No, today is not one of those days for me, at least so far. All I have to do is get the house clean so I can surprise my husband for his birthday with a special dinner tonight (birthday is tomorrow, but kids will be with grandparents… date night!), figure out a fun dinner, get my usual online work done plus get some work done for a client whose website I’m working on.

Oh, and Survivor’s on tonight. Can’t forget that.

So yes, some days I could really wish for some help. So I’m kind of intrigued by this new site, www.DoMyStuff.com.

At DoMyStuff.com you can post jobs you want to hire someone to do for you. This is not the usual outsourcing of website design, writing and so forth that many freelance sites do so well. This is also for posting jobs for a concierge, gardener, tutoring, help with the kids and so forth.

This could be interesting on both sides for some people. It can be nice to have someone to help you out, but it’s also another way to find people who will pay you to do things for them. Stay at home moms may not often have the funds to hire help, but they may want to earn money by helping someone else. This could really work out.

Pretty much everyone keeps important information on their computers. Most of us have experienced the dreaded computer crash, the one where you aren’t sure if you are going to get your files back.

Were they backed up?

Backing up your computer is vital. Last year I had to help my inlaws with one, very, very carefully as their computer had a virus that none of the antivirus software could removed. We had bought several different products, but nothing worked. So we had to take files folder by folder, inspecting each carefully for any unfamiliar files, to ensure the virus didn’t make it over to the external drive.

We’re talking hundreds of pictures, starting from the time my daughter, their first grandchild was born. Read the rest of this entry »

If you get into running an online business, one of the challenges is getting your site or sites up and running. You can do it yourself or hire someone.

Once you get the hang of it, using a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla is pretty easy. But making templates can be a lot of work.

There are free templates out there, but unless you want to look like everyone else you’re going to want to customize. For example, I had to figure out how to customize a WordPress template to match the rest of my site for this blog. If you compared it to the original… well, you can see some layout similarities, but I changed it quite significantly. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have noticed that I haven’t talked much about paid blogging lately. You may have even noticed that I haven’t posted as many paid posts on my blogs lately. Have I given up?

No, not really. It’s certainly not a case of giving up. It’s more a case of getting pickier. I’ve been pretty fussy of late as to which paid posts I will do. It has really slowed down my earnings, but I think it keeps the quality of my posts up.

I’m still in the $900 range in terms of earnings from blog advertising these past several months with PayPerPost. It’s not bad. I could earn more if I wanted to and didn’t care about keeping things relevant to this site. But having relevant posts matters tremendously to me. Read the rest of this entry »

What a coincedence! Yes, really. I just finished typing up my post on helping kids avoid inappropriate content, and here’s this opportunity to post about PC Pandora, a software tool to help them avoid it and to help you know what they’ve been doing online.

Talk about timing!

I hadn’t gotten into software solutions in that post, as no names really came to mind. My kids are young enough that I don’t have a lot of worries about their internet use. My 4 year old only uses the computer next to me, and she picks from a list I created. Read the rest of this entry »