Comments (5)

By Mom Unplugged, February 5, 2010 11:43 am

!!! Happy Birthday !!!

Three years ago today (February 5th, 2007) Unplug Your Kids was “born.”

Unplug Your Kids was originally supposed to be a shopping blog. My very first blog post ever was about the Skwish toy that all my babies have dearly loved.

Soon I also got into book reviews. Then I started talking about family life without TV. Next came crafts and other TV-free activities. Now I feel myself slipping into a new phase, although I am not exactly sure what that will be yet.

Like life itself, Unplug Your Kids has changed, hopefully for the better. I have changed also, again, hopefully for the better.

• In three years I have written 632 posts and received 4,136 comments.
• I have deleted 31,337 spam comments. (Thank you Akismet, I love you!)
• My teeny little counter at the bottom of my home page currently registers 331,690 visitors.
• My most popular day was Tuesday, October 21, 2008 with 4,166 visitors (crashed the server!).
• The most readers ever on line simultaneously were 248 on October 20, 2008 (nope, my web host was NOT happy with me in October 2008).
• My most popular post: Easy Homemade Musical Instruments with 24,246 views.
• My most commented post (that was not a giveaway or a TV Turnoff Challenge): Blog Fears with 41 lovely, supportive comments!
• For anyone who knows or cares about such things, Unplug Your Kids is a currently a Google page rank 4.

Astonishing!

Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who reads Unplug Your Kids and please join me for some virtual cake and ice cream!

Comments (2)

By Mom Unplugged, August 12, 2009 9:58 pm

Oh my, does that title sound totally self-absorbed, or what?? How embarrassing!

The thing is though, I get a surprising number of questions about Unplug Your Kids, so I decided that it might be a good idea to rewrite my two year-old brief and simple “About” page.

The result is an “Interview With Myself” page which (hopefully) answers some of the most frequent questions I receive.

Here is the link, if anyone is interested.

• An Interview With Myself

If you are not interested, that’s OK!

Comments (5)

By Mom Unplugged, May 29, 2008 10:20 pm

My first real foray in to the world of blog capitalism is open for business. No, I am not plastering Unplug Your Kids with ads for cheap narcotics, online casinos, and get rich quick schemes. It’s just my store!

All my life I have secretly wanted to own a toy store and a bookstore and fill my stores with all the toys and books that I like! (“Mines, mines, MINES!!!” as my 2 year-old would say). As a child, my toys were very meaningful to me. I am a packrat who kept many of them. I guess I just haven’t grown up yet.

Since owning a real “brick and mortar” toy or book store isn’t very practical in this day and age (especially in my small town), and there are plenty of wonderful online stores already, I decided to try setting up my own store through Amazon, just for fun. Besides, the toys and books that I like probably aren’t mainstream enough to ever be profitable anyway.

I have been fooling around with my store for over a year now, so it is finally time to try it out. I am quite proud that I managed to figure out how to fit the iframe reasonably well into my page. I feel like quite a techie!

As with all my Amazon links, I’ll earn a small percentage of any sale, even if someone enters Amazon via my store (or any Amazon link on my blog for that matter) and buys something else.

I don’t expect to become the next Donald Trump from this. My goal is very humble: to fund the purchase of a new book every month to review on my blog. I figure that in this way, I would be passing some of the goodness back to others. Of course I will feel that I have really hit the big time if I can cover the monthly cost of my web site hosting too!

This blog originally started out, long, long ago as a “shopping blog,” inspired by my friend Wishy who liked the gifts I bought her daughter. I guess my store is also a way to preserve that aspect of it, while I delve into other topics on the blog itself, as I have been doing for over a year now.

This leads to my last point…and if you have made it this far in reading my post, I am grateful! In addition to the more monetarily-oriented goals that I have mentioned above, I really hope that my store can help people cut through some of the toy and book junk out there. Having only a Walmart and Kmart to shop at for toys has made me an expert online shopper. I would like to pass along the good finds to others. Most of what I recommend, we have and love. The rest is stuff I would like to have and love!

So, I hope you enjoy the Unplug Your Kids store. If you like it, then check back from time to time because I will add new things as I find them. I also have a seasonal section that I plan on changing every so often. Knowing me, I will be tinkering with the store for quite some time.

The link is the “Shop Unplug Your Kids” tab in the upper right sidebar.

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(Photo thanks to photographer Kevin Rosseel and morguefile.com.)