April 26, 2005

For Rent | The top 150px of XSLTBlog

NOTE: No, I havent given in to the obvious temptation that exists from the potential of adding an extra $20 US Dollars to my bank account ( I wouldnt even know where to start to spend that kind of money! ;) by adding Google ads to top of my site... Tempting yes, but NEVER gonna happen...

No, this is something much more exciting than allowing Google to rape-and-pillage the content of my site, selling the rights to place ads that I have no control over right along side the content that I do have control over. In essence this is a chance for you and or your company to be given access to the top 150px of this site for the period of 30 days, enough time in which would allow this content, whatever you may choose for it to be, to be seen well over 100,000 times by a base of around 5,000 regular site visitors and 15-18,000 who will stop by every once in a while to gander at what I might be bitching and moaning about on any give day... Interested? Then read on...

Last week G. Ken Holman made an announcement to XSL-List in which he made a call for community contribution to help close out a majority of the remaining issues with Saxon 6.5.3, the current recommended version of Saxon for XSLT 1.0 production environments. It seems that Ken has been able to negotiate with Dr. Kay an amount that it would take for him to temporarily set things aside and finish out this list of issues, bringing Saxon 6.5.4 into existence which would contain a majority of the fixes necessary to bring this release even closer to near perfect conformance with the 1.0 specification.

I contacted Ken and asked, beyond financial contribution, what it was he felt I could do to help make this a reality. I quickly received a reply...

In discovering the actual dollar figure in which would allow Dr. Kay to justify temporarily setting aside work on the next Saxon 8.x release, of which is now funded via a base of customers who have either licensed Saxon SA or have asked for customization work, I was shocked by how little he was asking compared to what I would have expected for the amount of effort required to make this happen. As such I suggested to Ken that I send out a call for a corporate sponsor to simply pay the fee and in return recieve all the praise that would come from a loving community who would forever idolize them, looking to them as a source of inspiration for many, many years to come. I then realized that it just might be possible that a potential corporate sponsor might not buy in to my... hmmm, how should I say... obvious attempt to sweet talk them out of their hard earned money? So instead I decided to pimp out my blog... well, at least the top 150px of it, to the first person who contacts Ken and, upon discovering the amount of the requested fee, agrees to do so, working directly with Ken to make this happen. Upon receiving word back from Ken that things have been taken care of I will then await your contact as to just what it is you want to use this space for. I do reserver the right to reject content that I deem as innappropriate (e.g. slander towards a competitors product, "M. David Peterson is a big phreaking geek", you know that kind of stuff ;) or doesnt seem to serve any real purpose to help promote whatever it is your company is in the business of doing or making. In other words please only do this if you plan to use the space to help promote a product and not as a billboard for a bunch of worthless crap. Theres enough worthless crap on this blog, nobody is gonna wanna have to see any more than they are already forced into reading just to gain access to that occasional nugget of wisdom and insight I pay someone else to black label for me ;)

So, there you have it. This is literally on a first come, first served basis so even if its just an "I'm interested, tell me more" email you may want to hurry up and send it out such that you can be as close to the first one on Kens list and as such the potential suitor to a 30 day romp with the top 150px of XSLTBlog.

Ready, set, go!