Interview 

Dean over at Mr. Cheap Stuff interviewed me over the weekend and posted the results at his blog yesterday evening. Check out his interview post to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the Frugal Dad!

Festival of Frugality - ABC Edition

The lastest Festival or Frugality is up and running at My Dollar Plan.  There were some excellent selections in this edition.  Thanks to Madison for hosting, and for selecting my summer energy savings article as an editor’s pick.

Sounds like another deep post, doesn’t it?  Actually, this one should be fun.  One of the benefits of running your own site is you get to see how people landed here.  Some are directly referred from other sites, but a few manage to find Frugal Dad via the search engines.  And not all of the searches are related to finances or frugality.  Here are a few of the search phrases I found most entertaining, along with the link to the associated article:

“can you use the same towel twice”
“dreams about giving up”
“upside down car wreck money”
“stop to pick up food”
“unusual rustoleum car paint jobs“

I’ll be back with more thought-provoking financial posts later.  Just thought with all the negative financial news out the last several days everyone could use some comic relief.  I know I could!

Technorati Tags: search engines

Whew!  Had a scary moment late last night when I did something to completely fry my hosting account.  FrugalDad.com was down for about 14 hours, and it was a nervous time for me. 

Now would be a good time to talk about creating regular backups!  Unfortunately, I didn’t create a backup since this last week.  Thankfully, all recent work was not lost because of the fine work of my host, HostGator (affiliate), who created an automatic backup this past Sunday and was able to fully restore my blog to that point.  I appreciate their efforts today in getting me back online.

Tonight I’ll be adding back a couple articles posted earlier this week, and will resume my normal posting schedule tomorrow.  I’m sorry for any lost comments, links, etc., and I appreciate everyone contacting me via email.  It’s nice to know there are people out there looking forward to your work each day!

- Frugal Dad

Technorati Tags: hosting account, backup

Being relatively new to the personal finance blogging community I searched around for articles from other successful PF blogs on how to assemble my own site. I found a few real keepers, and thought I would share them here. The first two are recent posts, and the others reach back some, but their advice is timeless (and invaluable).

Clever Dude wrote a great article titled “How I Monetize my Blog.” In the article he describes the various ways to make money blogging, the advertisers used, and he shares his general philosophy on the influence advertisers have over personal finance bloggers.

Amy, over at The Motherload, put together a great piece outlining the concept of “Gaining a Readership: The Frugal Way.” As my name implies, I just love the idea of doing anything the frugal way!

The Simple Dollar devotes an entire category of posts labeled “Building a Better Blog.” Because I couldn’t single out a specific article amongst the great ones listed, I decided to link the entire category. Seriously, it is that good!

Millionaire Mommy shared her ideas on “How to Grow Your Blog Business: 12 Success Tips for Newbies.” As a newbie, these really hit home for me and there were several great tips to implement immediately.

If you know of any others you feel should be included, please include in the comments so all us “newbies” may use this post as a resource to improving our own personal finance blogs.

If you are reading this it means the site conversion from Blogger to Wordpress is now complete. I’d like to thank Amy over at My Debt Free Goal for providing outstanding instructions for implementing a Wordpress blog. I’ve been a fan of hers for a while now, and if you haven’t had a chance to check out her story I encourage you to do so.

Well, what now? Actually, quite a bit! Now that we are out from under the limitations of Blogger I hope to expand the site a bit. Literally, I want to expand the idead of living a frugal lifestyle and discuss more wide-ranging personal finance topics. I have a ton of thoughts in my head on a range of topics from mortgages to credit cards to retirement savings, so forgive me if things appear a bit disjointed at first. After the first week or two I should get in a rythm, and may even dedicate certain days to certain topics (Manic Monday Mortgages, or Super Tuesday Savings).

Thanks for joining us on this journey to financial freedom!

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Wordpress, mortgages, credit cards, retirement