Where my ADSENSE obsession led me

If you had read the dev logs closely, you probably would’ve gotten the gist of it, but my Google AdSense application kept getting rejected due to unintentional duplicate posts caused by countless trials, errors, and bad code. Thinking I had finally fixed almost all of those technical issues, I reapplied—and got the result today.

Whenever I asked various LLMs before if there were any "technical issues," they all pointed out a common concern: "It’s unclear whether this is a blog or product documentation." Back then, I was so consumed with identifying technical bugs and fixing code that I just brushed it off. But looking back, I realize that might have been one of the core issues all along.

I’ve mentioned this to ChatGPT and Gemini multiple times, but I should probably summarize the background story that I haven't actually shared anywhere public yet. To be honest, I had no intention of building this blog engine in the first place, and I certainly had zero intention of making it public on GitHub. I didn't even know the term "blog engine," so I had to spend a lot of time trying to grasp terms I was seeing for the first time—like blog engine, blog template, blog OS, CMS, and so on. In the end, I settled on calling it a "blog engine." Looking at it now, it feels a bit ambiguous, but the milk is already spilled, so I'm just rolling with it.

The main reason I decided to build SKBE was that after weighing various options, every single existing blog template or service was missing at least one feature I wanted. So I thought, "I should just build it myself with SvelteKit." Before I knew it, things spiraled out of hand. Since it had come to this, I figured, "Why not polish it up so others can use it too?" And that single thought led me down a 9-month rabbit hole of trial and error.

Among the core requirements I considered at first—like "easy design customization," "zero deployment and maintenance costs," and "ability to backup and restore posts"—was also "it’d be nice to make enough for a monthly cup of coffee." So I paid quite a bit of attention to AdSense. Having it repeatedly rejected was pretty frustrating mentally. My personal blog, which I host and test elsewhere, had already been approved for AdSense before I applied the SKBE engine to it. So even when it was running on the version with the duplicate content bug, AdSense didn't ban it, and it kept running smoothly. Since my personal blog doesn't support multiple languages and the traffic is pretty cute (tiny), it probably just flew under the radar and got overlooked—which I consider a stroke of luck. However, since this site is the official SKBE demo and documentation site, I felt it needed to be undeniably clean. So when those technical issues came to light, I was baffled, but at the same time, relieved. If I hadn't noticed and left it as-is, I would've basically been dumping a heap of trash code onto the web, right?

I'm sure there are still technical issues—big or small—that I'm unaware of. However, as far as the critical duplicate exposure issues go, I believe they are all resolved. After coming to that conclusion and verifying everything, getting rejected again by AdSense hit me like a bit of a shock, making me realize I had been subtly obsessed with it all along.

Right after that, my first thought was: "Well, if it’s not a technical problem, let's stop obsessing over it and just do what I need to do." It’d be great if AdSense got approved, but it’s not like anything really changes if it doesn't. I mean, the traffic here is... mostly just bots busily crawling back and forth anyway... To be completely honest, part of me thinks it would've been so much easier to just generate a bunch of typical blog posts early on, get AdSense approved, and start from there. Still, if I had done that, we wouldn't even have half of the 19 releases we have now, and severe duplicate content issues would still be lingering. Looking at it that way, I don't think where I ended up today is all that bad.

Besides, to make this place feel truly like a "blog," I decided I needed to stop trying to sound overly official and just write comfortably. So, I created a new category called "Dev Notes." Here, I plan to write about the unofficial stuff that happened during development—the records of my struggles, quick patches, moments of sheer disbelief, random rants, and so on.

For now, I consider the critical technical flaws mostly dealt with. My plan moving forward is to fix the minor inconveniences and issues that pop up as I actually write blog posts. And I’ll use this category to share the stories that come out of that process.

If you are reading this, you are probably part of the 0.000000000000000000000000001% of the global population. Since you're such a rare minority, I hope you take some pride (?) in that uniqueness. Now that I've opened my mouth, wrapping this up is hard, so I'll just end it with some random rambling.