But I think the fundamental distinction is not between work and non-work subjects, but when I do an activity and why I do it. Because I generally blog in my own time, and because I do it because I want to rather than because I am required to, I see it as a hobby.

Of course I am also lucky that I enjoy some aspects of my jobs as much as I enjoy a range of leisure activities. This is one reason I oppose the meddlers who want to set work hours.

Although I recently noticed the ads I never thought they caused the slightest distraction or annoyance of any kind. On the contrary I actually felt positive, seeing that there is a way to recover costs (in catallaxy’s case, probably not insignificant) without ANY harm to the core activity. As for the content of ads, I usually do not read ads in ANY media, so I do not care. This is advertiser’s problem.

I’m thinking of doing some independent research on the weekend – making a local duplicate of Club Troppo and running it through a full profiling / diagnostic kit to see where the code is spending most of its time.

But if, as I suspect, the problem is that CT is just producing too many MySQL queries, I don’t see what else can be done in the long run except to move. We’ll see how it pans out.

Second, and directed more at the substance of Andrew’s post, it is possible to set up the ads so that registered commenters don’t see them (at least while they’re logged in). Whether this is suitable depends on the blog, but I’d say it would work at Club Troppo. Essentially this means any ad revenue is generated by occasional blow-ins, while regular readers can opt out of seeing them.

I think the problem with Catallaxy is that the content is too diverse for Google Ads to make sense of it. Your content is more focused and so the Ads should be better targeted.

One problem I did find is that ads for university essay writing services kept popping up, which I then had to suppress using the competitive ad filter. Given some of the hats you wear, this could be a problem for you. Indeed, your writing on plagiarism issues could even become a magnet for them.

WordPress is completely dynamic in design – every page is regenerated from scratch every time it is requested. Now the main page of Troppo has around 190-200 queries worth of database work, a figure you can verify for yourself by zipping down and squinting at the footer.

I have enabled a cache mechanism to reduce the load somewhat. If the page is unchanged WordPress will simply spit out a cached version. Even then, however, the page gets changed every time someone comments, so it doesn’t reduce load all that much.

Before I recommend anything exciting to Ken, I’m waiting on Dreamhost to examine our database performance more closely. They’ve already moved our database to a less loaded MySQL server, and I’ve asked them to examine our database usage a bit more closely. But if they opine that it’s not unusual given our visitors and plugin loadout, we might have to move in order to improve MySQL performance.

I don’t like advertising in the media generally so I’d feel hypocritical accepting it. But if the price was right I’d probably override my aversions and take the money.

I’ll watch this thread and hopefully learn.

I wasn’t aware of database load issues but I must say on the surface I’m surprised. I would have thought only the last 5 or 6 posts of even the busiest blogs would be accessed and the rest would just lie there being accessed every blue moon or so.

Are you saying the whole lot works as a dynamic DB and fires up each time the site is accessed?