Some Pages Have Affiliate Links
You'll occasionally find affiliate links for services and Amazon books related to building and deploying web applications.
Why even bother putting the affiliate link notice in the footer?
Technically anyone who posts an Amazon affiliate link must mention that an affiliate link is on the page or it's a violation of their terms and service.
But that's not the main reason I put the notice. I just wanted to be transparent about sometimes sprinkling an affiliate link or 2 around.
Are podcast episodes and interviews made to push affiliate links?
Heck no.
For example, I have a link in the footer of this page linking to DigitalOcean. I've used them for literally 5+ years and they are being used to host this site. Using an affiliate link for that helps give hosting credits to my account to offset hosting costs.
Other examples of affiliate links might be linking to Amazon books that guests recommend. These are books that guests have read to help build or deploy their app. Often times it's books I've read or glanced through too because they are good but that's not always the case.
Another example of affiliate links might be guests suppling their own affiliate links to services they've been using for years as part of their text interview. That would be similar to what I did for DigitalOcean, except in this case the guest gets compensated.
You may also find an affiliate link for certain products or services that guests have, such as courses. This won't always be the case but it may happen. This just helps with hosting the site and helping me afford to be able to continue running this site.
How much does it cost to run this site?
The hosting costs will depend on the traffic but the real cost is time. Each podcast episode end-to-end takes 8 hours to produce and each email interview takes about 4 hours and that doesn't count the time to find guests which certainly adds up.
I also have no sponsors or a company backing this project. I'm a self employed freelancer and teacher. This is a passion project of mine. I like hearing how others build and deploy things but the time spent here competes with time I would bill clients and even create new courses.
If you want to read a much longer story about affiliate links, I wrote an article about that on my personal blog.