Remember alert services, blogs, and social network sites. Many of these can deliver updates to your inbox or phone.

Alert Services: Sends e-mail, text, etc. whenever your keyword shows up somewhere. Media services such as BBC News and TMCNet have their own alerts — so check out sites that cover your industry and sign up for their alerts. Here are general free keyword alert services.

1. AOL Alerts
2. Clip and Copy — three free searches in Basic account.
3. Google
4. GoogleAlert (not from Google) — gives three free searches).
5. Reuters
6. Windows Live Alerts
7. Yahoo

Blogs: You can most likely find blogs for every industry. Numerous blog directories exist that to make a list here would be futile. MasterNewMedia has a hey-ugggeee list.

Social network sites: Also too many to list, but it should include Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, and conversations like Twitter and forums. Also look for social networks covering your industry. The following sites/tools let you search Twitter with keywords:

• Summize
• TwitterMap search
• Google’s twitter search
• Terraminds
• Tweetscan

Track forums and other conversations with these sites:

• Boardtracker
• Omigili
• Klostu
• Twing
• Boardreader

Resources

• Copybrighter
• Online Reputation Management Blog
• Online Reputation Management Guide
• Radically Transparent

Of course, I wanted to know what gadgets they recommended for us geeky moms.

And for fun ‘cuz you’re allowed:

• Twitter cartoon and other funny Geek and Poke cartoon [Link: Buzz Bishop]
• Twitter Club
• Internet Pinball Database: My hubby’s favorite: High Speed.
• 32 places to find free shipping. Gotta love it especially when Amazon may be forced to charge tax to Texans.

#333333, #666666, #999999, and #cccccc (various shades of gray) are almost black, but not as good as black. Those sites don’t make this list.

It’s an epidemic that I alone can’t stop.

To reward those sites doing it right, they get a mention and a link here. Add your site to the comments section. However, we will check every link. If a site’s text hides in a fog, it will disappear.

Note — this only looks as the contrast between text and background — not the font choice, font size, text formatting style, or design.

1. Adversity University Blog
2. Be the Story
3. Blogcritics
4. Bob Bly
5. Book Marketing
6. The Book Sistah
7. Caroline Middlebrook
8. Chronicles of a Mompreneur
9. D. Keith Robinson
10. Dosh Dosh
11. Geekpreneur
12. Global Neighbourhoods
13. The Golden Pencil
14. Graywolf’s SEO Blog (yeah, even the guy with “Gray” in his name passed!)
15. GTO Management
16. How Not to Write
17. InternetVIZ
18. ISIPP
19. Melle.ca
20. Men with Pens
21. Molly
22. Niroze
23. PoeWar Writer’s Resource Center
24. The Program Witch Pages
25. Sparkplug CEO
26. Stowe Boyd
27. Strategic Public Relations
28. SuccessCREEations
29. Verge New Media
30. Writer’s Helper

You wouldn’t believe how many sites I looked at before my eyes begged me to stop. List is disappointingly short.

Moral: Black on white is NOT boring. It’s readable.

P.S. I skipped those with different colors because they may not be readable to those with various forms of color blindness.

But not one to let commercials sway me without research, I wondered how many attachments MacBook Air owners realllllly use. Lenovo smartly added attachments of products it has in its ultraportable Thinkpad X300 to the Mac Air to make people think thinner isn’t always better — you sacrifice some things.

Just looking at the two computers, the Mac Air still wows with its thinness. I found a twitterfriend who owns a Mac Air FabGal — check out our twitversation:

FabGal: Sorry, but mah MacBook Air could kick that ThinkPad’s ass. And also? It’s shiny! And silver! And my preshus. (drool)

Me: Mac Air does still look wowie wow wow. What do you add on to it regularly?

FabGal: I haven’t added anything to it so far. Everything transfered from iBook wirelessly. Am thinking of a superdrive, though.

So there you have it. One owner who doesn’t even have anything on her Mac Air. So seriously, how many Mac Air owners buy attachments and use them regularly? One attachment might not be so bad.

Nonetheless, the message comes through powerfully and will likely sway Windows users not to make the switch to a Mac … not just yet.

As I mentioned in my how I became a writer story, the whole thing started as a part-time venture while managing a part-time corporate job (for most of it) and three kids. I believe writing on the side while holding down a corporate job is a better route than chucking it all for the freelance life.

Yes, life is about risks, but you’re more likely to succeed by building up instead of starting with zip. Had I chucked it all back in 2000, I would’ve had less than a part-time amount of work and no health benefits. My spouse got laid off in 2003, right before #3 came along. We would’ve been in deep trouble had I chucked, which would’ve been more of an upchuck (holds back from the woodchuck routine).

I also volunteer and sit on several PTA boards. My mom was a full-time volunteer for the second half of my childhood. I wanted to be like her. Living a balanced life is important to me. My kids will grow up, so I need to enjoy them NOW.

Prefer to be all about your career? You might want to read Wake Up, Damn It! If your career makes you happy, then go for it and ignore everything here.

So how do I manage all of this? Not without a little insanity and stress at times, but these tips help make it easier:

1. Enroll younger kids in pre-school. Keeping them at home isn’t doable (unless you have a nanny). My youngest has learned amazing stuff he would never have learned had he stayed home. He enters kindergarten in the fall (sob).
2. Rely on a personal information manager complete with contacts, calendar, and to do lists. The Palm desktop has been my trusty sidekick since 1995. Use Outlook. Use any of the many online web-based applications.
3. Balance your schedule for the week. Non-work appointments take too many of my slots this week. I’ve rescheduled two. I try to spread out appointments, but that doesn’t always work and find a week becomes overloaded. So when I realize it, I start moving things around where I can. I review the week ahead sometime between Friday and Monday to ensure balance or to do something about it.
4. Accept working off hours. While I work a standard work week, appointments and kid events can cut into my work time. So I make it up in the evening or on weekends, but never at the sacrifice of sleep bring us to the next point…
5. Get sleep. Everyone requires a different amount of sleep to function well. If I stay up late working on something, I’m hurting more than helping my clients and business. While I might get something done late at night, I’m useless the next day and lose an entire day. So better to sleep and finish in the morning.
6. Avoid waiting until last minute to do work to make deadline. To avoid late nights, I make sure I have room to meet the deadline. This prevents racing the clock or sacrificing quality to make a deadline.
7. Make “No” part of your vocabulary. Or else, get stuck with deadlines close to each other, overload your schedule, and turn yourself into a stress machine (which affects your health). I believe, “When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” So parents, it may feel selfish to say, “No,” but your family benefits.
8. Drop stressful clients. I’ve dropped a client or two because I didn’t enjoy the work and dreaded working on their projects. Add these together spells energy drain. Worried about replacing them? Writers should always include marketing a part of their job.
9. Balance your kids’ activities. Who says they need to take music lessons, play sports, dance, and do scouts all at once? Kids need a break, too. Try to limit younger ones’ — who are trying things to find what they like — current activities to one or two. When one ends, you can try something else. After all, fewer activities means fewer chauffeuring jobs for parents.
10. Use your “I can’t write now” time wisely. When we find ourselves unable to write or work, we can easily fall into the trap of needlessly surfing the Web or doing other wasteful activities. When I’m in a stupor, I fold laundry, exercise, play games (that I need to review) — Things that benefit me.

How do you balance your writing life with your personal life?

Interesting:

• Is the Palm OS Dying? Should you care? I do! I have owned a Palm device since 1995 and am still hoping the company will surprise us and SOON.
• Student twitters his way out of Egyptian jail. WOW. Talk about major twitter impact. If I had done the same thing, I’d still be in jail.
• 20 things to do with nail polish. Well, color won’t work well for some of these, but good tips. Men — it’s OK to use nail polish! [Link: Deb Ng]

And because we always look for ways to save money:

• AAA gas price finder

And because I had my first job out of college at DOT:

• Secretary of DOT blog: My first job out of college was as a DOT trainee. We rotated to three different areas in one year and then permanently settled with one of the areas. I still stay in touch with many folks there — they are good people. Don’t let the FAA’s problems deter you from thinking otherwise.

I like Acrobat files, but not for e-mail newsletters. E-mail newsletters generally load fast unless the issue has too many images that aren’t optimized (you won’t find me subscribed to those that do this every time). But to click the link to go to the PDF page takes longer.

I still read some newsletters that use this method because they offer high quality content and I respect the editor behind the newsletter. I just might not read every issue or refer back.

E-mail newsletters work for me because I can file them, search them, and read them whenever. Yes, you can file the “click link for newsletter” e-mail, but you can’t search it. You won’t remember if the content you need came from that newsletter or another.

Yes, trying to get an e-mail newsletter to display the way you want it in every e-mail client is an impossible task. But that’s not an excuse for chucking the idea and going PDF where the newsletter doesn’t have to deal with e-mail application idiosyncrasies.

Remember all of us have lots of information coming at us… and we all have our preferences how we like to get that information: RSS, e-mail, Web. A successful newsletter provides readers with choices in how to obtain the content.

More related posts on this topic

• HTML in Newsletters
• Designing Newsletters for all E-mail-Kind
• Spread the Marketing Wealth for Best Results

Am I off base here? Or do you like your PDFs?

From reading other blogs, it looks like many love to hear how writers and freelancers went full-time. So here’s the full story.

In the beginning…

After kid #2 arrived, I started New York University’s online program in Internet Technology while on maternity leave. Initially, I wanted to do web design. After few Web design projects, I discovered web design was more frustrating than enjoyable.

Around this time, an e-mail newsletter for web designers had a contest where readers could submit an article related to web design. The winners received high quality software like Photoshop, so I gave it a shot. Readers loved the article, so I wrote a few more in the series for the newsletter.

The series started my writing portfolio and helped my land my first paid professional writing gig with a web design magazine. Slowly, I picked up more paid writing assignments discovering I loved working as a writer.

However, I was apprehensive about pursuing a career as a writer. I heard from many people how they wanted to be a writer. I honestly didn’t think I offered anything special as a writer. It also didn’t help with many talented bloggers and web site writers hitting the writing circuit. Regardless, I kept my eyes open for gigs and considered writing a sideline since I still had my corporate job.

Furthermore, I never dreamed of having my own business. I feared the sales aspect — getting more clients — because I couldn’t make normal phone calls. Cold calling was always awkward no matter how comfortable I was with making phone calls. Then there was finances, bookkeeping, the usual business stuff.

Returning to the Dilbertesque world

I returned to work a couple of weeks early from maternity leave on a part-time basis in hopes to convince management that I could do the job part-time. Management wasn’t receptive to the idea.

I wrote a memo with various options supported by data. Eventually, the company let me work part-time because there was another part-time employee who joined the team. We didn’t job share, however. Together, we made up one employee.

Eventually, she went with the wireless part of the business and I stayed with long distance retaining my part-time status. This let me build the writing business.

Dot com blah

I lost several clients when dot com went boom. This was a turning point because I could either scramble to get more clients or resign myself to a corporate career.

While feeling a pit in my stomach stomach I hit send and emailed people in my network including those I had interviewed for articles. I landed two new clients, one of which I met in person for the first time after working with him for six years.

I worked part-time until March 2005 when my company required me to return to a full-time schedule. By this time, I had plenty of business writing experience and a healthy portfolio.

The benefits… the benefits…

I couldn’t quit my job yet because my husband didn’t have health benefits. We had three kids, so it was important. My husband landed a job with decent benefits in June 2005. A month later, I retired from corporate America for full-time freelancing.

Just found this article on health insurance for freelancers for those who don’t have the luxury of relying on someone else for benefits.

Other becoming a writer stories…

Mary E. Lyons

Bob Younce

Many at how we became writers

Delaune Michel

Philip McCord

Catherine Shaffer

Catherine Leigh

Geoffrey Zimmerman (video)

Earl Pomerantz, TV writer

Jared Head (video)

Yours?

This is where headphones have an advantage. Just pull them down around your neck when someone comes to talk to you. But really… how hard is it to pull out the earbuds?

This is a business issue as many work environments allow employees to listen to audio while working as long as they use headphones so they don’t disturb neighbors.

Whenever my coworkers or manager stopped by, I immediately pulled off my headphones even if I could hear them with the headphones on. It’s about perception not about hearing.

Being deaf, I have a habit of always looking at people when they talk and expecting them to look at me even when I’m talking. Can’t tell ya how many times my hubby would have eyes someplace else and ears open. I just can’t talk to him that way though he doesn’t need to look at me to listen.

It takes a moment to unplug the headphones and earbuds and send a positive message to the other person that you want to focus on what he has to say.