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I just love this post on “Motherhood To Me….” I think I originally bookmarked it planning to make a similar post, but as I sit down to write it, I think the sentiments deserve more than that.
I think this deserves a Group Writing Project (albeit a bit impromptu). I’ll post the full rules tomorrow, but for today, just go read “Motherhood To Me….” I hope it will inspire you, too!
I have another guest post at The Power of Moms this weekend! It’s called “Doing It All.” Doesn’t it seem like we’re always told we can do it all, and we should be doing it all right now?
If you’re visiting from that post, welcome! Please check out some of my favorite posts on fulfillment:
Stay a while! Subscribe! And thank you for reading!
It’s hard to imagine my life five years from now. Five years ago, I’d been married for two years, I was one year out of school, I had one little baby, I worked from home in Internet marketing and I started a blog.
Now I’ve been married for almost seven years, and we have three kids. I’m still blogging, though I have to admit I’ve really dropped off from time to time. I blogged professionally for a long time writing about Internet marketing news and became something of an expert, but for the last year I’ve been able to just focus on my family. I’ve begun writing fiction again, after a long break starting in college. I’ve started a writing craft blog by myself and a craft blog with my sisters. I think I’ve had several more blog ideas come and go in the mean time, but so far these are sticking.
The reason I started this blog was to help me appreciate motherhood more, to help myself and others find fulfillment in a calling I believe to be the most important thing I could do with my life right now—but which was also alternately boring and overwhelming. I wanted to be able to help other mothers feel good about a choice to stay home with their children, even though it can be long stretches of dull, hard work between the few glittering moments.
Sometimes my personal journey goes well, and sometimes it’s still rough. I think if you’d asked me five years ago, I would have told you I’d have everything figured out by now—but I think learning to be happy and grateful and content and fulfilled is a lifetime endeavor, and even if I have to take two steps forward and one step back, even if I can’t see the progress a lot of the time, even if I still struggle, as long as I keep these efforts in mind, rely on my 
faith and don’t let myself get too discouraged, I’ll make it—maybe not in the next five years, but I’ll be closer every day I make the effort.
My entry in the Five Years From Now Group Writing Project
What do you think? Where will you be in five years? Share your entry in the GWP today!
That’s right! This month marks five years of blogging for me!
It’s the
I’ve got some fun stuff planned: favorite posts, giveaways and Group Writing Projects!
The fun starts on Monday Tuesday (since it’s Independence Day on Monday) and lasts all month! To keep up with the party, subscribe for free updates via RSS or delivered straight to your email inbox. If you’re on Facebook, follow with Networked Blogs in the sidebar > .
What are you celebrating this month? It’s also my anniversary and my daughter’s birthday later this month 😀
Photo by Gerry Dulay
We’re continuing our series on setting up WordPress on BlueHost. Today we’ll look at choosing a theme—the visual appearance of your site—and adding cool functionality with plugins. This post is based on WordPress 3.1.3.
When you set up a blog, you want to have a design, color scheme and layout that helps to convey your blog’s theme, genre, purpose and features. There are hundreds of free WordPress themes that can help you do that. Additionally, you may want to commission a custom theme, which can vary in price from $25 to $1000 and more. You can learn more about working with a blog designer or going it alone in our blog design series.
Things to keep in mind as you select your theme:
WordPress can help you find free themes for your blog in the Appearance menu, under Themes. At the top, select Install Themes.
On the Install Themes page, you have options to search for a theme. Check the box next to each option you want to search for, then click Find Theme, or you can search by keyword if you know the name of a theme you want to use.
The search will return all the themes that meet your criteria. Here, we checked pink, two columns and right sidebar. The search returned two themes:
To see what the themes look like full size, use the Preview link below the theme. This brings up a popup window with an interactive preview of the theme:
(You can close the preview by clicking the x in the upper left.)
If you like the theme or just want to try it out on your blog, click the Install button below the theme. This brings up another popup window. Click the Install Now button.
This automatically transfers the files of the theme to your website. Once the transfer is complete, you can click the Activate link from the transfer page to turn the theme on for your site. (You can also activate themes from the Appearance page.)
In the Appearance menu, you can see all the themes you’ve uploaded and change your theme. Under Available Themes, you should see the theme you just uploaded. Click on that theme to enable it for your blog. Be sure to check your site to make sure the theme is functioning properly.
Fluid width means that the blog layout is designed “resize” itself to maintain its proportions no matter how wide the viewer’s screen is. If you have a fluid layout and your posts column takes up 50% of the width of the screen, the posts column will take up 400 pixels on an 800×600 resolution screen and 960 pixels on a 1920×1200. Generally, these are considered more user-friendly, but a fixed width theme will work just fine, too.
Plugins are bits of code designed to customize and enhance your WordPress installation. Plugins can be installed in the same way that themes are, using the WordPress internal installer to find and install plugins.
You’ll find plugins in thee second set of left-hand menus of WordPress, under Plugins (if there’s a red circle with a number in it, that means you have that many plugins to update.) When you find a plugin that you’d like to implement in your blog, you can use the installer to find and automatically install it. The installer is at the bottom of the Plugins menu page, or you can click on “Add New” under the Plugins drop down menu.
From the Install Plugins window, you can search the WordPress plugin directory for your plugins.
Enter a term in the Search box to find a plugin, or navigate using the tags. Here we’re searching for a search plugin. This takes us to the results page, where the results look like this:
Details below the name generates a popup window with more info about the plugin—what it does, how popular it is, whether it’s compatible with your version of WordPress, etc.
Select the plugin you want and click on Install below the name. WordPress automatically installs the plugin.
Once the plugin is installed, if you want to use it right away, click Activate this plugin.
To work with your plugins later, go to the Plugins menu. You will see a list of all your uploaded plugins. The default WordPress install comes with two plugins: Akismet, a plugin to block spam comments, and Hello Dolly, a plugin to display lines from the song “Hello Dolly” in your WordPress admin screens. Once you’ve added your other plugins, these should also appear here. You can click the Activate link to activate each plugin individually, or you can use the checkboxes to activate, deactivate or delete more than one plugin at a time.
Note: WordPress will always deactivate all plugins before updating a WordPress installation.
Many plugins add menus to your WordPress so you can configure the options in them. Different plugins integrate into WordPress in different ways. The most common method seems to be for the plugin to add a submenu under the Tools or Settings menu. A few plugins add submenus to the Plugins or Dashboard menus; fewer still add another box to the left-hand menu bar all to themselves.
Some plugins don’t have menus in this way. Some plugins don’t have configurable options at all. Other plugins require you to edit the text of the plugin itself to configure the options (these are getting more and more rare). Study any documentation (the plugin author’s website or a readme file) to find these. Sometimes an explanation is included in the description of the plugin.
If you need to edit the plugin file itself which you should almost never have to do, you can do so by going to Plugins>Editor. The plugin files you have uploaded (active and inactive) will appear in a list on the right-hand side of the screen. Select the plugin you want to edit and follow its instructions. Be sure to save your changes. WordPress recommends deactivating a plugin before editing it and never editing an active plugin.
Most plugins come “widgetized,” packaged with drag-and-drop widgets to place in your blog layout so you don’t have to mess with the code, but rarely, some plugins will require you to insert a bit of code into your blog template to get them to work. To edit your theme’s files, in WordPress go to Appearance>Editor. There will be a list of files in your theme on the right-hand side of the screen. Select the appropriate file and follow the plugin’s directions carefully.
Note that it can be easy to “break” your blog (or a specific plugin) by editing its code. I recommend setting up a test blog on a subdomain to practice with these plugins to make sure that your blog will still function./p>
Ready to take the plunge? Sign up for hosting with BlueHost and set up your WordPress blog today!
Last night, I had something else to check on my site, and I decided it was about time I upgraded my blog software to the latest version. It’s only a few clicks in the management software of my site, and in about five minutes, it was all ready. I pulled up my site to make sure everything had made the transition okay.
And it welcomed me to my new WordPress blog.
Um, what?? This isn’t new. It’s nearly five years old. And when I visited the blog, it was a fresh, blank WordPress site.
Almost five years of posts, memories, pictures, ponderings—gone. I was a little distraught.
Miraculously, my web host keeps backups. I called their 24/7 tech support and in less than an hour from the initial implosion, the site was completely functional again. If you saw a “Hello World” post from me this morning, that’s why—and that’s why it’s not here now. Thank heavens! And Bluehost!
(I’ll be doing updates manually from now on. 😀 )
How can you avoid this panic? Back up your website regularly!
In WordPress, scroll down to Tools on the left-side menu. Select Backup.
The default information WordPress backs up is listed in the left column. If you have more information for plugins and their settings, you can select those from the list in the right column:
Scroll down to see the options: you can have it save the file to your server if you’re on your own host, download it to your computer, or send it to an email account you specify.
But! You can also set it up to automatically email a backup to you regularly:
Remember to check that email address! I have mine set up to mark it as read automatically. But because these files can be pretty big, you might want to delete older ones.
Blogger makes it easy to back up a blog.
To back up the content (posts, etc.), see Clarissa Draper’s instructions here. Four easy steps! (Summary: Settings > Basic > Export blog — Download blog — Save file. See Clarissa’s post for step-by-step with pictures.)
To back up the design and layout, see the (also) four (easy!) step instructions in Rachael Harrie’s post. (Summary: Design > Edit HTML — Download full template — Save file. Again, see Rachael’s post for step-by-step with pictures.)
And catching up on gratitude:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
And today:
What are you grateful for today?