dooce "sells out", feeds family, pays bills
First, I want to say that no one should apologize for their gut reaction to the redesign. All of this feedback is valid. You, my readers, have seen me and supported me through some of the roughest times in my life and the last thing I want to do is alienate you. I understand why some of you are upset about the ads.
Source: dooce: Wherein a whole bunch of you just roll your eyes
For what it's worth, I think her new ad-laden design was done in the least obnoxious way possible. Rather than dumping the ads "above the fold"—right in the middle of the interesting part (ie. the blog post)—hers are like billboards on the side of the road.
Where many bloggers would tile an arabesque, she's got moneymakers. Either way, my peril-sensitive advertising-sensitive sunglasses block them out just the same, but with less scrolling.
Archived Comments
I only realised that her site was so ad-laden when she mentioned it in her post. There's no ads in her atom feeds (and the feed is thankfully complete content).
To be honest, I'm surprised that so many people are still reading actual websites these days. I could care less about how people lay out their content on their website, I just want it to be interesting and in a feed.
Similarly, I find it a little frustrating when I have to go to someone's site to comment on their post -- I would comment a lot more if there was some kind of generic commenting interface available from within bloglines. (Though this way means I probably filter out the lower-quality comments with my visting-site-aversion-threshold).
I wonder how long it will take dooce to put ads back in her feeds?
Damn ... those are some serious BlogAds rates ... I guess that's what a huge audience (2,798 subscribers via Bloglines alone) will get you (I have 44 by that same metric).
Fortunately, you can Adblock the URLs http://images.pheedo.com/* and http://images.blogads.com/* . That doesn't do much for the text, but it's less distracting. And, like you said, it's not in the feed.
Incidentally, I'm thinking of adding a (redundant) "comment here" link to the bottom of each RSS entry ... I wonder how this will affect reader participation. Thoughts?