When I first heard that Stephen Harper’s conservative government had decided to make the long-form census, which is received by 1 in 5 Canadian households every 5 years, optional instead of mandatory, I didn’t really give it much thought. But as time has gone on, I’ve come to realize how ridiculously stupid and short sighted this decision is.

Just a few of the thousands of things that this data is used for:

• Businesses use the data when deciding where to open and expand
• Schools use the data to plan programs including ESL and child care
• The provinces use the data for “virtually every spending and tax decision”

The current argument being used by Harper is that the long form census is too long, too invasive, and the penalties for not complying are too harsh. Harper has implied that there were many complaints regarding privacy concerns and the long form census in the past, but there is absolutely nothing substantiating that claim. (We’re talking about 50 complaints to the privacy commissioner regarding the census in the last 20 years!) The problem with making the long form voluntary is that you introduce a huge sampling bias because many people will not respond, particularly those in certain groups like new immigrants, low income families, and ironically high-income families as well. This means that these groups, who are often the ones most in need of government services, will be under represented in the results, making much of the data nearly useless.

Particularly enraging is the implication by Industry Minister Tony Clement that Munir Sheikh, the chief statistician at Stats Canada, okayed the change. This turned out to be a blatant lie, and Sheikh submitted his resignation in response to it, stating that a voluntary census cannot take the place of a mandatory one, and essentially implying that it would make his job of collecting reliable stastical data impossible.  I applaud Sheikh’s integrity and dedication to his work; if only our politicians had such moral stature!

Below is a copy of a letter that I sent to both my MP (who happens to be from the Conservative Party), and the Prime Minister. I encourage everyone to send a similar letter to their MP and the PM. Feel free to copy my letter verbatim if you so desire, or create your own. The PM can be reached at pm@pm.gc.ca, and you can find out your riding’s MP and his/her email address here.

Get politically involved! It only takes a moment, and I promise, it will feel good!

Dear <MP’s name or Mr. Prime Minister>,

I am writing to implore you to save the mandatory long form census. There is no credible evidence that indicates that any significant number of  Canadians finds it an unwarranted invasion of privacy. The current government’s assertions of this without any proof cast a poor light on them, and make their intensions seem questionable at best.

The benefits that a mandatory long form census provide far outweigh any inconvenience for its intrusiveness. How will governments – your own included – be able to accurately provide services for minority groups without reliable statistical data indicating where those groups live and what services they need? How will infrastructure planning be able to be done efficiently and effectively without accurate data regarding how people commute to work, where they have recently moved from, and what kind of home they live in? This sort of information is essential in creating government policy that serves the people. How can you serve the people if you don’t know who they are or what they need?

The argument that the mandatory long form census is an invasion of privacy is clearly rebutted by the fact that the information is kept strictly confidential and cannot be traced back to its originator. If this is in fact not the case (as I have heard reference to in relation to changes made under Paul Martin to release census data forms nearly a century after they are collected for historical purposes), then please deal with the actual problem of the privacy breach. Not by throwing the baby out with the bath water as is being currently done.

I am not often sparked to action to write my MP or the Prime Minister. Please realize that this issue is much more far-reaching than your government perhaps imagined, and that many, many people are not just willing to let it go without a fight.

Sincerely,

Anna Maste

<make sure to include your address here>

I’m sure that anyone out there with a laptop who cooks has taken their laptop into the kitchen, opened to the recipe-du-jour. Last week I was making a stir-fry, and my laptop came along for fun. The irony of course is that I’ve made a stir-fry dozens of times with no recipe needed at all; but for some reason I decided that I was going to follow this “how-to” page, which includes a few different sauce variations. So the macbook was on the counter, between the olive oil and the cutting board. On the other side of the olive oil was the stove. I think you can guess what happened.

The right side of my keyboard got hit, the left side was spared. But of course, the most commonly used keys are on the right side — Enter and Delete being favorites of mine. Plus it seems that I hit the SpaceBar with my right hand almost exclusively, I suppose as a side effect of being right handed. That’s probably why enter and delete are over there too, since 90% of the population is right handed like me. Interestingly, a little research on the QWERTY keyboard layout indicates that far more words can be spelt with exclusively the left hand than the right. Of course neither Enter nor Delete would have appeared on original QWERTY keyboards, so perhaps they were put on the right hand side just to balance things out a bit. So now I’m not sure if I should be happy that the left side was spared instead of the reverse. I think I’ll choose not to be happy either way.

Currently I can type, however it is painful. Instead of just sticking down as I would expect from keys that had been covered in coffee or the like, it seems that my keys just don’t register keystrokes unless I hit them slowly and with excessive force. And even then I sometimes have to hit them multiple times. For someone who has been touch typing for 20 years (God, I can’t believe that’s true, man I feel old), it is P-A-I-N-F-U-L.

Forexample,hereis a paragraph wrien asif I could acually touch type again. Doingi with my eyes closedso that I don’t sccumb to the reflex to correterrors. Ugh. Prety nasty, huh?

The internet is a vast repository of resources of course, so I was able to find some fantastic info on how to clean macbook keys after getting the dreaded “coffee virus”. Particularly helpful was the link to a flickr set on cleaning macbook keys after a spill. I spent a good deal of time reading through and laughing at all the different things people managed to spill on their keyboards: Coffee, juice, Coke, white wine, beer, hot cocoa. I didn’t see any other olive oil victims though, perhaps I’m a first. (Although I doubt that, as I’ve discovered in the past, everything you can think of is surely somewhere on the internet — oh, and a quick search proves I’m right.)

Unfortunately, my attempts the other night to clean some of my keys seem to have not been fruitful. They’re just as slow and unresponsive as ever. Maybe I didn’t clean them well enough (entirely possible, since I have great difficulty seeing anything as small as the mechanism that is under the keys and all its nooks and crannies). Or maybe olive oil just doesn’t clean up as well or as easily as those other sticky beverages. But let this be a lesson to all of us — unlike your bike chain, oiling your keyboard does NOT make it run faster or smoother!

Now, time to power down and try cleaning up the space bar one more time… wishmeluck!

Yes, I thought we might be a bit crazy. Camping with our almost-ten-month-old? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Hubby and I used to go back-country camping with friends each summer, but this summer we decided that car-camping would be a good introduction. I just can’t see little peanut sitting still long enough in a canoe for us to paddle anywhere. So we booked a weekend car-camping site in August at Killbear Provincial Park.

Of course, driving 5 hours to “try” camping with a baby still seems a little nuts. But we had a group of friends, all with young children (18 months to 4 years) going to The Pinery this past weekend, and they had room for an extra tent. The Pinery is only a 2 hour drive from home, rather than a 5 hour drive, so it seemed like a good way to test the waters. Worst case scenario, peanut freaks out and we go get a hotel in Grand Bend or drive home if need be. I wouldn’t say I was preparing for the worst, but I was definitely trying to be prepared for the unexpected.

But it turns out, the weekend was a resounding success. Just look at this happy face:

One Dirty and Happy Camper

I think that the success of camping with baby comes down to a couple of key points:

1. Give up on the idea of keeping them clean. The first thing peanut did was put a toy shovel that was covered in dirt into his mouth. If I had tried to keep him from doing that, I would have been pulling things out of his hands all weekend, and neither of us would have had any fun. Just accept that your child will eat dirt, and try to think of it as an opportunity to build a healthy immune system. You’ll have much more fun that way. (And much cuter photos!)
2. Bring a baby carrier. Our Ergo has been so well used, I think it may be the best loved baby item we have. Peanut spent time in it on my back while I helped hubby erect a tent, and on my front while cuddling in front of the campfire. If you like to do hikes on trails, it’s an all-terrain-vehicle when compared with your standard stroller. And when you just get sick of chasing baby around, it’s almost as good as having another set of hands to hold him.
3. Don’t stress too much about schedules. Napping schedules are nice if you have them when at home, but there are way too many distractions when camping to expect your little one to go down at a specified time. I just let peanut do his napping in the Ergo when he seemed tired enough. And as for bed time — well, that was a bit of a write-off. But again, baby in baby carrier, in front of the fire. He nursed to sleep, and I was able to sit there and enjoy the fire (and my beer) for a couple more hours. Much better than worrying about him waking up in a tent alone and freaking out.
4. Co-sleeping is your friend. Even if you don’t do it normally at home, when camping I can’t imagine doing anything else. We had three thermarests next to each other, and baby in between us, then a sleeping bag underneath and another over top. (Actually, two sleeping bags on top would be better — one for hubby, and another for baby and Mom.) Of course, we were lucky that the weather was really mild; had it been colder we would have had to think about putting peanut in his own sleeping bag or something similar.

The only stressful part of our trip was one point where peanut woke up at 2am fussing, and then his fussing turned to screaming. None of the usual approaches to calming him worked (nursing, rocking, turning on a light), and finally my hubby opened the tent door to fetch his sippy cup as a last ditch attempt at appeasing him, and as soon as the door opened and some fresh air came in, the crying stopped immediately. We’re still not sure exactly what happened — A bad dream? Claustrophobia? Just needed some fresh air? But we’re glad the screaming only lasted a few minutes. (Which is a few minutes longer than our camping neighbours would have liked I’m sure, but many of your fellow campers have kids of their own, so trust that they’ve all been there and are sympathetic!)

For more camping with baby tips, check out Babes in the Woods: Hiking, Camping & Boating With Babies & Young Children. I just got a copy before we left for the weekend so haven’t had a chance to get through all of it, but so far the advice on dressing your babe for cold weather is wonderful. It’s written by a mom from Alaska who has spent countless days with her babes camping, hiking and boating. There are very few books about this topic, so this one is a real find.

Bottom line: Camping can be done with babies! And it can be very stress free. I think peanut had more fun this past weekend than ever before. We’ve already started planning another trip for next month, before our big trip to Killbear. Biggest tip: remember to bring your camera, as the pictures will be priceless!

I figure that this is on-topic in one way: saving money. If you want to be able to stop working for the “man”, and work at home, making money online is probably going to come slowly. Very VERY slowly. And in the mean time, you’d better start saving your pennies. One awesome way to do that is by using cloth diapers (assuming your little ones are still in diapers, of course).

We’ve had peanut in cloth diapers since almost day one. (We had planned a home birth but ended up at the hospital, so had a disposable there — then used the ‘sposies for a couple more days until all the meconium was gone, because I don’t wish washing out that tarry poop on anyone.) But we opted for a diaper service, rather than the do-it-yourself cloth diaper option.

It should be noted that a diaper service is NOT really a cheaper option than disposables, although I will defend to the death that it is a more environmentally friendly option. (Despite what the diaper companies might have you believe!) In many scenarios it can appear to be the same price as disposables, however some friends who’ve done both claim that the disposables were much cheaper when the babe was older, as he used far fewer, and they could be found on sale pretty easily if you keep your eyes open.

However, I think there’s very little room for error in saying that do-it-yourself route of cloth diapering is much cheaper than disposables. The big downside is of course the laundry. I was definitely scared of the laundry when peanut was first born, and thus the reason we went with the service. But now that he’s older and doesn’t go through near so many dipes, I think it would be pretty reasonable. And so, we’re planning to take the plunge: buying our own diapers and ditching the service.

Yesterday I went to our local amazing Extraordinary Baby Shoppe (love that store!), where I picked up a half dozen Bummis organic pre-fold diapers. For the uninitiated, a pre-fold is essentially a rectangular piece of fabric, divided into thirds, with 8 layers of cotton down the middle, and 4 layers of cotton on either side. The idea is that you fold these layers together to make a super absorbent center, but unfolded it will dry relatively quickly after being washed. You can either just stick the folded diaper in a wrap cover and put that on the babe, or pin the sides to make a diaper that stays on by itself (which you would still cover in a waterproof cover of some sort).

The decision to go with pre-folds is still not 100%, thus the reason we only bought 6 of them. (We’d probably need 2 – 3 dozen to get by exclusively on pre-folds and not have to laundry daily.) At this point, I’m still in the pre-wash stage (the cotton doesn’t become fully absorbent until it’s been laundered at least 3 times), so I haven’t had a chance to really test them out. My biggest concern (apart from washing poop – more on that later), is that peanut is going to be so incredibly squirmy that it will be impossible to get them on. Our diaper service that we’ve been using provides fitted diapers, which are still a challenge to get on, but I’ve perfected the art of snapping them up while he’s crawling away; I don’t think I’ll be able to do that with a pre-fold.

Other options outside of pre-folds include getting fitted diapers like the ones from the service, or all-in-ones which have a cover and diaper all in one (duh), or “pocket diapers”, which are a waterproof cover with a stay-dry lining of some sort on the inside (usually micro-fleece), and a pocket in the back where you stuff an absorbent soaker. The advantages of the all-in-ones and pocket diapers are that they’re really just like disposables in the way they go on. The disadvantage is that they’re way more costly! I think with pocket diapers the idea is that if there’s been no poop you can just swap out the soakers rather than laundering the whole thing, but you’d still need a significant number of pricy diapers to get through before laundry day.

Pre-folds on the other hand are cheap ($25 for 6 of the “baby” size, which goes from 15-40 lbs, quite a bit cheaper for premie and infant sizes), and the only other expense is covers which we already have a bunch of from using the diaper service. We’ve really been able to get away with only 4 covers in each size pretty well — they rarely get soiled with the fitted diapers, as they generally hold in poop. I’m not sure if we’ll have the same luck with the pre-folds, however the covers can at least be washed by hand in the sink and left to dry in the bathroom and be ready to be reused within several hours if necessary. (Can’t say that for all-in-ones or pocket diapers!)

All told, I’m expecting our cash outlay will be around $150 for diapers, and another $80 for covers. If I’d started peanut earlier I would have had to buy other sizes of pre-folds, so the cost would be higher from birth, however even if you hit $400, you’re still looking at a much cheaper solution than our service (which is $20/wk) or disposables.

Of course, we haven’t yet touched on the laundry. All the cloth advocates I’ve talked to and web sites I’ve read say that the laundry is “way easier than you think”. I’m really hoping that’s true and not just being used to try and sell me.  Part of my fear is that we have a front-loader washer, which for all it’s environmentally friendliness, apparently does not do a very good job getting diapers clean without some intervention. Multiple cycles, throwing in a wet towel to “trick” the machine in to thinking there’s a bigger load and adding more water — I’ve read a bunch of things on how to get them to wash cloth diapers well, but it sounds like everyone just needs to tweak their own routine for their own washer, so that will be a bit of a learning curve. I’ll let you know more on that next week when I actually get to that stage.

Oh, and the poop. Hmmm… with a service, you don’t do anything, you just throw the poopy diaper in a bag, then put the bag outside once a week and they take it away. Peanut’s breastfed poop was not at all stinky, so I never stressed about smell. The poop is getting slowly stinkier now though, so having it in his room for a week (during summer especially!) is looking less and less appealing. Another good reason to move on from the service. However, given that I don’t have the dedicated diaper washers that they do at the service, I think we’re going to have to  - ach – start scraping the poop into the toilet. I’ve read that some people use a special poop spatula (a poopula?), and others have a sprayer (like on your ktichen sink) that they use to spray the poop into the toilet. I’m not sure yet where we’ll go. For this trial week we’ll probably go with the poopula, since we’re not about to install a diaper sprayer in our bathroom quite yet. Again, this is an experiment, and I’ll let you know how that goes next week. Hopefully I won’t get covered in poop backspray.

So that’s the plan. I still have at least one more pre-wash to go before we enter the full experimental phase. But if all goes according to plan, then hopefully we can cut out one big monthly bill. Wish us luck!

However I also know my son, and the prospect of leaving him without me for 8+ hours a day causes my chest to tighten up and my heart rate to soar, and I start stressing out, knowing that he’ll be fine for a couple of hours, but then he’ll be tired and hungry, and want mama’s milk and touch to fill him up and calm him down so he can sleep. And the thought of not being there for him just tears me up inside. There are many people who I’m sure will think I’m being a helicopter parent, or spoiling my little guy, but we subscribe to the attachment parenting philosophy around here (more so than I ever anticipated before having a baby!), and at this point I really still feel he needs me to provide those things for him, and so I’m happy to give them.

Before peanut arrived I wasn’t sure how I would feel by the end of my time off with him, so I left work with the impression that I would be back to full time in a year. But these feelings prompted me to ask my company if I could come back part-time after my leave was up. As background: I’m a computer engineer. I had been at my company for four full years (almost to the day) before going on mat leave, and the company was only 8 years old at that point, so I was relatively senior in the grand scheme of things. I have done some time managing projects but have never much liked it, so a couple of years ago I begged to get taken off and put onto “product maintenance”, which mostly means fixing bugs and corresponding with support engineers to help them diagnose software problems onsite. It’s not really a shooting star career path, but I really LIKE it. I love the small contained units of problems that each “bug” represents, and I love that little feeling of accomplishment when I’ve fixed one, especially the ones that are hard to track down. (And if you’ve ever worked with multithreaded C++ code, you can know that some of those bugs, memory leaks in particular, can be a real bitch to track down.) And I’m damn good at it. I know that the support engineers have been counting the days until I come back from leave. There are people who have taken over my responsibilities, but they just aren’t as good at it as I was.

Unfortunately, those support engineers are going to have to learn to live without me, because although I’m coming back at least part-time, I have not been offered back my old position. Which is a shame, in my opinion. In the back of my mind I think one of the other reasons I enjoyed that job was because I knew it was the kind of job that could easily be done piece-meal, on a part-time basis, and I was thinking about this day when I would want to cut down from full-time work. Perhaps I’m a little full of myself, but I thought that I had made myself indispensable enough in my job that the company would gladly accommodate me, just to keep me and my knowledge base around. That seems to not be the case. I have been offered a position in a different department, doing work which will be somewhat similar, however will require some work that I’m not too excited about (coding in TCL? Ugh.)

I find myself a bit torn. I know of several other moms in professional careers (software developers, accountants), who wanted to go back part-time after having kids but were told flat-out that it was not an option. So I suppose I should be very thankful that my company is making this work for me. But part of me just doesn’t understand why it has to be so difficult, and why I have to be made to feel like they’re doing me a giant favour. I’m in the lucky position where financially we could afford it if I wanted to stay home full time. So I feel like in some respects I’m doing them the favour by coming back. Am I just overly full of myself? Or am I finally doing what I was never able to do five years ago, which is to know my own worth when it comes to my career?

There was an interesting news story that came out back in April, saying that part-time moms have the healthiest kids, when compared to both moms who work full time and those who stay at home full time. There’s also lots of data out there that says that most mothers would actually prefer part-time work. So I find myself wondering: if it’s what most moms want, and it’s actually better for families, why is there not more support for moms to do part-time work? Canada’s current conservative government has made it no secret that they fully support stay at home moms, to the tune of $100 per child per month paid to parents, instead of funding institutional daycares. While I don’t suggest that I support this funding model, it raises the question: if having moms work part-time is actually more beneficial for the family than a stay-at-home-mom, why is there no government programs to encourage it? There should be incentives to companies to find opportunities for moms who want to come back part-time, or to facilitate job-sharing where that’s an option. Of course I realize that not all jobs are going to be suited for part-time work. You can’t be a part-time CEO of a company. But what’s really preventing you from being a part-time surgeon? Or a part-time lawyer? Could you not just take on less patients/clients? There are many possibilities here, I just don’t think they’ve been examined very thoroughly, probably because most companies (and governments for that matter) are run by men, for whom the issue is not at all a priority.

If most women would actually prefer part-time work, then we’ve got a very strong voice. I think maybe it’s time to make that voice heard!

A sample kitchen garden, courtesy of Google Image Search

With much help from my beloved husband, and great thanks to a peanut for being happy to be carried around on my back for a good little while this weekend, we are oh-so-close to being done. I’ll post pictures of it as soon as it’s really done, which I’m hoping will be by the end of the week because my neighbours have just arrived home from a 5-week trip and I’m sure they’re none too thrilled with the big pile of dirt that’s still at the end of our driveway. (Most of the dirt has been in the beds for a few weeks already, but 5 cubic yards of dirt is a LOT of dirt.)

But more on topic, I’m trying to get back into the swing of actually doing some development for my mom’s website. From the start I knew that wordpress, wonderful as it is, would not cut it for this site (it needs significant membership capabilities). So I did a bit of searching around and discovered Drupal CMS, and thought it seemed pretty darn cool.

For the past month or two I’ve been futzing with Drupal, trying to learn what it can do, what I can make it do easily, what I can’t make it do easily. With some effort and brushing up on my php, I’m sure I could get it to do just about anything I want, but ideally there would be lots of supported modules already written that I could use, since writing php modules is really not my goal. So far I’ve found lots of modules available that do almost what I want a lot of the time. And there’s still a learning curve I’m climbing, where there may be easy way to do something that I just don’t know about yet. So far Drupal seems cool but I’m suffering from a bit of a lack of documentation. There’s a limited number of books on using it, and perhaps I just haven’t read them enough yet, but I’m wondering if I’ve chosen the best option.

I know that Joomla is a pretty direct competitor to Drupal in the CMS world, but I don’t know anything about it really outside that. (Okay, I know it’s open source and free, which are two of my criteria for CMSes, which it meets.) So my question to any of my readers (all 3 of you) is: What do you know about Joomla? Do you have any insight into what sort of flexibility it provides as a CMS? If you have any knowledge of how it compares to Drupal in particular I’d love to hear that too. I know I could probably learn all this myself if I played around with it and checked out the modules available for it, etc., but I’d rather have someone else sum it up for me if at all possible. And my readers (again, all 3 of you) are oh so smart! Why not tap into that?

So if you were the wonderful reader who clicked through an ad on my site — thank you. Of course, I’m not allowed to encourage you to do it again, because that would be breaking the rules of Google.

It’s sort of amazing to think that a single click can be worth that much money though (speaking as if $1.12 was a lot of money.) I certainly see why Google would need to have a real strategy in place to avoid click fraud — that could add up really fast. I’ve read stories of companies clicking on competitor’s ads (with no intent on buying obviously) to drive up their ad costs, and Google somehow seems to have a strategy to catch them too.

Man, Google really does see all, don’t they? They are quite like “God” (if one believes in a “God”) in several ways — they are the nearest thing the internet has to an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent overseer. They reward the good (with good search rankings) and punish the evil (by banning them from Google search results, which is tantamount to being struck down by lightening for most online businesses.) They give you commandments to live by (“Thou shalt not use link schemes or other tricks to try and pull the wool over the GoogleBot’s eyes”), advice on how to live well (“Have a site map for users and Googlebot to crawl”), but keep back just enough detail to be mysterious and somewhat arbitrary. (Will using bold on keywords make Google notice them and increase my ranking? Who knows? Only thy holiest Google.)

I’m surprised that nobody has started a Google-worshiping religion yet.  Oh wait — of course, it does indeed exist: The Church Of Google. As usual, I’m late to the party. And my commandment examples are nothing compared to theirs. Oh well, no original thought in this post. (But at least it’s not plagiarized, which would be breaking commandment number 8.)

My mother, Marianne, and her partner Randy started traveling in their RoadTrek Camper Van about 10 years ago. They spent one entire year on the road, and loved it so much that they’ve gone on a 5-month trip every other year since then. They mostly tour around through the southern United States, going when it’s cold here to enjoy the warmth there.

I’ve always been somewhat inspired by these two, in that they manage to travel for 5 months of the year and live frugally the rest of the year so that they can make that work. But the really amazing feat to me is always how frugally they can live on the road. For their first year’s trip, I think they each spent about $5000 for the entire year. That’s including gas for an RV! And beer! I couldn’t come close to living that cheaply here at home for an entire year, and if I even tried I’d be bored out of my mind. And here they had the trip of a lifetime on the cheap.

Well, my mother realized a few years ago that she clearly knew a bunch of stuff that the rest of the RV community did not, so she decided to try her hand at writing an e-book to share all of her knowledge. The result was the first of The Frugal Shunpiker’s Guides. She got a website (www.frugal-rv-travel.com) up and running with the help of a friend, and it wasn’t too long before she had her first book sale. I remember her announcing that at a family dinner very proudly!

Fast forward a couple of years later, and my mother’s monthly income from her website and e-book sales is over $500 last I heard. (It may well be more by now, I haven’t asked for an update for a little while!) Her web page is very well read in the RV community, she’s had articles published in both online and print RV magazines, and even been profiled in The New York Times! How many people can say that about their mothers?

You can understand now why mom mom is such an inspiration. She took her passion and made it work for her. As I write this, she is traveling throughout Southern Ontario in her camper van, gathering information to write a guide for the area. I miss her, but we keep in touch via e-mail and video Skype, so she doesn’t seem so far away.

Thanks for the inspiration Mom! I hope that someday I can be as successful at making money online as you have become!

The main problem with this is that if both the posts and the tag pages get indexed, then I appear to have duplicate content, which I know Google does not look favourably upon. Luckily there is a way to easily avoid this, using a robots meta tag with “noindex” content on my tag pages. It looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

You’ll want the same tag on category pages, search results, and anything else that just duplicates content on your site. WordPress has a nifty plugin that does all of this for you very easily with just a couple of clicks, called the All in One Search Engine Optimization Pack plugin. I highly recommend it. However it seems that the “noindex tag pages” option is off by default. So after discovering the problem it was quick to rectify; now I just have to wait and see when I get crawled again and my results on google stop showing the tag pages.

You may also have noticed that I’ve revised the title of my blog. I’ve had my domain, skulegirl.ca, for a while now, however using “SkuleGirl” as my title is not really very descriptive, is it? (Most people won’t even have a clue what it means or where it comes from. “Skule” is what the University of Toronto Faculty of Engineering refers to itself as. I graduated from there, thus the nickname. Nobody else seems to use it anywhere, so it was nice to have a unique name all to myself!) So the title of the blog has been changed. From all I’ve read, having your most important keywords in your title is really important for good search engine optimization. And since this blog is mainly about trying to be a work at home mom, having those words in the title seems not only important but appropriate.

Must chase after my little man now… he has managed to perfect the art of climbing up the two steps out of his bedroom, but doesn’t have a clue how to go down them properly yet. When do kiddos start to understand the concept of “turn around and go down backwards”? Apparently not yet.

My next order of business will be to go through some keyword analysis and determine what keywords I want to target, and then start paying attention to the search results for those keywords to see if we’re moving up in the ranks. So we’ll leave this as a short post for now, but just be happy to know that you don’t actually have to wait 6 weeks for Google to come and index your site; with a couple of well placed backlinks, it seems that Google will make it to your site relatively quickly.