Blissdom:: The Recap

I don’t know why I succumbed to the 2 colons in the title there. It seems to be the cool form of punctuation these days; I see it everywhere! They're like a cute little square and I love them!

Let me tell you about Blissdom- it was amazing.
The things I liked most were getting to meet wonderful, fun bloggers and learning about blogging as a craft.

One of the first things we talked about was your personal goals. For me, I would just like to tell my story. I want to have a record of my crazy antics so my kids can lock me away someday for all the stuff I put them through. Or just not feel guilty if they don’t visit me in the old folks home. Truly, this documenting is an act of love for my family {it’s all they're getting for V-Day}.
I also love to share stories and encourage other friends in the blogosphere. I enjoy connecting with other women {and guys} out there and you really do make my day.
So, without further ado, here are the top ten blogger-ific new things I learned at Blissdom ’09.

10. Blogger is at the bottom of the food chain for blogging platforms. Wordpress is the “industry standard” and Typepad is not that bad either. Blogger is for beginners and is super easy. And that’s why I love it.

9. You can buy your own website with your name and connect your blogger site to that. {That’s what I’m going to do in the BIG CHANGE.}

8. Twitter is what all the cool kids do. There is a whole world of people out there “tweeting”. If you don't know what that is, I will explain in a later post, but basically it’s a world of Facebook status updates. And, you need to update your Twitter pretty regularly- as in- at least every 8 hours. Or you’re dead to me. Well, not to me, but to the die hard twitter-ati {twitter mafia}.

7. If your blog gets 100- 200 visits a day, then it is in the top 10% of all blogs. You can track this several ways, but I track mine with Google Analytics.

6. Err on the side of caution with privacy. OK, whoops. Haven’t quite done that. That’s why, when the BIG CHANGE occurs, my kids’ names are going to be different. If you want to vote for new names for them, let me know in the comments section.

5. They’ll let just about anybody join the Twitter-ati. I’m already in. Let me know if you are a member of the Twitter-afia, too.

4. Pictures are a huge deal. I guess I knew this, but there are SO many cool sites with picture editing tools and storage info that I’ve got to start using. The one I’m most excited about is Picnik- especially since I got a one year free membership!

3. Blog layouts are also a huge deal. Of course I knew this, but I learned about where things need to be in a layout and how to make it remember-able.

2. I was not remember-able AT ALL when I got to meet and hang out with one of my favorite bloggers- Shannon from Rocks in my Dryer. I was like a bumbling idiot- much like when I met Keifer Sutherland. {What? You don’t know that story? I’ll post about it later…} Then I got to see her again on Saturday and apologized for my dorkiness. She is amazingly graceful and polite and acted like I hadn’t been a drooling groupie the day before. Just when we were getting to chatty and she might have had the impression that I was a normal person, I went and asked for a picture with her crossing the line back into dork-dom. Oh well. If she ever was going to be my friend, she might as well know the truth!

This is a horrible picture of me- obviously ignoring #4, but I'm getting over that.

1. Focus on good content and nothing else really matters. That was what I heard again and again from everyone. If you have the stuff that people want to read, then it doesn’t matter what your pictures look like, what your platform is or what kind of babbling, groupie idiot you are in real life.

I actually could list many more things I learned. The whole environment was really uplifting and encouraging; I will absolutely be back there next year! Thanks so much to the many people who put it on- the Blissfully Domestic Crew and the One to One Network. Phenomenal job, ladies!

P. S. Don’t tell Jason, but I have a new Valentine- or at least a new crush. He is Chris Mann and he came to sing for us live on Saturday. He is amazing. I have his CD and I might let you borrow it if you can claw it out of my white knuckled hands. His real CD isn’t out, yet, but I will be buying/ downloading it as soon as I can. We got a preview CD- how cool is that? Apparently it was only for the Twitter-ati. Being in the mafia pays.