As you may or may not have noticed, I have now posted information about advertising on RabbitEars. You can find it in the boxes at the top of the page, as well as under the Help/Info dropdown above.

Don't let anything on that page scare you away if you're considering. Please e-mail with any questions or concerns and I will get back to you as quickly as I can.

On the other hand, do not feel obligated, either. I offer the tools and information on RabbitEars free of charge and intend to keep it that way. I simply wish to cover costs which may increase and buy some additional gear to further improve the site.

In between my schoolwork, I've been spending a lot of time working on a new tool for RabbitEars. A few people have already seen it, but to many others, it will be brand new. Or, very old, depending on how you look at it.

Now located in the Tools menu, or by clicking here, you can now see the RabbitEars TV Query. It is a clone of the FCC's TV Query, but with some more features. Take it for a spin and let me know what you think, both good and bad, as well as what could be improved on it.

And there are definitely more things I'd like to add to it, but I decided I wanted to go ahead and launch it now to get feedback from as many people as possible. So try it out and let me know!

I'm sure everyone noticed that I've replaced the huge, tacky menu with a nice neat dropdown menu. Any opinions on the new design?

Hello, all!

Any ham operators participating in Field Day, the UVA radio club is on the air. I had to leave briefly to get a piece of replacement gear for a dead piece, but when I left, we were on 20 meters and we have a 40 meter dipole we'll be moving to later on.

Just listen for W4UVA, that's Whiskey 4 United Victor Alpha, and you'll hear either me or Bert (club VP). =)

I've never been a fan of advertising. Yes, it supports many items that we consider free and I appreciate that and do attempt to watch ads while watching programs on TV to support over-the-air broadcasters. Similarly, I dislike begging for donations. I still do donate to causes I like, but I don't like when people and organizations solicit donations.

As such, I'm in a bit of a box. I'm sure it's not just me, but I imagine many people have noticed that RabbitEars seems to get slower and slower as time goes on and I add more features. I have been tossing around the idea of relocating to another provider or upgrading hosting packages on my current provider. However, my current $11/month for which I'm not even responsible for paying is a very good deal to give up. Any change in hosting plan would require me to begin paying a much heftier hosting bill.

EDIT: To clarify, my problem is not a shortage of storage or bandwidth. My problem is that because of the huge numbers of on-the-fly calculations and database calls the website makes, it chews up RAM and processor time. I've not even used 10% of my allotted storage, and I'm using a tiny fraction of my allotted bandwidth (20GB out of 3TB so far this month).

I've considered adding advertising to RabbitEars off and on over the past several months. In fact, the current header design leaves room for advertising to the left and right of the logo. Any advertising I would put on RabbitEars would probably not be through a third party network like Google due to the recent rumors of malware being inserted into third party advertising. That doesn't mean I've ruled it out entirely, but it's highly unlikely that I would go that route.

Instead, I would do my own ad rotations and sell space directly to advertisers. No Flash advertising of any kind, simple text or image ads only. I know I don't want to see obnoxious ads when I visit a website, so I would certainly not put anything like that on RabbitEars.

I, of course, could not make RabbitEars work without the help of you, the public, who views the website and submits updates to me. So I pose the question to contributors, to potential advertisers, and to viewers and readers: What is your opinion? What would you like me to do? Are you willing to tolerate the lower speed of the site in exchange for a corner of the web without ads, or would you prefer a bit of advertising in exchange for a bit of speed? Feel free to leave a comment here or send me an e-mail.

(Please note that unlike other e-mails you send and comments you leave, I may not respond to these as I'm hoping to get a lot of opinions from a lot of people and with school being what it is, I may have to just listen and not respond.)