We broke the $1000 mark

We just past the point of earning $1000 from the Google Ads on this blog.


I don't actively manage the ads - I just let them run. Now that the kitchen remodel is complete, we get about 500 page reads and earn a few bucks a day.

As noted on the side bar, the money we earn is going to Compassion to help feed and educate children that live in difficult circumstances. We hope to be able to sponsor four additional kids with this money.


My hope is that people who benefit from the information on this blog will consider taking a bit of their savings and invest that in the human race, where ever they see fit.

We were featured in the LA Times

Our blog was featured in the LA Times blog section called Pardon our Dust.

There was a nice little review of our work, which increased our visits by quite a bit.

Getting some air time

I added a new blog-hit stats counter: Histats.com - lot of cool reports, etc. It's free, and easy to apply to your site.

I was reviewing the "referred by" report, and found that my blog has appeared in a few online magazines - a couple of them doing a short write-up. I realize that it's not that big of a deal, but I got excited about it.

Here is the list

• OnlineTips.org
• Charles and Hudson
• MOVE - Behind the Walls

At the end of the day, I have been blogging this kitchen to share info with people. I get a lot of personal satisfaction in helping people out, sharing ideas, etc. Also, I have always wanted to write, but never saw myself as having the skills - and this is a good way to practice.

Better Blogging...

I have been using the new version of Blogger for the past week, and I am pretty happy with the results. My favorite feature is the on-the-fly modification of the blog while I am looking at it. I also like the template flexibility: color, font, size, layout, etc. I ended up spending about 3 hours getting all the custom content on the old version ported over to the new.

Other Blogging Tools I Use

Statcounter.com

This is a great (and free) tool for tracking your sites visits. As far as I am concerned, if you can bring up a map of the users that visited your site with details, you have captured the "cool factor".

Photoblog.com

Blogger is definately a tool that is based in text with added photos. This is a good platform for communicating with poeple, but is not really that smooth for publishing a lot of pictures. Photoblog is just the opposite - it has a great interface for loading a lot of photos, but the text is limited to a summary. I have started the practice of loading a series of photos at photoblog, then linking a few to my blogger site.


Screenhunter from wisdom-soft.com

This is a screen capture application, that is really slick. It copies whatever is on your screen to you clipboard and/or a GIF file. I just zoom images to the size I want, then quickly capture them. It is a lot easier than trying resize, crop, etc.

This image took about 3 seconds:

Just trying to keep up with the Jones's...

I took a leap of faith and converted my blog from the old format to the new customized one. All in all, it was pretty painless.

It has a few limitations (doesn't like tables), but the ability to drag, drop and add page elements makes up for it. It publishes way faster, and the control panel has quite a bit more functionality.

I started a parent site: Greengate Ranch Remodel

When I started the 10K Kitchen Remodel blog, I really had no idea that other people blogged about the work they did on their homes, houseblogs.net, etc. I quickly came to find out that I am one of the many, not the few.

We purchased our current house to remodel it into what we wanted. The location and land were really what we were looking for, but to get that, we needed to by an older home that was not part of the new developments. If you know the Portland, Oregon area, you know that new homes come on lots the size of a manhole cover.

I will keep up this blog, since it is very specific with planning, costs, suppliers, etc., and continue to build my new one, covering our work on the whole house.

Greengate Ranch Remodel

Houseblogs.net

I just added this blog's RSS feed to houseblogs. net.

There are a number of interesting blogs listed there - all about building and remodeling homes.