Blog Awards and Rude

A nice surprise today in my email. Rue Rude received an award I had never even heard of, for "Best Ten Websites for Expats in France"-- a finalist. I was happy to see that The Paris Blog, an "overblog" of Paris blogs, came first. Laurie Pike does a great job of curating interesting and unusual posts about Paris. And whenever she chooses one from Rue Rude, the views go up!

When you've been blogging for a while, like me (Rue Rude is almost to its 11th year!), you have to make many decisions about where you want to go with it. For example, I have received enough commercial offers

to have made quite a bit of money from them, but it would be at the price of lining my sidebars with ads. I just haven't been ready to do that. Yet there are numbers of bloggers who make a living with their blogs; sometimes I look at them and think twice.

Some of my friends and family know that I have a blog, including my children (one of them discovered it while googling "Eurotrash" years ago). But most people I know, especially in France, still don't have any inkling, and I blog under a pseudonym for various reasons, one or two of them important. I don't go to bloggers' meetups and have probably missed out on a lot of promotion; but that does give me the freedom to write what I want. Is it worth it? I don't know....
I've also never entered any blog contests; so when something arrives out of the blue to say that someone is actually reading Rue Rude, it feels very nice.

Thank you!