And so the blogathon is over for another year. It was fun but staying up for 24 hours straight really does do funny things to your head 
. I was so sleep-deprived yesterday I just couldn’t get much done.
After a good night’s sleep last night, I’m at least awake today though it’s going to take me a while to catch up with my beauty sleep. Yawn!
Well, I’m busy blogging away for 24 hours straight at Day of Blogs 2008. As the night wears on, I’m planning to power down some of the lights around the house.
I’m going to be in my room but I’m going to keep my maxim lighting low and the music loud. I hope I don’t keep the kids up all night but I really need more than caffeine to keep me awake.
Good thing this is a Saturday night.
Are you besieged with passwords like I am? I’ve got tons of them swirling around in my brain and many times, I can’t decide which password goes with which account. Duh!
I think pretty soon, I’m going to need a password vault like Symark to keep those swirling passwords in check. Yes, I know, I’m not some bigtime IT department that needs major security administration tools to manage stuff like that.
But can you imagine if I were? I only have a desktop and a laptop and already my passwords are all in a mess and I’m all confused. Never mind, I work at home so I don’t have to worry if it’s raining passwords in a heterogenous computer environment.
You know, when I was first looking around for paid webhosting for my blogs, I went on countless wild goose chases comparing features and prices.
If I’d known about WebHostingGeeks at the time, it would’ve saved me a lot of time and frustration. Right there on their front page is a list of the top ten web hosts of 2008 nicely tabulated to highlight their features, bonus features and reviews.
If you want to find a good host, you have to read the reviews to see what others who’ve used the service are saying about it. There’s no two ways about it.
If you sign up blindly or purely based on price, then you’ll have to be prepared to live with the consequences. So don’t. I advise you to check out WebHostingGeeks.com before you make your choice.
Oh, and while you’re at it, be sure you take a look at their webhosting articles and webmaster resources to educate yourself and be just that little bit wiser. It’s a jungle out there.
Seeing as how the cost of everything is going up, up and away every day, I’ve been thinking about things to do to bring in some extra income. Well, nothing too ambitious, of course, considering how many other hats I’m already wearing right now.
I’m sure you would’ve heard about SocialSpark, a new blogging platform created by Izea where you get paid to write blog reviews. While I can’t say I’ve been a very active member of SocialSpark, I can see it shows great promise of bigger things to come from what I’ve seen so far.
It has a very strong social element to it which kinda makes it like a community where you can learn things about other bloggers, establish new friendships and find reviews to write as well.
The social side is what’s particular attractive to me as that’s one of my weak areas since it takes time to build relationships and time is something of a rare commodity for a mom with three kids. Heh!
Well, the site is very new to me at this point and there’s just tons of stuff in there I’d like to get to. I wish I’d time to roll up my sleeves and really get into the thick of things.
This post is sponsored by SocialSpark.
I was reading this interesting piece on the NY Times about two bloggers who blogged to death, or so we’ve been made to believe.
While it’s sad news indeed, it’s also pretty hard to believe that blogging alone could contribute to their demise. Blogging is, after all, a desk job and by any means a high-risk sport like racing.
Of course, there are bloggers who are so greedy for the money that they would sacrifice all else, to their own detriment. But I’m inclined to believe that in these cases, there are more factors involved than just blogging.
My thought on this is that if you can strike a balance and not be driven by greed alone, you’ll be okay even if you blog for money.
Those of us who got Google spanked know the pain of trying to etch out a living online with a big fat zero for a pagerank (PR).
In recent weeks though, you might have come across the term “real rank” (RR for short) in your internet travels. Real rank, as opposed to PR, is a measurement of your blog against the actual traffic and influence of other blogs.
Personally I think this is a much more viable and accurate way of measuring a blog’s worth. As an advertiser, your goal is to ensure your ad gets seen, so it makes sense to be able to see how well a blog you choose to advertise on is doing in terms of traffic.
If you’re a blogger, go sign up at IZEARanks.com to get your blog ranked. With IZEARanks, you just need to embed a piece of javascript to collect and report on how your blog ranks against other blogs in the system based on actual traffic.
In fact, it really pays to get Real Rank-ed now Izea.com (the company that introduced this) is paying $1,000 every week of February to the blog that hits No. 1 on the Real Rank charts.
I’m really looking forward to the holiday season but not to the expenses that are all coming of my pocket. There are gifts to buy, friends coming in from out of town, parties and dinners to organize and a home that needs a little sprucing up
If you’re like me and wanting to make some money from your blog, go check out bloggerwave. All you need is to sign up your blog. They’re really easy to work with and what’s most important is that they pay. So go give them a try.
While blogging is fun, what’s not so fun about it is having to remember all these passwords! The more stuff I sign up for, the more passwords I have to remember. That’s why I’m really very reluctant to sign up for new services and accounts.
Gosh, having all these passwords to remember is one thing. The other thing is writing them all down and putting them in a safe place. Duh!
Imagine my excitement when I found out that a Password Vault can manage and protect my passwords for me. Symark Software has a range of software solutions that can do just that.
What a relief! I was just getting to the point when I would stare at the screen blankly for a minute or two waiting for my password to come to mind.
Many times though, the password is in my fingers, not my brain. So why am I staring at the screen when my fingers are already beginning to fly across the keyboard? Beats me 
.
I really can’t believe what the Google update has done this time! We should’ve guessed something big was going down by the unusually long gap between the last update and this one - maybe?
At any rate, I wasn’t expecting my PR to go up because everything I’d read points to the fact that no one really knows how the Google algorithm works which means there’s no way to tell for sure if you’re doing the right thing.
That coupled with the fact that from experience, it’s somehow worked out that the blog I work hardest at is the one that sees little or no improvement and vice versa.
So after the last update, I decided, to heck with the link exchanges, I’ll just kick back and see what happens. I figure I’ll be happy to stay where I am, and if by some stroke of luck, I get pushed up a notch, that’d be a bonus, a free ride without stressing myself at all :wink: .
As it turns out, I’m glad I didn’t sweat the links and hard work because if I had, I’d be doubly mad today. Think I’ll go gobble some chocolate now to forget about the whole thing. No, wait, what am I saying, I don’t even have any chocolate in the house !
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