Be Not So Busy

Ok, this is one of those posts that I have to start with a disclaimer.  This post is not written with any person in kind, aside from myself. It is not about you, your friend, or that person we both know, smile at in passing, but don't really like much. It is not. To paraphrase Carly Simon, "you're so vain, you probably think this post is about you." However, to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine's facebook status the other day, if the shoe fits, feel free to wear it.

Reassess, yes that's the word.  I love blogging, I'm endlessly grateful for the opportunities it affords me and my family, to try new things, go to new places and make new friends.  But how much of my life does it swallow up, and what is the real impact on my family?  I'm finding that rather than enjoying experiences, I'm spending more of my time lining up the perfect photo, thinking about how to word things for the blog.  Rather than living in the moment and having fun, it's all about how I can write things up into a blog post. And that's not the point.  I didn't become a parent so that I could blog about it, I started blogging because I became a parent. Parenthood is the primary thing, not blogging.  A blog post takes maybe an hour to write, then you add in the time it takes to take and edit the photos, the thinking time, the time promoting on Facebook and Twitter, and even then I hear from those "in the know" that I'm not doing enough, I should be on G+, Instagram and Periscope (wtf is periscope, anyway?) as well.  I can't do that, I'm busy with my family, and my job.  Blogging is meant to be fun, not an obsession.

Be not so busy being a parent blogger that you forget to be a parent.  That's my new motto. I've had a bit of time off from the blog, you may have noticed. I'm back and refreshed, but with a new attitude. Quality not quantity in terms of posts, quality AND quantity in terms of family life.

Dear Spammers

Hello, you crazy spammers with your very loose grip on the English language. Welcome to my little corner of the blogosphere. I'm glad you're so interested in what I have to say, especially those hundreds of you that have taken the time to comment today.

Seriously though. Enough is enough. You aren't even trying to be relevant, and I'm fed up of my email beeping every 30 seconds to tell me you've commented again. You're not going yo get published you know.

So please, listen to Robbie and Bobbie, Squeaky's bee friends, and buzz off. (This is a family blog, I was thinking something much less polite.)

Slow blogging. Very slow blogging.

There's a new movement going around.  Going around at much the speed of cold custard, or proper tomato sauce (when you haven't hit the bottom of the bottle).  Non-Newtonian Fluids, that's the bunny.  Sorry.  You didn't come here for science lessons, even if it is something I learned from Richard Hammond & that bloke from Big Brother on Brainiac.

New movement, yeah, that's where I was.  That movement is Slow Blogging.  What?  Well, it does exactly what it says on the tin.  Rather than broadcasting every thought that passes through my tiny little mind to an unsuspecting public, taking a bit more time over it.  Quality rather than quantity.  And a bit of reading more, posting less.

Now I'm all for this.  I've got a job (with slightly less hours than last month, but hey).  I've got a child.  I've got a husband.  I've got a house, and a garden.  All of these take up my time, some more than others.  I also have a blog.  A nail polish habit.  And somewhere along the line I have to sleep.  I can't post new blog posts 3 times a day.  I can't read other people's blog posts who do.  Slow blogging is clearly the way to go, for me at least.  If you have the time & energy to blog multiple times a day, and have that much to say, good luck to you.  If I had the time, I still wouldn't have the content, and no-one really wants to read about my washing up, whether the bin men have turned up this week, or my theories on the location of my missing socks.

So, that's my new mantra.  Quality Not Quantity.

However, as I haven't written anything more useful than a shopping list in the last fortnight & I've got the blogging equivalent of the DT's,  here's a pictoral guide to our Easter Holiday adventures.

We took a trip to Ikea, where I was remarkably restrained and didn't buy any random household items I didn't really need (partly because they've discontinued my beloved mini roasting tin).  We did, however, buy a large cuddly broccolli, and treated ourselves to hot dogs & lingonberry pop.  Hot dogs are, apparently, the best food in the entire world.  Closely followed by ice cream.

We went to the shops in town.  And accidentally bumped into De Li from Waybuloo.  I think she was heading to get herself a pasty, or visiting one of Merthyr's fine clothes shops.  Seriously, we've actually got some nice shops in town now.  I wasn't even expecting De Li to be there, she just happened to be there the same time as us. And by some amazing coincidence, the photographer who was taking pics for the local paper of De Li & assorted children was the same photographer who took the pictures at our wedding.  He didn't recognise me, mind you I wasn't exactly dressed the same!

 I caught up with an old (not Old!) friend from uni, and spent a happy afternoon with a 3 year old, a 6 year old, 2 bemused husbands, and a selection of owls at the Owl Sanctuary at Ebbw Vale.  An absolutely amazing place, that it seems very few people know about, despite the popularity of the neighbouring outlet village. They rehabilitate injured wild birds of prey, and provide a safe & secure home for birds who can't be released back to the wild.

Squeaky even got the chance to handle a Barn Owl, but as you can see, she was a little bit suspicious about the whole idea.  Either that or plotting a way to use the owl to take over the whole world a la Dr Evil.


And finally, as if that wasn't enough adventure for ANYone, never mind a three year old with attitude, we went shopping.  Shoe shopping.  And I made the amateur mistake of letting her have some input herself.  Admittedly, she hasn't had new shoes in ages, because she has surprisingly slow-growing feet.  And there's a small (ok BIG) part of me that's really jealous & wanted these shoes for myself.  But someone chose a pair of Hello Kitty hi-tops, and there was nothing I could say that was going to change her mind.  Please note the expression of smug satisfaction on her face.  I am beyond jealous, but I could only find them up to a size 1, and I'm a 5.  And just to rub it in, she's refused to wear anything else all week, and one of my work colleagues has threatened to disown me if I find a pair in my size.

So, that was our Easter break.  How was yours?  I've even run out of Creme Eggs now.  Must be back to normality.

The LOLS of blogging

I've recently changed my email address for contacts from my blog.  My old one's still in use, so if you've got that, you still get me, but I have a new "just-for-blogging" email account.  And today it received it's first piece of spam.

The fact the name of the sender, and the name they claimed to have in the body of the post was a giveaway, as well as the obviously not-native-speaker use of English.  But they were offering to write me a guest post about keeping zombies at bay.  I'm tempted.  I really am.  If only they were writing in half decent English.  In fact, I might write my own post about the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse, maybe?

It makes a change from the spam commenters, who are getting progressively less relevant.  Don't ask me how to buy a house in California on a post about hair dye!  I neither know or care, try a real estate forum.

Dilemma

I have a million things I want to blog about right now.  Some of them might even be interesting!  However, I don't have a huge supply of brains to write coherent posts with, and the spare braincells I do have are being directed firmly at the issues I want to blog about, rather than blogging about them.

There's one post I desperately want to write while it's relevant, but to be fair, I feel I should approach the company in question for comment prior to publishing.  There's a question.  What would you do?  It's not a review, it's a genuine experience we've recently had with a major company, who many of you may be using in the near future, and a case of not delivering on what they promised and failing to communicate this.  The post is going to be strictly true & accurate, not emotional, but a wee bit angry.  They haven't asked me to write about them, they don't know anything about the blog at present.

But thinking about other media, if this were a magazine, there would be a box at the bottom saying "Xcorp declined to comment".  If it were TV, Esther Rantzen or Lynn Faulds-Wood (I'm old, OK?) would chase the CEO down the street with a camera crew asking why they let their customers down.  Should I, as a blogger, follow the same principles of balanced reporting & right to reply?  Or should I say "My blog, my opinions, like it or lump it"?

Juiced!

Being the cheeky blogger I am, when I got wind of Google's Juice Bar coming to Merthyr, I thought it sounded just the kind of event I'd like to try and muscle my way in to.  The Juice Bars are designed to help small businesses get online & make the most of digital media to grow and support their enterprise, but when has that stopped me?

A cheeky email to the nice lady from the council's Business Development unit (or words to that effect), and I was the proud owner of an invite to an 8 a.m. (yes! That early) Juice Bar session, just next door to the Welsh Assembly building.  Eyes on matchsticks, I turned up, raring to go, or at least raring to get at the coffee!

I didn't really know what to expect, to be honest. I was sort of thinking it would be a classroom type seminar, maybe a dozen or so people, a bit of a presentation & a chance to ask a few questions if you're the "stand up in front of a room" type (I'm not!)  So I was quite shocked to find that there were just 3 of us there, each with our own personal advisor, to ask questions as dumb or complicated as we liked.  Phew!  That said, for all I didn't know what to expect, my personal Google-dude certainly didn't expect little old blogging me first thing in the morning asking him questions about no-follow links & self-hosting!

I'll be fair, he did explain the no-follow link business to me in words I understand.  Pages appear higher in google searches the more times other pages link to them. As businesses figured this out, other people set up websites that were basically link farms, page after page of links & no content, and charged businesses for including their links, in order to increase their google ranking.  Google didn't like this much, and changed their super-secret logarithms to try and exclude these results.  In doing so, they also manage to pick up sites, such as blogs, where there are large numbers of links per page, often where the links have little or no connection to the site's main content.  They also try to identify "paid-for" links, i.e. paid content, one of the main ways is by identifying link text that appears across a number of blogs in a short space of time, as this is just another way of businesses buying page ranking.  Both the business "buying" their ranking, and the site where the links are found can have their ranking reduced.

For a blogger, the effect is twofold.  Firstly your blog appears lower on a search results page, if at all.  And secondly, to a PR company, your blog appears less influential due to your new reduced ranking.  Which means less PR approaches, less review opportunities, less prizes to give away, and in all essence, less readers.

However it's not all bad news.  He did say that if your link content is relevant to your blog content, it's less likely to set alarm bells ringing.  And blogger does now have that nice no-follow link button if you are hopelessly html-illiterate like me & need a widget to do everything for you.  If you're the kind of techie bod who uses the html editor instead, you're smart enough to know what you need to include in a link text to make it do no-follow anyway.  Or google can tell you.

I came away with my head full of no-follow links, a load of suggestions for monetizing my blog (which to me always sounds as though it's a way of making it into an impressionist painting of some waterlilies), the answers I really wanted to hear about self-hosting, and a goodies bag with a google stress-ball!

And if you're still wondering, yes, there actually was juice at the juice bar!

Help! I Am A Blogger!

I've been tagged by Joanne, over at The Blunt Truth in a meme, started over at Dragons and Fairy Dust all about, well, blogging. I have days where I think to myself "why am I doing this?" so the reflection is no bad thing.  Anyways, here goes...

What is your blog about?
The subtitle says "Growing up together in the South Wales Valleys", and that's still a fair description. It's a record of Squeaky's journey through childhood, my journey through parenthood, and a place where I can say things I don't always want to say on other parts of the internet, never mind the real world.  Oh, and reviews.  Sometimes it gets a bit review-heavy, then it'll settle down to all personal stuff for ages again.

When and how did you start blogging?
March 2010, when La Squeak was still a teeny tiny newborn, and I was dazed, confused, and pretty much stuck in the house with nothing better to do between feeds.  I'd had a personal journal on another platform for some time, but I wanted my journal of my life with Squeaky to be separate from that, and so this blog was born.  I never really started to write having a readership in mind, it was for me to start with, then I discovered, bit by bit, that other people wanted to read it too.

What was your first post?
Welcome Aboard the Squeakytrain way back over 2 years ago.  (I know, I missed my second blogaversary as well. My first completely passed me by as well. For some reason March tends to be a bit of a blur.

Does blogging affect your life and if so how?
I'm determined that blogging will only affect my, and Squeaky's life for the better.  That's the reason my posting can be a bit erratic, as I have to grab my moments when I can, mostly either late at night, or very early in the morning, so I guess it affects my sleep a bit!  Blogging has given us some great opportunities to try out products and experiences we wouldn't otherwise have had.  I'm not a full-on review blogger, I don't have the time or the energy for that, and I live too far from London to go to PR events, but our little corner of the internet has given us buggies, toys, food, books, clothes, music, dvds, amongst other things. It's given me the chance to learn loads, and to share some of that information with others.  It's taught me a lot about how companies and PR agents work, and through writing, and the events I have managed to attend, allowed me to gain some wonderful new friends.

My next big opportunity, and a good example of the above, is being sponsored by Cow & Gate Growing Up Milk to attend Cybher.  My role with Growing Up Milk as a mumtor has given me access to the results of various surveys and studies carried out by Cow & Gate, which I've been able to share with both my online & "real-world" friends, and it's been a source of information that's been very useful to me when I've had concerns about Squeaky.  I'm a visible and real face for a brand that I genuinely use, and I'm honoured that they've agreed to sponsor me for an experience I wouldn't otherwise have the chance to attend.

What do you love most about blogging?
Well, the opportunities, as I mentioned above.  The friendships I've made.  The support and community of bloggers, via blogs, twitter and facebook.  I even love the semi-regular dramas (mostly the great blogger/blagger debate), though I prefer to sit on the sidelines with popcorn & watch.  I love the complements I get, vain as I am, when someone says they like my writing, my photos, my adorable munchkin it gives me the warm fuzzies inside.  And creating a memory for Squeaky as she gets older.  One of my friends said I should get the blog printed for her for when she grows up.  I'm still not sure about that, there's quite a bit about poo and my boobs back in the early days, but the idea is there.

I'm not going to tag anyone, I need a shower, and Daddy will be home from work soon. But if you want to take part, consider yourself tagged.

For Information

I seem to have attracted the attention of a gaggle of spam commenters. As a result, all comments will now need to await moderation before publishing. It's nothing personal, I'm just not letting them cover my blog with their rubbish.  Ta.

Blogcamp Bristol - What a day

Just (well, 2 1/2 hours ago now) got back from Blogcamp Bristol.  My head is spinning with ideas, was to improve this here corner of the blogosphere, and wondering how to do half the things I haven't done before.  I've sorted out my pages, so I've got a contact page for all the lovely PRs to get in touch with me, without having to mooch around for my email address, I've got a disclosure page, tomorrow's going to be spent in clarifying & a little bit of archive editing (is that cheating?)

I think I need an idiot's guide though. Seriously, I can make a link, and add a picture or video, but that's about the limit of my talents.  I felt kind of like the newbie (and I've been blogging 18 months now, there were people at Blogcamp who'd been blogging WEEKS and they were all smarter than me)

I've got to admit, I've been kind of lazy in promoting my blog til now.  I've only shared on facebook or tweeted about posts that I'm really proud of - or I really wanted a response on.  That's going to change. If I've learned one thing today it's to get your profile out there. (And that bit about advanced twitter searches, but I'm keeping that as a big hairy secret)

So all in all, I had a fabby day, met some brilliant & inspiring bloggers, and have come away full of enthusiasm.  And germ. Thank you to Sally and the team, all the speakers, and everyone who came to Blogcamp Bristol for making it a great day.  (can you see what I'm doing here? Title, 1st para, etc!)

My brain has stopped

I was going to update tonight. I had at least 3 blog posts in my head that I was going to write.  I was going to tell you about my Graco U'Go, I was going to tell you about our trip to the new soft play place by our house, and I was going to tell you how excited I am to be going to In The Night Garden... Live tomorrow.

Instead I am full of all the hayfever in the world, and have new eardrops to try and kill the ear infection. That makes 3 different lots of anti-biotics I've put in my ears in the last 10 days.  And it meant I couldn't take Squeaky swimming this week either, last week I couldn't because I was at the hospital and doctors trying to get the ear infection sorted.  I'm getting fed up of this now.  Can I have a new head please? One that's not full of snot & gunge?  I'll look after it.

Oh well, SqueakyDaddy's on proper late shifts tomorrow & Sunday, that gives me more time to blog after Squeaky's in bed, so there may be posts.  There may be MANY posts. Don't be scared.