Blogtimore, Hon.

We need money. Our bills are coming due next month and we need to pay them. The generosity of the beg-a-thon we held a couple years ago got us through these couple of years and we appreciate all the help we received. But that was then and the goodwill is about gone.

In the ensuing couple of years, we’ve tried to innocuously cajole people to help us offset our bills. We sold “faces” and we put a PayPal button on the page for people to support us directly. However, both of those attempts at monetizing have been colossol failures. We’ve avoided placing ads on the page and/or charging people to register and/or maintain a listing on the site.

Well, friends, those days are coming to an end. Ads are on their way (in fact, if you wish to advertise on the site contact us at hon@blogtimore.com right away). We may even be forced to charge a fee to list and maintain feeds on the site. We even have an idea of how much it’ll cost: $1 a year.

That’s correct. If we can raise the equivalent of $1 a year from each of the hundreds of feeds we aggregate we can keep this site going for as long as there’s an internet. If we can’t then we can’t.

So please, click the PayPal button on right side of the screen on our home page and forward us a buck. Or forward us 10 and cover 9 deadbeats who don’t appreciate Blogtimore, Hon as much as you. We’ll forever thank you and you’ll be doing your good deed for the year.

(If you have a “face” currently on the site, this post isn’t meant for you. You’re awesome and will live to a ripe old age.)

Regular visitors to the site may have noticed some problems with Blogtimore, Hon lately. The site has not been updating, and was down for the better part of a week recently. The reason for these breaks in service center around RSS feeds becoming invalid due to either site redesigns or expired domains or general abandonment. We have just completed a massive sweep to remove all invalid feeds and everything should be working fine now.

However, even with the removal of quite a few feeds, we still have over 200 blogs participating on the site. While we are thrilled to have that many people thinking this site is a good place to provide exposure for their blogs, many of them are not really all that active anymore and may break our site in the near or distant future because of site redesigns or expired domains or general abandonment.

In order to stave off the site going down again for an extended period, we will be instituting a monthly behind the scenes house cleaning. Beginning February 15, and the 15th of every month after that, we will be deleting all feeds that have not been updated in the past 90 days. For the most part, visitors to the site won’t notice these blogs missing because they haven’t been featured much to begin with due to their not being updated, but looking for them will produce no results.

Other suggestions to streamline the site further are more than welcome. E-mail hon@blogtimore.com and let us know.

Bloggers who allow us to repurpose their feeds may or may not have noticed that the listed blogs are looking considerably more bare these days. We have removed the “faces” of those blogs who chose to not pay up $10 for continuing to have it displayed. Don’t worry, we ain’t mad at ya.

But it’s never to late to get back on the bandwagon. Or to climb on for the first time. Click here or e-mail hon@blogtimore.com for more details.

Hi. Been a while since we’ve been in touch. Hope your summer was grand and your autumn is golden. Here are a few administrative notes:

1. There is a slight backlog in adding new blogs to the site. We apologize and promise to sort through them in short order. We’ve been extraordinarily lazy around here lately.

2. We’re finished being lazy! That means changes are coming; most notably ads! Yes, we’re selling out. We promised to keep the site going for two more years when we begged for monetary support from the community back in the spring of ‘06. Those two years are up in the spring of ‘08, and judging by the amount of money we’ve gotten from keeping a PayPal donation button on the sidebar (a big, fat zilch) we need to start gathering funds now to keep from having to shell out cash from our own pockets to keep the site going come May. It’s either that or another beg-a-thon, and we don’t really want to beg again (however, if you want to unilaterally donate to the cause there is that PayPal button over there on the sidebar).

3. If you want to stop ads from appearing on the page, you can buy the site and do with it what you wish. Contact hon@blogtimore.com for more information.

4. When we implemented “faces” for the site to boost visibility for blogs we tried to charge people for it. That failed pretty spetacularly. So then we offered to show your “face” for free until the end of October 2007. Welp, it’s October 2007. Everyone who has a “face” on the site can expect an e-mail within the next several days that details the conditions to keep the “face” visible beyond Halloween (namely $10.30 sent to us via PayPal). The caveat to that is if you’ve submitted a “face” between September 1 and October 2 you will be able to show your “face” fee-free until the end of the year.
   

The site has been pretty stagnant lately. If you have ideas or suggestions on how to improve it or what to change, let us know. We’re always accepting correspondence at hon@blogtimore.com or feel free to leave a comment below.

We’re sorry to do this (well not really), but effective immediately we will not allow blogs that publish “sponsored” posts to be listed on Blogtimore. Sponsored posts are those that allow the blogger to cash in on his or her writing—via web sites such as payperpost.com—by “reviewing” or advertising web sites and/or products the blogger may or may not really know something about and may or may not have any experience with. We set up Blogtimore to highlight blogs and the bloggers behind them in the greater Baltimore area and not to enable them to essentially spam visitors to our site with posts they wouldn’t write if they weren’t getting a few bucks for them.

We can appreciate the spirit of enterprise the bloggers who participate in writing sponsored posts show, and we wish them luck in making a mint via blogging, but we will not be a party to it.

Especially if we’re not getting a cut of the action.

Hi, friends.

There was a glitch on our Count me in! form that was preventing bloggers from adding their blogs to our list of other blogs. Because of that, no new blogs have been added to the mix here on the site for weeks. Sorry ‘bout that. Someone wishing to add a blog finally spoke up and said “yo, wuddup with this,” thereby giving us an indication that something was wrong and that not every blog that wishes to be added to Blogtimore has already been added to Blogtimore.

There are two blogs we need to manually enter into the system. They will be assimilated this evening. If there are others out there who thought they added a blog feed and are wondering why it’s never been added, please try again at your individual conveniences. We know, er, think, um, hope it’ll work correctly now.

We have been woefully negligent lately here at Blogtimore, Hon World Headquarters. We haven’t been updating feeds or even monitoring correspondence all that closely. The result has been unupdated feeds, unadded new blogs and unanswered e-mails. We could blame it on issues we’ve had with connectivity to the back-end of the site where all the magic is made, but we kind of haven’t had any problems for about a week now. So we’ll just blame it on spending as much time in drunken holiday debauchery as possible over the last several weeks.

To make it up, we promise to having everything fresh and updated by Friday morning, December 20, 2006. If you have contacted us with a new blog submission or something else it will be handled by then.

To make it up further, and in the holiday spirit, we are looking to clear out the Blogtimore, Hon apparel warehouse of the last remaining Blogtimore, Hon t-shirts. These t-shirts can now be yours for the low, low price of FREE! All we ask is that you pay for shipping and handling (which includes the cost of packaging). We’re not quite sure yet, but we believe we can send out FREE t-shirts for only $4.00.

If interested, leave a comment here or e-mail hon@blogtimore.com. We have to check inventories, but we may have one or two adult size M shirts, maybe one adult size L shirt and about 10 adult size XL shirts. First come, first serve. Reserve your FREE (for $4) t-shirt today.

A while back, we introduced a way for those who include their blogs on our site to increase their visibility. We called it Blogtimore Faces. The idea was that bloggers could create a graphic that would allow visitors to the site to identify their favorite blogs/bloggers easier than scanning the post titles. We thought it was a great idea and thought $10/year for the increased exposure was reasonable.

Apparently, we were wrong. Response to this feature was decidely underwhelming. However, we still think it’s a nice idea, so we’re dropping the price of Blogtimore Faces, to the low, low price of… FREE!

All Faces will be FREE until October 31, 2007. After that time it will cost $10/year to keep the face active on the page. But heck, that’s a whole year and two weeks away. Why worry about it now?

All you have to do is send any image that you’d like to identify you and your blog to hon@blogtimore.com. It should be 146 X 40 pixels and can be in just about any graphic format (.jpg, .gif, etc.) you can think of. Check all the details here, but ignore all that mumbo jumbo about cost. Because, again, FREE Faces for all until October 31, 2007!

Go ahead, make yourself stand out by putting your best face forward.

Please keep in mind that changes to your blog may affect changes to your blog’s RSS feed which may affect changes to the ability of Blogtimore, Hon visitors to read your posts on this site. If you change from, say, a Moveable Type CMS (Content Management System) to one from WordPress your feed will almost certainly be affected on Blogtimore, Hon. Additionally, if you move your blog from a free hosted site, such as Blogger, to one you pay hosting for yourself (which includes Moveable Type and WordPress) your feed will definitely change.

The bottom line is it is your responsibility to let us know about changes to your site/feed if you wish to remain visible on the Blogtimore, Hon site. We may read your content through the site just like everyone else, but chances are very slim we’ll notice any changes to the way you deliver it, and chances are 100% percent we’re not going to make any changes to your feed without you telling us to.

While no one has qualified for any free Blogtimore stuff yet, there has been some pretty active participation in the Blogtimore, Hon Blog Referral Program. We just want to remind you the program is alive and you too can be sporting a totally free Blogtimore, Hon t-shirt by getting just five (5) other blogs signed up on the site. Check the post explaining how the whole thing works.

On another note, everyone who was owed a Blogtimore, Hon t-shirt from the Beg-A-Thon should have it by now (except for one generous benefactor). If you were owed a t-shirt from the Beg-A-Thon and did not receive it, please contact hon@blogtimore.com immediately (unless you’re that one person… we know who you are) so we can do something about it.