The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Hey, check this out: Mrs. Micah offers a lead to her friend Adam’s site, Your Money Relationship, whose proprietor is hustling up some readers and some publicity by offering chances at a free $50 gift Amazon.com certificate in exchange for a wide variety of lagniappes you can do for him.
Besides committing a smart move here, Adam has an interesting site. A freshly minted master of financial planning, he should know what he’s talking about when it comes to money management.
Today is Funny about Money’s first anniversary. I started this blog one year ago today. It wasn’t great at the outset, but I think it’s improved over time.
Because I started itas an idle lark in Apple’s iWeb, it suffered from that program’s weaknesses, one of which is that iWeb doesn’t have an effective way to track traffic and its code is too arcane and inaccessible to allow amateurs to install web-based traffic counters. So by the time I switched to WordPress last August, I had no idea how many people had visited the site and what pages they had seen; all I knew was that the home page had over 9,000 hits. Where visitors went before or after that is anyone’s guess. Since August 7, when the site went live at WordPress, Funny has had 37,800 discrete hits. That’s over 10,600 hits a month, which just amazes me.
Hands down, the most popular post was the one that described how to use olive oil as a hair conditioner. Posted on August 19, it still gets 30 to 40 hits a day! Who knew?
Olive oil is hot. As it were. The runner-up is usually Olive Oil: The Miracle Skin Cleanser. The one on using lemon juice or vinegar to bring out the highlights in your hair also gets several hits every day. Ah, blogger: thy name is vanity.
I don’t know that I could say which were my favorite posts.
Single in a Couples Culture got a lot of good feedback.
So did Is Frugality un-American?
I think Consumer Headaches: 15 Ways to Get Help was one of the site’s most useful posts. Well…except for the olive oil business, of course!
And I like the piece that explains how to make biweekly pay “fit” the realities of a bimonthly world by setting up a “pool” account and using it to fund piggy-banks that cover monthly expenses.
Home Inspections: Hire Your Own Craftsmen also went over well with readers.
Stealing from the Students is one of the best of many rants I published during the year. Later experience—episodes of plagiarism and plumb laziness—demonstrated that students recognize the administration’s cynicism toward them and take the understaffed and often pointless required courses about as seriously as the university seems to take them.
One of my favorite topics seems to be the cost of owning a pet…especially after I figured out that I’d spent over $48,000 on the German shepherd and the greyhound!
That notwithstanding, what did I do shortly after the shepherd’s demise? Oh yes.
Well, speaking of that expensive little friend, it’s after 10 a.m. and I haven’t fed her, nor have I started to get ready for tomorrow’s festivities.
Merry Christmas to all of you who observe it. And happy holidays to everyone!
Lookit this! Among a long and wonderful list of plans to improve life in 2009, Master Your Card publishes a link to this amazing site, a “job bank” for people who want to volunteer.
You enter your location and your skill or your interest, and presto! Up comes a list of volunteer opportunities that look custom-tailored for you.
This is a fantastic tool. One of the reasons I don’t volunteer as much as I would like is that I have no idea who can use my skills or how to access organizations that I’d like to work with. Too often if you cold-call an outfit that’s not actively looking for volunteers, you get a cold shoulder, because they already have everyone they need or limit their choices to an in-group. Here you can find organizations that are advertising for people to join up.
When I entered “editor” and my city, SIX volunteer opportunities came back, two of them very interesting. Enter “gardening” and a long list of neat possibilities comes up, all over the Valley.
Don’t miss the rest of Master Your Credit Card’s piece…especially the video on how the boob tube works on your brain.
Head over to The Digerati Life and check out Silicon Valley Blogger’s gorgeous Christmas give-away: a top-of-the-line multifunction Epson printer. w00t!
Want. Want it!!!
Don’t just sit there. Enter the contest right away.
Would you do a little Christmas lagniappe for me, please?
Go to this site right here and enter a complaint about the theft shown at this URL:
http:// www.ebliss.us/2008/12/posting-bookmarks-online
You’ll need to remove the space after http:// that I inserted to avoid giving the jerk proprietor a gratuitous link.
When you get to the AdSense support site, click on “Report a Policy Violation.” Then follow the steps. Enter the “ebliss” homepage URL where it asks for the name of the offending site, and then copy & paste the URL of the post he stole from Funny about Money and put that into the box to report the specific offense. Remember to remove that extra space after the double slash.
It’s one thing, I suppose, for the damned scrapers to knock off a single paragraph and then post a link, though I don’t like it that they use even a few of my words for the purpose of making money off my work. But when someone takes an entire post and sticks it online under a slew of ads…no. That will not do. Especially when, as in this case, he presents it as his own work. And, as in this case, his site is swimming in ads.
Lately I’ve been hiding my byline in white type after the first graf of posts I think will be scraped, and then deeper in the post placing another byline with a link to a FaM or Copyeditor’s Desk post with instructions on how to report the theft to Google’s advertising department. This may (with luck, I gather) cause Google to yank its ads from the word-thief’s site, effectively putting it out of business. The schmuck who ripped off today’s post didn’t even bother to delete those, probably because he has a machine committing his thefts.
Gee. Imagine how nice it would be to have a robot that you could send out to burglarize houses, knock over jewelry stores, and lift Porterhouse steaks off the Safeway’s butcher counters….
It will be a challenge, because blogging is intrinsically different from book writing. However, if you’ve organized your categories intelligently, you may be able to extract enough material for a salable book out of a year’s worth of posts.
I just posted a quickie guide to getting a book published over at The Copyeditor’s Desk. It’s not the be-all and end-all of publishing advice (it’s a blog post, for petesake), but it does clue you to a valuable resource many writers have yet to discover. Check it out!