Freelancer's Office: Blog

I found a new plugin for Firefox when I loaded Firefox onto my laptop last night.  The YourMinis dashboard that allows me to create a virtual desktop of widgets such as calendars, calculators, timers, comic strips, text editors and more.  I can already see where the thing is going to become an indispensable  part of my online work.  If you run Firefox I would suggest checking the plugin out, I’m still fiddling with it and learning how to use it.

The holidays have me slowed down a lot, but I am still plugging diligently away on my work and writing and everything else that I have to do during the holidays.

I just went through a few hours of writing non-stop as quick as I can work and my poor fingers are now aching.  I’m going to take a break for a little bit, get me some food and watch Without A Trace, then come back and do more work.

I have a few websites that I want to get organized tonight and get some work done on so that they are a little closer to being finished rather than the incomplete messes that they have been for far too long (no I’m not saying for how long).  So, food, Without A Trace, then website work.  Lots and lots of website work.
I guess no one ever said that working for yourself as a freelance writer would be easy, did they?  I do wish, however, that the rest of me got as much exercise as my fingers get. LOL  Ah well, I just have to figure out scheduling in workout time again.  Use that as a plotting session where I can think about what I want to be working on while I am exercising.  I usually use washing the dishes for that, but I think I could get into the habit of plotting things out in my head while I am on the treadmill or doing step aerobics.

I was looking at my website here and noticed something. Along the bottom of the site, where I had a links list for Google, there is an “Ads by Google” deal there, but it is sort of a search box deal where the reader can select the topic of the ads that they want to see.

I have never seen this before anywhere, so I assume it is a new deal that Google is testing out as an alternative to the public service ads?  I would not mind seeing this offered as a full feature that you can place below the search bar so that your readers can just type whatever they are interested in finding out about into the bar and be taken to a page of sites that are dedicated enough to their subject to have ads for it rather than just a mish mash of sites that the Google algorithm says look popular on those topics.

It has been well known for a long time that you can cheat the algorithm, so I can see where there might be a market for such a search alternative in the Google system.  I doubt if that is what they are up to with this thing, but it certainly does open up a lot of possibilities for different ways that a ad search might work.  I mean, after all, when you are looking for a business you open the phone book to the yellow pages, right?  This could be Google’s version of the traditional yellow pages where businesses and site owners can get listed in the “View Ads About” category and have their business targeted to people that are specifically looking for a business in the field of that subject.

I knew there was a reason why I bought so many notebooks when they went on sale at the start of the school year.  Normally they are what I use for outlining chapters in my novels, short stories and articles that I want to write (as well as countless other uses around the office like tracking supplies and so on and so forth), but now I have found a new use for them.

I have dedicated some of them to being editorial notebooks for my websites.

Yup, that’s right, editorial notebooks.  I take the notebook and write down on a page what topics I want to cover on the website and as I get those topics completed I check them off (or tear the page out).  This lets me keep running notes on what I am working on for each website with a single notebook dedicated to each of my sites.

It seems to be working fairly good so far and reminds me that I have to get things on one site or another done.

I want to build a place on a shelf for the notebooks to be kept, then I am going to cut strips of card stock to about two inches wide and create backs over the spiral binding on them so that a) they won’t grab one another on the shelf and b) I can tell at a glance at the spine what website each of the notebooks is for.