jonoalderson

Thanks for all the delightful feedback, folks!

Some people rightly pointed out that it was a bit hypocritical of my site to be loading a bunch of third-party JS and resources(!), which I've now addressed.

In my defence, this was only due to loading ReCAPTCHA on blog posts as a quick protection mechanism from an influx of spam - which I've now replaced with Turnstile (and only lazily trigger the JS+resources for that when the comment form enters the viewport).

Also, no, the post wasn't written by AI / ChatGPT / etc. :)

It's great fun, and the research is never-ending. Up to ~1,300 unique 'Days' at the moment, and tons more to research. Loads of months, weeks and years to do too, which have taken a back-burner.

No AdSense optimisation at all; barely touched the account. The most sophisticated it gets is that it's using the async code (which we got access to quite early on), and there's a bit of conditional logic which fires to determine which size to serve based on the viewport width. Love to hear any ideas you have - though AdSense is really a temporary cost covering measure while we grow the email database, develop the app, etc. We'll bin it when we're large enough to move reliably to other methods.

I run https://www.daysoftheyear.com, a calendar website which lists all of the weird, funny, odd etc national days, holidays events. Alternative celebrations, like 'Ferris Wheel Day' on Feb 14th (vs Valentines Day). They're all real celebrations researched, described, etc. It was built (and rebuilt several times, and constantly iterated) by me, from scratch, on WordPress, in my spare time over a period of years.

The site generates >$1.5k per month at the moment from AdSense alone, without any marketing other than SEO and broadcasting to the social followers we've accumulated. This revenue is secondary to the real and long-term value being generated in the form of large numbers of membership/email subscriptions and social followers.