Good Morning, and welcome to 2016.
For the last seven years, I have written a New Year’s Day post filled with blog updates, new series ideas, and what to expect in the upcoming year, first on Coupons, Deals, and More, and continuing the tradition on Ann’s Entitled Life. This year, I am saving the blog updates until next week as they are pretty vast.
Last year, I spent New Year’s day whining that I was working a bit too much for a retired-person, and was going to have to cut back.
Hahahahhahahahahahahahahaahahahhaha
I ended up working even more in 2015!
I am very fortunate in that Ann’s Entitled Life does quite well with traffic. This past year, on average, I had well over half a million people a month visiting this blog. And if anyone out there blogs, you know that is a lot of people! (Most bloggers count pageviews, I do not.) This truly exceeds my wildest expectations as I started Ann’s Entitled Life as a weblog; a traditional diary, and therefore had no expectations.
Ann’s Entitled Life spent this past year on three different hosts:
This blog started the year with wired tree. I like them. They answer problems quickly, are reasonably priced, and my email hooked up easily with them. At home I have top tier Verizon FIOS. That means basically any site with decent hosting is fairly quick (that also means if your site is not speedy for me and my FIOS + new computer, you need more bandwidth *cough*foodbloggers*cough*). Well, down in Florida we have Comcast. And I want to apologize to everyone who was on this site from mid-2014 through early-2015. Why? Well, Comcast isn’t all that speedy (even at top tier), so I got to see just how much slower this site could be for people without blazing internet speed.
Then, Ann’s Entitled Life moved on to wp-engine. Run fast, run far. Super fast, they keep spam at bay. However, I ended up moving on when my server bill was over $800 a month, AND they stuck me on cloudflare (making things even slower!).
And finally, Ann’s Entitled Life moved on to BigScoots who cleaned up the wp-engine mess and charge me $679 a month for a server that Hubby asked, “What? Are you hosting NASA!?”
Let’s just say things are pretty zippy now.
There are several other blog costs, and let’s face it, I am not a huge monetizer, so costs will become an issue if I don’t decide to do something about it, and soon.
I closed up the Facebook Group. And, I started a new Facebook page in August. The old Facebook page was messed up (Ann’s Entitled Life could not be found in Facebook search). And while I hate Facebook, and Facebook hates my page(s), Facebook is still my #1 source of traffic. Apparently, the people who like Facebook also like (at least some) of my blog content.
On Monday I will have a lot more about the changes coming to Ann’s Entitled Life in 2016, so stay tuned. 😉
On a personal note… Florida here we come! YAY! The weather in New York State has been amazing. I mean really amazing. This may be our first snowbirding year where it would have been find and dandy to stay home, but why take the chance? My parents are heading down mid-February, and I plan on dragging my Father into St Augustine on the train (and accompanying stops) at least a few times.
Since Max is doing so much better we also plan on taking him down to the beach a lot more. It is fun to gather shells on the beach, and Max gets a lot of exercise chasing the birds and the waves. The negative is he also gets all dirty and sandy, so we skip it for at last 3 days after grooming.
That’s about it for now. I want to thank you all for reading Ann’s Entitled Life. I wouldn’t mind if you all commented a bit (ok a lot) more. I love interacting with people who read Ann’s Entitled Life. I’d like to get to know you all too. So please feel free to comment on the blog!!
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Do you have any New Year plans? Resolutions? Goals? Ideas?
I wish you all a very Happy, Healthy, Fulfilling New Year. May 2016 be a year of much happiness and joy for you and yours!
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