Gadget Update

So about a week ago I added some gadgets and asked what people thought of them... Well they stink. The gadgets themselves were neat, however the creator made them to hack and redirect sites that used them. After numerous tries and visits to the help forum I have removed all the "fun" gadgets. From now on we will be sticking with gadgets that come directly from google and amazon.com and no where else. Unfortunately that means more ads for you. Plus side would be potentially more money for me... we will see. At this point I am just very thankful to have my site back in working order. I did find an mp3 player gadget from Amazon as well, so that is kind of fun. You can listen to snippets of songs from all genres and choose to download them if you want. My daughter is having a great time with that one! Dance Mama! Dance! AND she hasn't gotten bored yet since it only plays about 30 seconds of each song.

My Boys Hockey Tournament

This weekend was the big finish to the mite hockey season in our area. They end the season with a tournament where all the teams play 3 games over the weekend and they actually keep score. This is the only time during the season where they keep an official score of the game. Friday night we had a wedding so we missed the game. The team won, Go Team! So Saturday we played our second game and the kids all played hard and had fun and won again. (Fun was the most important thing for our boys) So since they won both games they moved on to the championship game. We called all the Grandparents and the Uncle's so they could come see the game. The kids had a great time on the ice and we all had a great time watching them play. They won the game 6-4 and my oldest even had an assist! We bought pictures from the photographers at the game, how can you not when they get medals and parents aren't allowed on the ice... After words we went out to celebrate their Uncle's Birthday and their win at the Applebee's restaurant in town. Last game of the season and possibly our last hockey game ever and it was a great one. My only wish is that they take the amazing feeling from the games this weekend with them in everything they do.

First Examiner.com article uploaded

I applied and was approved to be the children's crafts examiner for the Twin Cities Examiner.com site earlier this week. When approved you have 3 days to upload your first article for review before it goes live on the site. Well ok I wrote and article for them to review already that's not published so I had that, but realized tonight that with everything else going on I hadn't even signed on! So here I am on the 3rd day signing in for the first time reading the user agreement (and yes I really do read most of those things) and figuring out how to upload articles and what sort of tagging and categorizing you need to do with each article.... Thank goodness it is one of the easiest sites I have ever had to navigate! So easy to load and categorize my article! Now I just hope they like it when they review it. It is supposed to be locally specific and for this one I wasn't sure how to make it local other than to say "buy your supplies at your local craft store" but I tried. The great thing about the examiner site is they also have training tutorials just like Redgage so hopefully when I have time later this week I can go back and view some of them. I think I will have to write reviews of local places to go with your child and make crafts in order to make it easier for me to make the articles more locally specific. That's alright, I love writing about what I do with my kids and it will allow me to provide a good article detailing what ages the crafts are appropriate and how big of a mess they make this way... When I get my profile up after the review I will post it here for anyone who's interested to view.

New article site

I have more news... A few weeks ago I applied to be an examiner at examiner.com for the Twin Cities/Minneapolis/St. Paul MN site. After having them review my ehow articles and my blog and requesting an additional article writing sample... I have been accepted! Today is just full of firsts. I will be, once everything gets set up fully the new childrens arts and crafts examiner for the Twin Cities Examiner. I am very excited to write for examiner.com it is another different form of writing for me. Unlike Redgage where post my photos, blogs, and links to my ehow articles, or ehow where I post only How To articles. This will be my first experience writing articles in a very specific niche. As you will know if you have read any of my previous how to articles or my photos I am a very multi dimensional interest sort of person. I look forward to writing still mainly how to articles in the childrens crafts niche and think I will have fun throwing in reviews of local craft activities I experience with my children as well. So as my internet writing experience seems to really be taking off at this point I wish all of you luck in your ventures as well!

Redgage Update 3/4

Well I haev to say if I loved Redgage before I don't even know how I feel about it now! I was checking my e-mail and noticed a number of comment notifications about one particular post, so I went on RG to see what was up and here is one of my blog posts featured on RedGage.com! Thrilled would definately be an accurate description. You see other content featured and you think "that would be neat if they thought something of mine was good enough to be featured" but when it happens for the first time the feeling is just out of this world. To be fair when I was thinking about content that would be featured I never really expected to see one of my blog posts there. I thought maybe one of the pictures of the Russian Grizzly Bear was a possibility because I have gotten such great comments on the photograph details. So I go on with my day and decide to check my e-mail again just before going to bed. that was a mistake! Now I'm all excited all over again because I also won the Daily Contest on Redgage! You can enter knowledge based content that you have written such as blogs and articles or documents (not photos or links which are the majority of my content) into a daily contest. The winner of the daily contest wins $25.00 My Redgage earnings went from about $0.60 to over $28.00 in under 24 hours! Now I know many of you reading this are my friends from ehow and Redgage so you know how this feels when you see a decent number for the first time. It's great! But now I can't sleep because I am all wound up... LOL oh well. At least I am wound up over something good and not something bad!

Blog Gadgets

So I decided I didn't like all the empty space that was on the left side of my blog when you scrolled down so I have added some "gadgets" and am wondering what people think of them. I am also wondering if anyone knows how to adjust the blog screen. I like the brown border but think the space could be used better with a smaller border. This would allow you the reader to not have to scroll down as often to continue reading posts. Also some of the gadgets I found I really think are neat. Like the Dads movie review, but you can't view the whole thing at once. How annoying to have to move from side to side to view a movie review. Very cool application though, specifically made to review kids movies for parents so you don't end up sitting through a dud! I also think the graffiti artist app is great fun, when you don't hve to scroll every 2 seconds... So at any rate looking for feed back and if no one else knows how to adjust the frames I will probably be taking them back down and looking for other interesting gadgets that fit.

Redgage Update March 1st

I am doing well at Redgage and working towards my goals. I did reach the 100 content upload goal I set for myself when I started well ahead of time. Because of this I have increased my goal to have 200 content uploads by the end of March. I can upload links to my ehow articles which I have done and hope that this will increase cross traffic between my Redgage content and ehow articles. I plan to start writing children's book reviews to upload as I don't want to post How To articles on more than one site. Between my own love of reading and my 4 children I feel this will be an easy and fullfilling topic for me to write on. I really want to focus on more knowledge based content this month now that I have many of my favorite photos uploaded. I am really enjoying the Redgage community and can't wait to see how this all turns out.

February ehow earnings update

Well I set my goals mid month and am doing ok at them. My $ earnings have increased significantly. I have made well over 10 times what I did in January. My article goal was to have 100 articles by the end of March so I am behind there with only 29 articles written... My 2nd goal for March was to double whatever my earnings were on Feb 28th by March 31st. I still think this is a reasonable goal and if I am able to buckle down and write the remaining 71 articles this month than there shouldn't be a problem. Not having the motivation to write in about a week when I need to write atleast 2 articles a day however will be a much greater obstacle to overcome. Many of my article will start to mature this month and hit that window of 4-6 weeks where they say you will see what your average views per month should be for that article as the search engines should have picked it up at that time. We will see how I do and I will try to update about once a week on my progress. Motivation is low even though I can see the returns, so any help to keep me motivated is appreciated.

Olympic Hockey

So disapointed that Team USA lost in over time to Canada. They rallied at the end of the 3rd period so I really thought they would be able to pull it off. They did however play a really great game, came home with a silver medal, and the golie was named player of the tournament. And rightly so. So that ends our hockey run in this Olympics but they played well and tried hard...