Update: Comments are back! I’m done changing my mind on this…I hope.

I’ve decided to change things up around here and I’ve removed comments from the site (you might have noticed I did this a couple of months ago). I actually started the blog this way, but changed my mind after seeing it wasn’t really the norm in the personal finance blogging world. Well, I don’t want to be just another personal finance, weight loss, or whatever-else blog. There are too many of those already. I hope I have enough worthwhile things to say that I will rise above the noise some day, but even if I don’t - that’s okay with me. I don’t want to waste your time with more of the same content that can already be found by the truckload on the Internet, so if that’s all I produce you should unsubscribe and let this blog site quietly at the bottom of the pile of trash where it belongs.

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with comments, but in general they tend to be quite worthless. I also don’t mean to imply that I don’t appreciate the comments which have been left here. It’s just that I want to own every pixel of my site and that means that the words here need to belong to me. If you want to respond to what I say, write a post about it on your blog and let me know about it. You can also send me an email or hit me up on Twitter. Whatever you do, the point is that if I have something to say worthy of further commentary, carry on the conversation somewhere and let it grow naturally. It shouldn’t be confined to this site or dependent on my comment policy.

I started this blog because I thought it would help me to get some things in my life in order. Given the not-so-creative title, you can probably guess that means my finances and my weight. There is more to it than that, but those two problems are a great place to start. In addition to helping myself, I also want to share what I learn along the way and hopefully help someone else fix these same problems in their lives or avoid them altogether.

I thought I should be a ‘pro blogger’ and that meant the typical blocks of ads, posts made up of lists, content written to generate search engine traffic, and links shared only for the hope of getting something back in return. Well, now I realize that is all crap. Actually, I knew it was crap at the time, but I thought that was what bloggers do so I should do it too. Today I announce that the crap at Finance and Fat has come to an end (I hope).

I was close to removing all ads from my site again, but I decided to leave a couple in place. I hate to be a sellout, but I also really hate to spend money in addition to my time on this site so at the very least I want to see this site pay for itself and that means having a few Google ads floating around. I know most of you don’t care about the ads and probably most people read this site in an RSS reader or email anyway so you’ll never see the ads. For those of you who visit the site, you’ll only see ads on individual post pages and only in one place on the page (at least that’s how it is as I write this). My views may change in the future, but at least you know where I’m coming from- I’d rather be ad free, but I have to be honest here- I want this site to make some money.

I don’t want to waste any more of your valuable time blabbing about changes here on my website. I just want you to know that you can expect much higher quality content here in the future; and a lot less noise. If I fail to deliver that high quality content, I fully expect to lose my readers and that is how it should be. Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you are a blogger I hope you will consider if any of these changes would be right for you too. Also, if you are a blogger, you must watch this video by Merlin Mann. It just might help you change your perspective on what a blog should be.

Apologies if you have recently sent an email to feedback@financeandfat.com, but I had to delete that email address. There was just too much spam and I didn’t want to dig through it anymore. I created a new address with Gmail, which has amazingly good spam filters. You can now contact me using financeandfat [at] gmail [dot] com.

Please feel free to send any questions, comments, or criticisms to that address. I check it once a day.

Apologies for the down time. I made a foolish mistake while setting up a new code repository and version management tool- that’s just geek stuff if you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, it’s not important. I killed the site and couldn’t quickly fix it so I decided it would be a good time to upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 while I was at it. That probably complicated things a little bit, but now I am back up and running with the latest version of Wordpress and all things seem to be well for now. Please let me know if you notice any errors or other weird things on the site. Thanks for your understanding.