Note: the following post is sponsored.

At some point, a blog may grow to the point where it would make sense to move it into its own domain. For the somewhat technically-challenged, like myself, websites that would make this transition as simple as possible are valuable resources. Web Hosting Choice fits into this category as a guide to finding hosts for your site, offering helpful, straightforward information without any annoying advertisements. Their website is easy to navigate and includes a quick search tool, where you can enter the maximum you are willing to pay in monthly costs and setup fees, along with your required bandwith and diskspace. This is a great and simple way to filter out potential hosts based on your own preferences, saving you endless hours of surfing your way through company websites. If you are becoming more web savvy or looking to expand your personal or business webpage, make sure to check them out.

For awhile now, I've been toying with the idea of signing up with a paid blogging service. I don't want to sell out my blog, but I do spend a lot of time mentioning products, services and websites and it would be good to get something back every once in awhile from the companies I'm essentially providing free marketing for.

Some of the blogs I've been reading lately have been members of PayPerPost, which connects advertisers to bloggers in the form of opportunities that members can choose to reserve, write about, and then submit for approval. All of the available opportunites are listed so you can scan through them and pick out ones that you know something about or feel you can write about well enough to satisfy the requirements of the opportunity. If the advertiser approves your post, you get paid. Some of them are totally out of left field, but some I've seen fit what I write about on here anyways, so I signed up. Now that my blog has been approved by PayPerPost, I'm hoping to fit the occasional opportunity into my blog and make a few extra pennies, here and there.

It's a really easy service to use. The site is excellent and simple to navigate around and I was really impressed by the requirements they had of the bloggers. Their Code of Ethics is great. For instance, you can't follow a PPP post with another PPP post - you have to include at least one regular post of your own in between. I like that. It forces you to keep the blog on it's original track. I also like that you don't have to write positive posts. If something sucks, you can post that it sucks. Also, I have to disclose that I may occasionally be blogging for money, which I'll include at the bottom of my sidebar. Follow this link for more information about their blog ethics.

I'm not going to be catapulting my blog into the sales-oriented blogosphere...this blog will continue to do all of the things it was created to do, and it's nice that PPP recognizes my wish to keep it that way. However, it's no secret that I'm pretty focused on saving money these days and working towards some of my goals in a more meaningful and straightforward way. This seemed like a good way to do that, even if on a fairly small level. I'll let you know how it goes, but in the meantime, I encourage you to check them out if you're interested.

I read a lot of blogs. In fact, my drop-down URL menu includes more blogs than other sites, though I've realized that I visit a lot of them out of habit, and not because I actually think that they are stellar (or even very well written). Besides my friends' blogs (all stellar AND well-written), I've come across most of the blogs I read (or have read) by using Google's blog-searching tool while looking for information about something. Sure, I can read the info off the product's website, but why not look for what real people actually think about it? I have found some amazing products, recipes and websites by doing this and it's neat to see what some other people are able to do with their blogs.

Some of my current favorites are www.veganlunchbox.blogspot.com, a blog started by a very cool vegan Mom when she wanted to share the creative lunches she packed for her vegan son for school each day. Though he's homeschooled now (and so not taking lunches, or packing them himself - this is a very food-wise kid), the archives are full of photos of seriously cool lunches that make me want to cut sandwiches into cookie cutter shapes and melon ball the crap out of some fruit. She's amazing. Her new cookbook comes out this fall.

Another favorite is www.krystalatwork.blogspot.com, the blog of a financially savvy 20-something Canadian from my hometown, now working in the city across the water. She's so open and honest about her finances - at any given time you can actually see where she sits financially, if you were really interested in being that nosy - and the way she tracks and thinks about every penny she spends makes me think about my own pennies.

My ridiculously long list of blogs I read regularly (and the ones I would pass through on the way to links they had listed) obviously needed some serious culling, which I did today. Some of them were so boring that I forgot why I ever read them in the first place. Others had terrible punctuation and some had actually disappeared completely. I remember where most of them came from - searching for a review on a cookbook, or info for when I first started running in Ottawa, or some I marked just because their posts were so full of links that I had to mark them so I could go back and check them out.

It's great that so many people blog. I don't care if people think it's nerdy...it's part of the dialogue. While it's true that there is a lot of crap on the web (and I'm sure that there people who would put my own blog in this category), there is a lot of useful information and there are a lot of insightful people out there, blogging their way through life. It's a very, very cool time to be computer literate.