Things are changing around here.

You might even have noticed some changes already. I doubt I’ll be messing around with my site’s design or WordPress theme any time soon, I still like the way it looks, but I’ve become more and more irritated by internet advertising and so I’ve decided to stop being a part of the problem. 

So starting today, Saturday the twentieth day of August, there will be no more ads on this blog. This will continue for as long as I am actively posting, or at least convincing myself that I’m actively posting. Or at least a year, since I paid that far in advance.

If you see ads here in the future, either something’s gone wrong, I’ve abandoned the site (which I’d count as something going wrong, come to think of it.) or I’ve decided I can make significant money hosting ads. That last one seems unlikely, but you never know.

I have also registered the domain leotarvi.com, which is a little silly, since this is not a commercial site. In fact, I have no plans to ever make it a commercial site, so I probably should have gone with .org, but here we are. I’m not yet willing to register two domains for that, but maybe someday I’ll branch out and have a commercial site alongside my totally non-profit blog. That’d be fun.

You don’t have to change your bookmarks, incidentally; leotarvi.wordpress.com should always point here for as long as it’s on WordPress. And I’m pretty happy with WordPress so that’s not likely to change any time soon.

Speaking of commerce, one of the things included in my new premium WordPress service is monetization, which my spellcheck insists is not a word. I’m not actually sure if I can realistically monetize this blog, but it’s now costing me about a hundred bucks a year, and it would be cool if it could pay for that itself. I’ll look into it later.

For now, I think I need to do some writing. I haven’t written much in the last few years, and I’m not happy about that. There are lots of reasons for it, on a whole spectrum of good to bad, but I don’t have to like it. Right now, this morning, there is nothing stopping me from writing for hours and hours if need be, so I think I’m going to do a little of that.

I’m kinda hoping that a side effect of spending money on the blog is that I’ll feel more invested in it and use it more. It never seemed to work with paper journals, I have a drawer filled with blank books just waiting to be written in, but hope springs eternal and I have written here regularly in the past.

So that’s the state of things right now. Next thing for me to do is make a pot of tea and decide what I’m going to write about. Random thoughts or personal stuff or current events, or maybe start a series. I have a series in mind, but I’m not sure diving right into that is a good idea.

As always, comments are welcome, but especially feel free to give me suggestions for topics and feedback on the new ad-free Adventures.