No, I don’t have any sponsors. I would be happy to mention them regularly and give them appropriate exposure if I had. Given my personal principles they would also be ethical businesses, belong to one of the ethical registers on their stock exchange, be non-consumerist in product terms, or be of a charitable, philanthropic or not-for-profit nature. That means most indie authors would get a look-in!
But, you say, why are there advertisements appearing at the bottom of your pages?
If you are a WordPress user and logged in, you will be wondering what we are talking about unless you also have your own wordpress.com blog. You don’t see the ads, courtesy of WordPress.
In September WordPress advised us that the free blogging platform would now carry adverts. Of course we have no control over what adverts appear, although WordPress did indicate that they would be suitable for the type of blog involved, by which I hope they mean they recognise it’s a G rated blog so would only put G rated adverts on it. When I’ve not been logged in I’ve only seen adverts for WordPress itself on my blog so far. I don’t mind that, I think WordPress is a good product. I recommend it for anyone starting up a blog. It can be used very simply (just what I needed when I first started), but it can also be quite sophisticated, even with the restrictions placed on the free blog content (like not being able to display active widgets like Rafflecopter forms and Linky Lists).
But I don’t want adverts on my websites – especially ones where I have no control over what appears. There is an answer – WordPress immediately offered us the ability to stop them with a small annual charge. It’s less than the cost of many independent hosting packages. But I have a number of websites using this blog approach, as well as my blog itself. Getting them all ad-free would cost a lot, well, most of my current royalties!
Then I realised I already had my own answer: I have a paid hosting package for what was once my full-time job. On that hosting package I can have what are called multiple domains. That means, in essence, that provided I don’t have a huge amount of traffic on the sites or a huge amount of data stored in them, I can run more than one website from the same hosting package.
At the beginning of November I set up the Princelings website in this new form. I can use the WordPress software on it, although I have to add ‘plug-ins’ to get things that were previously included, including some statistics, spam filter on comments, and a whole load of things you don’t think of, like the buttons for Liking and sharing posts. But I’ve done it. I learned an awful lot in just a few days. The address http://princelings.co.uk now points to the site. But I need to do it slightly differently. I have a list of things to do straight away or in a different order next time.
Next time.
I’m planning to migrate this blog over to the new set-up between Christmas and New Year. You’ll be busy doing other things then, won’t you? Once my family leaves I’ll start moving JemimaPett into an ad-free world. With any luck it’ll be done before we enter 2014. But just some advance warning that you may find things a little clunky if you log on then. Princeling George will be around with his spanner (wrench) and hard hat, helping me fix things. When it’s done you’ll need to sign up to Follow us again, probably. I’ll let you know.
This is just by way of explanation and advance warning. Next week I’ll tell you what’s in store for December on the blog – yes, Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat!
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George’s avatar courtesy of Rodents With Attitude