My Favourite Mommy Blog

When I decided to join Dance of Motherhood’s contest on favourite mommy bloggers, I did not need to take a lot of time to decide who she will be. She is Ree aka Pioneer Woman. I discovered her blog by accident, when she was mentioned by one EntreCard using mommy blogger who was also one of my favourite sites to visit. I immediately checked out the blog and man, was I addicted to her style of writing and the wonderful things she writes about!

The blog is called Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. Pioneer Woman is a mother of four and is married to Marlboro Man, her rancher/cowboy husband of so many years. She is sharing their love story in her blog, interspersed with posts about her exciting life as a rancher’s wife, which incidentally is the complete opposite of her once-glamorous rat-race kind of existence. She also has a food blog she named Pioneer Woman Cooks.

Pioneer Woman has a unique brand of writing and she is extremely funny, witty and smart all at the same time. Her photos are awesome, too! Check her out and see what I am talking about.

Dance of Motherhood’s contest is open to all. A lot of EC points are up for grabs, so if you want to join and try your luck, check out the mechanics of the contest here. Do watch out for her Father's Day contest as well. This lady is one generous blogger, I can say.

Gratitude

There is just not enough gratefulness in the world today. Look at me, I haven’t been too eager to thank my top EntreCard droppers and visitors. Shame on me.

To make up for that, may I just give recognition to where it is due – my second time only to do it since I started regular blogging middle of last year. To all my visitors who come and read and leave their comments here, thank you so very much. I know that even non EC users also drop by and I just don’t have any idea who they are. Nevertheless, I am offering my heartfelt gratitude to you all.

Checking my EC drop inbox, I have seen some consistent visitors. I think they deserve mentioning here and putting their links to increase their traffic. They deserve nothing less than that. Currently, these awesome bloggers are:

Fatherlyours.com – A father from the Philippines who blogs about his family and his life in general. I can tell by his posts that he is a caring and responsible family man – a rarity nowadays.

Happy family matters – If you are after great parenting and family tips, this is the place to go. An ultimate destination for those who love to hear wisdom on how to keep family life manageable and exciting.

Absolutely Mom’s - this is owned by a woman who comes across to me as kind and a good mom. Her site is like a journal of their family’s life. She mentioned that Amy Grant is her favourite singer – and I think Amy is great too, so that is one common ground we have there.

Cheaper by the Half Dozen – This has a lay-out that is easy on the eyes, even with ads on the fringes (which means this lady is brilliant at earning money from her blog!). I enjoy her posts, and with six wonderful kids, she does not run out of stories to write about. There is the occasional paid review as well, which, as we all know, motivates a blogger to keep going.

A Girl for All Status – A no nonsense blogger who tells things as they are - no fancy words here. Her honesty and skilled writing make the visit worthwhile. Even ordinary things that happen to her become great conversation pieces because of the way she presents them.

Mommieshome.net – This is one of the best mommy pages I have ever been to. It is brimming with posts that mommies will find relevant, wherever they may be in the world. Its lay-out, color and structure, though not too feminine for my taste, gives one the impression that it is a page to be taken seriously – which I find desirable in a blog.

According 2 Nessa – A mom who talks about anything that affects her – from family matters to politics. She has a healthy and funny take on life and this literally “infects her readers.

Humane Blogging Tips – This post is the place to go if you want help with serious blogging. The guy is keen on giving tips to pro bloggers. He comes across as a “blogging big brother” to me.

Puzzled Me – A blog owned by a teen-ager from the Philippines, expect to find stuff that interest the young. Puzzled Me mainly writes about TV shows he follows in the Philippines (at least as far as I have read so far). His latest post is about a book by a popular and brilliant Filipino writer. This goes to show that this teen-ager knows how to feed his mind as well. Hope he lasts for a long time as a blogger.

Dance of Motherhood – This is a fellow Filipina who has a funny way of recounting her entire family’s antics and daily happenings. If you want to be treated to stories about how a family can stay together and still have fun, check this out. By the way, she has a great lay-out too, which she recently updated and dressed up.

By the way, Dance of Motherhood just launched this awesome contest. She wants you guys to write about your favourite Mommy Pages you have a chance to win EntreCard points. Dance of Motherhood, is this enough for me to qualify? - hehehe! Kidding aside, i will write a post on this to be able to join your contest.

Next post, I will also mention the sites that provided me with the most number of clicks via the EC ads I placed in them. I want to do this as my way of thanking them – to introduce them to you and to testify to their effectiveness as carriers. Til next post, guys!

Blogging Addiction Now Officially Incurable

See You In Blog No. 2

I am officially declaring that my addiction to blogging has now worsened to something between incurable and terminal stage. I mean, this is the point of no return for me and I probably would be blogging for the rest of my life – even when my fingers would already be too shaky and stiff due to arthritis (heaven forbid!) and old age.

I have a few brilliant realizations in the course of two years of active blogging: First, that blogging is like opening up my soul to strangers – some to eventually become friends, others to remain as spectators of my life.

Second, I have proven that blogging is an outlet of my creativity, as well as an escape to a perfect world, where I can project myself to the rest of the universe as sane and smart as I would want to be (do I hear murmurs of assent or dissent?).

Well, as proof of this blogging addiction, I set-up another blog, which means that I am opening my life just a little bit wider for all my readers to see a more “enhanced” image of myself. If you enjoy my posts here, you might want to see another side of my being by reading my other blog. In this second blog, I am the Filipina who left her country for greener pastures.

My interests here are everything that has something to do with Filipinos living abroad – their inspiring or heartbreaking stories, their struggles and the issues they grapple with. There will also be glimpses of the lives of others who are left in the Philippines, who are valiantly making a good life in their native land. In other words, Pinoy Around the World is about me as a Filipina – whatever that symbolizes, and my views about this phenomenal mass exodus of my countrymen to populate the rest of the world.

I am now one of those who maintain multiple blogs and can’t seem to stop creating more. I used to wonder how on earth these people could keep up with the demands of writing for more than one blog. Now, I know for a fact that it is as natural as living my life with all its different and unique facets. I realized that blogging with different themes need not mean myself living a fragmented life, but just living life while giving the attention and focus every aspect of it deserves.

Copycats

As I am in the process of re-building my site (which I de-constructed following a hacking incident), I found this blog really helpful. To Jim the owner, thank you so much for your informative posts. Without your blog, I’d still be lost in the chaos and panic attacks that followed the hacking.

While in that site, I read about how the blog’s content was copied by some new blogger (who actually gave his being new as his excuse for plagiarism!) and what the owner did to stop that fake blogger from copying his content. Then, it hit me. What will I do if I get copied as well? Certainly, it will be another stressful experience in blogosphere for me.

When pop-ups started appearing in my site, complete with links to porn sites, I freaked out totally. I felt like I was violated, that my personal space was desecrated. What is most frustrating is, not knowing who did it and that unbearable feeling of helplessness – for how can I fight back at a perpetrator I know not? And, how much more if my content was actually copied? All these articles are mine and mine alone, written by me without references (except for only one post, if my memory serves me right – which was properly acknowledged, by the way). I hate to think of them stolen from me and openly displayed by a moron who cannot write his or her own posts.

One unforgettable experience I had about content copying was with this certain writing client of mine. Since we were only negotiating online, I did not fully understand what she wanted me to do with a particular article. I though the client wanted me to re-write a certain article in her website (not knowing that she actually needed an original article). So re-write I did.

After she received my output, she sent me an angry e-mail, accusing me of copying the article from different websites, complete with links to all these allegedly copied sites. Apparently, she ran the article on Copyscape and the check returned with various copied parts from different sources. That was so humiliating for me. Remember that I thought she wanted a re-write so that is what I did, but I am not in the habit of copying content en toto (as I believe I can write as well as other writers out there). Being accused of this is insult to the highest degree for me.

In the midst of the humiliation and anger at being unfairly labeled as a plagiarist, I tried to look for an explanation. I started checking those links that came with the angry email. Then I realized, perhaps, it was the client’s website that got copied by those fakes! You see, as I just re-wrote the article, I took a few parts from the original article from the client’s website (which could have been already copied by those sites). I saw nothing wrong with the article as it was well-constructed and well-written, actually so it was just a matter of writing from another perspective. So, these certain parts came back in the Copyscape check as copied.

In an attempt to clear my name (the client already reported to the site administrator where we “met” as writer-client that I copied content), I emailed the client telling her that perhaps, it is her website that was copied and not I who copied from those sites. She double-checked and then ended up apologizing to me. She could not believe that I was still civil with her after those accusations.

What I cannot comprehend until now is that, how come this client of mine never realized that it was her own content that was copied? It's either she did not recognize it as she also hired another writer to do the original article which I re-wrote, or that it is just her nature to jump at the first person she can accuse of some wrongdoing even before any verification. It can also be that (which is the worst scenario), she is the one who copied from those articles. I never made time to find out, really.

I can say that I grew up and matured as an online writer after that – as it can only be considered nothing short of a baptism of fire. Having maintained honesty and integrity in my writing, that accusation of being a plagiarist was way too low for me. That is why I cannot understand some people who steal other people’s work and post them openly as their own, as if they do not know that they will get caught somehow. These people are shameless, really – blatantly displaying their skills in stealing.

I am writing this as a reminder to all fellow legitimate bloggers to vigilantly check for anyone stealing your content, and also a stern warning for those of you who know nothing better than stealing other people’s ideas and intellectual properties. Make blogosphere a better place – write your own posts!

One-armed Momma

This is one of the most difficult times of my blogging life. You see, I have a problem with my right elbow at the moment – it is way too painful for me to be using it. It’s been like this for four days now – I’ve been the one-armed Momma of the house all those days. The pain goes all the way to the hand and fingers that’s why I am typing this post with just my left hand. It helps that I am a lefty so I can still do it fast enough.

However, it frustrates me no end that I have all the time to update my blog but unable to do so because of this pain. I am taking medication now so I hope it will get better by tomorrow, but then, by the time it gets completely healed (God willing), I’ll be starting on my part time job already. Will the frustration ever end?

Oh well, I hope blogging will not get relegated to a lower position in my priority list when I get to start work as I really love doing this.

Please bear with. See you next post!

Prospective Cyber Millionaire's Mishaps

I don’t know about you, guys but I sure have a hilarious time trying to find ways to earn extra money in blogging. It was totally an alien concept to me, prior to the latter part of last year. I envy people who post about their monthly target and actual earnings. For sure, I would get all members of the blogging community rolling on the floor with laughter if I post mine – or ignite their sympathetic tendencies, whatever.

It does not help that I am totally ignorant about page ranks (gosh! – for the longest time, I could not even figure out where to check my own rank!). And when I did find out how, I was not encouraged a bit by what the stats have to say regarding my site’s popularity (sigh!) or lack thereof.

Anyway, one funny (but absolutely puzzling) experience was my Adsense Google earnings. I have had the ads on my site for months now. In late February, I checked my account and I was over the moon to find that I got $.40 in total earnings! Imagine my joy in seeing that there is indeed a possibility to earn there. The ads were actually installed in my web by my friend – as again, yours truly was ignorant about these things back then (well, until now).

The following day after I saw my fantastic Adsense earnings, I checked my account again to prove that I was not dreaming. Lo and behold! My $.40 was gone. I wanted to believe that I was wrong to presume that Google charges me that much to check my account everytime I fancy doing so. But how else will I explain it?

Maybe, as some bloggers suggest, they removed it because I violated their rules. One thing I can think of is that, I didn’t have a disclosure policy back then. Again, I did not know what this policy was all about – remember, I am clueless to the highest degree. So, I tried to research and finally got to coming up with my own version based on the template that is available online. Unfortunately, I deleted that temporarily when I got hacked last week – but I am getting ahead of myself.

Then, I saw ads and widgets of PayPerPost in other blogs. As a web content writer and eBook ghostwriter, PPP is a very attractive proposition for me. I get to do what I love most – writing, and I get paid. Again, I fell face down on the mud of failure when I got rejected. They said that I should meet the 20-posts-for-the-last-90-days requirement. They were being nice. They actually meant that I am a lazy blogger who cannot manage to make a decent post at least three times a week.

Next attempt was BuyBlogReviews. That one got me pretty excited because I was immediately approved. When I looked at the opportunities, though, no one would want to take a bidder with a page rank of 1,100,000+++++!

So, I turned to surveys and pay per view schemes. I thought Hit$4Pay is the one for me! They were pretty easy and enticing because of the sign up bonus. Unfortunately, after less than a week in the business, I got all these nasty pop-ups and unauthorized links. Deleting all the widgets, including those belonging to Hit$4Pay removed all these nasty hacker’s tricks. I am not blaming anyone of my legitimate widgets for the hacking, but somehow, that experience just scared the wits out of me and so I decided to opt out of Hit$4Pay. So far, I haven’t re-installed my PPP and BuyBlogReviews widgets either.

I got approved by Smorty as well, but before I could explore my opportunities further,the hacking happened which was followed by my de-constructing the page. So far, I am concentrating on guest blogging and writing articles for article directories. At least I can still write.

These experiences opened my eyes to the harsh realities in the blogosphere. It is a place where the dynamics of early human communities are at play – might makes right, survival of the fittest and whatever! It is a competitive world out there and while all the people blogging their lives away are so nice and supportive, the fact still remains that one has to prove his worth in order to survive.

Whatever, at least, I am learning new things and I am realizing more and more that I still prefer to write and interact with other people more than anything – yes, more than those few bucks I wanted to earn initially. It was a harsh reality check, but one that made my love and passion for communicating and writing stand out more than ever.

Happy blogging, everyone!

Hacked

I do not know how to react to this latest development. I am very disappointed and disturbed as it seems like my blog has been hacked, as pointed out by Jojo, one of my visitors. Pop-ups have been appearing everywhere and now, I jsut discovered that my text has unauthorized links to advertisers' sites. This is totally disgusting and annoying. Again, it is my first time to be face to face with hackers and it is an ugly feeling.

If any kind blogger is reading this who knows how to get rid of these unauthorized links, kindly tell me how to do it as I have lost all inspiration to continue with blogging.

Thank you.

Angst of a Frustrated Blogger

My addiction to blogging is starting to be more apparent. What is frustrating for me is my inability to spend more time on it than I would want to. My hands would itch from my longing to write about something I want to post, or I would desperately want to mutate into a dropping monster so that my EntreCard rating will at least increase – but I am just unable to.

Being a full-time mom to two active kids, an online writer and an aspiring pro blogger are proving to be too much for me. I want to post every single day just to share my random thoughts but I have articles to deliver to my lead writer and boys to drop in school and fetch later on – and I almost forgot, those house chores, too.

Enough of this angst, though. I will now commit to do quickie posts as often as possible. I hope my visitors will take time to read them, though, as I usually put in too much effort to write each article. Moreover, I will also get more active in my card dropping efforts, as my rank is way, way below - almost at the bottom of the heap. How pathetic.