17/365 Days: Me (and Friends) Time

We all have lives. We all have families, regardless of whether we simply live our lives as people who have grown around, with and because of a group of people, or whether we are taken care of our own. We all have responsibilities and that last episode of LOST to catch up on before the next episode airs. Very, very few of us take time out of our days and nights to indulge in purely recreational, self-fulfilling activities that are completely and utterly selfish and one-sided. While words such as self-fulfilling and selfish may latch onto you as very negative things to do, when it comes to relaxation, it is just about the best thing you can do.

We have all heard of the term “mental health days,” but the term is often tossed around as a joke between women as to what they wish they could do–if only they could afford the day off or were able shirk their daily duties to a fellow co-worker for the day. When it comes to women actually taking a true mental health day to do something fun and fulfilling for themselves, we may as well be living in a fantasy world because we just don’t do that and if they do, they take that dangerous day off of work to catch up on their list of errands that must be completed in order to live in a house that doesn’t smell faintly of gym socks or for functions or other obligations we really couldn’t fit into our schedule, but tried to convince ourselves we could.

I did not post on Woman Tribune yesterday. I thought about it and really sat down at the computer with the intention of writing and putting more content out there, but when it came down to it, my head and my heart wasn’t in it and the worst kind of blogging you can do is forced blogging when you’re just not feeling it. Through the years, I’ve noticed that when I forced myself to put content out there when I really just didn’t feel like it and wasn’t passionate about it, my hits would decline over time and my number of subscribers would follow suit. I was creating the same amount of content, but really, I knew it was all filler–and so did my readers. So instead of posting here yesterday, my partner and I hit up the store (in the middle of a snow storm, woops,) and filled up on the most junk food we have bought in a very long time. When we got home, we both went to our computers, but instead of working, we decided that it was time to spend some time together doing something we both love–play video games. And yes, we do consider him sitting in his office upstairs at his computer and me sitting downstairs at my computer “spending time together” if we’re both logged into the same video game and talking through Skype. We’re nerds like that.

We ended up playing Empire Builder with a friend of ours last night for over nine hours. That sounds extreme and of course I do not want to imply that everyone has nine hours to sit at the computer getting nothing but high scores on a video game accomplished, but being such a creature of the computer and such a video game nut, I needed a day of nothing but gaming to let me relax, rid my head of my absolutely insane list of things I need to accomplish, have been wanting to accomplish and have been trying to make myself accomplish. After last night and sitting here today, I don’t have to force a thing and I’m back to my normal, workaholic self.

So, in conclusion, regardless of your list of errands or the amount of minutes or hours you have to spare in a day, take some time to do something that you genuinely enjoy doing; something you may even feel guilty about because it is so self-indulgent. Do it and when you’re through and you have allowed yourself that time, you will come back to your list of errands, because they never do just disappear, regardless of how much we may want them to, an you will feel refreshed and be ready to get to work.

Blogging Schedules: It May Never be “Good Enough”, but that’s Okay

The blogosphere is made up of countless blogs on an exuberant amount of different topics. There is literally about 500 different blogs that appeal to every one person. That is how big the blogosphere is. While there are so, so many different things people bring up, explore, dissect and discuss on their blogs, when you cut through all the clever wording used to describe what a particular blog is all about what type of content you would expect to find there, there are mainly two different types of blogs–those used to detail, rant and rave about one’s life and blogs built and written by and for corporations. As more and more people start opening up and divulging just about everything that goes through their heads to their prospective audiences and as more corporations seek to identify and connect with their consumers, the line between these two, seemingly separate blog types continues to blur where we, the blog readers, see our favorite blogs writing about and being sponsored by corporations. Before the most recent FTC guidelines have been put into place, most of the time, blog readers did not know when we, bloggers, were just sharing information or were being compensated in some way for what we wrote about products and businesses.

As this already very thin line continues to blur, people who began blogging to divulge, rant, rave and detail their lives on the internet are evolving their blogs into their businesses and in some, albeit rare cases, a person’s blog makes up their entire of the bulk of their household income. While most people put the emphasis of being compensated for blog posts, advertisements and the like on mommybloggers, this trend has and will continue amongst any and all blogs with a significant audience that is deemed a “target audience” by consumers.

Woman Tribune started out as a business-like blog. It was not created merely to divulge about my life, although I have done just that on several occasions and will undoubtedly continue to do so as long as Woman Tribune is up and running, but it was created more-so to provide information and to explore and discuss information that is important and significant in the lives of women everywhere. To put it bluntly, Woman Tribune was created as a business, rather than something fun to do in my down time and because of that, Woman Tribune has always operated with a business-like platform. One of the major things to keep in mind when creating a blog with the purpose of it being a business in mind is that it must always contain recent information. While I do my best to post about relevant, interesting and varied topics, if I let Woman Tribune sit for a few days with no content going up after a number of days, it is pretty much the equivalent of committing blogosphere suicide. It starts to become irrelevant, something easy to gloss over and it becomes forgettable. So obviously, knowing that not only is content king in the blogging world, but frequent content is also king and something that must be kept in mind to sustain your blogging/business, the thought of blogging schedules is guaranteed to come up in your mind at least, oh, about 150 times. A day.

Blogging schedules are tricky. Every “professional blogger” or “internet/blog marketer, “interblog marketer” if you will, repeatedly states in just about every five posts for about five years straight to post on your blog as many times as you’d like, but around the same time every day in order to set your readers on a schedule and give them something to look forward to. This is all well and good, in theory, but can become quite a mess in no time and without any effort.

Firstly, trying to get my readers on some sort of “schedule” of when to expect my new posts seems a little weird to me. A little like parenting and why would I start treating my readers like my children when most of them already have children of their own? To add to this, because most of my readers do have children of their own, that means that while they probably love, and even fantasize, about the thought of having some semblance of a schedule, in reality, that is really not given to most parents. Adding to that, for a blogger to be available at around the same, exact time every day in order to update their blog makes it sound like they are lacking a life, which then again may be why they make the money and can be considered interblog marketers in the first place. Just sayin’…

I have always been a night owl; there is just something about the dark and the quiet that really jump-starts my mojo and really puts me to work. I tip a significant hat to the night time as being a key factor in my web design/development talents and for putting my natural knack for the English language to work as a writer early. I have been on the internet, designing and developing websites, writing (mostly) bad poetry and blogging since I was 13 years old. That is an entire decade of this stuff and for the longest time, I honestly had no idea what I was doing, but it worked and I built a name for myself in the political and feminist blogging worlds early. I thought I had some sort of an idea of what I was doing, but as I founded Woman Tribune and found myself enthralled with this new “blogging business” everyone jumped on the bandwagon of over the course of the past few years, I realized that in order to treat this business like a legitimate business, I was going to have to adapt to some business hours. This is exactly where my blogging schedule goes a bit haywire. Because I am a night owl, I am very often up all night (it’s 5:11am here right now and I have not yet been to bed. You obviously get the picture.) and because of this, I am usually not awake during “business hours,” ie: 9am to 5pm. A lot other bloggers have come out quite frequently to say that they too are night owls or suffer from insomnia and in order to still operate under the disguise, for lack of a better word, of being awake during normal business hours, they simply schedule their blog posts that they have written in advance, to publish throughout the day. I could do this if my WordPress did not consistently refuse to publish scheduled posts, therefore making me believe that my installation of WordPress has developed some sort of technological personality and I am just not ready for my content management system to start taking over my life, and then of course, the world.

Just a few days ago I had stayed up all night and got so, completely tired, but wanted to force myself to stay up all day and “work,” also known as write blog posts which is very much work in my life, this website technically being my business regardless of how much I enjoy doing it, but something dawned on me–something that should have dawned on me quite a while ago. I created Woman Tribune in order to provide information to women and to explore and open discussion about the topics that interest me, and collectively other women around the world. If I stay up all night and sleep all day, yet still provide this same service, then I have essentially fulfilled my obligation. If Woman Tribune has become even the least bit important, or a daily stop on women’s blog hopping and internet stays throughout the day, then it technically should not matter when new posts hit the home page.

When small potatoes bloggers, and yes I do very much consider myself small potatoes, I do not have an ego in the least when it comes to my “online personality,” see the blogs of corporations or really, really big potatoes bloggers updating several times a day it is because most of them have a staff of writers. Most of them have pre-written posts to publish throughout the day to make themselves look more professional, again for lack of a better word, than they really are. Bloggers who have created their own websites and who are the sole bloggers on their websites cannot catch up to the amount of volume being presented on professional and corporate-backed blogs and it is about time that we stop trying to. We don’t have teams or staff, we just have ourselves and if people are still logging onto our websites, then it must be enough and it must be okay.

Do you keep to a blogging schedule? Do you think having a blogging schedule or posting at the same time every day is important?

While I and Woman Tribune, essentially is a “small potatoes” blog, I am very interested in its continued expansion and if any women out there are interested in contributing guest posts or weekly/daily columns to Woman Tribune, please feel free to contact me directly at holly[at]womantribune[dot]com to contribute your awesome blogging talents. I’m sure we could work something out and you would be in pretty good company because for the most part, I kick ass. Again, just sayin’…

CEO of Sun Microsystems Tweets His Resignation

CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, has resigned and as only appropriate for a CEO of an IT company, he went out in style, tweeting his resignation. But it wasn’t just any old tweet, it was a full on tweet-haiku. Yeah, pretty awesome.

Schwartz has officially become the first Fortune 200 boss to tweet his resignation, which isn’t too big a surprise, considering he was the first chief executive of a major company to come out with a public blog of his own. He had also pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission to treat blogs the same as press releases and filings in matters of disclosing critical business matters to investors.

The reason behind Schwartz’s resignation is said to be because Sun was recently acquired by Oracle, which acquired the company after I.B.M. had moved to buy them out, but when negotiations came to a standstill, Oracle moved quickly to grab it. In an interview conducted last week with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, he had stated that he fully expects Schwartz to resign, rather than play a role in the new Sun/Oracle company.

While it is not well-known what is next for Jonathan Schwartz, he had stated in an e-mail that “with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.” and he is completely right; you never know what’s going to happen when it comes to an IT professional joining the ranks of the recently unemployed, but I’m sure the right company will snatch him up, perhaps a company with the same innovative ideas and mindset for the internet and blogging world.

Trade in Your Wedding Notebook for a Website

While we have all seen the tremendous impact personal and business websites and blogs have had over the internet and internet surfers, engaged couples have found that wedding websites have been extremely helpful and convenient in not only their wedding planning, budgeting and reference, but also for just about everything else.

Wedding websites are the new reference point for the bride and groom and also for their attendees and wedding party. The websites that couples can make range from simple to complex and can be used purely for getting the word out to your friends, family and colleagues along with your online friends and everyone else in the world or for just about everything that goes into planning a wedding complete with interactive sections for your bridal party to participate in.

There are many websites out there that cater specifically to couples who wish to build their own wedding site. If you are not HTML savvy, there are some very chic and elegant templates to choose from on Wed Simple and My Wedding; both sites are set up to be as simple or as complex as you’d like.

Through a wedding site you and your husband or wife-to-be set up, you can not only keep track of your guestbook and contact information, driving directions, menus, little notes that remind you of upcoming appointment, photo galleries of the whole process from the proposal to the honeymoon, an extensive online gift registry and also a personal blog for the two of you to get frustrations out, think out loud and so on.

If you are HTML savvy yourself you do not have to go through a pre-made wedding website company. You can simply buy your own domain through GoDaddy ($10) or NameNova ($7 and also the domain purchasing website I have used for about 2 years now) After you get your domain name all you need is the hosting, which I cannot recommend BlueHost enough; I have used them for years now and have never had a problem with them.

Wedding websites are your complete wedding planning tool so do you think now is a good time for you to throw away that overflowing binder and myriad of Post-It notes in various colors to keep track of your schedule? Yeah, me too.

Add Some Style to the Wordpress Admin Panel

As anyone who uses Wordpress knows, the admin panel is a little rough on the eyes. It’s the same blend of blues and greys, it never changes and if you get sick of looking at the ‘fresh’ design that was released with Wordpress 2.5 the only other option you have is the vintage Wordpress look, which is even worse than the fresh look.

If you’re like me, you know that change is good, especially when it comes to sites you look at every day. We all need to change it up a little bit every now and then, which is why sites like MySpace have so many free template sites and the same goes for Blogger and Wordpress design templates, why sites like Plurk and Twitter allow you to change the look of your profile, and so on. People do not want to be forced to look at the same thing over and over again. This also applies to the Wordpress Admin section. I know that I spend countless hours every week working on my websites; the amount of hours I put in on my websites are the equivalent of two full time jobs, not even factoring in the fact that I also work a full time job from home. With a “job” that you spend up to 80 hours a week on, looking at the Wordpress admin panel while you go about your website work can get a little sore on the eyes and very repetitive.

Pressing Pixels thought the same thing and decided to make a plugin to change the look of your Wordpress admin panel–Wordpress Custom Admin Branding.

The Wordpress Custom Admin Branding plugin is a great plugin and makes logging into your Wordpress panel again and again a little more refreshing than it would be normally. Here’s a look at what Woman Tribune’s Wordpress now looks like:

With this plugin, there are three separate parts of the Wordpress admin panel that may be changed with an image of your choice–The login screen, the header and the footer, as you can see to the left here. The plugin works with all Wordpress installations, I’m currently running Wordpress 2.6.1, which you can also see in the footer image, and the plugin works perfectly without any tweaking.

I definitely recommend this plugin for anyone who is sick of looking at the same old Wordpress admin panel. Download the plugin here.

The Task of Finding the Best Web Hosting

When you decide to open a website and you are not willing to use a free blogging platform, one of the biggest decisions you will make is who to purchase your web hosting from. There are many web hosting companies out there now and they are all eager to take your money, but you must look at what they are providing and then compare that to the other companies out there who want your business. While many opt to purchase from a well-known company, a lot of people are more interested in saving money, especially considering that not all people are in the position to add yet another expense to their lives.

The task of finding the best web hosting as gotten easier over time and now there is a website completely dedicated to rating hosting providers.

Web Hosting Rating is an upcoming website that will focus on the many web hosting companies there are out there, compare them to others and rate them, making the task of finding the right web hosting for you a lot easier. Until their site officially launches, they have compiled a series of articles for potential hosting clients to peruse and ultimately make the right decision for themselves. Their web hosting articles are an in depth review of the most common questions and concerns that those looking for web hosting are faced with; their articles section has a great deal to offer those who are looking to find more information on the topic and is definitely worth checking out.

Woman Tribune’s Magazine Makeover

Woman Tribune was recently made over into what this site’s first aspirations were–A magazine!

Every category is represented, the most recent post from every category is listed under ‘Other Recent Articles.’ You can also see our latest book review and recipe in the sidebar. In addition to our makeover and our ideas on an expansion of the site to let our readers be a bigger part of the site and be a little more hands on as we expand into a community, we have also added a poll for all of our readers to take part in; that being Would you be interested in participating in a monthly book club?

That’s right, one book a month with a private forum for all members to discuss the monthly book in. If you are interested, please vote yes in the poll and also leave a comment here with a valid email address and if we have enough people who want to take part in a book club, I will email you all personally with details on how to sign up and give you access to the forum.

Hope everyone likes the new magazine layout, leave your feedback in the comments!

Counter Offer Shenanigans on Sponsored Reviews

As it can be seen from the Disclosure Policy conveniently located in the footer of this website, I admit that while they are very few and far between, I will occasionally accept a sponsored review from a business or advertiser looking to generate buzz to their website or about their product or services.

A service that a great deal of experienced bloggers utilize in order to sell a sponsored review on their website is Sponsored Reviews. With its clean and easy to use interface, I personally find it to be a little less annoying than PayPerPost, which virtually every person with a website has ran to for some extra cash at one point or another. The way Sponsored Reviews works is a little different than what most bloggers are used to. In order to write a sponsored review you must select categories for your website, write a short description about it and then bid on reviews that advertisers have put in the marketplace that match the category in which you have placed your blog under.

Today I have run into something completely new to me when it comes to Sponsored Reviews–The advertisers’ ability to counter offer. While I have only accepted two offers on this website and those have been put on my other website only, I was a little surprised when I saw that an advertiser had sent me a counter offer on a recent bid I had made for this website. As most of you may have heard, Google PageRank has recently updated and when that happens, I always take a few moments to really dig through my statistics and see where this website stands as opposed to other websites in the same niche. After analyzing my overall statistics, I then go through my website listings that I have on services such as Sponsored Reviews and adjust my prices accordingly. Apparently, however, advertisers are likely to disagree with your proposal.

Just a few hours after bidding on a post I received an email of a counter offer over 75% lower than what I had offered in the first place. After wondering for a great deal of time if I had missed something and then realizing that advertisers are just generally known for counter offering bloggers ridiculous prices that are obviously beneath them, I counter offered them–For my original asking price.

So here is a lesson to all of the bloggers who utilize review services in order to help buy the groceries at the end of the month–When your bid receives a counter offer from an advertiser when you know damn well that the price they are countering you for is so obviously beneath you, do not buckle at the mere chance of a few dollars. As a web publisher, you must know where you stand and if you feel your website is worth $5 a post then by all means, you should most definitely be accepting $5 a post; however, if you feel as if your work is worth more, than you should be accepting no less than what you believe you are worth for your work.

Google PageRank Updates

Late last night Google nearly gave me a heart attack. Because I’m a little crazy when it comes to website stats I have a Google PageRank toolbar attached to my Firefox and while simply going through new comments and checking out some random websites I noticed my toolbar go up to a number…and stay there. To make sure I wasn’t officially going insane, I closed out my entire browser and restarted it just to make sure that the toolbar wasn’t stuck at a number from a previous website I had been on. To my very (pleasantly) surprised eyes, I was right–Google PageRank had updated!

After doing some surfing around I noticed that Google has given quite a bit of people higher PageRank. Are they suddenly becoming a little more lenient or are they getting all of our hopes up in order to smash us back down to 0 by next update?

Whatever the case, congratulations to everyone whose PageRank went up–Woman Tribune has went from PR 2 to PR 4, so we’re quite happy around these parts.

To get the Live PageRank Firefox addon and become a little schizo when it comes to checking PR, click here.

ScratchBack: Because the PayPal Donation Button is Ugly

Making money for your blogging/website endeavors isn’t new, it’s actually a big reason why so many people are starting their own websites. Once Darren Rowse published on his website that he makes a six-figure income purely from blogging and has even went as far as to publish a book about blogging for cash, everyone has been jumping on the blog bandwagon.

There are many ways that you can make money blogging including putting a PayPal donation button on your site. Most of your readers are not advertisers and so while you can make money from direct advertising on your website, there are still a great deal of people visiting your site and if you write about a great deal of information that appeals to many people and they appreciate the work you have put in to your website in order to bring them the content they crave, some people may love to have the option of donating a little money to you to thank you for your contribution and let you know that they appreciate your hard work.

If anyone has actually seen the PayPal donation button you may have noticed that it is seriously one of the ugliest buttons to ever grace a website. I don’t know what layout the PayPal donation button would look good on, but it honestly looks horrendous on most websites and while it lets your readers donate to you, they don’t get much out of it.

ScratchBack took all of what I’ve already covered into consideration when thinking of a program that would let a website’s readers give back a little. ScratchBack is a program that gives you a fancy shmancy tip jar for your blog. It lets your readers scratch your back and like the saying goes, it also lets you scratch their back in return by providing a link back to their site when they purchase a link using the ScratchBack widget, which you can see in action on my sidebar to the right.

ScratchBack is a great program with an easy to manage control panel, making the entire program fool proof to set up for your website. It is also quite flexible with many color options for you to choose that will match your website’s layout the best and it also lets you pick your own widget rate, giving you complete control over the price of your top spots. By pricing your top spots low you may get more people who purchase a link on your site and scratch your back, but by pricing them a little higher, your links will be more in demand, especially if you choose to only display a certain number of top spots at a time. For instance, on Woman Tribune, our top spots are priced at $25 for an entire month. Looking at that purely from an advertising perspective, you are able to tell me that you appreciate the hard work put into this website and in return, get a link back to your website or blog for about 83 cents a day–A complete steal when you inquire about advertising prices on a website. Even if you don’t have a website of your own and you still want to scratch my back, you can link to your favorite website, a friend’s website or a website that you feel readers of Woman Tribune would be interested in.

To sign up with ScratchBack you can go to their website and you can also check out their blog for exciting industry news. They have also implemented a link directory which is huge, so go on over to their blog directory and submit your link.

Hint hint: Link directories are important because it provides a back link to your website which helps raise your Google PageRank.

We give ScratchBack…
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