• How did I survive before RSS feeds? Once upon a time I used to simply bookmark blogs in my browser, then visit them one by one. Do you have any idea what a tedious process it was to read blog entries on different blogs that were in different fonts, sizes, and colors?
• I really wish Twhirl offered the option to filter by lists. Twhirl was my Twitter client of choice, but once I began following hundreds (literally) of bloggers for product review/giveaway purposes, I switched to TweetDeck, since it gave me the option to filter columns by lists.
• Does anyone use Myspace these days? I still maintain my profile, but I’ll go weeks between logins.
• Facebook or Twitter – what’s your preference? I prefer Facebook for keeping in touch with family members, but I prefer Twitter for keeping in touch with online friends and acquaintances.
• I need to go update my WordPress installations as soon as I get the chance. People: never slack on this! Doing so can mean the difference between a safe blog and one that winds up getting hacked.

While I don’t schedule tweets all of the time, I do it enough that I would be quite lost without the handy service. Yet oddly enough, Twitter themselves does not offer this handy service. Fortunately, the following free third party Twitter applications do:

• Hootsuite.com”>Hootsuite
• TweetDeckTweetDeck

More and more social media companies and brands and general advertisers are taking advantage of scheduled tweets, and I myself am taking advantage of them.

• Wordless Wednesday
• You Capture
• Photo-a-Day

When it comes to digital photography, I’m not a professional, but I have produced some pretty decent shots. However, I refuse to “go into business” with photography. I did that with blogging, and to be honest, while I still love blogging, doing it for a living has definitely sucked some of the fun out of it. I won’t make that same mistake with photography.

Right now it’s about 10:00am (eastern time), and my blogging is a little distracted because I am watching Mad Men. Oops. This is why I generally don’t watch TV while I’m blogging, though I know a lot of bloggers do so all of the time. Then again, they may not have the work load and deadlines that I do, so in their case it’s probably not a big deal if it takes them several hours to bang out just a few blog entries.

• white background
• medium gray text
• darker gray text for headings as well as bold and italicized text
• generous line spacing
• arial or trebuchet ms for fonts
• pink, orange, green, or yellow for links and other non-gray colors

It’s no surprise that these elements repeat themselves over and over again in the majority of the layouts I put together for In My Bag (my product review blog) and Jenn.nu (my personal blog). But after 12+ years of making layouts for my personal blog, and 5+ years of making layouts for multiple blogs, I won’t lie: I’m in a bit of a rut. More and more time goes between one layout and the next, and my more recent layouts look a lot like one another. Oh well. I guess what really counts, mroe than anything, is that I still have a passion for what I do, and my layouts have “my” signature look to them. ♥

Today’s 5 tips for Friday are related to social media networking, and they are as follows:

1. Check in often! Even if you don’t update every X amount of hours, or every day, try to send in a status update several times a week, so your followers know that you’re still around, and that you’re still worth following.
2. If you maintain multiple social networking profiles, make sure that your profiles are consistent in terms of profile blurbs and photos.
3. Find new followers! Don’t sit and wait for people to find you.
5. If you’re a company, post coupon codes or other special deals to entice your followers to see what you’ve got to offer.
6. Even if you’re not a company, share deals and great finds anyway!

I’m not sure how I feel about bloggers writing books. Well, let me re-phrase. I don’t care if bloggers write books. More power to them. But I probably won’t buy them. Too many times bloggers are guilty of regurgitating their blog content into books – Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com is certainly guilty of that, as are a few others. How can you do that? It’s one thing to include a few memorable anecdotes (and include links to the actual posts the anecdotes were taken from), but it’s quite another to basically print out entire posts from your blog and stick them between the front and back of a book.

It’s for that reason that I will most likely never purchase a blogger’s book. As the old saying goes: why pay for the cow when you can get the milk for free?

But that hour gives me plenty of time to find cute things, as evidenced by the following:

Hawaiian print blanket (who wants a luau now?!)

Adorable braids with flowers woven through them (source)

Black tulle dress for a little girl (source)

Are you on Pinterest? If so, add me – I’m kissmykitty.

• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Tumblr
• WordPress

Of these, Blogger is probably the best choice in terms of freedom of layout customization and widget usage. WordPress.com allows you to install free themes, but charges premium fees for the use of premium themes, or if you’d like to edit stylesheets or other theme files. Tumblr offers both free and paid themes, with some customization choices for both. LiveJournal uses its own strictly-proprietary platform, and its strong community feel can be off-putting to non-registered visitors to LiveJournal-hosted blogs.

As far as my personal recommendation, I would honestly recommend WordPress. Chances are you’ll wind up using the self-hosted version of the content management system, so it makes sense to use it when just starting out with your blog. Plus, you can easily migrate a free-hosted WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation. If anything, the limitations with themes may inspire and motivate you to settle on a domain name and “upgrade” to your own space a little sooner.

There used to be a few pay-to-tweet companies floating about, but most of them closed down, and the one I really liked, Be A Magpie, was bought out by Sponsored Tweets (also owned by IZEA, the same “umbrella” company that owns PayPerPost and Social Spark). Sponsored Tweets is pretty decent – on average, they pay about $1.50 per tweet. What’s annoying is that there’s a minimum $50 account balance required before a payout is made. You initiate payouts yourself, which is pretty nice. But you can initiate payouts sooner than the $50.00 minimum, though there’s a $2.00 fee for that.

Paid tweeting is something I partake in from time to time. It’s not reliable as far as paying the bills or filling my vehicle’s gas tank, but it’s enough to pick up some groceries on every now and again, which is nice.