About a week on, and one binge day past, I’m finding no problem at all keeping my blood sugar level between 5 and 7 – even on the binge day and the day afterwards.

This is great. Now I can focus on losing some weight, feeling great in myself.

After more than a year working with my diabetes nurse and GP to get my medication right, I ended up on one Gliclazide tablet a day and three Metformins. That’s not far off needing to inject Insulin, some have said.

One of my goals for 2012 was to become purely diet-controlled, that is, come off all diabetes medication.

Some form of low carbohydrate diet makes a lot of sense for diabetics, and being a borderline geek, I decided to give Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb diet in his book The Four-Hour Body a go.

In less than three weeks, I’ve been able to come off all my diabetes medication, after my blood sugar levels have plummeted.

Time for celebration, I think. Thanks Tim!

It’s some time since I worked out how to display ads on Vanilla, but although we’ve tried different types of Amazon ads in different places on the site, we’ve seen little click-through and no sales. I think there are some reasons why this is the case.

On the face of it, there’s a great synergy between some of Amazon’s product ranges and what we as hi-fi and music enthusiasts buy – CDs, records and data storage, for a start.

Wouldn’t it be great if Amazon’s ads reflected the music we’ve mentioned in our discussions? If we discuss a Van Morrison album, for example, why can’t Amazon show ads for the specific album we’ve mentioned and/or a link to the artist’s page where all available albums in different formats are listed?

No such thing happened.

The special offers being shown yesterday were about half the same as were being shown at the start. You’d think they only stocked about 50 CDs, with about 10 on special!

So earlier today, I installed AdSense. Over just a few hours, Google seems to have figured out what the site is about, and is successfully showing different ads on different pages. And, most critically, the ads seem relevant and are changing.

You can see which of the two has invested in their ad platform.

I don’t know yet if we’ll make any money from AdSense – I know Audio Chews won’t get rich – but the aim is only to move to better hosting, in the first place.

I chose Wu Wei by Jeff Ngan as a canny balance between clean minimalism and allowing me to cram in all the baggage that comes with the ever-evolving behemoth that is Dangerous Thinking.

I hope I’ve finished making small tweaks to the site. So it’s over to you. Drop me a comment if there’s something not working for you.

Fantastic images.

Audio Chews is running a simple competition, so if you want to win these great cables – I can vouch for how good they are, as I use Tellurium Q’s speaker cables in my own system – just hop over to Audio Chews. You’ll need to join to enter, but joining and entry are both free,

This is going to be one of my longer posts, but I can summarise it quickly:

Use the Pockets plug-in.

If you’re in for the long haul, first, a bit of background. With the assistance of a few mates, I run a hi-fi and music community called Audio Chews, for which we use Vanilla. An inspired choice of platform by my business partner Paul Silver, it’s proved to be a delight to use after some exposure to other forum software.

It’s been hosted on an ‘all-you-can-eat’ deal, along with some of my other sites, but we’d like to put it on some better hosting. But that costs more money than I’m paying at the moment, so we’re looking to get a bit of revenue from the visitors to the site – Google Analytics has shown that despite a small and loyal membership, we get a lot of visitors who don’t join.

Hopefully, they’ll not be averse to clicking on some ads. But how to get them on the site?

Like WordPress, which I’m using for this blog and quite a few other sites, Vanilla uses plug-ins to enhance its functionality, but unlike WordPress, there are no explicit advertising or AdSense plug-ins. I finally discovered that the Pockets plug-in allows you to drop in some HTML in loads of different places (pockets) around the Vanilla theme.

1. Open an advertising account

I’d decided to use the Amazon Associates scheme for Audio Chews, but you could use Google AdSense or anything you like.

2. Download and install the Pockets plug-in

The Pockets plug-in is here. Download, unzip and FTP into your plug-ins folder.

3. Activate the plug-in

From your Vanilla Dashboard, scroll down to the Addons section on the left of the screen and click on Plugins. Scroll down to the Pockets plug-in and click on Enable. You’ll be taken to the Pockets configuration screen. You can also get here from the Appearance section on the left of the screen (you must have enabled Pockets first, though).

4. Have a look at the configuration screen

It’s actually pretty easy to use, but gives you lots of flexibility.

First, click on Show Pocket Locations.

The pocket positions are in yellow. Scroll around and see where you can place your ads, and decide where you want to put them.

5. Have a look at the kind of ad options you have in your advertising account

The ones that interested me in my Amazon Associates account were the Contextual Widgets, which taylor the products offered in the ads to your community’s content. Once you’ve decided what kinds of ads you want to display, grab the HTML and head back to Vanilla.

6. Add the ads to the community

Click on Pocket, if you need to. Then click on Add Pocket. Paste the HTML into the second panel, labelled Body, and name the ad – ‘Top of main content’, or something.

For the moment, leave Page as All. You can play with more advanced page choices later – I’m going to run the ads a while before I start restricting the pages they’re shown on. The choose the Location for the ad – these are the pockets you displayed earlier – and under Repeat, choose where you you want the pocket to appear. At this stage of the game, Before or After is probably best, as they cover the most popular positions on the page.

Ignore the Conditions options. Then, under Enable/Disable, choose Test Mode. Click Save, and have a look at your home page. You’ll be able to see the ad, but your members won’t.

If anything’s not quite right, go back to Step 5.

Otherwise, go back to the Pockets screen and change Test Mode to Enabled. Save, and all your members and visitors will be able to see the ad. Then set up as many ads as you need.

There’s a lot more that can be done, but this summarises about where I stand at the moment with the advertising on Audio Chews.

I’ll leave it to TreeHugger to expand on its actual merits.

Built on Stilts: Tom Kundig’s Sol Duc Cabin : TreeHugger.

That’s why this remarkably mainstream-looking structure caught my attention. It belongs in a 21st century vernacular, not a medieval one.

High-tech Modular Demountable Café Built Of Straw Bale is a “Learning Aid in Low Impact Environmental Design.” : TreeHugger.