Yesterday, the blog passed another milestone I certainly wasn’t thinking about in 2011 when I started this crazy thing. Yes, it’s really been 15 years. And yes, I’m a day late again this year, but I wasn’t planning on spending a day exploring more of Western Oregon with friends yesterday. That’s a valid excuse for being late, right?
It only took ten years of living here, but I am indeed finally seeing more of Oregon, which is probably a good thing when my parents will be visiting Oregon for the first time later this year. I’d like to believe the east coast having crappy weather this year helped convince them to at last give the Pacific Northwest another chance, but it probably helps more that Oregon isn’t Washington, and our wine is definitely better (totally not biased.)
So what have I been up to since last May? Well, the Brookvilles were definitely a disaster. I was able to cross Multnomah Falls off the to-do list along with Astoria (to be fair, Astoria wasn’t on the list as much as the coast again was, but would definitely go back.) The annual trip up to Seattle for Sakura-Con went off without a hitch this year, but there were a ton of Cheesecake Factory cosplays (every con has a least one year that will go down in lore forever). Portland still isn’t 100% to pre-pandemic life, but downtown looks a hell of a lot better now. The new structure for the city government does appear to be working.
However, not being 100% back does mean public transport is seeing some brutal impacts from budget shortfalls. TriMet and Portland Streetcar aren’t having it as badly as some other cities yet, but come August, Portland will lose a MAX line in downtown. Part of TriMet’s next round of budget cuts include cutting the Green Line to run between Gateway and Clackamas Town Center only. Sure, it’s become the armpit of the MAX network over the last few years, but cutting it back definitely won’t help with that. Yes, I am one of the ones who recommended it as a cost-saving measure (and honestly said make it a bus at one point), but it’s a move that does not bode well for the rest of the system, let alone public transport in Oregon overall.
I am genuinely worried about the city’s ability to fund the extension of the NS Line to Montgomery Park. It’s a real slap in the face that PBOT is currently repaving part of NW 23rd avenue, only to have it ripped up again next year for construction of the extension (in theory). Yes, NW 23rd needs the work now (and by “now” I actually mean five years ago), but the current political climate sure isn’t favorable towards getting the grants originally expected to pay for the majority of the extension – and that’s before even thinking about the cost of the 15 new trains that will be ordered from CAF for the extension (and to replace the now 25 year-old original fleet). I am hopeful we’ll at least see something come to fruition, but I think opening in 2030 is now a very ambitious goal.
Overall, things this year have been pretty similar to last year. It has been nice getting to see more of Oregon this year, and I think Portland is back on the right track. As for any major changes to the blog, I might finally move to a VPS, but doing so would be a substantial investment.
Yes, 15 years later and this thing is still running on a shared server. I’ve done the best I can to keep things going, but the blog has seen a noticeable increase in traffic. Mentions from The Urbanist and OPB definitely accounted for a good chunk of it, and it’s certainly traffic I’m happy to have, but it’s also meant having to get creative to keep the blog running. The blog is now using CloudFlare as an additional CDN, which has helped avoid total outages, but it has its limits, and the blog does get a not insignificant amount of bot traffic thanks to everyone trying to jump on the AI bandwagon.
Back in 2021, I did start running ADs from Google on a small set of posts, specifically the ones that were seeing a lot of traffic at the time. I honestly forget the last time I added an AD to the end of a post, and I don’t even remember which posts had them running now. More ADs are something I could try to offset the cost of moving to a VPS, but I hate ADs, and I hate websites that block ad blockers even more. Want to immediately lose my potential business? Install Admiral on your website. Seriously, I will not return if that’s the first thing your site greets me with.
That said, no I am not going to paywall the blog. That would be an incredibly stupid thing to do when the majority of the blog is a mirror of my Instagram posts. I’ve toyed with the idea of adding an AD area to the footer, but the few posts that are running ADs have generated zero income so far this year, and they generated less than 20 cents last year. AdSense won’t even tell me what pages were running ADs because they get so few impressions.
And I’m still fine with that. Yes, I could and probably should have tried to monetize the blog more over the last 15 years, but I didn’t start this to make money. That’s why for the longest time any of the affiliate advertising that existed in the past was paid out as store credit. I could have cashed out to offset hosting costs, but I’d rather cash out for more books instead.
So, in closing, I don’t know what the next 15 years have in store, let alone what will happen in the next year. I certainly don’t expect there to be any significant changes to the blog for the foreseeable future, but like I said last year, it’s remarkable how much can change in a short amount of time, but it’s still incredibly easy to fall in to a routine.
