The Blonde Diaries

I find that during the winter months, people tend to branch out and find new things to do around the house. Cooking, indoor exercising, reading, and blogging for example are all great things you can do around the house. If you are new to blogging it can be very daunting. Where do you begin once you get your blog set up? You have articles but feel like no one is reading them. How about checking out directory submission sites? Most are free to list your blog with a little except and you can develop quite a bit of traffic and a good following. It is also a great way to discover a new blog or two. If you don’t know which ones to sign up for how about checking out your favorite blogs to see where they are listing. Starting with what you like is often the best place to find great tips and tricks.

A few days ago when I was bouncing around blogs for Aloha Friday and then again on Teaser Tuesday, I noticed a bunch of blogs had this thing called Google Friend Connect on them.  I wasn’t quite sure what it was so of course I Googled it.   Why not right?

So I found out that Google FriendConnect is another social networking format for both bloggers and readers.  You can follow a blog and then go into your blogger account and see a list of all the blogs you are following because you like them.  There are other options based on how your friend has set their FriendConnect up where you can invite others, leave comments, rate posts, etc.  Right now I just have mine set up to help people bookmark/favorite me/follow me but I will have to see what other features I can add on for fun.

Here is a brief overview on Google FriendConnect if you want more information on it and how to sign up.  I would also like to thank The Accessory Lady for signing up to be my first friend.  I was wondering if I would ever have one. LOL!

Hello and welcome to a new week. I had a fairly good weekend minus the wreck on Whiskey Bay that pushed my travel time up from 4 hours to almost 6 hours last night. I was able to catch up on my email and a few websites that I didn’t read over the weekend while sitting on the bridge. Made it home around 10 and decided to start reading a new book to kick this week off right. I am ready to start this week off with my Manic Monday Meme post. So here we go!

Do you usually wear perfume/cologne? If so, what’s your current favorite? I don’t on a daily basis but when I do I wear Escada Island Kiss.  It was a summer fragrance from 2006 or something.  I just keep finding it online and at Marshalls and am stockpiling it since it has been discontinued.

What’s the last book you’ve read that you thought was really good? If you don’t have one, what looks promising on your to-be-read list?  Well, I just finished What a Girl Wants yesterday and it was a fairly good chick lit book.  Not a favorite but overall pretty good.  I’m moving on to the next book in the series She’s Out of Control so far I am about 1/3 of the way through the book and am enjoying it too.

Fill in the blank: I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing skinny jeans.  My mom just got back from the UK and apparently that is all they wear over there.

I logged in this morning to see a note about upgrading to WordPress 2.8. I didn’t realize a new version of WordPress would be released soon nor did I know what changes or upgrades would be in store once I pushed that button and allowed my software to upgrade automatically. I figure at the end of the day I will need to upgrade so why not just go for it and then read about it later.

Upgrading went as easily as clicking a button with a mouse which is exactly what I did. No issues (no exceptions, waive further review – LOL a little auditor humor) everything seems to be working fine. One thing I did notice that was new is a box on my sidebar for series tags. I wasn’t paying attention earlier when I did my post about Direct TV and put in all of my post tags in the series tag box. I couldn’t figure out why there were no tags for that post until I came back later and saw that there are now 2 boxes for tagging posts. I haven’t figured out what series tags are for but thought I’d give a heads up so you don’t have the same question bugging you later on.

I also just noticed a link on my side bar to install a theme directly through the admin part of my blog. That will be nice because I never remember the address to get to my server. Then once I am finally to my server site, I never remember what user name and password I have used. I don’t have any themes picked out to add but I might have to do a search to find one and test this little feature out.

Have you noticed anything cool with this new version?? Leave me a comment and tell me all about it.

It has been two weeks since I have switched my blog host and so far everything is going well.  I am very pleased with my new host and how easy it is to set things up with them.  In fact, I now have 3 domain names with Wordpress installed and ready for me to get to work on the actual blog part.  How cool is that? I am very happy that I was able to find Webhosting Geeks to help figure out which host I wanted to go with because I went into this blogging thing pretty blindly last year and just went with this one host that wasn’t all that good. I didn’t have any major down time but anytime I needed support with something they weren’t too eager to help. I found the reviews by both the geeks and people like me to be very helpful in narrowing down the choices since there are so many hosts out there.

Specifically, the web hosting awards given out each year from the geeks gave me a great starting point when I started shopping around. If you are thinking about self-hosting or just want a new host, start with webhosting geeks and their review pages and their awards pages. It will really help you sort through the really good hosts and the really not so good ones. You can also research based on what you want your hosting to do – blogs, forums, email, etc – and how environmentally friendly you want it to be. I actually switched to Hostgator when I switched because thanks to webhosting geeks I realized that by using them I was helping out my state. Hostgator is in Texas and they use wind power from the wind power farms in West Texas! So The Blonde Diaries is green and supporting a local business.