More Community-Building

As you've probably noticed, I've been testing Google ads on this page. With some of my recent behind-the-scenes changes, the cost of maintaining the site grew a little, and I wanted to see if I could recoup some of those costs. You'll probably be happy to hear that the experiment was largely a failure. The ads weren't particularly well-targeted, and I've pulled them down. I may experiment with some other options, but for now we're back to ad-free.

But if I'm trying selling our, you deserve an improved rebeldad.com at the very least. So I've launched a rebeldad.com forum where you can swap stories and advice. I had a reader ask me if I knew of any good fatherhood forums and had to admit that I didn't. So I've created a new one. Have at it.

(I should note that I have no desire to build one of those little-used forums that litter the web. I'm giving this six months, and if no community develops, I'll take it offline.)

Also: if you read rebeldad.com as an RSS feed (and you should), you should see some subtle changes within the feed, including simple ways to e-mail posts, add interesting post to del.icio.us and see comments. Those items are only available when you use the feeds.feedburner.com/rebeldad feed. They won't be seen if you're using www.rebeldad.com/atom.xml.