Trading Assistant Journal

Jun 7th, 2009 by Scott Pooler

This article was first published on our old location to re-direct our readers to this URL. It explains why the move was necessary and offers thanks for the experience at WordPress.com. Please excuse the re-publication but with the 301 re-directs and many readers having a new feedburner feed re-directed to this address, I thought it would be best to add the explanation here, now that we are all settled in to our new home.

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Hosting courtesy Beach Host

Go To: http://tradingassistantjournal.com

The TRADING ASSISTANT JOURNAL is Now Located at http://tradingassistantjournal.com

The Trading Assistant Journal has enjoyed a long and beneficial relationship with the fine people at Automatic and WordPress.com for many years. On our end, we would happily stay here and provide great content for the WordPress.com community and our over 80,000 readers but it seems that our inability to refuse advertisements on this publication has placed us outside of the WordPress.com terms of service.

This was not really a surprise!

I have been well aware of the advertising policy at WordPress.com and I understand the reasoning behind such a policy. It has been a delicate situation between this particular blog and its host for some time. We have communicated back and forth about it and in the past WordPress.com has been kind enough to allow us to continue to offer our readers and advertisers a mix of good content and quality product offerings.

Recently this blog was suspended for a violation or violations of the WordPress.com advertising policy.

WordPress.com

Guilty as charged - your Honor!

We did it, we accepted advertising - oh the ghastly truth!

Will my Mom survive the embarrassment?

Guilty of Advertising

Seriously, It seems that Automatic and WordPress.com may be very close to changing their position regarding advertising and I sincerely hope that they do. Advertising and monetization is the next step for any developed blog property. Blogger is the nearest competition to Wordpress.com (although I consider it an inferior platform) and yet that platform is well monetized (Go figure - Google and advertising, what do they know?).

Automatic, charge me a fee, make me promise to be a good advertising publisher but let me sell my work!

Maybe someday...

Too Late For the TAJ!

In any case, it seems the decision has not come soon enough for our stay at WordPress.com. We have removed all advertising from this installation at http://allbusinessauctions.wordpress.com after Automatic was kind enough to remove our suspension and allow us to do so. Thank you for this time we needed to make the transition!

Just a note, I did not go off the handle when this blog was suspended by Wordpress.com. I simply followed the instructions, backed up my data, transferred that data to a new self hosted installation, restored the data, installed the theme and set the 301 permanent redirect. I then wrote a very calm email to WordPress.com requesting the suspension be lifted so that I could:

Remove the offending advertisements
Extract the rest of my data from the sidebars (blocked when suspended and not exported in a database dump)
Leave this permanent sticky post - re-directing readers to the new location at http://tradingassistantjournal.com

I did not fly off the handle, I did not call anyone names, I did not see this as a conspiracy. It is what it is, I knew the rules, I knew the consequences, I pushed the envelope and now I am paying the price. Time to man up and say thank you so much for the opportunity and have a nice day!

No reason at all to be angry or upset with Automatic or WordPress.com - This is the best light Content Management System in the World! I will always be a huge fan!

This little WordPress.com blog called the Trading Assistant Journal and hosted by Automatic for free all this time, gave me the opportunity to learn about online publishing in a way I would never have been so passionate about without the experience gained with this blog. I would not now know what I do about social web development and content management without this blog.

I would not be as well known, as well respected, as confident in my abilities, without the experience gained while publishing this free WordPress.com blog, So....

THANK YOU! AUTOMATIC and WordPress.com!

You gave me an opportunity which in almost all respects, changed my life. Thank you very much, I will always have fond memories of this experience.

Remember - The TRADING ASSISTANT JOURNAL is Now Located at http://tradingassistantjournal.com

The blog will live on at the new location, and the old pages will remain here for awhile to allow our readers to find us once again!

At our new location, everything looks very familiar, no dramatic changes to the format or theme of the blog, except we do have more advertising opportunities and more features available due to the expansion through extensions and plugins in the self hosted version of WordPress.

New features will be coming, and yes, we may change the look, but this is not really in the plans just yet... Mostly you will notice better image galleries, and other plugins. There really is no limit to the features that can be added to a self hosted WordPress Content Management System. You watch!

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