A friend recently asked about the Women at Home University website.  (For those of you who are not familiar, WAHU is not an actual, degree-granting university, but a suggested list of resources for learning about a wide variety of home and family skills.)  When I went to look it back up, I discovered that the site is apparently defunct – but I was able to find it using one of my favorite fall-back tools: the internet archive.

It’s been around for long enough that I guess I figured everyone knew about it, but apparently not everyone does, so let me share this wonderful tool with you.   The internet archive is a project that seeks to archive every page on the internet.  (You can opt out if you object, but this is such an amazing public service that I can’t imagine why you would want to unless the content of your site is private or restricted in some way.  They don’t take credit for your content – just save a “snapshot” of it – and as far as I’m aware, they don’t make money off of it or anything.  It’s just like having a copy of an out-of-print book stored in a library.)  What this means is that when you mourn the loss of that great, informative site, you can take heart – you may still be able to scrounge up the information.

Head over to the internet archive at www.archive.org.  Type the address of the defunct website into the “wayback machine” search box, and see what comes up.  Chances are, there’s an archived copy of the page available.  Now, site functionality (forms and other interactive features) will not be available, and images are hit-or-miss.  But I think I’ve always found the basic information preserved intact.

(Go ahead and try it out.  Look up www.womenathomeuniversity.org.)  The internet archive definitely works for me!

a

So…what would you like to see here?  Which posts are your favorites?  Do you have any burning questions about me and/or my household?  When you read the Titus 2 Homemaker blog, what do you wonder about?

a

a

Pros

• The money.  I would be lying if I said this wasn’t a factor.  (Duh.  It’s paid blogging.)  I am already posting, so getting paid for inserting a link is a nice perk.  And it has been a pretty steady, dependable income.
• Creative prompts.  Having a specific keyword phrase to use stretches my creativity, as I have to figure out how to fit that phrase into what I’m writing.  (Sometimes it’s easier than others.)
• Encouragement to post.  If I have to write a post, I have to write a post.  It keeps me writing.

Cons

• I can’t choose which assignments I take; it’s all-or-nothing.  (On rare occasions, if something is truly offensive, I can ask that it be removed from my account, but I can’t just do the ones I like and skip the others.)
• In-post disclosures aren’t permitted.  My site disclosure makes clear that I do these links, but I can’t spell out for you which links are the paid ones.
• Encouragement to post.  Just because I can write doesn’t necessarily mean I have something to say worth saying.  Sometimes, maybe I should just stay quiet.

And Why I’m Quitting

The balance of pros to cons here is influenced greatly by the quality of keyword phrases and links I’m given.  As long as they’re pretty good, then it isn’t that big a deal that I have to do them all and can’t tell you, my readers, which specific links are which.  But when the overall quality of links and keyword phrases deteriorates, the balance starts to visibly shift in the other direction.  Unfortunately, I feel that the overall quality of the links is getting more and more what I call “spammy.” (Besides, weight loss links figure in heavily anymore, and how many ways are there of working things like “diet pills that work” naturally into posts on a blog where the owner is attempting to gain weight?  It’s getting harder and harder to write these posts without sounding like an advertisement!)

So, I’m quitting.  I want you to be able to know that when you see a link in one of my posts, it’s there because I hand-picked it.  (Or, in the case of a review post or something, it’s obviously a link to the product being reviewed.)  And I’m tired of seeing these “spammy” phrases on my blog.  (In the beginning, they were fairly rare, with more “normal” phrases being, well, normal.)  I do have a stack of assignments already in my queue that I will complete over the next week or so, but after that, these are gone.

(I may be willing to accept paid links in the future on an occasional, assignment-by-assignment basis, but not this all-or-nothing stuff, and only if I can clearly disclose that the post contains paid links.)

Thanks for bearing with me while I finish out this assignment queue, and please don’t leave me in the meantime!

a

Google, Yahoo, and the others all assume that, for instance, insurancespecialists.com is going to be about insurance.  So it should be highly relevant to people searching for insurance.  Titus2homemaker.com should be very relevant to those searching for “titus 2 homemaker”  (I’m the number one result.)  or “titus 2″ “homemaker” (again, number one).  So, if you can use one or more of your primary keywords in your domain name, that will give you an automatic boost in the search engines.  (Obviously, though, use good judgment.  It’s probably better to have a non-keyword domain name that fits than a domain name that’s a random string of keywords.  Be sure it makes sense!)

Now, the hard work is still to come.  I’m that number one result for those terms in the search engines, but I have a pretty high bounce rate.    If you want to keep your traffic, it’s still necessary to produce good content that’s what people are looking for and, apparently, I’m not very good at that (yet!).

If you’ve had a blog for a while, and it’s growing steadily, I probably wouldn’t recommend suddenly renaming everything.  But if you’re just getting started, that’s another little tip to keep in mind as you plan your site.

a

Anyway, although it’s slow, I’m making progress, and I thought some of you might be curious and want to see what it looks like.  Here’s the working template: temporary blog.  Now, a few things to note.  One, this isn’t really a working blog; it’s just something I set up to have a place to play with this template and not mess up this, real, blog.    Second, it isn’t finished yet.  The overall layout is right, but the details (font sizes, comment area layout, etc.) aren’t ironed out yet.  And third, the initial design uses this site’s current colors.  When I get a new header, the colors may change but, for now, I wanted to move to the layout I want without making everything here totally topsy-turvy.  I’d like to know what you think, especially if you have preferences for the layout of individual posts.

a

a

It is astounding, too, just how many details there are to consider in theme design.  Just as one tiny example, take search engine optimization.  The best SEO software, “counseling,” etc. is no substitute for a template that’s properly coded to tell WordPress to use the proper page titles.  So far, I have most of the structure intact (starting from the closest theme I could find to the layout I was looking for, which wasn’t all that close), but I will be moving onto appearance soon, and I don’t understand some of CSS’s terminology.

a

I just learned about this new blog site, and it looks pretty cool.  I have repeatedly found myself, while browsing “deal” blogs, wishing I knew who blog about this sort of thing near me.  They would probably have similar prices, they would have the same stores, etc.  Well, The Frugal Map will let you find this out.  It’s bran-new, and I think it hasn’t officially launched yet (but will within the next couple of weeks).  You can search by locality, by store, etc. this way and find matching blogs.

a

Body + Soul is one I was a bit nervous to get to begin with.  I wasn’t sure if it might have a bunch of weird meditation stuff in it or something.  And it does occasionally have an article I’m not crazy about, for that reason.  But the bulk of the magazine, by far, is not of this persuasion.  I had an opportunity to try a one-year subscription free, and discovered that it’s actually quite down-to-earth.  And it isn’t all diet tips and exercise routines, either.  In general, I would just consider it a women’s magazine – except that whether it’s showcasing cosmetics, offering wrinkle cream reviews, talking about clothes, or whatever, it does so with a natural (and, often, “green”) bent.  I liked it so much that first year that I actually paid to renew it, and it’s been a long while since I paid for a magazine subscription.  But I was saving a lot of articles!  It also does talk about healthy diet, supplements, etc.  One of my favorite parts is the section that highlights one particular healthy food each issue, tells you what its strongest benefits are, and offers a few suggestions for preparation.

Woman’s Day is a bit harder for me to explain.  It’s “just” a women’s magazine, but I find it useful.  I collect a lot of little “snippets”  from it each issue  – household tips, recipes, etc.  And I find out about some great websites.  Plus, I find that most of it is broken down into pretty small, “bite-sized” chunks, so it’s easy to read in small bits of time, too.

a