Happy New Year, 2009 edition

I want to officially wish all my readers a wonderful, joyous, prosperous, and mellow New Year, just the way Burt Reynolds said it at the end of Boogie Nights, MELLOW.

In janitorial news, Blogger.com developed a glitch sometime after 12/29/08 that did not allow me to post for a while. I found a fix (simple really, changing my SFTP settings to use the IP address of madmadlife.com) but I'm so annoyed with Blogger's lack of help that I'll be moving the blog to WordPress before too long. The heat seems to be off since publishing now works, but at some point if you notice any weirdness here in the shape of a fugly "under construction" type of blog, you now know why. I'll try to keep the fugly to a minimum.

Go 2009!

How do you work this thing?

This blog has been live since November 2007, but I haven't actually announced it, formally, to anybody. It gets linked from comments I leave on others' blogs, it's listed in a couple of my online profiles, I've linked to it on my Twitter feed, and my posts appear on Facebook. But yesterday I went and added a link to Mad Mad Life in my e-mail signature, so all hell is sure to break loose as more people I actually know will now have access to it.

So I wanted to explain why there has been no formal announcement. These are my issues:

1) I'm not satisfied with my post consistency. It would be just like me to announce this great, new thing, only to abandon it. (See Turtles All the Way Down, currently on hiatus.)

2) I'm not satisfied with my voice. Neither my range of topics nor my quality of writing have yet lived up to what I had in mind. But at this point I've decided that that's OK. I think it takes all writers a couple years to find their voice (voices?), and I certainly have never been a consistent writer. I have time to improve.

3) I'm not satisfied with the site design. I'm currently using a modified template, and have always planned to create a new design. But I was never really worried about that. Content is king, and there are plenty of successful blogs out there that use completely unmodified templates.

4) I'm not satisfied with the site's functionality. I'm a Blogger n00b. I label each post meticulously, but where is the list of labels in the right column? And where is the "Older posts" link at the bottom of the home page? And why doesn't the logo link back to the home page from all other pages? I actually code web sites for a living so these are things I'm sure I can figure out how to add in, but I have yet to take the time. (But shouldn't they have been included in the template?)

Anyway, I have readers, and I even get some comments now and then, so I still probably won't be making that formal announcement just yet.

I hope you'll keep visiting...think of it as our secret little corner of the web. An exclusive club. (But I'll understand, really, I will, if you want to spread it around anyway.)

XOXOXO, Jen S.

How do you keep a blog going?

The whole idea of beginning and maintaining this blog was scary from the start. I went through a couple periods over the past 6 months where I had absolutely nothing billable to work on, and when I wasn't keeping myself busy watching Law & Order reruns on TNT (and USA, NBC, WPWR, and occasionally Bravo) I was thinking about what else I could do on the internet to generate income. Those hazy Turner Network Television-induced thoughts are partially responsible for Mad Mad Life.

So when I get into busier times, such as when I'm working for agencies on site, working for other clients at home, and busy with springtime activities (spring house cleaning, spring yard cleaning, and of course, the vegetable garden), it is difficult to figure out when to budget in blogging time.

When this blogging plan hatched, it wasn't time that I thought would be the problem: I thought ideas would be the problem. It turns out that figuring out an intelligent way to present my ideas is somewhat challenging, but the more pressing problem is budgeting time. Right now, for instance, I have about five small ideas that I want to go ahead and publish, but I'm a bit overwhelmed with deciding how much time to devote to each. How much I should flesh them out. Which one should I publish first? I have entered a phase of immobility that I need to snap out of.

So I'm going to just get writing. Meanwhile, tell me how you budget your blogging time. Do you have a special time during the day when you sit down to write? Or do you just fire up the blog software when you are taking a break from something else and an idea hits you?

First Order of Madness

How do you raise a blog?

Aside from one previous foray into the blogging world whose main purpose was to learn Movable Type, I do not have any experience with writing for the masses' daily (or near-daily) consumption. I've often wondered what it's like to have a writing deadline, say for a daily newspaper column. What would I write about? Where would I get my ideas? What would be my goal?

And so, much like my first blog, the purpose of this blog is to figure something out. No, not how to use Blogger, although that will be an added bonus. Instead, I'm going to try to figure out how to produce an interesting, useful, and worthwhile piece of written work, on an at least semi-regular basis, for the world to enjoy.

What's it all about?

I am currently subscribed to about 60 RSS feeds from a wide variety of web sites and blogs. Most of these feeds have a common theme: I pay attention to them because I want to learn something. Their topics range from finance to marketing to design to wine to personal care. A few exhibit some topic crossover, but not many. So I click from feed to feed, learning how to extend the life of my razor followed by how to invest $10,000 followed by how to create customer loyalty. This works for me.

But at the same time, just reading all of these life tips (I wanted to call this blog "Life Tips," by the way, and while I was disappointed when I learned that the domain name was taken, I now consider that idea painfully boring) gives me ideas of my own on a near-daily basis. I know other things you can do to avoid household clutter! I have other ideas about how to save money when you shop! And I know there are others like myself who share my interest of wanting to learn as much as possible about how to improve their lives in all sorts of ways. How to keep it all together.

So here I am. Right now I'm just getting the blog up and running; I hope to write a "real" entry within a few days. In fact, this post was unplanned and has been completely off-the-cuff; I just needed to type something to test out the "Publish Post" button I see at the bottom of this page. I decided it would make the most sense to type something that might be worth reading, at least someday down the line, rather than "testing ... can you see me?" Because then I'd have to go back and delete that post and think of something more appropriate to write as my first entry. And that's just giving myself extra, unnecessary work, which is something I am very much against and will write about in the future.

So this has been my very first idea-in-practice when it comes to keeping it all together. I hope this project proves useful to you as well.