WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
I know I said a while back that teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk was going to be an ad-free zone, but inspired by Chris Craft and my recent cheque from the Google Adsense programme for historyshareforum.com, I am going to relent slightly. From now on, a small, fairly unobstrusive link will be visible on this site to bluehost.com. I use this company for my web hosting needs and have found them cheap, reliable and flexible. As I currently recommend them to all and sundry for free in any case, I might as well get some of my web hosting bills paid by endorsing their services! 
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Hey Doug,
You know I've been wondering about the whole advertising thing. On the one hand I enjoy having my blog and website knowing that I'm not being sold anything. On the other I'm watching my colleagues progress with their own blogs and knocking Casey Bisson's Maison Bisson off the list, they are earning enough to at least pay for their hosting and some techie toys. A former student worker of mine pulled in $100 last month alone (of course he just wrote a theme and a plug-in so that didn't hurt).
I'm torn. There are things I'd like to do that require money to get going and there's only so much of my own piggy-bank I can tap with three kids! However, I'm not sure how I feel about advertising, particularly with Ad-Sense. I'd almost rather vet my advertisers myself and know the devil I'm dealing with as opposed to the one(s) I don't but are being pushed to my readers by Google.
As much as we in the edublogosphere talk about open-source and freeware being the wave of the future, we still need to make ends meet. I haven't yet found an open-source mortgage, a freeware gas substitute or a way to get my bank accounting to increment by itself.
In the immortal words of Pooh, "Oh bother!"
Take care and best wishes to your family,
John
Excellent! I'll take that as one valued reader/commenter (with a very readable blog themselves) who doesn't mind. Good good!
As I mentioned on Chris' I recommend Bluehost wholeheartedly even without the affiliation link, but if a few people sign up for them through me, it pays a years worth of bills. I do agree with John (above) though, I'm not so hot on the Google AdSense, just because I don't know what's being promoted on my blog. Bluehost I know and can get behind. I have no idea what ads Google is going to display. So I sleep better this way.