spring cleaning at joyful.life!

Treasures from the used bookstore, my favorite clutch, and beautiful anniversary flowers from my guy. 

In the spirit of rejuvenation I've been doing a little rearranging here at joyful.life. You may have noticed some stylistic changes around the blog (wider format, double sidebars, rotating links, and more!) and hopefully things will be a little more streamlined going forward.

A couple things of note:

1. If you have a blog or website of your own and you want to share the joy, grab a "button" from the left sidebar and link up my blog with yours! Drop your blog name in the comments and I will be sure to stop by and check out your digs. (p.s. I'll be honest...I almost had a complete meltdown (a joyful one) when I found out that a few lovely bloggers are sharing j.l on their blogroll. I hope you will visit KTandCoffee and Viva La Vida and say hello!)

2. After a long and winding battle I've decided to remove my "ad free blog" icon from the site. While I am a believer in thoughtful promotion of goods and services, and I don't have any near future plans to start selling ads on j.l, I wanted to open things up to grand future possibilities.  I can't deny it would be wonderful to make a living by doing something I love, but I'm just not there yet. This will also allow me to promote my shop and faves from etsy guilt free!

3. Speaking of advertising...I decided to start sharing some of my favorite products (books I'm reading, beauty products I love, etc.) in a rotating Amazon widget on the right sidebar. The purpose of this is to share with you some of my favorite things and tell you a little bit about why I love them. But, you must know there is pretty decent perk for me too. If you visit j.l and click through to buy something on Amazon, I will make a small amount from the sale (about 4 cents per $1 spent) and you pay nothing more than you would if you had visited Amazon's website directly. This is my first (and only for now) attempt at monetizing my blog.

4. And lastly, check out the new social media links, etsy page with links to products in my shop, rotating favorite quotes, and (coming soon!) links to post groups such as music, thrifting, recipes...and more! I'm really excited for all of these changes and I really hope you like what you see!

Let me know what you think in the comments section if there is something you would like to see more of, something that doesn't look quite right on your screen, or just to say "hi!". I would love to hear from you!