Photo by ninjapoodles.
As if I didn’t have enough things to do, I have started a new blog: Frugal Homeschooling, [It’s still there, but no new posts since Sept. 2008. I was stretched too thin, trying to do two blogs.] inspired by the popularity of my math resource page. For months, I have been wanting to write a similar page about homeschooling, but it always seemed like too big a chore even to get started.
On the new blog, however, I can enter links one post at a time — check out the latest Frugal posts in the sidebar widget, just under my Popular Posts list. Bit by bit, I hope it will grow into a helpful resource list for homeschoolers.
Why Did I Move to Blogger?
I enjoy blogging Lets Play Math! with WordPress.com. I like having Pages, and Categories, and “Keep reading” links, and lots of memory for uploading pictures or pdf handouts. I like the huge variety of templates, and I LOVE the way Akismet blocks spam comments.
But WordPress.com blogging has one serious limitation: no advertising. Well, no advertising by the blogger — I recently discovered that WordPress supports itself by putting ads on my blog, but they keep it semi-secret by hiding the ads from registered users. [Edited to add: Of course, they have to pay for our free blogs somehow. And when your blog gets big enough, you can join their Ad Control Program and share the revenue.]
Blogger, on the other hand, makes it so easy to insert ads that even I can handle it. The ads are relatively innocuous little things, and very well targeted — in the process of tweaking the template design, I’ve been hard-pressed to keep from clicking a few of them myself. (It’s against the rules for the website owner to click an ad link, no matter how interesting it looks!)
Will the ads make a difference? I’ll have to wait and see. Our budget still has problems, and if I don’t find some way to monetize this blogging hobby, I may be forced to trade it in for a “real” job.
Of course, what I should do is finish one of my books-in-progress. Surely at least a few of you would by my math games book, if I ever got it published, right?
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 