Have you heard about Blog Action Day? I heard about it in passing last year, but I didn’t give it much thought. But just this morning I stumbled upon a post about this year’s Blog Action Day, and saw that the subject is poverty. I quickly signed up.

As someone who has lived below the poverty line and is a resident of one of the poorer parts of this country, poverty is a subject that really hits home for me. But I’m not so blind as to not realize that a lot of people have it much, much worse than I ever did. Anyway, I felt compelled to put my two cents in on Blog Action Day this year.

I’m not exactly sure what I’ll write about yet, but I do know that I want to be a part of this important event. I believe that we bloggers can make a difference in the world, especially when we unite. So if you have a blog (or podcast or videocast), won’t you join me? It’s on October 15th, which gives us plenty of time to come up with something good.

I’m still busting butt trying to get my articles done. So there will be no home theme post today. Lucky for me, writing posts that have to do with the NaBloPoMo theme is not a requirement for participation. I didn’t even have to write this since I’ve already done one post today, but I thought I would explain for those of you eagerly awaiting the next installment.

Back to work now… I’ll pick up where I left off tomorrow.

I tried to get into the CPanel of my hosting account earlier, only to be greeted with a Page Not Found message. I tried again and got the same thing. So I decided to check on my blog and make sure it was okay.

I typed in the domain name, and a page bearing my template came up after a longer-than-usual wait. But what it said where my post should have been chilled me to the bone: “Sorry, but you’re looking for something that is not here.”

I proceeded to freak out. Had my all of my blogs and my website been wiped out by some mysterious, unknown force? I checked my web host’s forums, and that only freaked me out even further. There had been a fire at one of their data centers. Noooo!!!

As it turns out, the fire only affected dedicated hosting customers. My problem was just a hiccup, my sites are operational, and my blog didn’t get eaten by the Web Monster. Whew.

Still, I’m planning on doing some backups. That was scary.

I tried participating in NaBloPoMo last November, back when it was just a one-month deal. I made an effort, but I didn’t quite get a post in every day. I decided I wouldn’t bother participating again.

Now they’re doing it every month, but I still wasn’t going to bother. But I got an email about the theme for June, and I couldn’t help myself. I signed on, and maybe this time I’ll be able to follow through.

So what was this awesome theme, you ask? Home. It’s a subject that’s near and dear to my heart right now, considering all that we’ve been through over the past few months trying to make sure we would have a home. So I’m going to go for broke and give it a try once more.

I’m thinking I’ll start off with a post each day about all of the different places I’ve called home. I’m not sure yet where I’ll go from there, but I don’t think I’ll run out of things to say about the subject before the month’s out. Now if I can just find the time to post every day, all will be well.

There was an article in the New York Times last month about how bloggers are overworking themselves to the point of exhaustion. It was even insinuated that blogging might be to blame for some recent deaths. Who writes this stuff?

There’s no doubt that stress is a killer. But blogging in and of itself is not a cause of stress. Not unless you let it be. For me, blogging is a very positive thing. Let me tell you a little bit about why blogging makes me happy.

I started blogging in 2006. I hadn’t been online for a long time up until early that year, and I started browsing blogs. I thought about starting a blog, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to open up to the whole entire world like that. But it kept eating at me for some unknown reason, and it seemed like everyone else online was doing it, so I finally gave in. I opened an account at Blogger.com, and I got started.

It took me a while to get comfortable with it, but eventually I did. At the time I was working the night shift at a factory job, but I was trying to find a way to work at home. I wrote about my experiences in hopes of being an inspiration to other moms who wanted to do the same thing (even though I wasn’t having any luck).

I started blogging fairly regularly, because I was really beginning to love it. Then I found out I could make money blogging, and that made me ecstatic. I didn’t make enough to quit my job, but it helped me get some extra money to help with my quest to go into business for myself.

I started some more blogs, and I kept trying to find some way to work from home. I tried direct sales, but I really sucked at that. I bought a website, and started making a little money with that, but it wasn’t as much as I was making blogging. Then I got mad and quit my job, and I really began to feel the pressure to make something work.

Then it hit me why I hadn’t been able to say no to blogging in the first place: I love to write! Why not become a freelance writer?

I nearly talked myself out of pursuing that idea before I even tried it. After all, I didn’t have any formal education in writing or English. And I wasn’t that good of a writer… was I? But I finally decided that I had nothing to lose, so I started applying for online writing jobs.

Unfortunately, I got no responses. I ended up having to take a horrible job to help make ends meet, and I gave up on my dream of becoming a writer. I still blogged though, because I enjoyed it and it was helping me bring in money (and vent my frustrations about the whole situation).

Several months later, I got an email from a mailing list I had signed up for that included some information about a new company that was taking applications for ghostwriters. At first I dismissed it, but it kept eating at me in much the same way that the idea of starting a blog did. I trusted my instincts, and I applied. That very evening, I received an email- but not from the company I had just applied to. It was a lady I had written to when I first started applying for writing jobs, informing me that the project she was previously recruiting for had been shelved but she needed writers for a new project. I literally did a happy dance!

I also heard back from the other company the next week, and ended up getting that job. And somewhere in that time frame I got an ongoing blogging gig too! And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the beginning of my writing career.

I eventually was able to quit working outside the home, and now here I am working my own hours and enjoying life much more than I did before. Things are far from perfect, but I love what I do for a living, and that makes a big difference in one’s entire outlook. And it all started with blogging.

That’s not the only reason I like to blog, though. I still like being able to complain about the hideous color of my house (nope, haven’t gotten around to painting it yet) and brag about Pumpkin’s grades anytime I want to, even if nobody at home wants to hear it. And I still make a fair amount of money from it, which helps with the bills right now and will hopefully buy me and my family some nice things once our finances are looking better. So I can safely say that blogging is not killing me. It has made my life better in numerous ways, and I plan to be blogging until I’m old and gray. I might keel over in front of the computer, but I dare them to blame it on blogging.

Here’s a little video I made about why blogging makes me happy. It’s full of my favorite cheesy happy tunes, and it tells an abbreviated version of the above story in case you couldn’t make it through reading the whole thing. Enjoy!

I finally got around to updating my WordPress installation for this blog. Everything went fairly smoothly, except for one thing: Much to my dismay, the theme I was using started causing error messages to be displayed on each post.

I loved that theme, and I had no intention of changing it any time soon. But I decided to look for a new one. I might have been able to fix it had I done some research, but I just don’t have the time. I’m doing well to look for a new one right now.

Now I’m glad I did. I found this beautiful theme that you see here, and I love it. I can’t afford a custom theme, but if I could I don’t think I could have done any better than this.

If you like this theme, scroll down to the bottom for a link to where I got it. I would find it and add it to this post, but I’m feeling lazy tonight. Please forgive me.

I just realized something. I was looking at a blog with the Blog Catalog widget on it, and I am a member so my avatar and user name show up in it whenever I visit. My user name there is mountainmama. I just happened to look at the widget a little closer than I usually do, and it cuts off my name smack in the middle of the last m.

So instead of mountainmama, it appears to be mountainman. Even more notable is that my avatar is a cartoon girl…

Don’t laugh. It’s not funny.

Well, NaBloPoMo is over, and I didn’t manage to post every day for the whole month. Sometimes it was my fault, others it was things beyond my control (such as Internet outages).

I hope I can participate successfully next year. Maybe things won’t be so crazy for me by then. I’ll certainly give it my best shot. I’d like to participate in NaNoWriMo as well, though, because I’ve started on several novels only to stop after a few pages. Maybe I’ll manage to do both next time around.

I’m considering selling a couple of my websites. I haven’t made a final decision yet, but I’m seriously thinking about it. Here’s the info on them if anyone wants to try to convince me.

TBA Deals- I’m pretty sure I’m ready to let go of this one. This is the first real website I owned. I didn’t start it myself, it was around for a few years before I bought it from another work at home mom. But I rehauled the whole thing to work with CSS, and added some new content. It made me a decent amount of money for a while, but I’ve gotten so busy with my writing work that I haven’t been able to devote the time to it that I should. It comes with several ebooks to sell, there are directories that I sell advertising in, and I’ve made some money with affiliate programs on it. It was a PR 3 before Google started acting dumb, but as of right now it’s showing up as a 0.

The Work at Home Scam Blog- This one I’m not sure whether I’m ready to let go or not. It’s a blog, but I had big plans to add more stuff and make it a full-fledged site. Again, my writing work got in the way. The blog is a total labor of love- I haven’t made a red cent off of it. But it has some well-researched content and draws a good amount of traffic for a blog that is not updated frequently. Even after all of the PR mess, it is currently showing a 3. If someone wanted to make a profit from it, they certainly could.

So there they are. I’m not ready to put them up for auction yet, but if anyone is interested email me at kristy at awahmsblog dot com for more info and I’ll be happy to discuss them with you.

Google has made a lot of bloggers angry lately with their whole PR hullabaloo, myself included. Many sites have lost PageRank over the past couple of weeks, and the majority of them have been blogs. Of those blogs, the ones that have suffered the most are the ones who monetize through methods other than Google’s own Adsense. Coincidence? I think not.

I’ve tried Adsense, and quite frankly it sucks. I’ve had it on one of my non-blog websites for about a year and a half now, and I still have yet to break $100 so that I can even get paid. To be exact, I have $36.27 in my account, and it’s not because I don’t put the ads where anyone can see them.

They just want to punish those of us who have found better ways to make money. I know they won’t lose any sleep over it, but I’m going to remove the Adsense ads I do have up and replace them with something else. No point in making money for a company I am truly beginning to hate and getting nothing to show for it myself.

Another thing that we as webmasters need to do is quit using Google as much as possible. I’ve been using the Scroogle Scraper for my search needs lately, because it gets results from Google without the annoying paid results and without letting Google put a cookie on your machine or track your searches. But I’m going to take it a step further and start using a different search engine for my everyday search needs.

It will take a little more effort on my part. Ask.com has most of the flexibility that Google offers as far as searching for various media and with added parameters, but it’s not quite as up-to-date. MSN Search is pretty up-to-date but doesn’t offer quite as much flexibility, and I don’t like Microsoft much more than I do Google. But between the two of them, maybe I can accomplish all that I need to.

If anyone knows any other good search alternatives, drop me a comment. And bloggers, if we all band together and find alternatives to everything Google, maybe we can (1) make PageRank less important and (2) hit Google where it hurts: In the pocketbook. (If you’re interested, check out their stock prices.)