World of Royalty Blog

I have (1) guests and (2) a cold, so I’m taking a little break from blogging, but I will be back soon. The Royalty.nu site will be minimally updated, with the Royal News page on hold for a few days. The New Royal Books list will be updated as usual on the first day of the month.

Sorry for the absence, and HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all!

I’ve been having some trouble with the blog’s theme, so I’ll be changing it soon. In the meantime, things may look a little jumbled. My apologies.

…it’s a topic that certainly concerns me as a website owner:

For the Love of God, I Don’t Want Whiter Teeth or a Flatter Stomach – Who’s to blame for these hideous Internet ads that just won’t go away?

I try hard to keep bad ads off my sites, and it is a never-ending battle. Scam/spam ads are absolutely everywhere these days. Your best bet is to check out any unknown company’s reputation carefully before you buy anything.

I am a bit behind on my email. Apologies if you don’t receive a quick reply from me. I’ll probably remain slow until next week, but I will catch up on everything eventually!

If you’re a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll probably notice that I’ve changed the header image. What can I say: I’m fickle.

Well, actually, I changed the image to match the new beige background color, and I changed that because the previous purple background, while quite royal, made it hard to read the blog’s text while the rest of the blog was taking its sweet time loading… OK, never mind, let’s just go back to calling me fickle.

I fear the blog title doesn’t show up very well against the new image, but I can’t find a title color that works better with that image. Aargh. Also, I’m wondering if the blog has too many colors going on now…? I’d hate to kill the pink/purple in the sidebar, but should I??? Oh, dear. I should, shouldn’t I.

Obviously I am not a design guru. If you have an opinion about this new look, good or bad, please share it. Or feel free to simply point at the blog and laugh heartily.

In case you’re wondering, the new header image is from an 1815 painting of Heidelberg Castle by Carl Philipp Fohr. According to Wikimedia Commons, it is in the public domain.

I have house guests and it’s cutting into my blogging time — apologies. I’ll try to update this blog again soon.

Having nothing else to post at the moment, I’ll share Quantcast’s estimate of the demographics of Royalty.nu visitors.

I know the widget looks a bit cut-off at the edges but that’s due to the code Quantcast provided and I can’t find a way to fix it.

This chart only applies to visitors from the U.S., although approximately 45% of Royalty.nu visitors come from other countries. (It’s Quantcast’s choice to focus only on the U.S., not mine!) Numbers in boldface are higher than Quantcast’s expected Internet average of 100.

As you can see, the World of Royalty Blog has undergone a big redesign! I loved the old theme, but I never felt it matched the blog’s content. It was hard to tear myself away from the pretty flowers and ribbons, but I’ve finally done it. (Weep.)

This theme isn’t exactly austere — especially now that I’ve added fluffy purple clouds and pink links — but it’s easy on the eyes, I think. The header image is taken from a public-domain photo I found on Wikimedia Commons.

I didn’t have room in the sidebar for my lengthy blogroll, so you’ll find that on the new Links page. There’s also a new Archives page that includes a list of all the tags used on this site (248 so far), from “Amazon” (the region, not the website) to “Zara Phillips.”

It took me forever to talk myself into this redesign, but now I’m happy I did. I won’t think about the flowers and ribbons I’ve lost. This is so much better. Less girly. More serious. Plus purple and pink. Yay!

Like it? Hate it? I want to hear what you think!

I’m fiddling around with the blog theme again, so things will be in disarray for a while.

The main World of Royalty website is 11 years old today. All I can say is wow.

OK — maybe I can say a little more than that.

The site started on April 17, 1998 as a single page on Geocities — just a place to keep my history links so I wouldn’t lose them if my computer crashed. (Bookmarking sites like Delicious didn’t exist in Ye Olden Days.)

Soon I added a news page, and some history articles that were frequently revised to reflect suggestions from the site’s visitors. (Wikipedia didn’t exist in the Olden Days, either.)

I moved to the Royalty.nu domain in 2001. The site still has link lists and some history articles, but these days I’m focusing mainly on royal news and royalty books because that’s where I think I can still add something useful.

Will Royalty.nu exist 11 years from now? Probably. It definitely would not have survived for its first 11 years without the kindness, encouragement and support of its loyal visitors. My thanks to you all.