majority of my visitors visit using mobile devices. Too many ads is definitely more of a killer to the mobile experience compared to the desktop.

To make way for ads, I'll try uploading higher resolution scans that's somewhere in the middle; not too big that'll kill mobile bandwidth, but good enough for those using "Retina-class displays". And of course, those scans will not be for sale. I'll probably follow the 220 dpi resolution of Retina MacBook.

If I don't enough, I'll consider my second attempt at having a "permanent" web presence (I did have a Blogger thing a long time ago) another failure and just shut this site down (as again, it's expensive).