Linky Love

I’m So Unspectacular

August 27, 2008 by Tricia

My Toronto blogger friend, Lyndon from Lyndonology, tagged me last week with the Six Unspectacular Quirks meme.

I don’t do this kind of meme very often, but sometimes they are kind of fun and I think they give readers a better idea of who the blogger is, so I decided I’d give it a whirl.

If you’d like to participate in this meme go right ahead. Here’s the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Mention the rules.
3. Tell six unspectacular quirks of yours.
4. Tag six bloggers by linking.
5. Leave a comment for each blogger.

I’m going to leave out rule 4 and 5 because if I tag others I’ll just end up getting more tags! LOL

I think I have a lot of quirks so picking out just 6 won’t be easy! Let’s see …

1. I really like my feet being tickled. Not the tickle to make you laugh until you can’t breath kind of tickle … just nice gentle tickles with the tips of your fingers. It’s sooooo relaxing. I married Chris because he’s a good tickler. Ok I married him for other reasons too, but that was on the list. 😉

2. When I was a baby I went through a period where the only way my parents could get me to sleep was to put me on my stomach and pat my bum until I was bouncing like a basketball. I’d fall asleep that way and start crying as soon as they stopped! They’d have to take turns bouncing me for hours! Strangely enough I can now fall asleep without having my bum patted.

3. I detested – really really hated! peanut butter all my life. Just the smell of it would make me nauseated, but … a couple of months ago I got a craving for it and I now eat it regularly.

4. I don’t like most reality shows, but I think I’m secretly addicted to America’s Got Talent. I guess it isn’t a secret anymore.

5. My regular and casual visitors likely already know I like dogs and probably realize that I’m an animal lover, but did you know that I love reptiles? I kept reptiles for decades. We currently only have an Eastern Box Turtle and an Ornate Box Turtle, but we’ve had as many as 9 lizards and the two turtles at the height of our reptile keeping days. Back in 1995 I started my first website “Tricia’s Chinese Water Dragon, Reptile and Amphibian Care Page“. Yeah I’ve come up with better names for my sites since then, but that one’s accurate in it’s description. It’s a huge website that gets 1000’s of visitors each day and it’s had over 15 million page views since I started tracking stats. I’ll bet you never thought there’d be that many people seeking reptile care info, did ya? I’ll also bet that you didn’t know I’m a reptile guru!

6. When I was a child my parents had trouble getting me to eat my vegetables. Somehow my mom figured out that I’d eat some veggies, that most people like better cooked, raw. These days I’ll eat most veggies (cooked), but I still don’t mind eating things like Potatoes and turnip raw – in fact I think I prefer them that way!

Ok so was that unbelievably unspectacularly quirky enough for you? Feel free to do this meme on your blog or better yet leave me a comment with one of your unspectacular quirks!

________________________________________________

Earlier today I received an award from a blogger who clams she’s mainly a lurker. I love it when I’ve made a post that finally gets a reader to leave a comment or better yet, as in this case, give me an award that says:

Thank you Wendy! When I went to visit Wendy’s site, The Domestiquette I discovered that she’d given the award to 5 other great blogs which will now become part of my reading list, along with Wendy’s blog of course! BTW I’ve been to Wendy’s site before in my travels, but I’ll try to get there a little more often.

BTW Wendy I hope your internet connection gets better!

Like the previous tag I believe I’m supposed to pick out blogs I’d like to give the award to, but there are so many blogs that I really love! It’s too hard! So I think I’ll pass on that part of the tag, but if you’d like to award some of your favorite blogs with this award go ahead and copy the award image (do not link to it!) and give it out to your favs.

So what are your quirks? This inquiring mind wants to know!

aLinks WordPress plugin creates automatic links within posts

June 6, 2008 by Tricia

A few days ago I downloaded a WordPress plugin called aLinks. This plugin has been around for a while, but I’d never thought to try it until now, even though Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was singing it’s praises last September. I should have tried it earlier! This plugin has a ton of potential.

Bloggers link to lots of sites in their posts. They link to their blogging friends, they link to past posts, they link to great websites they’ve just discovered and some even add affiliate links to their posts. It’s just something we do. I’ll even go so far as to bet that most of the bloggers reading this post likely link to at least one site in just about every post they write.

Why not make linking easier?

The aLinks plugin has been designed so that you can set up a link within the plugins admin area and then never have to hyperlink to that phrase every again!

I haven’t set up the plugin on this blog yet as I wanted to try it on one of my smaller less trafficked blogs first while I test to see if it causes any CPU over use problems on my server. (remember last year I went through two web hosting companies because my sites were using too much of the shared servers memory!)

If you’d like to see what one of the links looks like once it’s set up check out this post on My World. I used the built in Amazon module to quickly create a link to an Amazon page that sells dog beds. Now whenever I write the words dog bed in a post on My World it will automatically link to that Amazon page for me. Not only that, but I set up the aLinks plugin so that it will find any of my past posts that have any of the keyword phrases that I created and it will add the links to them too.

I have a number of blogs and I make references to them occasionally so I spent a few minutes setting up automatic links for my various blogs. Now all I have to do is type in the name of one of my blogs and when I publish my post the link to whichever blog I mentioned will appear. Just that alone will save me some time.

Considering that I have so many blogs I also appreciate the export/ import feature. Once you create your list of keyword phrase links you can import them to another blog using the plugin. That’s going to come in handy once I’m done setting up the first blog I’m trying aLinks on!

This plugin has too many great features for me to describe in one post.

I’ll just finish by telling you that you can add modules to the plugin for a few affiliate programs such as eBay, Clickbank, Commission Junction, iTunes and several others, as well as one for Wikepedia. This means that along with the built in Amazon module you’ll be able to monetize your blog by scattering a few links to products you’re happy recommending. Link the word “book” to Amazons bestseller page and anytime you use the word book in a post you’ll automatically have a link that could earn you money.

The aLinks plugin has been updated recently to work with WordPress 2.5.1 so if you’re a WordPress Blogger consider giving this plugin a try.

Update – I don’t use this plugin anymore because it stopped working and there doesn’t seem to be anymore updates. In fact creators page no longer seems to exist. Sorry!

Finally joined Entrecard

April 25, 2008 by Tricia

Well I finally got around to joining Entrecard. I started yesterday and I’m happy to say that I’ve already seen an increase in visitors.

Of course to get visitors you also need to go around and visit other sites too. In my travels I’ve found some very interesting blogs. Right now I’m slowly going through the blogs listed in the Home and Garden category and I’m pleased to see that many of them are truly garden related.

I suppose I’ll eventually get some of my other sites listed in Entrecard, but I’ve only listed this one so far. If you’re visiting this site in response to my visit from Entrecard and you have a garden blog be sure to check out As the Garden Grows – that’s my garden blog.

The only frustrating thing about Entrecard that I’ve found so far is that if you’re like me and you have more than one blog – or a ton! and you’d like to list more than one site at Entrecard you have to set up a new account for each site. I’d love it if they’d allow you to list more than one site in an account.

Have you joined Entrecard yet?

BTW – Don’t forget to check out my Entrecard advertiser. My badge is just to the left in the sidebar. Todays renter is one of my new blogging friends. She has two blogs. I featured her main blog Roxiticus Desperate Housewives yesterday and now I have her Roxiticus Best Blogs site up.

I’ve already got renters/advertisers set up into May! I think Entrecard is going to keep me busy … as if I’m not already busy enough!

If you’re new here please stop and say hi. I don’t bite!

Updating the Do Follow Blogroll

April 19, 2008 by Tricia

Over the past week I’ve been slowly, and I mean very slowly thanks to my big allergic reaction earlier in the week, going over the Do Follow Blogroll that I maintain.

As anyone that’s part of the list or who’s spent time visiting the sites on the blogroll knows not all of the blogs listed on it are dofollow. Some have reverted back to nofollow.

While I know some have reverted back by choice and just neglected to inform me so that I could take their sites off the list, others might have changed blog themes or upgraded their blogging platform installation and forgot to turn their dofollow plugin back on.

Even I had a dofollow problem a while back. When I updated my Bad Behavior plugin it interfered with the do follow plugin. As it turns out the older version of the Google Sitemaps plugin I was using was interfering as well.

A month of so ago I updated my plugins to the latest Google Sitemaps and Bad Behavior plugins, and updated my permalinks (as some articles suggest you do that when you make changes to your site) and Ta Da … Lucia’s Linky Love dofollow plugin was working again.

So … if you happen to be using a dofollow plugin and it doesn’t appear to be working, try turning off all of your plugins and then turning them back on one by one. This might help pinpoint which ones are interfering with others. Also take a few minutes to upgrade your plugins as well and then update your permalinks.

This might just solve your problem.

Now back to what I was saying …

I’m going over the list and contacting any bloggers who’s sites don’t appear to be following anymore. If I don’t get a reply back within a reasonable amount of time or find evidence on the site, such as post stating they are no longer a dofollow blog, I’ll be removing those sites from the list.

The list is huge so it will take me some time to go over all of the sites.

If anyone does discover a site that seems to no longer be a dofollow blog I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know so that I could check the site for myself and contact the blogs owner.

BTW I’ve also been delayed in adding new sites so I’ll be going over requests shortly as well. If you request that your site be added to the list please be sure that your site really is dofollow and that it’s a few months old. I generally don’t add brand new sites to the list unless they are owned by a blogger who has other blogs that they update frequently.

Don’t cry over Spilt Milk – Laugh!

October 19, 2007 by Tricia

I guess I’m having a regular Linky Love fest over here today. I figured that while I was spreading the love I should also tell you about Spilt Milk – the blog.

Spilt Milk is written by Tee, a stay at home mom with two boys. Like Lisa, I know Tee from some of the forums that we both frequent.

Tee’s blog is a great site to visit when you want a laugh or when you feel like reading some inspirational stories like the story about the mother of a soldier who’s currently stationed in Iraq and how he wanted his mom to send him some silly string.

Along with humorous posts, funny videos and images you’ll find some mighty cool links such as the ones in one of her recent posts entitled Cool things to do with Google, the virtual pumpkin carving contest, or perhaps the video of the of the guitar player with no arms. I must show that post to my husband!

I really like her post with Balloon Art photos! Now that’s cool.

Poke around her site for a while. I’m sure you’ll find some things that make you laugh. Oh and as you might do with any site that you enjoy – don’t forget to bookmark her site or subscribe so you won’t miss any posts!

I’m So Unspectacular

aLinks WordPress plugin creates automatic links within posts

Finally joined Entrecard

Meta

Search this site

Blogs I Visit

Meta

Search this site

Tags

Blogs I Visit