Getting A Life

I’m on page one!

I just checked to see where I was in Google search rankings and I’m at the bottom of page one now! I’m so stoked! This is awesome!

Of course that just means I’ll have to hold my own feet to the fire and make this blog something worth looking at, eh?

Site updates

I really, really, really need to fix some of the pages I have on this blog. I’ve been needing to do that for a while. What I’ve got right now makes the website look very poorly put together.

I’m also not 100 percent sure I will continue with the present blog layout. I may adopt the one I’m using for my homepage. We’ll see.

So anyway, if you’ve come here and thought, “What in the world…?” when you read my pages, be of good cheer. It’ll all be fixed soonish.

I’m on page 2!

Every now and again I go to Google and plug in the search term getting a life. In the past when I’ve done this I could not find my blog at all; if it was in the results, it was buried way back on page 5000 or something.

Well, now it’s the second result on page two of Google’s search results. Go me!

And this just goes to prove the person right that I was reading today elsewhere who was talking about some of the myths of search engine optimization (SEO). Basically, if some so-called SEO “expert” tells you that you have to purchase their services in order to land on page one Google search results, find another expert. You also don’t have to submit your URL anywhere. The way search engines work now, they find you automatically. For example, I am the only person on Earth with this first and last name combination, as far as I know. Because I have a homepage and use my real name, and I have also participated in several other sites on the Web, if you plug my name into Google I have first-page Google results. For another example, I opened a CafePress shop a few years ago that was based around a T-shirt design I did with a phrase that is fairly widely used in a certain subculture of which I was once a member. Long story short, for some reason my store was popular enough that not only was I on the first page, my store was the first result. I put forth almost no effort to get it found, either; all I did was take my design and plaster it on a bunch of schwag and direct some of my friends to it. That was a really cool experience, and I doubt I’ll replicate it any time soon (although it wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all if I did!).

We’ll see if I can make it onto page one with this site. I feel pretty optimistic about it; I need an excuse to write here more often anyway.

Note about yesterday’s post

I have a real problem with writing in that I am quite verbose and will ramble on forever if somebody doesn’t shut me up. I drove my professor nuts in English Comp in college, let’s put it that way (although he also gave me As). So the previous post is waaayyyy longer than I wanted it to be. I keep forgetting I’m blogging, and blogging seems to work better for readers with shorter attention spans. No offense and you know I love ya–I’m the same way. “Ooh shiny! *click*”

So it’s been set to private and I’m going to work on chopping it up into smaller pieces and maybe going slightly more in-depth on the different parts.

Meanwhile I’m looking at my spending from last month again and am contemplating another post, or maybe a series of them, going through where I think I spent too much and where I can do better. So stay tuned for that.

You know, it’s funny–this isn’t a personal finance blog! I’m just reeeally focused on money right now because until I get that part of my life straightened out, doing most other things I need to do in my life’s going to be difficult at best.

Having a little trouble

I’m feeling really blocked lately and I’m not sure if it’s a psychological symptom of something physical also being blocked in some way (I’m late and no, I don’t have to worry about that), or just me being cranky and extra-introverted with the hormones, or what. I did skip one day on my vitamins Saturday, but that’s all right, I did really well before that and I took them Sunday.

I need to catch up with my money-tracking, which has fallen behind a bit and if it falls behind any farther I’ll be in trouble. Then I need to post up the numbers to keep things above-table. (Or something like that. I’m horrible with clichés.) Then… yeah… I don’t know.

Update

Wow, I haven’t written anything here since Saturday! Oops! Well, I’ve also caused myself sleep deprivation, have been keeping up with the dishes, and now the weather is nice so we tend to go out as often as not. There’s a playground now literally walking distance from here, which was not there last year (as far as I remember). So.

I have also been taking my vitamins daily but Joe’s Goals is down so I can’t keep track. Boo!

I went through a glitch for a few days where I wanted to give up on this thing and re-organize how I blog and about what, but I think Aunt Flo must be on her way here because from time to time I get into that headspace where I want to just clear everything out and start over, and then my hormone levels change or something and it wears off. I’m so weird.

Hopefully I’ll write more later today. No promises though.

Quick update

1. I have started using a little widget called Joe’s Goals. It’s over there in the far-right sidebar. At the moment I am only tracking whether I take my vitamins every day. Every little bit helps.

2. I have signed up with PayPerPost. I have no idea what sorts of assignments I’ll be doing but they’ll always be as clearly marked as I’m allowed to mark ‘em so you’ll know I’m being paid to write them. Nobody gets to tell me what to put on this blog otherwise, so if the ad-type blog posts bother you, just skip over them.

3. Thea’s speech therapy appointment time has changed to 3:30 every Tuesday. We have the car again today, however. (I’m up late, not up early.)

4. I’ve redone my NetWorthIQ widget, which is also in the far-right sidebar. Hopefully this is the last time I have to restart it. I think I’ve covered every debt now. *sigh*

5. I have been picking at my finances and trying to figure out a sensible repayment plan on my debts as well as a monthly budget. And I’m annoyed at myself because I had gotten up to $40 in the savings account this month and now a good chunk of it’s been spent out again. If I can’t even manage to get $500 into the stupid thing and not touch it then how am I going to tackle the rest of my money issues? Part of the problem, I feel, is that my little girl’s dad frequently runs out of money before he’s halfway through his pay period (which is two weeks), so guess who picks up the slack from the already small amount of pocket change I have. It’s ridiculous; as I said to him during an unrelated conversation, I really despise seeing someone better off than me resource-wise who chooses to squander it all. Sheesh, if you don’t want it, send it my way!

Erm, but meanwhile, yeah. Working on it still. Going to be a nice interesting uphill climb.

Other stuff on me old mind but I’m sleepy.

Cha-ching?

Dude. My blog went up another couple thousand in “worth” (see widget in first sidebar, near the bottom). On top of that the blog has gone up 3 points in “authority” on Technorati. In both cases we’re talking about small potatoes but I’m still kind of jazzed. Then again, I am easily amused.

Sorry I have been quiet, and a few personal finance notes

It may not necessarily look like it because I think I’ve posted something almost every day this past week, but I have not been writing as much as I would have liked. When I’ve gotten online I’ve not had much uninterrupted time to both read and write, and it’s easier to read than to write when you’re constantly pulled away from the laptop, so I’ve mostly been reading. On top of that I’ve been falling asleep with my daughter at night a lot lately. I don’t know what it is. I guess I need a lot of sleep. I’ve been trying to keep up with my vitamins more, and I haven’t gotten all out of sorts again like I did a few weeks ago (and was probably anemic at the time), but I’m still not at 100 percent and probably won’t be for a while, it’s looking like, unless I go back on low-carb. And that is really, really hard to do right now.

So I am here, and I am reading some of you (hi! *waves*), but I’m afraid I’ve been boring in return. Sorry.

I’m working on restarting the whole keeping-track-of-finances thing. I lost track of my finances sometime during March and decided to just count my money again at the beginning of April and start over clean, including starting over in GnuCash. I have to take things in fits and starts for the same reason I have not been writing much here. Part of the process is streamlining a few things. For instance, I have been trying to keep track of not one but three cash accounts: one for the bills in my wallet, one for my penny bank, and one for my not-penny coin bank. The end result being that every time money moved from my purse to one of those banks or vice-versa, I had to make note of it. Yes, I know. I don’t get it either. I finally did a double-take, looked at what I was doing to myself, counted out my coins and dumped them all into the silver piggy bank that used to just hold the pennies. (It isn’t real silver, more like silver-color-painted-ceramic. But it’s pretty, and the color just says “money” to me.) And it’s all counted as part of a category named Cash On Hand now, to save my sanity.

(In fact, while I was at the credit union yesterday making a deposit, I noticed they have a machine where you can dump all your change. It’s just like CoinStar machines at grocery stores, except that when you take your printout to the bank teller, they don’t take a chunk of your money. So I think what I’ll be doing with our little coin collection is periodically taking it to the credit union and dumping it into my savings account. Which I probably might have anyway, but thinking I’d have to roll the coins before I took them in was triggering my procrastination reflex. Ha.)

I’ve been having an interesting time trying to come up with some visual symbol of my progress, too. I tried to set up a graph at No Credit Needed, twice now mind you, and I don’t think something’s working right because my account there keeps disappearing. That, or I somehow violated some rule, or they’re not taking new members. Whatever it is, I should probably use something else instead. I found a crafting blog where they had instructions for making bar graphs and I’ll probably go with that because it’ll let me track several items at once.

And just to give you an idea how much I get pulled away from this thing, I started this entry over an hour ago! I have to admit, though, that if I were to make a living at this, it’s a lot better to be interrupted at blogging than it is at, say, working on the phone.

Wow, the worth of my blog has gone up.

According to some little Technorati widget, my blog was worth $2258.06 or something like that. Now… *points to sidebar* …It has gone up a thousand bucks. Must be those two weird links I got that for some reason weren’t anti-spammed off.

Hey, I’m not complaining.