I have removed the Amazon.com contextual link ads from the blog because they seem annoying and aren't actually generating any sales commissions. I guess I don't blog enough on consistent enough topics for Amazon to do a better job of suggesting fun and fine products to go with my limited eloquence.

I've also replaced the ads in the left sidebar with Amazon's new widgets for my own wish lists. When Amazon started allowing multiple wish lists, I split mine into five parts (books, DVDs, music, home, work) just to make things slihgtly easier to manage. That's worked pretty well, except now the widgets only let me use one of those lists per widget, so I've put two in the sidebar: the top one for books, the bottom one for DVDs.

Nothing we do has ever generated huge amounts of Amazon commissions, so when we get the small gift certificates, we use them to buy stuff off the wish lists anyway. It just seemed more efficient to put those things front and center than to display generic ads for things you might want that might eventually generate enough revenue to buy one of the things on the list. The link at the top of the sidebar still takes you to the page with all five of the wish lists, so you can see all the weird things I like.

(This is not necessarily a bleg; the blog is essentially running using spare CPU power and bandwidth, and if that changed, I'd either stop it or do something real to make it self-sufficient. Two people have already sent me DVDs in the past year, for which I am quite grateful. There's not been a lot of budget for extras, though, so the wish lists hold the things I would buy if I had the funds at the time they came out. Books and DVDs are the first thing to fall out when the budget tightens, as you might imagine. Extra TV channels go next.)