State of the Cookie: March 2008

It's been a couple of months since Bryan completed his contract coding for MilkandCookies. It's been as much time since I should have started looking for a day job again. Once I got off my ass and started looking, I experienced some rather disappointing interviews, one of which was 7 hours long meeting with 16 people!!! But I'm happy to say that, after about a week of negotiations, I accepted an offer from The Seattle Times as a Software Engineer, working on their websites.

I seriously thought about this job at I Can Has Cheezburger?, but then I saw this statement and was instantly repelled: "using ASP.NET (using C#), SQLServer and IIS." *blech*

What does this mean to me? Presents! I bought a PS3. My username is euchrid_ebus. All the good ones were taken, so I used one based on my SecondLife username Euchid Ebus. If you have a Playstation or an SL account, invite me as a friend so we can kill/play together.

I am also going to buy an iPhone. No they aren't perfect, and I love my Blackberry; but let's face it, they have the best mobile browser around and that's what I really need to closely monitor the site when I am away from a computer.

What does this mean for the site(s). It means that I am going to be contracting out major new features to, well, contractors. I will still be the Senior Architect as well as coding minor features and bugs. I already have a person in mind to take over new features. Stay tuned for more on that.

I took down the banner ad toward the top of the page. It was displayed only to Anonymous users as an experiment. No one formally complained about it, and it did well at first. But since then, revenue has leveled off to about what it was before I put it up, maybe a little better. So I see it as a wash, net zero.

I am constantly experimenting with revenue streams. We want the best bang with the least annoyance. So far, so good. Those of you who know about the crazy attempts most advertisers make to get their ads into buzz worthy websites know the litany of pitches I regularly reject. ;)

My first day at The Times is Monday March 17th. Not only do they know about MilkandCookies, but it's in a large part because of the site that I got hired. So there are no confict of interests.

Since our last State of the Cookies, MilkandCookies traffic has shown very little fluctuation. While I would like to say it's been on the rise, I do get alot of confidence from how solid the daily traffic is.

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Jaxon
Founder, MilkandCookies