KirstenL4W

I did it!  Thirty days in a row with a new post every day.  Yay me!

I have to say, I am wiped from the effort.  It’s tiring to think of something to write every single day, just for the sake of posting something that has a bit of meaning to it.   I don’t think I’ll be doing this again next year.  What I am going to do, however, is this - Blogging Without Obligation.  I actually came across this a few years ago, and I think I had the badge on my old digs over at Blogspot, but I never carried it over to the new place.  Now I am.  For those who don’t want to click over, here’s the hows and whys of BWO:

• Because you shouldn’t have to look at your blog like it is a treadmill
• Because it is okay to just say what you have to say.  If that makes for a long post, fine.  Short post, fine.  Frequent post, fine.  Infrequent post, fine.
• Because it is okay to not always be enthralled with the sound of your own typing
• Because sometimes less is more
• Because only blogging when you truly feel inspired keeps up the integrity of your blog
• Because they are probably not going to inscribe your stat, link, and comment numbers on your tombstone
• Because for most of us blogging is just a hobby.  A way to express yourself and connect with others.  You should not have to apologize for lapses in posts.  Just take a step back and enjoy life; not everything you do has to be “bloggable.”
• Because if you blog without obligation you will keep your blog around longer, because it won’t be a chore.  Plus, you will be doing your part to eradicate post pollution.  One post at a time…

Don’t think you’ll never hear from me again.  That’s not what this is about.  This is about blogging on my own schedule, whatever I decide it may be, however regular or irregular it may be.  That was the hardest thing about NaBloPoMo - trying to fit in a blog post every single day.  While I know that I can publish posts to come out at a future date, I rarely do that.  I generally like my stuff to come out every day.  Also, I never keep stuff in draft, because if I don’t put out a post right away, I will look it over and see that it sucks or is just really an incoherent thought.  So I don’t use those features because they don’t work for me.  So if I don’t get to it, I don’t get to it.

On the other hand, participating in NaBloPoMo did get me thinking about my blog a lot more, and reminded me that there’s a lot more out there that I can blog about.  I don’t need every post to be perfect.  I was getting too hard on myself as far as what quality I would accept for posts I would publish, and I needed to stop doing that.  NaBloPoMo helped, and on that end I do hope I will post more frequently.

So that’s it.  I finished NaBloPoMo.  And now I will be Blogging Without Obligation.

It’s the last week of NaBloPoMo, and so far it’s looking pretty good for me as far as accomplishing this.  I am finding it increasingly difficult to come up with stuff to blog about on a daily basis, at least when I’m trying to tend to my own life, Mister, the housekeeping, and getting ready for Thanksgiving.  Usually I end up sitting at the computer with just a few hours left in the day, desperately reading blogs and rapidly scanning the internets for inspiration.  It shouldn’t be like that - I believe that especially with a personal blog such as mine, the posts should happen more naturally.  For those of us that blog, we either think about it every day or we don’t.  If you’re in the group that thinks about it every day, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to find something to write about at least once or twice a week.  If you’re in the group that doesn’t think about it every day, or even once in awhile, then why do you blog?  Do you get a lot of personal satisfaction from it?  Even when I’m only putting a few posts out there per month, I enjoy blogging and reading blogs very much.  I think that’s the purpose of blogs.  I don’t think of my blog as something that can pay me, or as a job, or a way to get rich.  It’s a personal blog.  Personal.  What I get out of it isn’t monetary, it isn’t to boost my ego or make me famous.  It’s just because I like to write, and I like seeing something that I created out there for everyone else to see.  That’s all.

So, anyway, now that I really went off on a tangent there, let’s change the subject.  There’s only one month left until Christmas!  Do you have your shopping done?  Are you braving the crowds on Black Friday?  My answers are no and no, respectively.  I’ve done some shopping and have some ideas in my head of what to get people, but I really need to sit down and make a list and get my shopping organized before I hit the mall.  My card list is done, though, so I’ll be sitting down this weekend to make cards.  I’ve always wanted to do that, and this year I’m crazy enough to try.  Yeah, I’m nuts like that.  But it will make me appreciate throwing a few boxes of cards into my basket next year.  There’s a reason for everything, right?

24 down, 6 to go.  I can do this!

Over at Lightening’s Blogworld, there’s a question: Is NaBloPoMo Bad for Blogging?  I’ve been starting to wonder that myself.  This past week, influenced by the hormonal roller coaster, I find myself very uninspired.  Uninspired to write, uninspired to cook an interesting meal, uninspired to have a decent conversation with my husband (totally my thing - nothing to do with him).  I get this way every 4 weeks, on schedule.

But this post isn’t about my hormones.  Lightening discusses some of the good and bad about NaBloPoMo.  Good because it encourages us to post every day, and bad because now no one has time to read all the posts that are coming out.   She asks, “Do you have an opinion on Nablopomo? Do you think it’s good for blogging or not so good for blogging? Have you ever participated?”

First part.  Do I have an opinion on NaBloPoMo?  Well, yeah.  It is great because I’ve been blogging every day, which I haven’t done in quite a long time.  There’s a bit of a sense of community to it all as well, because as I go through my daily reads and the bit of link-chasing that I do, I see others that are participating and feel like I belong.  It’s also gotten me to stop procrastinating so much about posting, which I tend to do a lot, though I’ve still got a ways to go on that front.

Do I think it’s good for blogging or not so good for blogging?  Generally, I think it’s a good thing.  For me, like I said above, it’s gotten me to stop procrastinating so much.  And I think, overall, I’ve been able to avoid an endless litany of “too tired to post today” posts that tend to pop up every November.  But on the other hand, the pressure to put out a post every day leads to too many “no post today” posts.  As Lightening pointed out, those posts clutter up our feed readers and take up a lot more time to get through.  Don’t get me wrong, there have been quite a bit of quality posts, but they tend to be from bloggers already in the habit of posting 4-5 times per week.  It’s fun to join in on stuff like this, but I think the blogosphere will be a bit better if people just stop trying so hard and write when they feel like they have something to say, not out of obligation.  That being said, while I’m enjoying the challenge, once this is over I will be Blogging Without Obligation.

Have I ever participated?  This is the first time I’ve participated, but the third year that I’ve been in the blogosphere.  In the past, I’ve been a bit behind the curve on these sort of trends, but this year, with my post frequency falling, I figured I needed the challenge.  I procrastinate too much -think about a post for a week or so before I post it, or something else entirely.  I’d been going a week to 10 days between posts lately, and this was just the thing to kick start me back into making blogging a more regular habit.  Lots of times I don’t post because I am quite tired at the end of the day, and by the time I come home I just want to do nothing.  I read some blogs, stumble a lot, and generally avoid heavy thinking until a burst of inspiration comes along.  NaBloPoMo has helped me recapture what it was like when I was a young blogger, thinking about everything in my life in terms of a blog post.  I hope to be able to keep it up for the rest of the month (12 more posts after this one), and after that I think I should be able to post about 3 times per week, which is a happy medium between every day and a couple times per month.

So what about you - what do you think about the questions that Lightening has put forth?

As I was composing yesterday’s post, I was exremely frustrated with how the formatting turned out.  In case you hadn’t noticed, the paragraph after the RSS icon is squished, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix it.  It’s happened before, and it’s only been happening since I switched to WordPress.  I’ve been thinking about this, and I think I have come up with a huge point:

• When I was on Blogger, I hated their WSYWIG editor so I always composed my posts in html.  I’m using the Advanced TinyMCE Editor here, which is a much fuller-featured WSYWIG editor than the basic WP insallation offers.

So could that be it?  Could it be that writing posts in code is the key?  I am also not a huge fan of the “Insert Picture” feature, but if I link to a pic on my Flickr page and use the “Insert Link” feature, the picture placement is much more to my liking, and the text doesn’t butt up against it.

Now if I’m going to be writing all my posts in html, I’ll really need to brush up on my skillz.  In the first 6 months or so of having this blog, I had a lot more computer time that let me play and learn.  I don’t have that kind of time now to experiment with everything, so I have to make do with what little I remember.

While I was playing around in the code this evening, I did manage to do a couple of tweaks.  I took out the icky dotted underline and changed the color of links to make them more noticeable, and I put a small border around my pictures.  Eventually I’d like to customize a template the way I did on my old Blogger blog, but besides the time issue, WordPress and its multi-faceted templates intimidate me.  PHP is still a very foreign language to me.  Maybe one of these years I’ll have time to sit down and figure it all out, but right now?  I just need to keep writing, and hopefully without my post formatting getting all messed up.

No, I’m not trying to make you eat anything.  I just had dinner myself, so I don’t really want to think about food right now.  I want to talk about technical stuff.

Yesterday I went and did a few updates to my site, mostly revolving around my RSS Feed.  I put the link to my feed on every page, and put a bit of text with the button on this page you are reading now (unless you’re reading from a feed reader already, in which case you know what this post is about).   So for those who don’t know, let me tell you about what a feed is.  Did you notice the weird blue button on the right?  The one that looks like this?

That is what is known as an RSS subscription button.  Usually you see them in orange, but I’m not a fan of orange, and Snoskred made a whole bunch of really pretty ones, so I used one of hers instead.  But that icon, no matter what color you see it in, means that you can subscribe to a blog or website.  You’ll also see a lot of talk about RSS, which means Really Simple Syndication.  In the simplest terms, RSS is technical jargon that means you can get a subscription to your favorite blog or website.  Everyone is familiar with subscriptions.  You probably have a subscription to the local newspaper and maybe a few magazines.  Subscriptions are pretty cool because it means that what you want to read comes to you when it’s ready, so you don’t have to waste your time going to get it.  Magazines, newspapers, and other print materials like that come out on a schedule so even if you didn’t have a subscription, you’d pretty much know when to go get the latest issue.

Blogs and other online articles might not publish on a regular schedule, so going to get the latest posts can be an effort in futility at times.  I know - I’ve done it.  As I started blogging more and finding other blogs that I wanted to read, I realized that it took a lot of my precious time to visit each blog or website individually to see if there was anything new.  I wanted the new stuff to come to me, because it would save me so much time.  So I asked around, and found out there is a way to get what I want: it’s called a Feed Reader.So, just like the latest issue of Vogue is delivered to your mailbox, feed readers are a sort of collection box for your blog subscriptions, where all the latest posts stay until you go to read them, all in one handy place.  There are lots of readers out there, and I use Google Reader.  It’s the first one that I tried, since I already used Google quiet a bit, and it’s worked very well for me.  Another popular reader is Bloglines.

Now, every day I can go to my reader and see exactly how many new posts there are, and it shows me the posts so I can read them.  It certainly saves me a lot of time, and I don’t lose track of where I was.  I don’t miss anything.

What if you don’t want to use a reader?  Well, it’s not as popular as being able to subscribe in a reader, but there are plenty of blogs that offer email subscriptions so that the latest posts go directly to your email.  I offer it.  I do it because I want to make it easy for you to read my blog.  If your favorite blog doesn’t offer email subscriptions, then contact them or leave a comment asking about it.  If they offer a feed, it’s very easy to offer it by email as well.

I’m sure you want to know how all this way cool internet subscription stuff is possible.  Well, the most popular way by far is to use Feedburner.  They make it easy - pretty much all you have to do is tell them what your blog address is, and they give you the code for a basic orange feed icon and tell you how to put it on your blog.  They also let you offer email subscriptions and even that way cool thing that tells you how many readers a blog has.  It’s all pretty easy, and it certainly makes the experience of blogging and reading blogs so much more fun!

Now that you know how feeds work, click on the big blue button above.  You know you want to!

It’s the weekend, finally!  This was one of the longest weeks I can remember.  I don’t usually talk about work here, because when you work for a large company like I do, they tend to frown on that sort of thing.  But this week we had some layoffs.  One of the people laid off was the guy I work with, so it shook our group up quite a bit.  That threw the rest of the week off for us, and let’s just say that I am really, really glad I get two days off.  Also, Mister has been really sick this week but seems to feel better when I’m home, so being home all weekend should help him feel a lot better.

Since Mister has been sick, we don’t have any plans for this weekend (other than the usual chores), so I am going to try and do a bit of blogroll housecleaning.  I looked at my blogroll and wow, there’s a lot on there that I haven’t read in a long, long time.  I wonder if there’s a way to combine the Blogrolling service with a feed reader like Google Reader.  That would make it so much easier to do the maintenance, since I visit my reader multiple times per day but hardly ever visit Blogrolling.

Speaking of the Blogroll, I added two more today.  Anglofille is an American girl living in one of my favorite cities in the world - London!  She’s studying for her PhD and making me really want to go to London again as she writes about her life there.  Rio Gringa is an American who lives in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.  She is also an excellent writer and has a lot of resources for learning about Brazil and Brazilian culture.  Both gals have great blogs and contribute towards satisfying the wanderlust and thirst for other cultures that I have (either that or making it worse, who knows, but go visit them).  If you’re not on my blogroll but you are a regular reader, let me know and I’ll check your blog out.

I might venture out this weekend to go to the office supply store.  It seems that I need a new wrist rest for my keyboard.  I have one of those “gel” ones with a fabric covering, and due to my tendency to rest my chin in my hand while my elbow is on the wrist rest, the seam seems to have burst, and the sticky, snot like gel is oozing out when I put too much pressure on it.  Maybe I can lure Mister to Fry’s Electronics!  Oh, and happy things: I got a postcard from Uncle N Period today.  He just got back from a trip to Egypt for culture and Eritrea to ride the trains.  I like getting postcards from far-off lands, and nearly all the postcards I have from those places are from Uncle N Period and Aunt Bird.  Smiles in the mail!  And no, Uncle N Period, you can’t have the stamp.  It’s too pretty so I’m keeping it.  I hope you got some for yourself while you were there!

Back to the topics of  Mister and office, we have a Sirius satellite radio in our home office.  Mister usually likes his 80s music, but I’m more of an acoustic person, so lately Mister has been changing the station to CoffeeHouse 30 for me.  He’s so incredibly sweet, because in general he hates that kind of music, and wants to react to it like John Belushi’s character in Animal House does.  But he knows I like it and it relaxes me, so he puts it on in the evenings for me.  I really love that man!

So that’s it for Friday - bad week, it’s the weekend now, blogroll housekeeping, smiles by mail, and music I like with the man I love.  Here’s to the weekend!

I thought long and hard about monetizing my blog.  I didn’t want to clutter up my fine work with ads, and I wasn’t keen on the whole pay-per-post idea.  In the past, you’ve probably seen some posts with links to products on Amazon.com using an affiliate program.  That’s about the extent of my efforts to make money from the blog.  Then Amazon came out with a whole storefront thing that you can insert in your site.  I fiddled around with it and realized I could probably do that.  So I made a shop - months ago.  I made the new page and let it sit in draft for the longest time, thinking I’ll release it when I have the time to work on it more.  But then I figured, why not?  Why not release it now?  So I did.  I’m featuring some stuff I’ve mentioned on the blog, along with other stuff I love.  And I decided to stay exclusively with Amazon because it’s a site that everyone knows, and they carry nearly everything.  So go check it out.  I’ll be adding more stuff as time and inspiration permits, so check back once in awhile.

The Aussie Blogger’s Blog came out with a great new blogging tool - the Lazy Blogger’s Post Generator.  There’s lots of options for coming up with a post.  Here’s what I got:

Holy Snapping Duck Do! I just got a bajillion whiny emails saying I have not updated this since Hammertime was in the charts… You would not believe the amount of people that are totally stalking me. I hope you still love me!.

I am going ahead with setting fire to people wearing Crocs, being distracted by the shiny, just generally being a terrible burden to every Lost Boy that crosses my path, my day is filled with fluorescent light from 4am to 11pm at which point I fall asleep on the couch. I am plotting and planning. can’t they see I am blogging.

I will try to remember I promised you if one more person emails me to ask why I haven’t posted today I will start posting pictures of toe fungus, or fecal murals. Seriously! What do you mean you don’t believe me?

If you want to post, and don’t know what to say, head over to the Lazy Blogger’s Post Generator today!  And while you’re at it, check out the Aussie Blogger’s Blog and the Aussie Blogger’s Forum.  You don’t even have to be Australian or pretend to like vegemite, you just have to like blogging.

I was reading the news while on my lunch hour at work a few weeks ago and came across this article.  It discusses the therapeutic benefits of blogging.  Since my very first post, I have felt a certain comfort in putting my thoughts online.  If I’m looking for feedback, someone who doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall could well be able to offer a fresh perspective versus someone who does know me.  Heck, just getting it out there helps.  I have noticed that if I write something down in my journal, it helps but only to a point.  I’ve long used journaling as a way to articulate my thoughts, to help turn them from abstract figments of thoughts into something more concrete so that I can continue on with whatever has been on my mine.

But blogging is different.  It helps communicate those thoughts.  Even though my audience is largely made up of people who don’t know me, whom I don’t communicate with except in blog comments, that anonymity is freeing.  People read my blog because they’re interested.  Because I’ve said something that they can relate to.  I find that in real life, I am quieter and not as open with all my thoughts because I feel that most people don’t understand.  Whether they say they do or not, it’s difficult for me to convey my feelings in spoken form and get the desired effect.  I just don’t think on my feet like that.  The method of communication that works best for me is writing, and when you’re face to face with someone, well, it’s hard.

Though blogging is thought of as a form of communication,  some people don’t get that.  I mean, I write down everything I’m thinking, and a blog post is 100% my thoughts.  But the communication comes in comments.  It comes in reading other people’s blogs.  While others won’t put out posts meant to say something directly to me as a response to my posts, their thoughts will touch me and speak to my much in the same way that mine do for others.

It’s a great big wide interwebs out there.  Those that don’t live an online life or who use the internet as an information resource with the occasional email to keep in touch don’t get the power of blogging.  Not blogging for money or having a niche blog.  Personal blogging.  It’s fun, as a hobby should be.  It’s absorbing, as a good television series ought to be.  And it’s therapeutic, as journaling is.   For those of us who blog, it’s as necessary as a nice long chat with a close friend is.

Maybe, just maybe, I will find time to blog in the next week or so.  We are still unpacking boxes, which is not what I want to do when I get home from work, so I usually don’t.  Weekends are fun-filled as usual, with errands, social stuff, and/or loafing around, so not too much gets done then, either.  And we are getting to the point where we are seeing that we have too much stuff and not enough places to store it efficiently in, because the furniture we had at the old place doesn’t work here.  Ah well, such is life.  It will get done, and I will blog again.

I’m going to be taking a break from the blog for a little while, including my Music on Mondays posts.  With the wedding, house, and now allergies, my stress level is way too high to have to worry about keeping up appearances around here.  I’ll be back, but right now I just need to not worry about blogging with any frequency.

Today is my 2nd blogiversary.  I never knew when I started that I would be here for so long - usually I don’t make it that long with things, as I tend to lose interest and move on.  I admit that this past year has seen me less dedicated to blogging, and more dedicated to Boyfriend, but I wouldn’t change that for the world.  I like having my blog, but I love having Boyfriend.  But he does enjoy my blog, which he reads in between raids at his Silly Little Game.

I do have things that I’d love to be able to do with this blog, but they’d require me quitting my job and becoming a hermit.  I don’t network this blog as much as I could, but I’ve also recently become satisfied with what I’ve got here.  I’ve read some article lately that have to do with being satisfied with the size of your blog and the number of comments, and while I do get a bit disappointed when I don’t get any comments, I’m happy with my blog’s size the way it is.   I also think I’ve gotten better at the blog-life balance, and that is pretty cool.

So what’s in store for the next year?  Well, you’ll continue to hear about me, and I might write the occasional blogging article as well.  I’ll continue with my Music on Mondays, and I’ll do my best to make sure this blog doesn’t hit the Terrible Twos.

Announce your engagement. Seriously, I go and mention to a few friends that I am getting married, and my traffic skyrockets. Check this out:

I had 139 views on 3/10/08, which since my blog stats day is 8 hours ahead of my day, was the day I announced my engagement. My previous high traffic was 91 views, a couple days after I made the move to WordPress back in January. So yay, great news! I wonder if I can maintain this level of traffic as I get closer to the wedding date?

A few days ago, I asked the question “Do You Keep A Written Journal or Diary?”  My thought was that like me, most personal bloggers started blogs or keep them as an extension to or instead of their written journals.  The results really surprised me.  Though hardly a scientific poll, the results showed that most people do not keeps personal journals.  With 8 votes, the results were:

• 3 Votes, 38% - No, never have
• 3 Votes, 38% - No, haven’t for years
• 1 Vote, 13% - Yes, but stopped when I started blogging
• 1 Vote, 13% - Yes, in addition to my blog
• 0 Votes, 0% - Never have, but my blog is my journal

So it seems that the popular thinking regarding personal bloggers is not really true - personal blogs are mostly NOT just online diaries.  With that being said, why do you blog?  Leave a comment and/or write a post about it, and link back here so I can read all your results.  I’m very curious now.

On the Aussie Blogger’s Forum, there is a discussion regarding 15 Design Decisions that Annoy Readers.  I shared my imput in the discussion, and an interesting point emerged on the topic of search boxes.  I have a search box on my blog - it’s the default WordPress search.  I put it there because I think it might help people, but I’ve never used a search box on a blog before, and never heard of anyone else using one until I saw the responses.  My own typical experience using search boxes is on an actual search engine, on large sites such as Wikipedia, or on an actual website instead of a blog.  On blogs, I’ve been content to just surf around, and if there’s something I know I’ll want to refer to frequently (like Sephy’s post on how to FTP, because I forget every single time I go to do it), then I bookmark it.

Lani pointed out some downsides to using categories, and Snoskred mentioned that she uses the search box all the time, even on her own blog.  Snos mentioned that having some links to favorites in the sidebar is a great feature for that very reason.

So with that objective in mind, how does one determine favorite posts?  I could go by the ones that have the most comments, but are those necessarily the posts that people will want to refer back to?  Because I see the whole search function as a reference, so I would want a link list feature to serve the same purpose.  So, getting away from comment count, do I then choose MY favorite posts?  Is that helpful for you?  And since I don’t often (or ever) post the über-useful how-to posts like Snoskred, Sephy and others, then what exactly do I post that you want to keep going back to?

Since  “Posts People Want To Read Over and Over Again” is not something I can really track with stats, I’d like some input from you, my dear readers.  What are your favorite posts on my blog?

When I started this blog, it was as an extension of my personal journal.  I’ve kept a journal for years, and I saw that blogging was a way to journal, stay anonymous, and have the possibility of feedback.  Over time, the use of my written journal waned, and now I only keep a weekly journal for a specific purpose not related to blogging.

A lot of people who don’t blog or who do blog but don’t really network within the blogosphere are of the opinion that blogs are merely journals.  For a lot of personal blogs, this may be true.  But I don’t know.  I am curious, though, so I created this poll:

This poll is aimed at personal blogs and the bloggers that keep them, but if you are a niche blogger, don’t let that hold you back.   You are always free to leave more information in the comments if you want to elaborate.

Edited to add:  This poll is now closed, and I wrote a follow-up post on the findings.  You can read it here.

I have spent the better part of the day (ok, all day) online, reading blogs, searching for new blogs, stumbling, and basically farting around looking for something to blog about. I did find some sites that help bloggers find inspiration for posting, but they all seem geared towards metabloggers. What do all you personal bloggers do when you want to post, but are uninspired? I’m not talking about posting the minutiae of my day because I feel like I have to post. I really want to post about something, to keep my blog current, to draw readers in. I just have no idea what.

Where do you find inspiration?

Last night I spent way too much time going through all my posts and fixing my backlinks so they point to this blog, not Blogger.  I do need to fix my photos also, but right now I’m so not motivated to do that, so it will be awhile until that happens.

I’ve also made a few changes to my sidebar to clean it up a bit.  Categories and archives now have a drop-down menu, the blogroll has been moved completely to its own page, and I did a bit of fine-tuning to make it look nice.  If anyone has any other suggestions, I would love to hear them.

New Feature Coming Soon!

That’s right!  I’ve been talking about it for awhile now, and my new feature will debut on Monday, January 21.  I had originally set it for February 4th, but I’m impatient and it’s about ready, so starting next week you’ll get to see it.  It’s called Music on Mondays and I’ll be focusing some of my musical chat into a weekly column.  I also have a new page that will list all my Music on Monday columns, along with previous blog posts having to do with music.   So go check out some of my old posts about music to get a taste of what’s to come!

If you read enough pro blogs, you might get the impression that there are certain rules that must be adhered to if you are going to make money from your blog, and that the only goal with blogging is to make bucketloads of money.  But quite honestly, that is not the goal of most bloggers, at least not most of the bloggers I know (of).  Most bloggers get into it because they have something to say or just want to get their voice out there.  Over time, they hear of the possibility of making money with a blog, and I’m sure it goes through everyone’s mind at one point or another.

I read a post yesterday about monetizing a blog.  You can read it here.  In the article, Lightening asked lots of questions and had some very intelligent comments about monetizing (or monetising, since she’s Australian), going pro and whether or not monetizing is a good idea for smaller, personal blogs.

I’m not a problogger.  I never intended to be, and I still don’t want to be.  Blogging is a hobby, and the second it starts to feel like a job it won’t be a fun hobby anymore.  Also, I know my personality.  I’m just not very entrepreneurial, so working hard to find a new and exciting way to present my blog in such a way that people will just want to click on all my ads and make me rich beyond my wildest dreams is just not something I want to put any effort into.  I just want to babble on incessantly about whatever comes to mind.

That being said, I do have an affiliate program.  They can be a decent way to make a bit of extra money, but I had another goal mind.  When I talk about certain things that I love, I want to share them with you in whatever way I can, and leaving you with something to put in a search engine isn’t quite what I had in mind.  I mean, let’s say your BFF calls up and starts raving about this awesome new thing they just got and how much they love it.  Then when you express your interest in obtaining AwesomeNewThing, they tell you that they bought it at a store and if you look around you can find one too.  Ok.  Um, which store?  That’s all I’m trying to prevent.  If I mention something that you might be interested in, I certainly hope it would be handy that I provide a link for you to check it out immediately.  If I make money from it, that’s great.  Then I can buy more of the sort of stuff I mention (usually CDs and movies).  I’m not looking to pay my rent from this, just to provide a service and perhaps get a little pocket change.

I have always hated sales, especially sales with the dreaded SALES GOALS.  The one commisioned/goal-oriented retail job that I had only worked out because I worked mostly on weekends, where I could have a much higher chance of a good hours to sales ratio.  But other than that, I hated that I had to use certain techniques that, while effective, were aimed solely at parting this customer with their hard-earned cash.  I don’t have any conversion goals on my affiliate marketing.  I just want to spread the love for the stuff I mention and make it easy for you all to check it out further.  Any income from it is just a bonus.

There are no rules to monetize your blog.  There are certainly techniques that have a high success rate, but there are no hard and fast rules.  The only rule is to do whatever feels right to you, because it’s your blog.  If you do want further advice on what techniques will work for you, it is super easy to do a search on the subject, or just surf fellow bloggers’ blogrolls, because most of us, whether we want to monetize or not, have at least one pro in our rolls.

I’ve noticed that, during the course of being a blogger, there are a few things I have done correctly to help my blog along. The most prominent (to me) is the name of my blog. All About Me - And Then Some. I have seen other blogs with similar names, but here’s what I think is right with this name.

1. It is obvious from the title that it is a personal blog, but it also leaves open the possibility that I might actually talk about a subject other than myself. The title is relevant and stays relevant as my blog grows and changes over the years. Since I don’t think I’ll ever be a pro blogger with a specific niche, this works very well for me.

2. It’s at the beginning of the alphabet. Not the total beginning, since other blog names do come before me, but if people put me on their blogrolls by the title of my blog, then I’m up near the top. Now when cruising other people’s blogrolls, I’ll start at the top and work my way down, but very often I run out of steam by the time I get to the M’s. Consequently, this gives me more traffic by blogroll surfing than “Mary’s Blog” or something like that. So that makes me an “A” blogger.  Ha, ha!

3. Except for the title of this post (and a few other rare exceptions), I never forgot what I learned in my English classes, specifically the writing classes.  Many pros say this, and I am in total agreement - a little bit of good grammar goes a long way.  The way kids text these days, with all their “ur” for your and 2 for two, to, or too, is just really annoying for those of us who learned to spell from weekly spelling lists, not telephone keypads.

4. I remembered what I learned by osmosis from working as a receptionist at a graphic design firm.  For over two years, I was surrounded by people who not only appreciated, but were huge fans of good design.  It has turned me into a nit-picking design freak.  At work, a flyer advertising a Weight Watchers 10 week session was distributed, and it only took me a few seconds to pick out the two biggest design flaws in it.  Good design is as such that one does not need to think about it.  My new blog is not perfect, at least as far as I’m concerned, but I’m gonna get myself a book and try to tweak it to my satisfaction.

Now, things I done bad

I started on Blogger.  This wasn’t a fatal move in itself - it did allow me to learn about blogging, html, css, and of course make lots of blogger friends, all for free.  But it was limiting too - I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to do, and I didn’t have control of my content.

I just didn’t know lots of stuff.  Again, this is not a fatal flaw because I eagerly learned what I needed to know rather than claiming ignorance.  I could have just picked a standard template, left the colors as they were, and typed some stuff in the box and hit “Post.”  I might have even had a halfway decent blog that way because my content rocks (It’s my blog, so I can say that).  But it still would have looked like all the others.  I need to be unique, even if just in my tiny way.  So, I learned and did just that.  You might never see a totally built from scratch by me template and design on here, but I intend to learn enough about wordpress to know what to change if something is bugging me or I just need a tiny change.

As time goes on and I see how well the things I done right work for me, I’m really glad that I had the foresight dumb luck to make the decisions I did, because I didn’t totally screw myself and was able to build myself quite the decent little blog.