This post brought to you by Dad-Blogs' FatherHood Friday. Be sure to swing by for all the other great Dads and Moms who love to share their lives online!
I’ve spent all morning working on today’s post, well, the bits of the morning where I wasn’t taking The Teenager to school. Then there were the times I was holding the baby, which is a chore, let me tell you. Every time I hold that warm little snuggly body against me I can’t help thinking that I’d much rather be in front of my glaring blank white computer screen instead of throwing the baby in to the air and hearing his sweet, genuine giggle as I tickle under his ribs with my nose. Who wants that?
This post brought to you by Dad-Blogs' FatherHood Friday. Be sure to swing by for all the other great Dads and Moms who love to share their lives online!
I’m not going to lie. I started this blog to try to make money.
A year ago, I discovered guys like John Chow and Shoemoney. I saw sites like Problogger and thought, ‘Man, I could do that! Let me at it!’
A year ago this month I started the Howefitz blog, and I have not made one cent. In fact, I’ve lost a few. (I’m lookin at you, aweber!)
As I begin to write this, it’s just after 4 am in the Rocky Mountains. My beautiful wife and two children are still asleep. I’m awake on purpose. I set my alarm for this time. This is my favorite blogging hour. Some days, I miss this hour. I hit the snooze alarm a few too many times, or I do get up and get sidetracked by checking email, my twitter followers, Facebook, and MySpace. But today is special. According to Dad Blogs, today is fatherhood Friday.
Waay back in 2008, I blogged about the dangers of Twitter. In that blog, I made the case that it’s possible to pollute your favorite social media sites with compelling entries such as “I’m eating a burrito.” I thought that this could be off-putting to the people you could be trying to attract to your blog/online business by tweeting.
As we look to a bright new year, many of us are looking back at the year we just had. Then we look forward to the year ahead. I am doing the latter with a vengeance. This does not come without the required retrospective, however.
The past year has been very busy for me. I moved twice, continued to try to sell my home in Missouri, worked overnight and days, considered a second job, started several blogs, discovered Facebook and Twitter while growing increasingly impatient with MySpace, and somewhere in there tried to figure out how to get family and ‘me’ time.
Lately I’ve been doing some soul searching about my responsibility to the online community. I recently became a fairly heavy Twitter user. Any time I am at my computer, Tweetdeck is running. At work, I have Tiny Twitter running on my phone.
Interested in monetizing wesites and blogs, I decided to give Magpie a try. I decided to have them post an ad in my tweet stream after every five tweets. I then tweeted things like what I had for breakfast, the weather outside, whatever was on my mind. I literally started to think in 140 characters or less. (‘This just happened, how would I tweet that?’) I was trying to earn some cash from Magpie!
It seems like any blog you look at these days raves about Twitter. Well, let me join the crowd! Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users to quickly send out messages to keep in touch, communicate, pimp their blog, or whatever else they feel like selling/doing. I have blogged previously about how a tweet got one of my favorite Star Trek novel writers to comment on my blog. Today, I used it as a form of text support. Using Tweetdeck I sent out a cry for help.
What my plea for assistance looks like on tweetdeck
Today was really crappy. Super crappy. I mean, it couldn’t have gotten worse if Murphy himself showed up, slapped me around a bit and screamed his law in my face. It was seriously that bad. I was so depressed and mopey when I got home that my wife, empathic soul that she is, immediately felt depressed and mopey too. A few minutes before Heroes started, my wife got a phone call and left the room. Not wanting to watch one of my favorite shows without my favorite companion, I hit record, changed the channel on the T.V., and sulked some more.
After taking some down time from the ol’ laptop, I decided to check out some new developments I had heard about, starting with the new Gmail themes.
GMail Themes
If you’re a user of Gmail, you may have noticed it looks a little different. That’s because they just added themes! If you go to your settings panel, you’ll notice a new tab called, you guessed it, ‘themes’. If you’re the more condervative type, there are several different color schemes to choose from. If you like to have a little more fun, there are themes such as Bus Stop (similar to the bus stop theme in iGoogle). My two personal faves are Ninja and Planets.
Waay back in 2008, I 
