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.