Freelancer's Office: Blog

Nono you fool! Not the giant attack spiders! Release the Technorati spiders! They need to confirm this blog is to be link to my Technorati Profile .

It seems like every time I start to think I might actually catch up on work for a day, I hear the clock in the other room chiming that it is four in the morning and I am only half through what I had wanted to get done the day before.  :::pounds head on desk:::

Here it is, three in the morning, and I am nowhere near finished with everything that I was supposed to have got done today.  In fact, I had promised myself I would find the time to spend an hour to an hour and a half on my novel before bedtime - I’m not going to get that done.  By the time I finish up in the office and head for my bedroom it will easily be four in the morning and I will be  too asleep to even think about taking the laptop along and working on my novel before I go to sleep.

And reading… HA! I have several books here that I bought that I want to read, I know I am not going to get any reading done, no matter I kept telling myself I would be able to find the time after Thanksgiving.  ::sigh:: It just seems like one thing after another, huh?  First there is no time for work because of this holiday, then that one, then a business trip interferes, then more holidays, birthdays… when am I supposed to fit sleep into things?

I’ll wedge some sleep in here in a hour or two… I hope.  For now, back to work to see how caught up on today’s  work I can get.  Wish me luck.

I find it interesting how the same spammers locate blogs at a set time after they have been created. I have created a few WordPress blogs now, and it seems like every time I have to deal with the same exact comment spammers at about the same time after each of the blogs goes live.  It seems to be some kind of trigger goes off for the spammers to signal to them that “Oh hey! There’s a blog that has not yet been spammed over there!”  And it does not matter if I mark the dudes with the sex links as spam, he still shows up on the next site I make, so marking as spam apparently only works on a blog by blog basis, it does not seem to be something that goes into a general file to keep him off everyone’s sites.

Ah well, as long as I can ban him from each of my sites, then I guess it works okay, after all, something that someone else might mark as spam for some reason might be perfectly agreeable to 90% of the other WordPress bloggers out there, so dealing with it on a case by case basis is better than having someone else deciding for me what my readers like, right?  I mean, shoot, that’s why I have worked so hard to take control of the advertising on as many of my websites as I can, so I can judge what I feel my readers would have an interest in, not leave it up to some computer algorithm or some guy suffering from a bad day wanting to ban everyone that has the nerve to leave a comment.

You have heard of editorial calendars, right? Those are the things that magazines create to help freelance authors know when they need to be submitting particular pieces for specific seasonal issues of the magazines.

Well, I have decided that I am going to be creating myself an editorial calendar for my blogs - something that I can use to reference what kinds of articles I want to be writing for each of my blogs during the various times of the year for seasonal or date-specific material that I want to be sure I get written up in time for a certain event.

For example: my editorial calendar for my weight loss site will note that I want to start working on an article for a 30 day slim down piece in December so that I can have it ready to post by the first week of January as a target piece for ladies wanting to loose 10 pounds by Valentines day. My editorial calendar for my family caregiver info site will note that I want to start working on an article for how to reduce stress during summer vacations with care recipients in January so that I can be sure to have it finished and ready to be published on my site by mid may when most people are looking foward to preparing for a coming summer getaway in June.

By preparing these editorial calendars I am hoping that I can eradicate the hassle of scrambling to get articles written and published at the last moment - instead I will have a clear roadmap to show me what I should be working on and when I need to begin work on it.

I’m back in Alaska now after going to Las Vegas for Blog World Expo and PostieCon07. I had a great time down there and learned a lot, particularly at PostieCon, where they had an unveiling of their new platform SocialSpark.

Right now I am still settling in after all the excitement of what happened and all the people I met and everything, so I will talk about it all later over on my travel blog site at Phantascene.com’s Travel Journal check that site out if you want to see more about my trip as I get it written.