Weblog | taking control over money | Donna Fielding

My Mini-vacation

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:40:18 -0400

Just a short post to say that I liked being away for a few days. After working so hard on this site, I finally took a break from it: unfortunately, I don't seem to have missed too much. I was in two carnivals earlier in the week, and I will be following up with them tomorrow. I did not get any comments on either of my postings -- either no one read them or they read them and had nothing to say. I don't know, maybe, I need to be more to the point or something. I did change the site as per my husband's suggestion. I hope that it doesn't make it look as though it has no "content." But, I was indexing everything in the middle of the page which was taking away some very valuable real estate: so, I've created a list of topics and articles and I hope people will be able to navigate the site easily through this method. It does look better, I just hope you all get to see the real content. Well, I've spent over two hours doing that today, and I promised to stay on vacation until the end of today so I'm glad the work is done, but I think I'll put this baby on-line and out of my head for now.

I'm up for 5 days now

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 23:03:34 -0400

I can't believe how late I stay up at night playing with this new toy: my website. I mean, I could spend less time, but I'm trying to make it look good, and I want the ads to flow properly, and I really want to advertise things that I use and think are useful for people. I have a bottom section on each page called "keywords." Now, I think I know that this is where I can fill in those words that would presumably be used in a search. But, every time I close the thing down, it saves the last set of key words I made to some pages, leaves old ones on others, and puts the last set on a bunch more. In fact, the site does unexpected things often; however, given my learning curve, and my experiences with the more sophisticated sites, this is really great design software for a newbie like me. I can't decide whether to keep changing the keywords if they are just going to disappear or if I could somehow put them in my site.

I also want to mention a couple of wonderful things that have happened. By chance, I asked a question of a gentleman named Jon, and Jon was just so lovely to me -- he seems to be on a similar journey through a slightly different, and, seemingly, more successful route, than me. I think you might enjoy his website, here's a link: http://www.successpart2.com/ I used to fear being out there on the computer, I'd read web posts, but rarely post my own; I thought it was strange that people had social networks on computer sites. But, I think that the appeal is that no one in our day to day life really wants to know the details of our finances -- in fact, I've tried to keep this general enough so that those people won't find out. But, somehow, although I've decided not to be anonymous, I feel like I can't be judged by other people who are reading because we're all talking about the same things: our lives and what happen to be important in them now. I look forward to people giving me feedback -- I'm going to start sending out my site to some of my friends and family (the supportive ones) -- and, my own family can't believe that I actually learned enough to create this. So, I feel good.

On the practical side, I spent the better part of the morning trying to get through current paperwork that I needed to take care of: bills and getting accounts into quicken. I spent little time on researching other sites, but I did add a couple of applications to some affiliate programs. And I did get some hits on the site -- adsense showed me that. That was actually exciting because it made me feel like the site can do all of the things I want it to, including, possibly, bringing in extra revenue. I will write an article on all of these things when I feel like I have something to add to the conversation. So, I'll publish and look one more time, and then off to bed -- hopefully, tomorrow really is another day.

Day 2

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 12:41:43 -0400

I promised myself not to work on my website today and to go to the beach, so, what did I do? I got up and checked my e-mail to see if I got on some of the blogger sites I tried to join, and I got an e-mail telling me how to add my blog to two sites. I don't know if that will help me to get the website out there, it's still not on the Google search engine -- I'm not sure how long that should take, I hope not forever -- I'd like to see how people react to this site I've created. I did test my "comment" feature on the blog, and it appears to be working; now, I've got to figure out how to delete the comment and how to show comments. It's all a learning experience. When I am up and running and searchable, I'll explain the things I'm doing to try to get out there in more detail. I'm off to the beach.

And so it begins

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 18:54:30 -0400

This has been, by far, one of the hardest pursuits I have ever attempted. I have been a lawyer, a legal writing instructor, and a teacher in my careers. I love teaching -- it inspires me beyond end, and it keeps me young and up to date. I'm also privileged that I am good at it: so I feel rewarded and wonderful and proud of the work I do. But, learning to be a good teacher while having two growing children and a husband, a home, and a dog, left me burnt out when it came to keeping organized and maintaining our house and our bills. My husband never wanted to be the bill payer -- he does not want to work all day and try to deal with all the issues that finances raise. So, for several years, we've buried our head in the sand and watched all the debt and all that paperwork and all that clutter pile up.

I'm never through learning how to be a better teacher. But, I do have certain aspects of that job down, and, this summer, I have concentrated on learning how to be a better financial manager -- most women know just what I mean, our jobs in running our homes and our families' lives force us to develop new and better skills every day. But, I never expected that the path to financial health would really excite my curiosity so much that I would do the type of research I have done. And, then, I ended up here -- writing about my family's actual financial situation and how painful it can be, and, hopefully, helping us and you from the lessons I've learned. And, believe me, there are some people who are young who could benefit from those lessons -- this could become a "how to" on what people starting out in their adult lives should NEVER do.

And then came the website. I read this article that I referred you to earlier, and off I went -- learning about web site creation and design and making choices I had no business making probably, but I did it anyway -- because I just felt that I have learned so much lately, I should try to make it useable. Well, I tried four different types of web software before I settled on Sandvox, and figured out I needed the "Pro" software because it allows you to paste in your own "code." And, I've learned about linking and trackbacks (something that tells you how people got to your site or where else your site is linked, I'm not sure which), although my research has left me a bit hazy about how I use them exactly and I still don't know how to work them in my site, and I have about 20 websites in my "how to make a website" favorites folder in my Safari browser. (That was 2 days ago -- now, I think it's up to 50).

Today, I got ads from ad-sense, a Google program, and affiliated with companies whose products I've used and who I can link to once I get into the affiliate program. So, the increasing revenue portion of this website, which is fairly short, is the part I may end up blogging most about because it is a whole entirely new thing. I have no idea how any person is going to find this website -- which is just a shame because I think lots of people would feel better if they knew that they were not alone in making some financial messes, and those same people could save tons of time and energy if they follow some of my advice. At the least, I hope that I help to motivate people to start working on their financial situation now, rather than letting it just go. So, today, I researched a lot about getting the website out there -- I've submitted it to Google, but, so far, it doesn't appear in any index because you need people to link you to their sites and stuff that requires me to look into a whole slew of other steps to take to get the website out. But, I feel good -- I found software to make the site and learned how to use it, I found a web-hosting service, www.itsamac.com and I started finding a bunch of sites to tell me how to get my site out there.

Today I affiliated with Amazon and Quicken -- because I use their products and mention them elsewhere in my site. I still need to understand how to make "trackbacks" work for me, and how to get on an index -- I've done what I can for that other than go blog at every site in the world. Should I be proud yet? I've learned so much in a short time -- that's worth being proud of.

I've definitely worked too much in the last few days on this site considering that the rest of the family probably, no, definitely, wants my attention. So, that's all for now. Also, I'm going to post this into the carnival I mention in the sidebar. Go check it out. Modified on:

Weblog | taking control over money | Donna Fielding

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My Mini-vacation

I'm up for 5 days now

Day 2

And so it begins