Ouch, WordPress lesson learned

I just got an unpleasant reminder about how this blog may sometimes look to my readers, and I’m not happy.

First of all, please accept my apologies if you have ever been confronted with an ad while visiting here. I hate the idea of ads intruding on my blog, my readers, and me.

I’d long ago forgotten that WordPress allows “a few” Google ads to appear “occasionally” on our blogs. And I’d forgotten that as long as I’m logged into WP and have AdBlocker running, I won’t see those ads. Which may also explain why I haven’t seen them on anyone else’s blog, either. Out of sight, out of mind.

Perhaps, then, you can imagine my shock when I happened to be on my other computer, not logged into WP and not running AdBlocker, and saw this abomination on my blog. Of all posts to intrude upon, the WP/Google computer picked the one I deliberately made small, simple, and quiet — the one that was intended to be a note of sympathy, a moment of silence, in the chaos following the Japan earthquake. It’s abhorrent to me that anyone would try to profit from that disaster, and I resent being made a part of it.

I realize the ads are inserted by some computer program that tries, maybe, to make them relate to the content, but that’s a pretty feeble excuse for this example of an algorithm’s shortcomings. I’m angry at WordPress and Google and especially Quake Kare, but I’m also angry at myself. After all, I’d been warned.

WordPress has a No Ads option where I can pay to keep all ads off my blog, and as backward as that sounds, it looks like that’s what I need to do.

Again, I apologize to anyone who encountered this or any other ads here. I’d been under the impression they’d be innocuous little ads in the sidebar; otherwise I would never have allowed them at all.