Widgets and Night Walks

As a blogger, the most common question I’m asked is: what do you blog about? If my answer takes longer than 3 seconds, their eyes glaze over.

Now look right at my sidebar and scroll down to see “Categories”. Say that in 3 seconds.

Click here: remember this? The start of my network? It was too much, WAY too much. Managing one site is enough, and I couldn’t pull off 8. My interests remain the same, but publishing and maintaining them proved impossible.

So now what?

I sat down quietly with a pen and paper, and narrowed it down to 5 topics / categories:

3/5 of those topics have companies who see the value in social media, and invest real money, not gift cards or swagg. Good.

So I’ve been hunched over my laptop, re-designing the backend of KeriBlog.

This is a big deal. Above are my Widgets, what you know as my sidebar, look right. There is no easy method to move them from one site to another. What you see on the side is hours of build time. Manage 8 sidebars? OMFG.

If I do this correctly, I will be able to use the same one across all the sub-sites, and that’s huge.  I did not do this correctly when testing on KeriOnCars though, see, sidebar vanished.

I’m trying to be better at remembering to push away from my computer regularly, not to sit there in the shape of a C for hours on end. So easy to do, isn’t it.

Ice cream stop.

It was quiet last night, didn’t see anything that exciting on the street.

Then back home to hunch.  Found this, exciting!

That’s my sidebar above. Blog friends: your sidebar is in your wp_options file.

If you have any advice theming categories on WordPress, please let me know.

As IF It’s the Weekend Already

I tweeted a few weeks back: I think time goes faster in a big city, and that’s not good.

HOW is it already June?

Blogging is a good way to track time.  And it seems every month, the below moment comes faster and faster.

This is a screenshot of my file structure on my hard drive.

The “BLOG” folder is stuff for you, the “PHONE” folder is stuff for me.

Yesterday was dedicated to “Life Admin”.

I spent last night gloriously silent on my laptop, type type type, and a bottle of Pellagrino.

Friendly reminder: find me fastest on Twitter, never FB.  I just feed my Tweets into there so something shows up.

Then they move to here.

Why I feel compelled to always show you my desk, I don’t know.  So many desk photos on here, on ‘The Canadian Explorer’… remember that time my desk gave me mold poisoning?

Kay I’ve gotta get moving here.  Have a great Saturday, TTYL

 

I Miss My Rotating Header

Remember the old KeriBlog with a constantly rotating header, this one?

I miss it.  I miss making them.  Took a photo today and was all, oh I’ll make this into a… no, I don’t have that anymore.  That’s how this post came to be.

Replace the wood grain up there with these?  Hmmm.

Inside a Masonic Lodge come ON.

I’ve been making a ton of Sidebar Art lately. Go to BloggingAboutFood.com to see.

I’ll post them all together when I’m done. You can learn a lot about me from my sidebars.

 

 

If You’ve Never Blogged…

There are 3 things to know:

1 – Bloggers have good work ethics and problem-solving brains

2 – They spend a lot of time alone; it’s a solitary endeavour, blogging

3 – It’s the invisible in-between stuff that is most frustrating

If ever you see two people finding out the other also blogs, and they exchange a sort of nod, this is what they’re nodding about.

What’s the invisible in-between stuff?

Kay, let’s post a slideshow.  I need one for my new professional photos, thanks Suzy.

First, I need some software to make one. Start researching what works best with WordPress.

Looks like, of all the internet, there’s two real contenders. So choose one, download then upload the plugin, learn it, insert the code.

You might break your own site:

Back and forth between the help file, Google searches and the software. We’re over an hour by now.

Now the photos are too giant and need resizing.

They won’t open in your budget Photoshop version, so find a workaround, which no way will support batch-editing that would be ‘catching a break’, so one by one here we go…

By now you’ll likely look and feel like this.

Oh what?  YouTube has stopped working?

Set the slideshow aside, this needs to be fixed right now… (go ‘Get Info’ on Safari in your Finder and choose 32-bit, restart Safari).

Back to the slideshow… check test refresh…. check test refresh….. check test refresh….

All to post photos and talk about …. yourself.

This is what’s behind the blogs you visit, so now you have a better idea of what it takes to post whatever it is you’re looking at.

The end.

PS – don’t forget… that’s great your post is done and looking good, but if no one sees it, what’s the point?  And and aaaaannnndddd………

PPS – I lost the edited draft of this post and had to write it twice. Oh irony.