Out-of-Control Ads (Problem Hopefully Fixed)

Dear Readers,

I hope you are all doing well and are having a lovely week. We spent the weekend in Catalina celebrating my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. It was a beautiful weekend and I filmed an outfits of the weekend video, which is now on YouTube.

Something has been happening on my blog for awhile now that has bothered me and I'm sure you probably noticed it... Google Ads. And lots of them! I noticed this a few weeks ago, but to be very honest, I am so busy with the kids and work I didn't have the time to figure out how to fix it. I found myself very frustrated with the large banner ads on the blog because I never placed them there.

I put it on my to-do list to look into it (did I enable some strange ad feature without knowing it?) but I never got around to investigating it. (Anything technical or to do with websites really confounds me. It's actually amazing that I run a blog in the first place.) It wasn't until I received an email of complaint from a reader tonight that prompted me to look into it again.

My chief frustration was this: I completely disabled Google ads on my blog, but they were still popping up. After much research, I found out that Google implemented a new feature called "Auto Ads" that I was automatically enrolled in (I did not opt for this) where they place ads where they like. It is explained in this article here. I went to check, and sure enough, I was enrolled in Auto Ads, even though I never opted for this and did not know what it was. So I have since disabled that feature and things should go back to normal.

I apologize for the inconvenience and aggravation this may have caused.

I appreciate your understanding and, for my long-time readers, sticking with me through it all. As I am homeschooling with four children (including a baby), I find myself in the busiest time of my life. My work is also very meaningful to me, so I make time to fit it in as well and make it a priority. The joy with my work continues to be found in you, the reader, and I appreciate you very much.

Another change you might notice is that I now approve comments before they are published. I was receiving a lot of spam comments in the past and my monitoring of the comments has completely eliminated that problem. So if you write a comment, it will be sent to me for review, and I will publish it.

I have taken away the ability to comment anonymously as I found that the only people who did so, had negative things to say :)

Thank you, as always, for your support of my work. You make it all worthwhile.

With gratitude,

Jennifer