Sunday, January 3, 2010

Progress Tracking Bars

Made some changes to the blog this weekend, namely:

1.) Getting rid of ads. I was curious if I'd be able to make any money from ad-revenue, and it turns out the answer is pretty much no. Over six months, I've earned less than $20... not even enough to make it worth my time to jump through Google AdSense's paperwork (since they count it as income, they need your social security number, banking info, etc. so that they can verify identities and send paperwork for tax purposes). I might put them back at some point in the future, but they are gone for now.

2.) Added progress bars on the right-hand side. Although I'm tracking each individual debt separately (e.g., mine & Hubby), the bars just show the total by category. We also have our mortgage debt that isn't shown.

4 comments:

  1. Good for you - I do like the bars.. how do you do them? I can never seem to get them figured out! haha.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I often wondered if it was worth it to do ads. Thanks for your version of how it went for you. Great looking progress bars! Jp kitty if you like mine, just send me an email (joliereves at yahoo dot com) and i can send you the instructions.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jolie - Don't let me scare you off from trying to make some extra money, I just don't get enough visitors to my blog to make it worthwhile. I made only pennies from impressions (# of page views), most of the $20 was from a handful of people actually clicking on the ads. The other thing I noticed was that most of the ads I had were from debt consolidation & credit counseling services. Google did a good job of matching topics from my entries, and I think most people reading personal finance blogs know to stay away from those services!

    JPKitty - Goliath Debt posted a blog entry on how to add progress bars, and then I just modified the headers & amounts accordingly. I had to enter in the high $ amount (on the left side of each bar), and then I had to calculate and enter the percent complete. Here's a link to the instructions & code:

    http://goliathdebt.blogspot.com/2009/02/some-site-stuff.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. I like the progress bars too! Visual cues always help me out.

    ReplyDelete