Paid Link/Ad and Review Policy

I get lots of email requesting ad link exchanges/sales and product/service reviews, so I felt it was time to officially present my policy on the matter to save us all time and hassle.

1. No one-sided link requests. I will only free-link resources which I either personally endorse or feel provide useful, pertinent content to my visitors. Sometimes I will do a link exchange, but only if the site in question meets the above criteria and maintains a reasonably visible link back to Strangegirl.com. Despite my best efforts to present truly useful outside links, I cannot personally guarantee the quality of any outgoing link presented on my site. This is particularly true as time passes (sites disappear, change, &c.).

2. I do not link dating sites, random online communities (unless I have had good firsthand experiences with the communities in question), link farms, or sites that go beyond my general PG-13 comfort level. This goes for paid links as well as free ones. That said, sometimes Google Ads serves up some oddities. While I try to weed out Google adlinks that don’t meet my standards, the nature of the AdSense beast is unpredictable. For that reason, don’t use the Google Ads you see on my site as a measure of your potential success.

2. In general, I do not free-link commercial sites. On occasion, I will free-link a commercial site that I feel has significant free content OR has provided me with excellent service, but this is relatively rare. Don’t ask for it.

3. I don’t buy content and guest blogging is limited to people I specifically ask to contribute.

4. I will mark any paid advertisements (including links) appearing on my site. This usually means that I’ll provide some sort of sponsorship proviso for the sake of my visitors, as well as a rel=nofollow link tag attribute for the sake of Googlebot.

5. All linking and ad agreements are unique. Rates, placement, and other agreement elements will vary with circumstances.

6. I reserve the right to remove links, paid or otherwise, that point to content which I feel is offensive (to me or my site visitors), fraudulent, dangerous (e.g. points to sites infested with malware, &c.), and the like. Remaining time on the agreement will not be refunded.

7. I will not update your ads. Make sure you submit correct code, copy, and imagery to me upon our initial agreement or at renewal time. Occasionally, a well-meaning adbuyer may have good reason to ask for an update; I will consider each of those requests on a case-by-case basis.

8. If you’re interested in providing goods or services for review, get in touch. Please note that items/services reviewed must meet the theme requirements of my site. Anything related to Jane Austen (particularly Emma), vintage fashion, vintage decor, pinup, and the like is most likely to appeal to my readers. Please note that I will state somewhere in my review that the items/services were provided to me for free (or, under rare circumstances, at a significant discount) for the purpose of review. While I strive for positivity on my blog, my reviews will be honest. In the rare circumstance that goods or services provided for review do not meet basic quality standards, I may opt not to publish a review. This is to the advantage of the item/service provider. Finally, I cannot return items presented for review.

9. I reserve the right to change and add to my policy – without notice – as time goes on.

Thank you.

If you want to buy an ad on any of my websites, please get in touch. Describe the ads you’d like to place. Remember to include specific URLs and precise information about your budget.

I am Marianne Dashwood!

I am Marianne Dashwood!

Take the Quiz here!

For Austenprose: Regency costuming in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey adaptations

As part of her “Go Gothic!” tribute to Northanger Abbey, my friend Laurel Ann invited me to do a light look at the costuming in the 1986 and 2007 television adaptations of the novel.

Here it is!

Anyway, I hope people enjoy it.

More general goo…

The big news of the moment:  I’m writing an article on fashion in the Northanger Abbey adaptations for my friend Laurel Ann’s “Go Gothic” festival at Austenprose Blog. It’s set to publish on October 15. If you’re a fan of Jane Austen, you’ll really enjoy her blog!

Now for the boring stuff:

Kali enjoys simplifying her internet life.  Kali also has trouble letting go of past projects that have outstripped their usefulness.  This means that Kali has trouble making decisions as to what to update and what to delete.

I’m in the process of redesigning and otherwise generally cleaning up Better Haunts & Graveyards.  The current design is something like six years old, and it looks it.  Once that’s out of the way, Halloween-tree.com and Livadia.org are going to have their days of reckoning.

Right now, I’m thinking I’ll just merge the Halloween site with Better Haunts; there isn’t enough left to justify its continued independent existence.  As for the Romanov site, I’m torn.  On one hand, it looks old and we just don’t have the time or interest to update it anymore.  Further, all it seems to do in its current limbo state is invite image-ganking bandwidth thieves and freaky Russian spam.  On the other hand, it would sincerely suck to see all of our hard work on the scrapbooks and such go down the crapper.  As usual, I’m the queen of indecision.

In other news, Strawberry Canyon and Desire are closing up shop.  The current plan per Marsha and myself is to open up a new, joint writing workshop with no sim and a broader focus.  I think most of us were bored with the figure skating premise.

When will it debut? Not a clue. Probably sometime before Christmas.

Welcome, foolish mortals…

…to my new(ish) WordPress blog experiment.  While it’s a PITA to template and tends to clunkiness, it may prove to be a good solution to my update dilemma;  I want an easy way to post announcements and share minor updates and random one-off ideas without having to create whole new, separate sections or rework old ones.  So, I’m giving it a whirl.  If I like it, I’ll replace the main site with this thing (The Emma Adaptations Pages and my other semi-independent projects will retain their unique layouts).

Keep watching for changes and updates…