Since the advent of paid posting (hell, for that matter since the advent of advertising) Selling Out has been a big issue. There’s a current post at Skelliewag about Hot not to sell out. Granted, my view of selling out isn’t the same as your view and your view isn’t the same as ShoeMoney’s. I’ve done all kinds of paid blogging and I’ve run all kinds of crazy ads on the site.

There was a point where I was blogging several times a day (about three or four) on whatever “topic” I was assigned, whether or not I had any experience with it or not and whether or not I thought it was a good product or not. Since then, I’ve matured a little, the ads are beginning to produce more revenue than the posting and I’ve begun to be more selective in my “paid” posts. Occasionally I will do a blatantly obvious paid post for a product or service I believe in and use.

Personally, it isn’t “selling out” if you write about things you use and know. I use and know Wordpress, it isn’t selling out when I tell people that its the best blogging platform available. Likewise, its hardly selling out for placing a “paid link” in a post I was going to make anyways, as long as the link fits.

The Skelliewag post does point to the need to continue posting for yourself and not your readers and the point that you should post for creative purposes and not to follow the traffic spikes. It would be pointless for a blog about cooking to post about the recent iPhone 3g release or about the traffic on the turn-pike. However, on a blog that runs the gamut, it might fit a little better. Post about what you know. Post about what you like. Don’t worry about your readers, eventually they’ll find it and who knows, they might like what you have to say.

One of my favorite things to do is to try out new plugins and I have to say, the new plugin interface in WP 2.7 is AWESOME. Absolutely Awesome. I can search and install without leaving my admin area. Something that other suites have been able to do for a while and its something that helps bring Wordpress to the forefront of Blogging platforms. That being said, if you’ve ever checked out my Plugins Used page, you’ll know, I like me some plugins (I have about 55 active plugins at the moment).

Here’s a list of my favorites…

• All in One SEO Pack – Anyone who isn’t using this plugin is shooting themselves in the foot. This plugin helps make it easy to add keywords, titles and other much needed objects to your pages and posts. Plus, its kinda cool… now you can say, “Yea, I’m doing the SEO thing. Are you?”
• Comment Email Responder – I think I’ve talked about this one before. Its a godsend! Now, you can notify your commenter via email when you reply to their comment. This does two things, one, it lets them know you’ve commented and two, it pulls them back to the site. Often times to comment again. Its been a big help in retaining readers here.
• CommentLuv – It started as a simple plugin to pull your commenter’s last post and has evolved in to a movement. Even cooler is the fact that they run contests that your commenters are automagically entered in. Its a good way to add links to your site as well and to help out your friends by Deep linking to their posts.
• Comment Timeout – Yes, I run akismet, but with the Comment Timeout plugin, I have to clear a lot less spam. You can specify a time period for your comments to close (after the last comment was made). On here, its set for a month. A month after the last comment or the post, the comments close on that post. Helps keep a lot of spam out. A lot.
• Google Sitemaps – The last one I want to talk about today is the google sitemap plugin. It simply generates a sitemap of all your pages (or just the ones you specify) and puts it in a location. You can then alert google, yahoo, ask, etc. that you have a sitemap and it will help the bots crawl. Its good for increasing your ranking and it does something that WP should do anyways.

Thats just a short list of some of the plugins I like and use, I’ll cover more next week, don’t you worry. Is there a plugin you use that you think I’d benefit from??

So last year I posted a thursday thirteen of the 13 coolest Christmas Gift Ideas I could find. I thought that was a good idea, so I’m going to do it again this year, however, its only going to be a top ten. Don’t you fret, and don’t you frown though, it won’t have diet pills or a flowbee on the list.

• The first one is for the kids. I know some parents are going to have a fit, but my little ones love wearing their Crocs during the spring and summer (emma would sleep in them if we’d let her) and with the multitude of colors and styles they go with almost everything. They are comfy and as long as you watch your little ones feet on the escalators, they’re safe too!
• Anything from ThinkGeek.com. Personally I like the Dr. Who Sonic Screwdriver (however they never seem to have any in stock!), but their array of Digital frames and other oddities are pretty hard to beat. Who knew you needed a giant plush microbe?
• The entire first two seasons of the new Dr. Who. Anyone who’s seen the new Dr. Who knows this is a must have. Anyone who hasn’t needs this so they know what they’ve been missing. I highly suggest picking it up!
• TiVo 80-hour Dual Tuner DVR – Seriously. Who needs VCR’s any more when you can have a DUAL DVR? Record two stations at once AND watch your favorite show at the same time. What could be better? This is something I’ve been meaning to get for the longest time, it would sure make life so much easier!
• Jelly Belly Jelly beans. I could eat these all day long. Jelly Bellies are by far the best and now you can order to your hearts content. I’d take a pound or two myself for christmas. A couple of Christmases ago, I received the dispenser and it is awesome. I can set it to require change or not (that helps off set the cost of refilling!). Plus, they make great stocking stuffers!!
• Satellite prints of your favorite places! Nothing is cooler than having a satellite image of your favorite city, beach, mountain top. Terra Prints does it for you. They can even frame if it you want. The quality is good too. For those of us who are bent on keeping an eye on the weather, they even have a series of Hurrican maps. Pretty cool for the dork in your life
• For the person who is always getting lost… GPS Devices are a hot thing for Christmas this year (and the past couple of years). I’ve looked at getting Amy a GPS unit for her car, but both of our phones are equipped with GPS receivers and can use Google Maps or the Blackberry Maps so it makes it a little useless. But a handheld, no data plan needed receiver could be helpful on the trail
• A Personalized Book This one’s pretty cool and I’ve received a couple of them already from Amy. Its a little late this year to start a project for Christmas, but a personalized photo journal (think scrapbook but much cooler) is a pretty cool gift. Heritage Makers offers a ton of templates, an easy to use interface and it was listed as one of Oprah’s favorite things this Christmas season. How cool is that?
• What do you get a t-shirt junkie for Christmas? How about another shirt? Busted Tees has some of the hands down funniest shirts available that you would still wear in public. Personally I like the “That’s what she said” shirt, though the Binford Tools is a cool shirt as well for any Tool Man fans out there. If you’re shopping for someone thats hard to shop for, you can’t go wrong with a funny T!
• For a person who enjoys to try the local brews when ever they travel (and to be honest, who doesn’t like to drink a fat tire in Colorado, an Abita in New Orleans or a SweetWater 420 in Atlanta) how about bringing the brewing a little closer to home with a Home Brew Kit from Mr. Beer? I’ve thought it would be fun to get in to the business myself. After all, what a better way to find out what makes a good beer then trying it first hand?

These are just some ideas, if you have others, leave a comment, I’d love to know what you want for Christmas!

Holy Flying Cows Batman, what a whirlwind weekend! Friday night we piled in the car and headed to Eric and Tracy’s for a party for Eric. He’s 28 or something tomorrow. We were there until 11ish I think. It was a late night for everyone!

We woke up Saturday morning and headed to Portrait Innovations for some family photos (I’ll post one in a bit) probably the last one we’ll take as a family of four…. that was ok. The girls were very well behaved and it was a little easier than it could have been. A word to the wise, if you are going to do family photos (at least around this time of year) try and get an early appointment. Mostly, everyone is happy and if you’re at the studio early enough, they aren’t too backed up yet!

Then it was home to clean and cook for the annual Dinner party. We’ve thrown it for four years now and its become something of a tradition with our friends that we have a dinner party for christmas. There were 15 of us there (stretching the limits of our seating ability) and we enjoyed a find feast of Roast, Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes, rice and salad and some other little odds and ends. We managed to keep going until about 2:30a, when Amy and Jeff finally left and we pushed Ms. Kingry to a bed for the night. All in all it was good food and good fun with friends.

To round out the weekend we went to a Playhouse Disney Live show and to Ikea where we managed to spend $50 on stuff we didn’t know we really needed! The PHD show was ok (amy liked it better than Doodlebops), the girls liked it anyways. It was cool to see some of the characters come to life even if they were a little exaggerated (Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy were of course the highlight). If you haven’t taken your child to a show like that that yet, I would highly recommend it. The music is all stuff they hear on Disney, the colors and lights are good for even the youngest ones. Its fun for the family!

Anywho, that was our weekend, now its on to finalizing Christmas plans and getting ready to make the trek to Chicago for New Years….

So apparently Wordpress 2.7 is out today (or sometime last night) and of course, they are recommending that you upgrade immediately. Your sites won’t die if you don’t, but don’t expect it to go smoothly.

Among some of the changes to wordpress are a new layout for the admin areas. I had just gotten used to the way 2.6 was doing things, and they’ve totally changed it in 2.7. Its a little smoother looking, but it seems to run about the same. Navigation is a trick, but once you pick up on it, its pretty good. There are options to install plugins directly from the dashboard and other admin sections which is a nice change. The layout is all web 2.0ish and rounded corner looking. In all it seems to be a decent upgrade, though they probably could have gone with a complete new version.

I did run in to a problem upgrading one of my sites to 2.7. There’s a reason they warn you to disable all plugins before upgrading. Several of the plugins I had on the site were not friendly with 2.7. I was able to move ALL of the plugins from the plugins directory to a different directory and then do the upgrade. Once that was done, I copied them all back to the plugins directory and added them one by one. It didn’t take too long, but I could have avoided it all together if I had just disabled the plugins to begin with. Let me know what you think of 2.7!

So maybe I’m a little behind on this (after all a google search shows stories from October) but I just caught this on the news last night. Apparently, there’s a doll out there that proclaims “Islam is the Light” as your child cycles through its series of sounds. It looks to be a bug that Fisherprice knows about as they have addressed it, but after several months its still on the shelves and people are still buying the doll. You can hear the sound better on Mattel’s site.

Issues like this aren’t anything new and the manufacturer is working on correcting the issue and should be back out soon. Personally, this one isn’t as bad as it could have been (we have a talking Teletubby at home that says “Faggot, Faggot”) and it even kind of makes me want to own one a little.

The thing that gets me is that the only reason they found out about this is because the mom and dad took it out of the box to play with and test before they wrapped it for christmas. Whats with that? Should I play with all of my kids toys? What would you do if you found out your doll was promoting something you didn’t agree with?

So we’re getting a little bit of a late start this year. Usually, by the first weekend in December, we’ve got the tree up, the house is decorated in side and out and we’re counting the days until santa pokes his head out of our dirty chimney flue. Not this year. This year, despite the weather being a lot colder, we’re running behind. Partly because last weekend over the holiday, I spent most of it painting and partly because I just don’t feel like putting all the stuff up this year.

One of the reasons is that we’re leaving for Chicago the day after Christmas to visit the girls grandparents (amy’s parents) for New Years. That means the house needs to be clean before we leave, we have to have an artificial tree and I have to venture north during the winter.

We did put up the fake tree this week. We decorated it tonight and it was a challenge explaining to the girls how they need to spread the ornaments around. Emm’s didn’t get it right away, but with my help (she needed help getting up high) we got the tree decorated and TinkerBell is sitting high atop the tree looking down on it.

We did put the train out again, and as expected, Lumiere went bonkers. I’ll take some video this year and post it again. Have you started decorating?