Same guy as earlier, now with healthier skin. Plus, he spins!

Behold… My creation…

Maybe he’s some odd piece of pottery, or an alien wailing to evolve further. Almost feels like this should be made into a business card or something.

And, he’s not a flying monkey, so Jon should be okay with it. Joanne may lose her appetite and Pete might fill him up with Christmas lights. Doesn’t look like Nina, so he’s definitely not The Alien Next Door. Two doors down maybe.

Poor fellow. Even his teeth are fleshy.

Two, Two, Hurray! It’s double the double for Tuesday. I have no idea what that means either, but I thought it was catchy. Maybe it would work better as “7w0 7w0 f0r 7u35d4y!”

Anyway, here are the first two:

A license to blog? Is “unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky”? Should it be regulated, or self-regulated? The author of this article suggests neither. What would Benjamin Franklin say?

Bad ideas can be contagious. And they usually get government funding too. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… haha, fooled you. Actually, the first part of the article is the interesting bit, unless you are interested in Washington’s real estate market.

And, now for your second two:

Solar powered hydrogen generator. Make your own hydrogen at home with a couple solar panels, some empty pop bottles and some wires and tubing. Do try not to blow yourself up. Interesting, though the camera work is a bit, well, bouncy-bouncy. Maybe a small tripod would be a good buy.

Six Steps to Deflate Self-Defeating Fears. I’d like to think I saved the best for last. It’s a nice little reward for you for trudging through all the other links. If you only visit one of these links, this ought to be the one! I know all about “Analysis Paralysis!” (Sadly.)

Two-two-da-luh!

Why does it seem like the money you spend adds up faster than the money you save?

Since I started (and restarted) making a serious effort at getting my financial house in order, it seems that, despite cutting out spending on non-essentials, my savings haven’t equalled what I was spending.

While it’s disappointing to look at the numbers, the reason is pretty clear. After setting aside money for paying regular bills and necessities as well as savings, the balance goes toward paying stuff off. The good news is that, instead of buying new non-essentials, I’m getting stuff paid off.

The reason savings don’t quite equal previous spending is because savings are a fixed amount, whether a percentage or a dollar amount of your income–however you figure it–and spending was variable. In other words, you might spend a dollar here or there, but only save a dollar. You get a check, and you set aside a specific amount for savings. You don’t look into your checkbook later in the week and say, hey, I think I’ll save some of that. But, with spending, you’ll look at your checkbook and say, hey, I can spare a couple bucks to buy this…

Because of that, your savings may not add up as much as what your spending did.

Savings are generally planned out, while spending is more inconsistent. For example, you may have spent $5 for coffee and a donut for breakfast before work. Maybe one week, you went every day ($25) and another week you went three times ($15) and the third week you went three times ($15). So, if you decided to save that money instead of spending you, while you might cut out the coffee and donuts, you might have decided to save $15 per week. Over a three week period, you saved $45, whereas in the same three week period you might have spent $55. So, your savings may not grow as quickly as what your spending did.

On top of that, you might also have spent $15 on lunch one day a week, bringing your expenditures to $100 while your savings stayed at $45.

On the plus side, if you’re using that extra money to pay things off, that’s not a bad thing. But, if you want your savings to grow a little faster, you’re going to need to punch some numbers to see if you can increase your weekly savings or if it’s better to continue to pay things off. Ideally, even if you have debts to pay, you should be trying to save some money, even if it’s only a small amount, to save for emergencies or other situations that may arise where you’ll need some extra money.

For other money-saving ideas, be sure to add Sabrina’s Money Matters and The Simple Dollar to your RSS feed or blogroll.

Using WordPress’s timestamp feature is really easy. Just edit the timestamp to the date and time you want your post to appear and then hit “Publish.” That’s assuming, of course, you’ve already written the post, which would obviously be the first step.

If you’re used to writing posts and then publishing them right away, you have to be a bit more careful with your timestamped posts.

Date & Time

Be mindful of when you plan on scheduling your post to appear. For example, I am writing this at 1:20 a.m. on Monday morning and this will be posted to the blog on Tuesday morning. If I refer to something that happened yesterday (Sunday), my readers will think I’m referring to something that happened Monday. Likewise, tomorrow means Wednesday to you, but right now it’s Tuesday to me. This is something you need to watch carefully when timestamping your posts. Alternatively, instead of using imprecise terms, you can refer to the precise day, i.e., “Wednesday” instead of “tomorrow.”

Of course, you will still need to be careful with “today.” It would be awkward to refer to “Tuesday” when the day is Tuesday. The reader will not be sure if you’re referring to the present day or next Tuesday. It’s best to use “today” to refer to the day the post is appearing. Just be careful not to mix your “today” (the day you are writing) with your readers’ today (the day the post appears). In some cases, that can cause great confusion!

Notification?

Should you notify your readers that the post was previously written? That’s up to you. In many cases, it’s probably not important. Magazines have articles that were written weeks or months in advance. They don’t typically date their articles with the day it was written.

In some cases, you may not want people to know you’re away, especially if anyone who reads your blog might know where you live. Don’t just think of your blogging friends. Unless your blog is password-protected, anyone could be reading it. Saying “I’m in Cancun!” could be a bad move. Didn’t you previously mention you didn’t have a security system? Or you have no friends to watch your house? Be careful out there!

The flip side of that is keeping your blog updated, even when you’re away from your computer, can keep the appearance up that you are still at home, typing away madly at your computer. Think the lack of comments will be noticed? Apologize. Sorry I’ve been too busy to reply to your comments, but I’ve been busy, busy, busy! I’ll reply as soon as I can!

The Downside

The downside of timestamped posts, especially if you’re away and cannot undo them, is the risk of appearing insensitive. I once commented on someone else’s blog that I didn’t like driving across bridges, unaware that a bridge had collapsed that same day.

There’s an old joke about how you would like to die peacefully in your sleep like your grandfather, not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car. That may be amusing, but having it appear on your blog the same day one of your blogging friends posts about his grandfather and others dying in an automobile accident is going to appear very insensitive, especially if your post appears after his.

Don’t think that’s limited to jokes either. A report blaming the elderly for X number of traffic fatalities per year is probably not going to be much better.

It would be best to keep such topics for when you are blogging live. That way, you can either hold off on such a post or at least be able to express your regrets to your friend and suggest he not read your post and point out it was previously written and was not intended as commentary on his situation. In that vein, I apologize in advance if such a thing has happened on the day this post is appearing!

On the other hand, if you’ve decided on notifying your readers that you’ll be away and that posts were previously written, you can defuse any appearances of insensitivity that way. It will still be awkward, but your readers will know (and hopefully understand!) that you weren’t being mean-spirited.

In any event, timestamping can be a very useful feature in WordPress. Use it wisely!

Despite not yet launching the other previously announced planned blogs and despite not keeping the StampReport.com very active (yet!) and ditto with Design Print Blog! and also despite giving some serious thought over the past couple days about getting ready to launch one of my previously announced planned blogs, I have decided to launch yet another new blog!

As I mentioned in my reply to Rolando’s comment earlier today, I had just registered a new domain name for a new blog. It’s a very Web 2.0 name, I think.

My previously announced planned blog that I spoke of giving serious thought to over the past couple days is a blog on plants, which would include gardening and houseplants. That’s one of my interests, so it shouldn’t be too hard finding things to write about. As you may have noticed, I slipped in that link for growing pineapples in yesterday’s “Links o’ the Week.”

Writing about a topic you enjoy is one of the keys to building a successful blog. And, it can be monetized too. I can include lots of gardening and houseplant related links, from books to tools. So, that’s great as well. I do still plan on starting this blog.

But, the thing is that, despite the fact that I have plants virtually everywhere, and despite the fact that I check them virtually every day, I don’t really think of plant-related topics every day. There are things I could write about, but every day? Okay, I could but…

This other blog will be on something I think of virtually every day. Every day, I check news sites with news on the subject. There are a number of fellow bloggers who know and enjoy and even write about the topic. I’ve even occasionally written about it here. (Hint: It’s one of my categories!)

Right now, I don’t make a dime off of any of the time spent on it. Heck, even if I make a few pennies a day, that would be better than nothing. Well, just so long as those pennies add up enough to pay for the domain name registration.

Stay tuned! First I have to come up with a cool logo to go with the name. Then get WordPress setup and launch!

Being able to store drafts in WordPress is a pretty handy feature. Of course, you’ll occasionally run into drafts that have inconvenient text such as this:

“As a special incentive, if [...snip...] before the end of this year (that’s December 31, 2007), I will write a special viral links story and include ALL the [...snip...]. That’s right–I will compose a story which will include links to as many as 10,000* bloggers!”

When I started that post on October 1st, reaching 10,000 bloggers by the end of the year was still a reasonable possibility. But now? Now I will have to change that date, won’t I?

Oh, yes, some details were snipped out of that snippet. Curious you are? Wait then you must. Hmmm, yes, wait then you must.

*That’s asterisk’d in the original post and explains why there could be fewer than 10,000. Ten thousand would be the maximum.

Thanks to Phil, I learned of this website where your blog (or MySpace page, website, etc.) can be rated. Phil was rated “G.”

My current rating is “G”, but it did note that I had one mention of “porn.” Presumably, I still got the “G” rating because there is no porn on this blog.

Looking for payday loan?

I don’t think they take into consideration sites that you link to, because several of them (as I sometimes warn) don’t use G language and/or have G content! (Doug’s blog, for example, is rated R!) On further examination, it only examines your first page, not the entire blog. I note this because a search for “porn” on my blog currently returns 3 posts, while the rating system only indicated 1. At the time of this writing, one post appears on the blog’s main page: “Stripping Naked to be Taken Seriously.”

Anyway, it’s a nice little piece of linkbait. You get your blog rated, post your rating and they slip in a little ad below it. (See it?) Sure, you could edit it out, but that wouldn’t be fair to the creator of the rating thingy, would it? Of course, before you get one of those “payday loans” you might want to check out some reviews on a site like Sabrina’s Money Matters, which currently doesn’t have any info on payday loans, but it was the first site that came to mind.

Here you go!

This one’s been in my WordPress “drafts” for ages. Guess I thought I would write something up. So much for that! Too bad I didn’t see it before yesterday’s “Links o’ the Week” post; I could have slipped it in there.

50, w00t 15 4pp4r3n71y n0w 4 w0rd.

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D0 y0u 7h1nk 7h47 0n3 d4y 3C0mm3rc3 51735 w111 b3 f0rm4773d 7h15 w4y?

7h3 5c4r13r 7h1ng 15 7h47 1 w45 4b13 70 pr00fr34d wh47 1 ju57 7yp3d!!!