Found Not Lost

One site that I have been subscribed to for a while because it has been tremendously helpful in my blogging attempts is Kikolani.com. Whether you’ve been blogging a while or just getting started, Kikolani.com has a ton of useful information for you. One series that I look forward to from Kikolani.com is her weekly Fetching Friday post. Every Friday, she posts about other blogs that she finds interesting that week. Kristi, the author of Kikolani.com, is an avid stumbler and Fetching Friday is a roundup of all the blogs she stumbled on.

I like Fetching Fridays because she organizes the posts she finds into categories that range from blogging, photography, to free seo tools. Here are how she breaks down some of the articles she stumbles on:

Blogging & Writing
Business & Finance
Graphic & Web Design
Make Money Online
Personal Development, Self Improvement & Health
Photography & Digital Art
Seach Engines/SEO
Social Media
Tech Security
Wordpress

Once in a while she would also post about weird and bizarre things she finds online. I don’t always have time to read all the links, but of the ones that I have followed, I was never disappointed in the content and always found something new and interesting.

Oh, and if you’re interested, Kristi also hosts the Do-Follow Blog Directory. If you don’t know what do-follow means, get on over there and learn more about it.

I read somewhere that one of the most annoying posts among bloggers is the “Sorry I haven’t posted” post. Well, that’s what I have done these past couple of weeks. I haven’t posted and I really am sorry that I haven’t.

So I’m breaking the rule. If this post is annoying, then so be it. I just feel like I need a transition post or an explanation between the last one I posted weeks ago to the next one. But, that’s just me. So, sorry for this post too
Read more…

I have been using Photobucket’s free online storage service for the photos that I use for blogging. I think that Photobucket has the best photo storage service available online. Even though there are bells and whistles that used to be attractive to me in other services, I always went back to Photobucket because of their solid basic services.

They provide almost unlimited storage and bandwidth as part of their free service package. For a small blog or one that is just starting out, this is plenty. I never did fill my quota up in the four years that I had the free service. I could have stayed that way longer but for a unique and hard to pass up offer that I found just recently.

They had an offer for free upgrade to the pro service if you sign up for Netflix. Well what a coincidence! It just so happened that I was approaching my storage limit in the free Photobucket owing to the large sized formats I had been uploading lately. And the kids had been bugging me to buy more DVDs and/or rent movies more and more as they got interested in new and old movies. So it just made sense for us to sign up for Netflix! When I signed up for the $9 a month plan on Netflix, I got Photobucket Pro FREE for a year! That was an awesome deal especially as we already got our money’s worth in DVD rentals before our free first month was even over.

So check it out if this deal is still available. It’s definitely worth it.

These giveaways are a lot of work but they are also a whole lot of fun! I have been entering quite a few of them and have actually won some pretty cool prices! I’ve won books, snacks, bags, and recently, I even won a Visa gift card! I can’t wait to go shopping with that one I wish I could use it to pay off some bills instead. It seems like all our insurance payments came due at the same time. So now in addition to the utility bills this month, we also have to pay the car insurance, the home insurance and the term life insurance. ANYWAY, getting back on topic, I usually hold a giveaway roundup every Friday on Amoores.com if you just want a one stop place to get all the giveaways.

I’ve noticed that the giveaways get pushed down the list pretty fast as I post more reviews and giveaways. So just to give you guys a head’s up, in case you haven’t noticed already, I added a new link on the navigation bar above titled GIVEAWAYS. That link will take you to a page that lists all the giveaways on this site, past and present. For the ones that have already closed, it will also list the winners for each one.

If you’re are blogger and left a link to your site when you left me a comment, I will link back to your site when I list your name as winner. Just an added link love bonus from me to you Also for you bloggers out there, I just added the Do-Follow plugin on this blog and the main blog, Amoores.com. If you don’t know what Do-Follow is, it simply means that when you leave a comment on this blog, the link that you leave counts as a backlink to your blog. Kikolani gives a better explanation for do-follow than I can give you so go on over there and read up on it.

Maybe it was a sign that my sidebar was getting cluttered. Who knows.

I just spent the last hour trying to figure out what I did wrong with this blog. I was updating a widget when lo and behold, when I went to save, it went wonky (yes, I said wonky for lack of a technical term) and the whole widget disappeared! Here I was thinking I needed to recover one widget and I was panicking. I tweeted it, I put in an appeal on my facebook page and I was googling like crazy. I even tried to contact my hosting provider, BlueHost, but they don’t provide script support. Bummer. Searched through all the Wordpress forums, nothing. Well, nothing simple that I could understand anyway.

THEN, it got worse.

Not only did my blog have some weird code above the header, I also discovered that not just that one text widget disappeared, ALL of them disappeared. I wanted to cry!

I found this solution on how to recover your widgets when they decide to magically disappear, but it required a plug in that you have to download and install and what it does is it essentially resets all your plugins. Well I didn’t want to take the risk of losing the rest of the remaining plugins so I just decided to muck through and rebuild all of them from scratch.

Lesson learned, back up, back up and back up again. Not everyone has a good support system nowadays. The POS systems, though, claim to have support behind them. I just hope it’s better than what I went through today.

If you hear any more nay sayers saying that blogging is just a phase and that it will soon go away, tell them to think again. Big Name companies have taken notice of the influence of bloggers and have started tapping the market. You’d realize this if you’ve been paying attentions. Mommy blogs, or blogs run by moms, no matter what the topic, especially, have been posting more products that they have received as samples and they review them on their blogs. This blog is one of those. I have received offers from several companies and PR firms to have them send me samples and I can write what I want about them.

Now I don’t get as many as some mommy bloggers nor have I gotten anything major, but they’ve started to trickle in. I’ve heard of at least a couple mom bloggers, for instance, who have received cars to test drive and review on their blogs. Us lesser fish though don’t get the sweet deals yet, and there are many out there. There are a plethora of products to choose from; from cosmetics, to the best diet pills, to a variety of snacks, not to mention a ton of gadgets and other technology stuff.

If this is something that you’re interested in getting into, then now is the time to take advantage of these opportunities. There is word that even the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has taken notice and may soon start regulating the reviews published on blogs.