Identity Crisis

I’m having a blog identity crisis.

My blog turned 11 years old at the end of last month. Eleven years of writing, recording, growing, maturing – some of it is lost but the majority of which is here for everyone to see, read, judge.

Instead of making plans to celebrate the occasion I’ve been making plans to move on. Badgered by a past of Pants and PHP and “the e-famous girl who ruled the blogosphere” (not my words) & I’m not really any of those people any more. The Pants lost their novelty, the PHP is strictly work and it’s amazing how quickly one loses their childless following when the only thing they’ve posted about that week is poop.

Except I can’t do it. I can’t move somewhere else, I can’t remove years and years of being me; even hidden away I’d still be the same person and people would still remember.

So here I sit in blog limbo, having a little identity crisis, wondering how I move on from this feeling of being lost at sea.

Posted on: May 10, 2013 · Category: Interwebs 21

Random Question

To lurkers and non-lurkers alike… how long have you been reading my blog, roughly? Just being extraordinarily nosy :)

Posted on: October 6, 2012 · Category: Misc 65

Tots100, Nofollow and Hypocrisy

This afternoon, I ended up on ‘Bloggers didn’t Come Down in the Last Shower‘, a post by blogger Sally deriding SEOs for their approach to bloggers, PR and paid links. Sally has a problem with PR/SEO types who disguise their intentions or outright lie about the potential damage to blogger’s search engine rankings caused by paid links that don’t carry the nofollow attribute.

No problems there, I agree completely. I get several e-mails on a daily basis from link builders who’ve clearly not read my blog or contact page who make out that they can provide me with content that’s the next best thing, beneficial to my site, bla dee freakin’ bla. Yawn, delete.

Sally links to a post she wrote for Tots100 in the beginning of her post. Unless you’re a parenting blogger, you’re probably unaware that Tots100 is a “community” that ranks bloggers who’ve signed up “using a unique scoring algorithm that reflects a blog’s popularity, influence and engagement”. That’s a toplist, to those of us who’ve been around since the 90s. Sally, incidentally, is the founder of Tots100. Anyway, the post discusses nofollow and why it’s important to add the attribute to paid links. It’s not the most technically accurate but given the audience is generally non-technical, I’ll forgive it that.

What bothers me about the Tots100 post, and the “bloggers aren’t stupid!” follow-up, is that it completely fails to mention the link to the family holidays website (‘familyholidays.co.uk’) contained within the Tots100 badge that all participating bloggers must place on their website to be included and/or ranked in the toplist/index/community/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. The link to the family holidays website is provided without the nofollow attribute. Now, the bloggers adding it to their sidebar might not be paid for its placement but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Tots100 don’t include this as a friendly gesture to the company behind familyholidays.co.uk. To spell that out for you: Tots100 will be financially compensated for their affiliation with the family holidays site. Financial compensation = it’s a bloody paid link! See update below

So why the hypocritical double standards? Haven’t figured that one out yet…

Update @ 20:11

Sally from Tots100 has stated that they are not paid or compensated for the links to the family holidays website. The links, across hundreds of blogs, are purely there (quoting #43687):

[..] Because it’s a great company, we’re happy to be associated with them, and that’s about as far as it goes.

I would argue that they still need to be nofollowed (untrusted link) but at least this means that, apparently, Tots100 aren’t slapping dofollowed advertising on member’s sites.

Posted on: May 17, 2012 · Category: Interwebs

Why are Mummy Blogs so Ugly?

I know, it’s true, I probably announced at one stage that I’d never read ‘proper’ mummy blogs (or blogs written by mums, whichever way you look at it). I also said I’d never talk about poo, and look how that turned out. Here is my confession: I, queen of the hypocrites, am a champion “mom blog” reader. If it’s well written or contains suitably awesome pictures, I will dip in and out for as long as my attention is held.

Except, so many of these blogs are just… ugly. Sure, not everyone can afford to hire an awesome designer like Lilian to sex their blogs up but even if you’re stuck using a free theme, there’s no excuse for these:


I tried to anonymise these – it’s not my intention to ‘out’ anyone in particular

Different size ad’ banners, blocks overlapping columns, seemingly random mixtures of fonts / sizes / colours etc. :(

I considered maybe it was just my long standing bias against ad-supported blogs making me grumpy, but Jamie has advertising spots and hers don’t look like they were vomited onto the page. PhD in Parenting has tons of adverts, well over my comfort zone even, but they’re all evenly sized and organised neatly.

I get that these bloggers are not (generally) web designers and that most have better things to do with their time (like mopping up sick and all the other fun crap that comes with having kids) than moving buttons and banners and content blocks 3 pixels to the left / right / up a touch, just one more tweak … I think I just turned into an awkward client. Ahem.

Perhaps surprisingly, given my previous rants on PPP etc, I get that many of these blogs generate that little bit of extra income per month that enables some parents to be at home with their kids (and for that reason alone I’m tempted to spew viagra links all up my sidebar). I just think that you can achieve a nice looking blog without distracting my eyes with spamerific banners and buttons, and without breaking the bank. At the end of the day, the content is more important than the adverts, and if you think otherwise then you’re seriously missing the point.

Posted on: May 9, 2012 · Category: Interwebs

Where did all these posts come from?

I’ve done some thinking, and have decided that for now I am going to say ‘stuff you’ to anyone who wants to try and dig up shit / stalk me. As such I’ve imported the posts I created whilst I was “away”; nothing exciting but may flood your RSS feed (for which I apologise).

So, tentatively ‘back’…

Posted on: May 4, 2012 · Category: Updates