Over the past few months, we’ve made several changes to the feathery dinosaur’s website, and I’ve gotten little feedback other than a Tweet from a “fan” who complained that he didn’t like it. Of course, he didn’t explain why, so all the Skeptical Raptor could do is take his claw and scratch his head.
Here’s what we’ve done over the past three months:
- Speeded up the website. Load times seem to be near instantaneous, though, and as an Apple fan, it breaks my heart, it’s sometimes slow with Safari.
- Removed about 50% of the advertising. It slowed down the website and some of it was obtrusive. And despite our best efforts some of the advertising ended up being in contradiction to what we write here.
- Changed a lot of formatting things to make this easier to read. One of the Raptor’s fanboys helped out a lot in getting the font and font size just right.
But all of this leads to other issues. We’re still trying to improve the design of the website to make it visually appealing AND fast. But we need feedback from you, the loyal and casual readers, to adjust what we’ve done. The website must be a tool to share good writing on topics that interest you. If it’s visually unappealing, or takes forever to load, you won’t read it. So please comment below. And because the internet works on negativity, please drop a note if all is fine.
Another consequence of changes is ads. We’ve lost about 50% of the ad revenue because of the reduction in number of ads. Because of the high readership and popularity, this website is expensive to run. We can’t go to a website hosting service and get their cheapest plan. No, we need to get dedicated servers and a ton of other technical tools to run it efficiently. We laugh when we see adverts on TV that make it so easy to start a website for your business – it is not that easy.
Photo of the Skeptical Raptor when he hears Donald Trump saying vaccines cause autism. They don’t.
Begging is annoying. But we need contributions to survive. We don’t need gold bars shipped in from Big Pharma, but we do need contributions of any level to continue providing content for the foreseeable future. To be honest, without your contributions, we were considering shutting down this website last year. It’s no longer a cute hobby – it’s a almost full time business. And those Big Pharma and Big Agra shill checks keep bouncing. They have no honor.
So click on either of the links below, GoFundMe or PayPal, to contribute to this website. Please. We really need the help to keep going.
Finally, one issue that troubles us. We used to get 40-50 comments on blog posts, now we get a handful, sometimes none at all. Please comment (see what we did there) on why this might be happening. I’m beginning to miss the good old days when anti-vaxxers trolled the articles. Like our favorite alcoholic, drug addict.
And please comment here. Tell us how we’re doing – don’t be rude, be constructive. We need the feedback.
[wp_ad_camp_5]
- Acetaminophen during pregnancy linked to autism? Maybe. - 2023-09-27
- Vaccines approved for pregnant women — Tdap, RSV, COVID, flu - 2023-09-27
- Does breast milk contain mRNA from COVID vaccine? - 2023-09-26
