Trying. I’ve been trying… It has been trying. And I am tired, but happy.
Lots and lots of life events in the last few months Important visit from the East Coast family branch was of major importance. My daughter graduated from college and I helped her move across country. I also visited family and the area in which I grew up for the first time since my mother’s death. Now my hubby and I are negotiating the new rules for the empty nest. So in keeping with my usual modus operandi of trying to do too many things at a time, I decided to participate in the February Nablopomo challenge on BlogHer. I wrote some good pieces but didn’t make the whole month challenge. My hosting company troubles ate up my “buffer” posts I’d stored up. Then taxes and converting our personal finance tracking software to a different platform did in the blog challenge. But our taxes are filed, and that is a good thing.
I write a lot, but I write in so many different places, I don’t think I can showcase my writing to its best advantage because it is so dispersed.
I tried having all my blogs be scraped and posted to my business site, but with Google penalizing multiply posted content, I don’t think that is such a good idea. This added to the dormant state of some of my blogs that makes me question whether it is worth my time to post new posts when I have new ideas to those that do not have an active, current readership. Plus the posting of personal blog posts on my business site just did not seem like a good idea, and I ended up censoring content I really wanted to share.
So I’m back in the search for how to blog my multiple passions, showcase all my writing, and still maintain some professional polish for my business.
I’ll keep you posted on what I figure out. How do you balance and present your different voices.
Gathering Up My Content
As you may have noticed, I’ve been re-designing this site. I have several objectives I want to achieve with these changes.
First
I write, create, and publish something every day, yet any one of my individuals blogs is ineligible for many of the blogging community activities in which I would like to participate because if I submit any one of my blogs, I am not thought to not write enough. Double Bind. So I have decided to take a risk and put it all out in the public and bring all my blogs together here together here on N. F. Hill, my business site, as a portfolio of sorts.
Second
I really wanted to move up into the world of professional template use. Free themes are great, there are some wonderful ones, but I want to be able to offer clients a bit more. So, to showcase these additional offerings, for this site I purchased the pack of themes offered by Elegant Themes. I tried many of them out and decided that I liked the Magnificent theme offered by Elegant Themes. I’m fine-tuning all the options within this theme and will probably remain busy with customizations for a week or so.
Third
I needed to test out an aggregator to collect and republish posts from other sites in the legal way such plugins were intended to function, even though these plugins also are the bad boys used to scrape sites. For some reason, it was difficult to find the correct plugin but the one that does, just what I needed it to do is WP-o-Matic. The indexed keyword I initially omitted using was the term autoblogging.
The term autoblogging sends shivers up my spine as the unsuspecting might not know that you can grab content from all over the web and claim it for your own blog. You can stop this particular plugin from being able to hijack your full content articles by making sure that when you set up an RSS feed that you do not set it to full content. Make sure you only provide excerpts of your blog posts when you set up Atom or RSS feeds for your site. There is usually a simple yes or no type question in your main set up panel for your blog that allows you to choose whether you want full or excerpted content distributed via RSS feeds.
The only changes I had to make to this site to get these incoming feeds to work were to add two plugins: SimplePie Core, and WP-o-Matic. I also had to make sure full content feeds were enabled for the sites from which I wanted to port content.