Toreas Blog

Google was kind enough to send along a coupon for around $100 in AdWords money. AdWords is what they call their money maker. In short, you pay them and they display your ad everywhere where people have signed up for their AdSense product. You can specify by keywords and so get a more targeted way of having your ad displayed.

So I set up the account, selected keywords and setup an ad. Pretty early on I discovered that the Toreas page has a big flaw. I was leading people to the homepage and they were lost there. Few found their way to the introduction from there. Even fewer kept reading on. So I went and changed that to show them directly to Chapter 1. Now suddenly a lot more staid and started reading. They even went on and started reading chapter 2 and 3.

Currently this experiment brings in about 50 new readers a day and so far quiet a few have returned for more. I might keep this up at a later date if it keeps on performing this well.

This one month has been interesting but it also has limitations. Although I have upped the limits pretty high, the limits were rarely reached. I believe you could get a lot of visitors through this program, but now, after I stopped it for all but some selected search keywords, I will see how many of these I will retain over the next month.

Things went faster than anticipated and here comes chapter 11 already. The conclusion of Zara’s and Eric’s rather unexpected and uncomfortable swimming excursion.

Chapter 12 is almost ready as well, but I want to read it over twice more as it is a pivotal moment in the story. Meanwhile I keep writing chapter 13, which will introduce you to the last of the 3 main characters for at least the first large part of the story.

After two rewrites, here is chapter 10. It has turned out a lot longer than I originally expected, but I hope that is to the liking of you, the reader. You get to witness some conversation between Zara and Eric, where they both say more about themselves than ever before.

The next 3 chapters are very important. A lot happens in them and I’m in the process of working them over now. I probably have to rewrite large potions of it, so this might take some time. For me the sequence is one big thing, so I treat it like one gigantic chapter for myself. I’ll try to finish by next weekend though.

I have been reading the next chapter over and over again in the past days. I’m very unhappy with it. It has two important bits in there and neither is really conveyed the way I would like them to appear. But I am at a loss for words or what I should change.

So tomorrow I will attempt a rewrite of the chapter. Thanks to using a version control software, there is no problem in overwriting the existing one, I can always retrieve the old one. If the attempt gets worse than the original, I’ll just revert to the old version and give correcting that one another stab. All of this though delays the chapter more than I wanted to. The plan was to release this soonish, but now it will have to wait longer.

Go and read the shortish chapter 9. Where are Eric and Zara?

This chapter now has been posted using a new system I have created. It accesses Mediawiki and Twitter so far directly. I’m also planing on having WordPress and even Facebook integrated into this. So now all I do is fill out a form where I say this is chapter 9, paste the text of the chapter into one box, edit (if I want to) the twitter message which is prefilled, edit the blog post and push a button.

Now it will create the page on the wiki for chapter 9, change the template for latest chapter, so clicking the link on the main page will lead to the latest one, change the template that shows the latest changes in the upper right area of the main page, recalculate all the stats with this new page added and automatically update the wiki page about statistics and then post the new status to twitter. Next stop, making it post to WordPress.

But this has some time. For now, I will concentrate on writing the story. This software already takes care of the most time consuming aspects anyways, the rest is just laziness on my part.