I’ve been asked, how do you do it? Blogging like you don’t have a newborn to take are of? Like you don’t sleep?

Yes, I have a 12 week old baby whom I love so much, the baby I’ve been waiting for, for years. I love sleeping too, especially after the baby arrived (new moms will know why!). The moment I brought Benjamin home from the hospital, some parts of my life was beyond my control, including blogging and as someone who keeps a blogging schedule and write everyday, I was scared.

Will I temporarily shut down my blog for a period of time until my schedule at home settle down? Or do I write sporadic posts? I love blogging too much that I can’t take it off from my routine. I wanted and decided that this blog stay afloat.

Of course I did struggle at first with c-section recovery (I slept lots) and attending to the demands of a newborn baby during the first few days/weeks. Finding the time seems impossible and I was wondering if the day will come that I’d be able to type a blog post, sitting down properly and using two hands.

Here are my tips for blogging/writing with a newborn in the house:

HAVE THE BLOGGING TOOLS
1. iPhone/iPad – These two has been a great blogging tool for me now that I have a baby. If you’ve been reading my blog before, you’ll probably raise your eyebrows and say, “but you hate the iPad!”. I did hate the iPad. “Did” – past tense. I love it now. Like anything in life, it was all about getting used to something! (Don’t tell me, I told you so!)

I understand that not all have these gadgets but for those who do, this is how I manage to continue blogging. Plus, typing in the iPad/iPhone is effortlessly quiet so when the baby is sleeping, he can’t wake up because there’s no keyboard sound even if I’m typing like a mad woman.

2. Wordress app – if you have either of the two gadgets mentioned in #1 and if your blog is hosted at WordPress (if not, then it should!), install the WordPress app. It’s free. Once you have this installed you are ready to blog.

3. Notebook & pen – The good old trusted friends of mine. Just because you don’t have an iPhone or iPad doesn’t mean you’re doomed. I used to write a lot using the conventional pen and paper. I still do now, sometimes.

FINDING THAT ELUSIVE TIME
I always believe that even though people say they don’t have time (like if you ask them why they don’t exercise) they actually do, if they make for it. Basically, IF you love doing something, you will make time for it. Period.

Here’s how I manage my blogging time:

1. Less naps – As much as my mom nags me to sleep when the baby sleeps, I don’t because I CAN’T. I am a morning person so I can’t sleep when the baby sleeps at daytime unless we had a really rough night. I guess I am lucky that he sleeps really well at night. My soon to be 3 month old baby naps at about 2 hours each time so this is when I can steal some writing time (and do household chores).

Of course I napped right after we came home from the hospital so I can recover but the moment I regained my strength, it was hard for me to sleep when it’s daytime.

2. Typing fast – speed is a time saver. If you can type fast, you’ll be thankful for this skill at this time.

One hand typing? Definitely a skill to master!

CREATE A WRITING STRATEGY
This sounds heavy but simply put, create a plan on how you would want blogging to change . Would you take a blogging off time? Or would want to continue?

Here are the strategies I use, because I chose to continue blogging as much as I can:

1. Write in installments – I don’t stress out on writing posts completely. When an idea pops up in my mind AND I have time, I type it and save it as a draft. Later on, when I find another time, I just modify (this takes less time than starting from scratch!) them.

2. Write something everyday - In the first few days, I’ve had sporadic posting but I never stopped writing. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t even have to make sense. I don’t have as much time as I once did to write. As a result of this, I have learned to accept that I can’t always crank out a full blog post in a day. While at times I can, usually, my posts are written little by little on a course of several days.

3.  Stock pile posts – Doing #1 will gain you lots of posts you can pull out later when you have something more to say. You can then have a blog post to publish to continue your connection with your readers.

4. Multi-task – I told a fellow Dubai blogger Mrs. Dubai when she asked me via Twitter that I write blog posts when I am breastfeeding. But Twitter’s 140 character limit did not allow me to explain more – I only blog while breastfeeding WHEN the baby is feeding while asleep, maybe not asleep-asleep but whe he’s closing his eyes and can’t get off the boob.

I love breastfeeding as it creates a special bond with me and my baby. I love how he looks at me when I’m holding him. See? How can you take your eyes off that sweet smile? I can’t trade those moments with anything in the world, including blogging.

However, when he is feeding while we are lying down and he’s sleeping, that leaves me with nothing to do but stare at the blank ceiling so that’s when I pull out the mighty iPhone and type away things.

Again, it doesn’t have to be a complete blog post.

5. Don’t sweat about it – I love blogging but I don’t feel pressured to do it. This is my free therapy, my outlet, my breather but it isn’t my whole life. If I can find the time, I blog because I enjoy doing it, not because I am pressured to do it.

I cut myself some slack.

With a newborn, the balance of things will shift and you’ll just have to juggle things differently. There are days when I can’t write anything but I can be on Twitter everyday (3 Reasons Why I love Twitter), especially on the wee hours of the night when I can’t fall back to sleep after diaper duty/feeding to connect to other people. Twitter is microblogging – you only have 140 characters to express your thoughts. It’s quick and easy and gives me (almost) the same good feeling as when I’m blogging. (I am @sandierpastures on Twitter, just in case)

Lastly, life with a newborn is exciting. Every morning is an adventure waiting to unfold. Yes, them babies are a handful but they are not babies forever. Now is the time to enjoy them when you can still hold all of them in your bossom, their sweet smelling little heads under your chin.

I will enjoy this special time with my baby, blogging along as I go and only as much as I possibly can. No pressure!

As you can see, this blog is finally getting smart by using the premium theme Thesis Theme from DIY Themes. Now I believe it is easier on the eyes because of the typography, has got the functionality I wanted and most importantly loads faster than the free themes I have used before!

I don’t know how I stumbled upon the Thesis theme but I believe it was a tweet from Chris Pearson, the Thesis developer himself. I LOVED how neat and cool his blog looked despite the simple design and when I saw that one of the blogs I really like, Simple Mom.net runs oh so beautifully on the Thesis theme, I simply got to have it too!!

The theme promised easy user customization, “do more, code less” and for someone with no time (and skills!) to tweak theme codes, this was perfect.

When you install the Thesis theme, you can immediately customize the framework of your site – how it will look like, straight from the WordPress Dashboard:

Just among the few of the things you can customize straight away from the Design Options Menu are:

• the number of columns in your website
• the fonts
• the number of teasers (past posts with only introduction)
• the archives (collection of past posts)
• ….and lots, lots more

For someone who don’t have a lot of php and css coding knowledge and hacks their way through WordPress themes, Thesis will give them a lot of functionality via a simple control panel instead of having to edit any actual WordPress code. Thesis contains a future-proof customization system that allows you to produce unique designs without having to touch any core code.

(If you are keen on buying the Thesis theme a.k.a. the best investment for your blog, I’d really appreciate if you use my affiliate link. Thanks!!)

Download the latest version of Thesis >>>>

You can see this gallery of just some of the folks who’s using Thesis theme to be impressed.

Why Did I Hire a Thesis Designer When I Claim It’s That Easy to Customize?

The basic customization is easy – site layout, colors, font styles but I wanted a personal touch to my website and with zero Photoshop skills, I needed someone’s help. I saw Kristen Symonds a.k.a. Kristarella profile at the Double Mule site as a Double Mule Certified Thesis Designer and thought I’d like her to work on my blog. She made the header image, installed a script to make my teasers to include a thumbnail pic without using a WordPress plugin, customized the subscribe options and generally fine tuned the overall look of the blog.

It has been great working with Kris – we live in the opposite sides of the world (me in Dubai and she in Australia) and have a huge time difference. Still she was attentive to all the emails I sent, with the details of the customization that I wanted. She was patient despite her really tough schedule.

Countless emails back and forth in a span of a few weeks and I have my own customized Thesis Theme at last.

NOTE: Thesis works in a bit techie jargon called “hooks” so it is best to have someone who knows the Thesis framework to work on your site. It will save time and service fees that is dependent on time the designer spent on design/coding work!!

Conclusion

If you have kick ass skills at php coding and CSS and can do all this customization yourself, well, lucky you. If you’re like me and well, can’t, then The Thesis might be a great solution.

Plus, the DIY Themes community is huge and their forum has the best supportive team out there. With the Thesis theme community growing larger and larger in number everyday, your Thesis questions will likely be answered and coding/design problem solved.

Hi, if you’re reading this blog from your feed reader, you can’t see the changes to the blog theme. So please pop on over and see!

Finally I’m using the Thesis Theme, the premium, SEO friendly theme that’s fast loading, easy to customize and use. I am still on the process of checking out glitches on the design front and the general functionality of the blog so if you see anything wonky, can you please let me know?

Thanks!

Hello everyone. I suppose this time the blog is not an eye sore anymore, yeah? If you’ve visited the last few days, you know what I’m talking about. It was messy. It seems that a plugin caused some unpleasant display of the blog theme that made my blog posts unreadable. I get annoyed when that happens!

And I only knew when you my lovely readers told me.

I mean, there are blog readers and then there are readers who care. They were kind enough to point it to me via different mediums: Twitter, email, by comments  that something is wrong. Thank you very much, all of you!

I would never have known because it was showing ok at my end!

No wonder I only had very few comments lately – my blog was annoying!

That said, I will be changing themes again soon, donning something from Thesis designer Kristarella. I’m excited at what lies ahead and I would need all your help and input in case something is wrong that my eyes have missed!

Hope you are all having a wonderful day, because you all deserve it.

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Stay tuned for the winner of the $50 gift certificate from Baby Kaed and another giveaway is coming up – to win a beautiful handmade necklace.

Thinking of getting something out of your time spent on blogging? I’ll tell you something that works! (I know that sounds like a desperate saleman but…here’s a true story)

I’ve been receiving ad money from advertisers via Linkworth regularly since the start of 2011 so I would like to share it to readers who are thinking of monetizing their blogs.

Linkworth is a professional advertising and publishing program that link and connect online advertisers with site owners or publishers. They offer several kinds of advertising opportunities including text link ads, link posts, banner ads and rotating ads, etc.

In case you are confused whether to signup for this or have questions like, “is this for real?”, “isn’t this a scam?” – I hear you. I’ve been asking those questions in the past too, myself. But from first hand experience with Linkworth, I can tell you that yes, they are legit, they’re not scammers and the payouts are regular, on time and accurate!

If you are open to selling text link ads on your blog sidebar, writing sponsored posts, or providing banner space for advertisers, I would encourage you to sign up with Linkworth!

HOW DOES IT WORK?

You sign up (it’s free), list your blog, set your price and wait for ad requests to come. That’s it!

I waited for a few weeks before advertisers picked up my blog and asked for an ad placement. As time went, I got more ad placement requests even if I increased my ad price.

With Linkworth, publishers/bloggers decide the cost of every ad that will be displayed on their website/blog. Simply saying, you name your price. This is where you experiment what your blog’s worth in terms of traffic or influence. When you have set the price and don’t get ad offers for a couple of weeks, either you wait out longer or lower down your price.

BLOGGER BENEFITS

• Monetize your site by selling ads with relatively little maintenance and coding knowledge
• Earn up to maximum of 70%* from ad revenues
• No clicks needed on the ads to earn
• Text Ads are in the sidebar, mostly displayed on the homepage only so it’s non-obtrusive
• Manage all of your published ads and websites with our Control Center
• The more websites you list, the more money you earn

* By default they have 70/30 commission split; Bloggers make 70% of each opportunity that comes their way. And another option is 50/50.

CONCLUSION

Linkworth is highly recommended! While there are a lot of advertising options out there, they are definitely worth trying out. For the curious – I’ve earned about US$500 so far (with LinkAds and LinkPost). This amount might not make other big bloggers happy but this ain’t peanut money for me! Sign up to make money, now.

Photo credit

When I look at blogs based in Dubai or the UAE in general, I can almost tell how many years the blogger has spent living in this region. If most of the posts are about places they’ve recently been along with a string of photos, it’s most likely that they’re new here. On our first year (or two here,) we out and about almost every weekend: going on desert safari (more than once), watch camels in the wild or just off the streets in the city outskirt, getting on an Abra to cross the creek, riding the monorail to Atlantis Hotel and the new Dubai Metro trains and lots, lots and lots of wandering like a real tourist.

When the blogger starts posting things about self and family, all those topics with no tourist-y touch, the blogger must be here for more than 2 years.

Lately, I’ve been (unnecessarily) talking about myself, my moods, family and other no need to mention more personal stuffs like infertility – tell tale signs that yes I’m already a member of the “I’ve- already-explored-Dubai-too-much-now-I-talk-about-myself” group. Nothing wrong with that I guess for some people but I think it’s time to change gears.

So that said, I guess I’ll take a break from posts about myself and write about what’s going on outside and where we’ve been to. After all, I am sure that people will be more intrigued to read about what’s going on with the Kardashians or with Justin Bieber than with what’s going on about me!

Well, I’m happy to report that I actually got something else to say. See you next post!

How about you, has your blog topics changed from when you started blogging and now?

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By the way, this blog had been recently mentioned in the local newspaper, The National – the article is about more Emiratis (local UAE nationals) getting more into blogging. The article highlighted blogging expatriates as well – that’s where I was mentioned.

I have two different wordpress plugins (Akismet and Bad Behavior) to fight spam comments on this blog. So far, they have served me really well especially lately that I’ve been receiving a lot of ridiculously insane spam commenters who come and litter my site with trash. On the average, I get 100 spam comments on my spam folder daily.

Here’s one that caught my attention:

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I am a poor man from the African region, I need money to survive by comment on your blogs / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. Here are the list of my websites

(Vimax, vimax, penis enlargement, penis enlargement pills, bigger penis, penis enlargement pills, penis enlargement, download youtube videos, penis enlargement pills) bigger penis
vimax
penis enlargement pills
penis enlargement
vimax

PLEASE SEND YOUR HELP BY APPROVING MY COMMENT!
Regards: PoormanBHS2011

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Well, lookie! Some ‘poor’ people in Africa have computers now, connected to the internet, knows how to make links, do a Google search, leave comments on blogs, etc.

And *ahem* most importantly, they now have the knowledge on how to enlarge something other than their wallets.

Any annoying spam comments on your blog lately?

UPDATE: Duh moment!! I forgot to turn off the Theme Tester plugin that allows me to make changes only I can see…meaning, I’ve been talking about a new theme that’s not visible to anyone! It’s ready now though. Tell me what you think about it.

I’ve been a bit bored with my old wordpress theme that I decided to search, search and search some more, try out and finally install a new one. So far, I like it except maybe for a few things that need tweaking like how it would be so wonderful for the header image to rotate every page load. A header image that changes would be cool but since I have yet to find out how to do that, I’ll stick to this one for now…

How do you find the new theme? If you’re having problems viewing my website right now, please let me know so I can look into it. Thank you.

Happy Monday!

By the way, the you can leave your comment at the left of the post title. Thanks!

I keep a day planner and a calendar to schedule tasks at home and at work. When I started blogging early this year, keeping a blogging schedule just came to me naturally.

Darren Rowse of the Problogger says, keeping a blogging schedule instead of sporadic posting makes post frequency and quality more consistent, increases productivity and made him able to build more momentum in his blog.

The beauty of most blogging platforms, including wordpress is the ability to post date a blog entry. If I know that I will not have time during the week for regular posting, I set aside a couple of hours on Saturdays and Sundays when I have the most free time at work, to write enough entries and set them to publish at later dates.

That being said, I have written Thursday Thirteen, a random meme, a photo entry for the Saturday Photo Hunt to last me until the end of the year. I have several other posts for topics randomly coming out of my head in my drafts.

I want to post on a regular basis. I have worked well with discipline in the past and scheduling was/is always a part of my everyday life so keeping a blogging schedule is a fairly easy task for me.

Do you keep a blogging schedule?

I have decided to join the U Comment, I Follow movement that’s been going on for quite a while now. It means that the comments you leave here at Sandier Pastures will now be “followed” by search engine spiders.

What the nofollow is all about

The main point of the U Comment, I Follow is to discard the nofollow tag in the comments. The nofollow tag is embedded automatically in the comments for the purpose of reducing spam comments but it seems that it doesn’t work or work only to a minimum. What it does it to tell Google and other search engines not to follow links in the comments. That means, when someone posts a comment here, that’s it, dead end, commenters don’t get any Google juice.

Why I decided to remove it

First, it has been known not to work efficiently on spam. I have another plugin I am using another plugin to catch spam comments, so that should take care of it. Then by removing the nofollow tag in the comments, comments left here in my site can get a link love.

Getting it done 

Depending on your blog platform, you can install a plugin to turn off the “nofollow” on blog comments. For WordPress users, you can download the plugin here.

Randa Clay explains it better so go check out her site. You can also download a cool button to display in your blog to show the blogosphere that you are participating in this some sort of “movement”.