February Blog Challenge – Days 18-28

I know, I know.  It isn’t even February anymore.  However, I have legitimate reasons for being so far behind.  I am a great daughter and have been caring for my mother while she recovered from surgery.  Granted, that’s just since the end of last week, and before that I have no excuse.  Anyways, I’m going to do my best to just finish a damn month here.  🙂

Holy Crap, Award x3

I was nominated for the Beautiful Blogger Award by Mr. Purple, *here*.

I am super surprised to get nominated for 3 different awards so close together.  Or even at all!  Thank you so much!

I Got Another Award!?

I have been nominated for the Liebster Award by kateginnivan, *here*.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!  I still don’t know what I’m doing here.  I looked it up on Google and I think I’m doing this correctly!

I’d like to thank the Academy…

Ok, as promised, here we go!  I have waded through the plethora of comments and likes and shares and reblogs and follows and amazing, amazing feedback from my Freshly Pressed post.  I have finally found a way to rig my laptop so that it functions enough to not just crash every time I try to use it.  I am was caught up on my daily post challenge….oh well.  Down to business:

I was nominated for the Sunshine Blog Award by Tech Tard.  The original post is *here*.

Thank you so very much for nominating me for this award!  I have no idea what I’m doing, but whatever.  Picture, nominations, and answers to questions….I’m just jumping in head first 🙂

A Complete & Utter Loss For Words…

This ^ is where I’m at right now.  And  those of you that have followed my blog for a bit could probably attest to the fact that this is not normal…

Big news in my world is that I randomly and unexpectedly received a notification on my phone today that I had been mentioned in a Tweet by Freshly Pressed for a recent post I had done.  I thought to myself “That’s strange.  Freshly Pressed is big news for WordPress.  But this is Twitter…”  So I load up my Twitter, expecting it to be something random (since the only Tweets I get mentioned in are the fake accounts promoting porn), but I find that it is, indeed, Freshly Pressed.  I’m still thinking, “Okay, okay.  But it’s not the Freshly Pressed.  There’s no way.”  I expand the Tweet to see that it’s already been retweeted twice.  I figure I should probably promote myself a bit, even if it is a mistake, so I retweet it, too.

Then I open my WordPress app.  Mind you, the WordPress app is insanely finicky and often just crashes.  It’s nearly impossible to do anything aside from using the reader on it, but it does send notifications if someone comments on one your posts, but checking notifications and replying to comments more or less turns into a fiasco for me every time.  For any of you that see a comment or a reply with a typo in it, it’s because of my blasted phone and its horrible attempt at autocorrect and it makes me want to scream.  So generally I tend to only use the phone app to read other blog posts.  I tap on the FP icon and it loads up the page – with my little letter right at the top – and I almost immediately begin getting comment notifications.

Stop Copying Me!

Maybe the most popular sibling phrase aside from “Stop touching me” and “I’m not touching you.”  Annoying – yes.  Illegal – no.  Immoral – maybe.  But what if you’re not a kid anymore?  And what if the copying isn’t your actions or expressions, but your hard work?  Your blood, sweat, and tears, just stolen right out from under you…

So in case everyone hasn’t noticed, I can sometimes obsess.  I am a worry wart and once I get an idea, it can sometimes take over my entire life for a span of time.  This is why I’m lightweight freaking out right now about the safety of my blog.  That’s right, folks: I’m talking about plagiarism.

*cue insidious music*

found on Tumblr

In all seriousness now, I really am having a moment of panic.  I was looking through some other blogs today and saw that one blogger had a Copyright statement in their sidebar.  Before seeing this, I though my simple “Copyright © 2012/13” at the bottom of my original pieces was just fine.  But after seeing this I thought, “Hmm.  Maybe I should make one of those statements, too.”  I decided it couldn’t hurt to add on to my footers.  By this point, however, I couldn’t remember the blog that I’d seen it on.  I decided to Google it and try to find a general copyright statement to put on my blog.  That’s when all hell broke loose…

Party Time, Everyone’s Invited!

I stumbled upon Jessica and her idea to host a blog party a couple of days ago.  Basically, she is requesting links from fellow bloggers of their most viewed blog post to be emailed to her by Monday, the 28th.  Then she will be sharing the links to the posts from the 31st to February 3rd.

Umm, hello…can we say it all together now: great freaking idea!  This is such a good way to connect with other bloggers, find blogs that you may never have seen without this, and get your own blog out there to even more people.  I just sent her my blog post information to be included in this shindig, and I think everyone else should, too.  The more, the merrier, right?

If this sounds interesting to you, go check out her post about it on her blog Everything under the sun and more for the full description and how to join in.  The direct link to the blog post is below.

While you’re there, check out the rest of the blog, too.  Her blog is full of great stuff.

Then join in on the party!

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• It’s a Party.. And you are invited! (everythingunderthesunandmore.wordpress.com)

Freshly Pressed/Stale and Wrinkled/None of the above

I keep coming across blog posts giving the how-to’s for getting a post be “Freshly Pressed.”  It’s great, really.  These writers who are talented, creative, and witty enough to be awarded a Freshly Pressed entry sharing their ones and twos on how they got to where they are.  But I see it as less a calculated formula to blog success and more just good-fortune and luck.

Write about something interesting.  Of course, that would be helpful to have a successful blog.  However, the things that interest me probably don’t interest even a fraction of other bloggers on this site.  So are you then supposed to write about something that the masses find interesting, rather that something you find interesting?  Well, that just wouldn’t work either.  I don’t care how good of a writer a person is, if they are writing about something they aren’t interested in or don’t care for, that comes across in their writing no matter how hard they try to camouflage it.  I imagine that a dull, drab, borderline anti-“whatever the subject matter is” blog post will be even further from being Freshly Pressed than an intriguing, excitable post about a topic with a smaller fan base.

Make sure you make clear and concise statements, using good grammar, yada yada yada.  Is this supposed to be a surprise?  A writer should, at all times, ensure that their writings are full of real sentences with proper grammar unless is serves the writing to be done otherwise.  For example: I am well aware that “yada yada yada” is gibberish.  However, it was useful to the point I was attempting to make in that sentence, which was that I felt that finishing that sentence was pointless because the information it would have provided should be common sense for any writer.

Venting…

Ok, I know I’m being a little impatient, but I can’t help it.  My second blog, The Cleverness of Us All, is not coming along the way I envisioned and the Twitter account for that blog is lame-o.  I want to figure out a way to just incorporate it into this, my original blog, but I am struggling to make that work.  For whatever reason, I’m having a terrible time at coming up with ideas and solutions and it’s killing me!  I normally don’t have such a hard time putting my creativity to work to solve a little road bump, but I am now.  And this has me second guessing whether I should be putting my little funnies out there in the first place.  If it is a good idea that should happen, it shouldn’t be so complicated to make it work, right?  Bleh, it’s making me want to grit my teeth.  Really, it makes me want to scream, but that would be both overdramatic and frowned upon inside my place of employment…

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• I’ve Gone and Dual-Blog Done It (imthatkay.wordpress.com)

I’ve Gone and Dual-Blog Done It

I decided to just go for it. A couple posts ago, I wrote about the random statements and pictures I was collecting from friends and last night/this morning, on a whim, I created a second blog and a second Twitter account to post these up. I don’t know how it’s going to work out. I may condense it later so it is a part of this blog and my original Twitter account, but as of right now I couldn’t find a way to make it seem cohesive. But on a fickle person, so I will probably change it multiple times before being happy with it.

Anyways: this second blog is entitled The Cleverness of Us All (at clevernessofus.wordpress.com) and the Twitter account dedicated to this is @ClevernessOfUs so check it out if you’ve got the spare time!