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Blogging

PF Blogging: All Our Advice on a Notecard?

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Here’s a fine revelation from PBS NewsHour: All the financial advice anyone needs fits on a 3×5 notecard!

Just so. Herein lies the great mystification of the personal-finance blogging boom. There’s only so much you can say when you assay to advise and pontificate about dealing with money. Yet there are still hundreds of us, all nattering on and on about…yeah. The contents of an index card.

Advice on a card 2Really, how many ways can you say these things? After awhile, if you’re a PF blogger you realize you’re repeating yourself ad nauseam. Many of the original bunch tired of it and sold their sites, sometimes for a decent price.  Others, like FaM, started writing about new topics. I see Frugal Scholar has announced that her site will no longer focus on frugality but “other things I’m writing about.”

There are so many other things. And most of them are far more interesting. Than money, I mean.

Politics, for example. Cultural issues…especially in a culture that really doesn’t regard caring for children and a home as productive work. Books. Food. Travel. Real estate. Gardening. Dogs. Cats. The hilarious folly of the passing scene. Life, the universe, and all that.

 

Giveaway of the Week!

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Hey, the redoubtable Donna Freedman is GIVING AWAY a copy of her course on writing winning blog posts! That’s a $147 value. And really, the full price is a give-away of sorts: Donna has been a journalist for a lot of years, and she’s one of the most engaging writers in online personal-finance circles. You’ve seen her posts at MSN Money, Money Talks News, Get Rich Slowly, Wise Bread…and of course at her own site, Surviving and Thriving. It’s a 12-part course designed to help you make your writing great, and you also get coaching advice from now until the end of time.

Add a comment to Donna’s post for a chance to win. Deadline to enter is 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 22.

Cookbooks Sell?

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Dark Kindle LoResHot diggety, folks! The 30 Pounds/4 Months cookbook seems to be selling. Either that or I created one heckuva cover for the thing.

Clicks on the Bitly link for the cookbook exceed those for any of the Racy Books by about a zillion to one. Apparently readers are more concerned about their waistlines than their fantasy sex lives. 😀

We may be looking at the difference between plugging a book on Facebook and plugging it on Twitter. Obviously, I can’t very well post glowing reviews of Porn Lite novelettes on FB, so all of the active campaigning for the Roberta Stuart bookoids has gone up on Twitter and Google+. Twitter is a bottomless pothole for that kind of stuff, so one competes against well-funded, savvy advertisers there.

The mention I put on Facebook was passed along by a couple of FB friendoids there. That presumably had the effect of a recommendation. And it presumably reached a lot more people than my feeble FB membership does.

Interesting. It speaks to the idea (one that has gone unarticulated in this space) of creating short eBooks from past FaM content. Y’know, Funny has been in business since Two Thousand and Aught-Seven! That is an OLD PF blog.

Funny isn’t even a personal finance blog anymore. These days it’s more like a lifestyle blog…or just a personal journal. How many times can you say “get a job…live below your means…save extra cash…set up a Roth IRA…use your employer’s 401(k)…get out of debt…start a side hustle…check out these bargains…avoid these scams…try these frugal household hints…make your own laundry soap” without turning blue? Hafta say: after a few years of that one gets mightily tired of it. Plus the field is way too crowded now. I wonder how many PF bloggers are out there today? Has anyone checked Sam‘s Yakezie group‘s membership lately? It must be vast by now.

BTW, did you read this post from Sam on the hidden benefits of trolls? The guy’s a freaking genius.

LOL! I’m too easily distracted today. Must brew another pot of coffee and get down to some actual work.

The Enterprise: Things Are Looking Up

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Welp, I’m feeling a great deal less prickly today, so we’ll replace those crabby-looking cacti in the header with some cheery flowers. The enterprise — actually, both enterprises, blogging and micropublishing — are beginning to look up.

Today our heroic new Web wrangler, Grayson Bell, managed to get the last of the Blog Empire over to our new host, BigScoots. It’s been a long haul: we first moved the whole gigantic package to WestHost, but that proved to be a big mistake. After a week or more of intense frustration, we decided to cut our losses and choose another self-hosting site. He’s worked with BigScoots before and highly recommends it.

And yea verily! All of the sites are now working like a dream: lightning fast speeds and no glitches. So far.

It’s been a very long day (again). As usual, I didn’t get any of the scheduled writing time in. But I did get all the transferred sites tested, and I started populating the sites for the Racy Book Publishing Venture:

Camptown Races Press and
Camptown Ladies Talk (my favorite!)

And I published another episode of Fire-Rider to Amazon today. It’s not live yet — takes Amazon 24 hours or so to put these things online. But it’s on its way, anyway.

This morning I made a presentation to the Scottsdale Business Association, the bidness networking group I belong to. Subject: What I learned about publishing on Amazon. I’ll probably post some version of that at Writers Plain & Simple, now that said site has been revived. It was really down and out, pretty much for the duration.

I’m whipped. I’m hungry. And I need a bourbon and water. But at least we’re back in business.

And so, until tomorrow!

 

Tales of Micropublishing

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LOL! Check out my wee squib at LinkedIn. With that one, I’ve probably blown my blogging wad for the day.

But y’know, I’ve really got to start haunting the social media more. I don’t understand how they work, and they look like still more techno-timesuck. Well…I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they are.

The logic of “social media” where long strings of bloviations are posted mystifies me. Do people REALLY have nothing else to do but sift through all that chatter? Do they read any of it? Why?

I guess what puzzles me the most is that something like Twitter or LinkedIn seems so unfocussed. Finding something useful there — something relevant to your job our your interests — looks like a tall order. Among a great deal of chaff, I found this nicely written post at LinkedIn by Arizona graphic designer and book coach Michele de Filippo, but when I went back to find it, I had a time relocating it.

Twitter takes that staticky effect to a whole level unto its own. There what you see when you sign in is toilet paper. A long strand of toilet paper that apparently unrolls ad infinitum, with (as far as I can see) no end. Ever. Most of the posts there appear to be automatically slapped up there. A few live people are chatting back and forth. But the question is, how do t hey find each other and how do they filter out all the irrelevant static so as to have something resembling a “conversation”?

At Twitter, “Direct Messages” is clogged with spam…here’s some guy congratulating me on something I supposedly published on Disqus. Specifically what is not mentioned, of course, because the purpose of his message is to advertise something. A few live humans thank me for following them. Hm. I haven’t figured out how the hashtag thing is supposed to work on Twitter. Strange.

So…I gather we’re supposed to use the platforms to reach out to people who might be interested in whatever we have to offer. But the question is, how do we FIND them, so we’re not blitzing harmless bystanders with flak that doesn’t even faintly interest them? In the do unto others department, I’d rather not spray Web users with irrelevancies in the hope of reaching one or two folks who like what I’m offering.

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Facebook seems to make a little more sense. The page that pops up when I go to that thing is filtered (somehow) so only my friends’ posts show up, and by and large what they post is either interesting or entertaining. Twitter feels like carpet-bombing. Facebook is more like a firing range. With targets.

In the marketing department, I finally got around to updating the Fire-Rider site. It’s been down, like all the other provinces of the Blog Empire, off and on for the past ten days or two weeks. When I’ve had time to work on it, it’s  been down; when it’s been up, my hands have been full of other work.

Speaking of the which, WonderAccountant wants to know where a stack of statements are (?? how would I know?) and why my bank account is off by approximately the amount of a Social Security check (no clue!)

And so, away…

Of Artichokes and Oysters…and New Books

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 In the first of two annoying crashes, the Mac crashed and deleted everything I’d written here. I can’t even remember what I was going on about.

In the second of two exceptionally annoying crashes, WestHost (our new web server) crashed a post I was writing at Writers Plain & Simple and erased 30 minutes worth of work. In spite of my having saved it. No. BECAUSE of my saving it: I hit “save” and the “Edit Post” page went down.

God…freaking…DAMN…it, this has been another of those marathon time-suck days. Coming up with the idea of clustering the time-sucks on specific days was good: yesterday I got some writing done. Day before yesterday, not so much, because reality inetervened. But yesterday: Bobbi got tossed in the middle of BillyBob’s king-sized bed.

What could possibly happen?

So…artichokes. Did you know you can freeze them?

Trader Joe’s sells these wonderful little baby artichokes, SO cute and so delicious. They come in packages of four. What usually happens here at the Funny Farm is that I cook them all (they fit fine in a pasta kettle), eat one, and drop the rest in a Ziplock bag to stash in the fridge.

I may (or may not) eat a second one the next day or so later. But then the package gets shoved to the back of the refrigerator shelf. And I lose track of them.

(Did you know that some people think starting a sentence with “and” or “but” sounds pompous? Honi soit qui mal y pense, say I to that. Goddammit.)

Anyway, so before long these lost artichokes spoil. And I am disgusted and discouraged.

It’s quite enough to have computer technology to make you disgusted and discouraged, without having to be disgusted and discouraged over rotten artichokes.

Freeze them:

Cook them all. (To wit: boil a pot of water; add a little chopped up garlic and a sliced lemon if you have it; toss in the ‘chokes; cook until done, about an hour.)

Take them out of the hot water and set them upside down in a strainer or colander that’s been placed in the kitchen sink. Let the water drain out and the artichokes cool to room temperature.

Place the artichokes on a tray or cookie sheet. Set this in the coldest part of your freezer. Wait.

When the artichokes are frozen through, place them in air-tight plastic freezer bags and store in the freezer until you get around to eating them.

Voilà.

This morning I posted the third Fire-Rider installment on Amazon. It only took three hours to acquire the ISBNs for that and the fourth story and then to get the present piece “published.”

This happened because of the dizzying swarm of errors I’ve instilled in the MSS. I’m laboring away thinking godDAMNit, I know I fixed that I know it I know it I KNOW it!!!!!!!

Well. Yes. I did fix it. But I stored the fixed files to a flash drive and failed to copy them back up to DropBox.

But that notwithstanding, there were a couple of errors in the “fixed” files that I hadn’t fixed.

You begin to sense the complications implicit in this chain of events? Yeah. On and on and on…

I think they’re all fixed now. But I hate Word. I hate it hate it hate it. WHY does it default to do the stupidest most ridiculous most pointless things imaginable by the techie brain? Why do you have to fight it uphill every single step of the way?

Oh Hell. Fire-Rider isn’t an unwitting iteration of the Odyssey. It’s an allegory of  Man vs. Machine.

FR III isn’t online at Amazon yet (it takes awhile for these things to arrive in the marketplace. But FR II is here.

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