There are so many challenges when you work at home. Scheduling, feeling professional, networking are all more challenging when you work at home.

Whether you’re telecommuting from a job you could also do from the office, have a work at home job you only do at home or run a home business, it’s easy to find yourself separated socially from your coworkers, people in your industry, anyone you don’t actually live with.

There are plenty of things you can do to not feel so isolated, both personally and professionally. You have to find the time to fit social time into your life, but it can also be good for professional development.

The Internet, of course, is a great resource. You can use forums such as the one here on Home with the Kids to meet other people who work at home. You can use instant messages to communicate with coworkers and email for longer messages. Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping your home life and your professional life separate when you work at home can be a real challenge. If you fail to set enough boundaries, your work life can run right over your home life, leaving you feeling pressured to keep working and unable to enjoy the time with your family you would like to have.

Depending on the age of your children, there are many things you can do to make working at home a little easier to keep apart from the rest of your life. If you can spare the space and equipment to set things up separately you can make things much easier to keep apart.

A dedicated work space is perhaps the most important item. You need somewhere that you can get work done with minimal interference. Ideally, this means a room you can close off to use as your home office, but not everyone has a room available for a home office.

You’ll need rules about your office. Can the kids interrupt you freely? Can you have younger ones bring in toys to play quietly so you can work while still supervising them?

A separate work computer once again is ideal but not achievable for everyone. A work computer allows you to have a machine that you don’t have to compete with anyone else to use. If you need to keep files confidential it is much easier to do so on a private machine than one shared with your family. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m just delighted. I’ve added the ability to add comments to most of the articles on this site using a great new tool called Instant Site Comments.

Instant Site Comments allows you to add comments to plain HTML pages. I had spent the past few months thinking about whether or not to switch this site on over to a content management system to give visitors the ability to comment here. I just thought it was a great idea. Apparently I wasn’t the only one.

Not only am I delighted by the ability to add comments to the site, but Robert Blackstone, who created the software, is very helpful. I had some problems getting thing set up and he was truly a delight to work with. The issue was with some server settings that allowed the program to work well on some servers but not others, and unfortunately mine was one of the ones it wouldn’t work on. With an update to the program, that is not a problem any more.

One of the things I love about Instant Site Comments is that now I can keep building websites in plain HTML if I want, WordPress if I want or use a content management system. I love that kind of flexibility. There are good reasons to use each method, depending on what you want to accomplish and how much flexibility you need in the appearance of each page. Now the ability to allow user participation doesn’t require that I use WordPress or a CMS. I just love that.

I don’t recommend many products, as you know if you’ve read much of what I write. I’m recommending Instant Site Comments to anyone who wants comments on their HTML site without the hassle of changing how their site is set up.

[tags]Instant Site Comments,comments on site[/tags]

Some days it’s just about impossible to get it all done. Between taking care of the kids and working at home, running errands and so forth, getting time to do some plain old housecleaning is pretty difficult. However, it doesn’t have to be impossible.

Take a look at your expectations of yourself. Remembering that being a stay at home mom is the equivalent of two full time jobs, plus any work at home job or home business you may have, chances are your life is quite busy. A perfect house each and every day may be a bit much to ask of yourself.

That doesn’t mean you aren’t keeping a clean house. It can mean knowing how much mess to cope with when more important things are stacking up.

What matters most to you in keeping your house clean. Obviously, keeping a sanitary kitchen is a very high priority, but other priorities can be more by personal preference. Some feel the need to vacuum daily, while others can let it go longer.

One of my favorite tricks is to simply not try to get it all done in one shot. Five minutes here, ten there and you get a lot done throughout the day. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve removed this review, as more current information makes me withdraw my approval of this program. Too many reports of the trial being hard to cancel for me to be comfortable.

Always keeping busy! This time I’ve decided to work on a site based on Ariel’s interests. It’s called Ariel’s Turn.

I plan to cover a few different areas, such as favorite websites, books, videos and so forth. Hopefully I’ll keep it updated as her interests change. It’s still a work in progress; aside from placeholder pages for the areas I want to develop, I’ve added links to her favorite websites. That’s mostly because it will make it easier for me to allow her to pick which she wants to go to.

This is also a way for me to talk to Ariel about what I do. I’m hoping she’ll like the idea of a website about her. And yes, once this is done, there will be one for Gage too!

It’s been a while since I’ve seen any news on this one, but I have found an update. For some this may cause financial pain, but that is what happens in Ponzi schemes even when you think you’ve done well.

You can see the article on ABC 4’s site. While there is some money in the account to pay back some of those who lost money, there isn’t nearly enough, and they are looking at going after some of the big winners in this Ponzi scheme.

It looks like it will be quite complex figuring out who gets money back. First they have to try to resolve chargebacks through the various financial institutions. Then they have to figure out who lost money.

I really do feel for the people who were fooled by this and similar scams. It’s so hard to earn money from home I know this looked like a blessing to many people. Unfortunately, there isn’t any real way to earn like this anywhere. Real investments don’t pay off day after day, month after month at so high a rate. Those that do pay a relatively high rate come with a high risk of losing it all. There are no guarantees.

[tags]12DailyPro,ponzi,scam,work at home scams[/tags]

For so long, when you heard about hackers or virus creators, you’d hear about the lone teenager or young adult who’d done it. But now online crime is being commited more by organized crime.

What this means is that more and more the goal is financial gain rather than bragging rights. It’s beyond phishing or hacking your computer. The risks are becoming greater and it’s more important to protect your computer and your personal information. This also means that attacks are becoming more sophisticated.

I discussed yesterday the steps you need to take to protect your home computer – firewall, antivirus and antispyware. In addition, you also need to know how to spot potential problems.

One of my big recommendations is to use Mozilla (downloadable as a part of Google Pack, link beneath the navigation on the left) rather than Internet Explorer. If you just prefer IE that much, at least consider turning off ActiveX, which is one of the biggest risks when you’re visiting sites. It may mean some slight annoyances on some sites, but it improves your security. Read the rest of this entry »

I found this report on ZD Net very interesting. It says that employees surfing the internet is more dangerous to their networks than spam. While the study was focused on how this impacts companies, I think it is very important to consider how this can impact your home computer.

This is from a Danish report, but so many internet trends are worldwide that this is worth paying attention to. They found that about 30% of companies that had dealt with a virus got it from the surfing activities of an employee, versus 20-25% of those same companies getting a virus from emails.

This is perhaps a good time to think about your own surfing habits and what you do to protect your computer from infection. How’s your firewall? Antivirus up to date? Do you use antispyware protection too?

There are all kinds of solutions. I still use and recommend ZoneAlarm’s free firewall. It’s been the best by quite a few ratings for a number of years, yet you don’t have to pay for it. There is an upgraded version you can pay for, of course, that does more.

For antivirus and antispyware, I always check out what’s up at download.com. It’s a great way to see which ones are still doing the job well. Alternatively, you can get free products by downloading Google Pack, which I have linked to on the left. When I used it, I got the free version of AdAware and a six month trial of Norton Antivirus.

Of course, you should always pay attention to the sites you and your family tend to visit. If you’re getting virus or antispyware warnings you need to figure out why and avoid that source. That means checking out the sites your kids visit and making sure they understand when to open an email.

[tags]surfing,spam,virus,ZD Net[/tags]

You hear about the different parenting styles, such as permissive, authoritarian, authoritative and uninvolved. You may have one you identify with most, but probably don’t stick with one style entirely.

While there are certainly legitimate personal preferences, there are some parenting techniques that work well and others that don’t.

An overly permissive style, for example, doesn’t give your children enough rules in their life. You’ll always hear people saying that children crave rules, and there is a truth to that.

Worse is the uninvolved style, where there is little direction in the child’s life. Parents really need to be involved with their children, helping them to learn and develop socially.

At the other end of things, excessive control of your children doesn’t teach them how to live their own lives when they get older. A child needs a degree of freedom to express his or her own thoughts and feelings and have their wants taken into consideration. That doesn’t mean giving in, but it can mean explaining why the child cannot have something. Read the rest of this entry »