With the launch of The Parent Vortex I have discovered many new things! Behold my new discoveries gleaned by incessantly trawling the interwebs in order to learn about how to blog in the public eye:

- Gravatar is a free service that gives you a globally recognized avatar, so no matter what kind of blog you’re commenting on it will show your lovely mug. This makes commenters more recognizable, saves everyone the hassle of creating a billion user profiles on a billion different blogs, and it is easy and straightforward to add more pictures or more associated emails.
-Google Analytics is also free, gives you shiny lovely graphs and pie charts to display your blog stats, and integrates seamlessly with Google AdSense. I still like and use Statcounter, which is also free, easy to use and seems to be a bit more up to the minute on the stats.
- The boggling array of WordPress themes, both free and paid. There’s lots more than you see in the default Themes folder! Astounding!
- Twitter is way more useful when used with a focus in mind. Also more addictive, educational, social and yet still kind of banal.
- The somewhat seedy world of blog monetization and affiliate marketing. I’m still just dipping my toes in here, but there’s sure a lot of ways to make (next to) nothing on your blog.
- URL shorteners like bit.ly track the stats for your shortened links, letting you see when they’ve been retweeted and passed on from user to user. Nifty!

As someone who’s been blogging for ten years now I feel somewhat like a kid who’s just come out of hiding in my room to discover a huge party in my house. Blogs are massive. Twitter is massive. And hey, it’s kind of fun heading out into that party and grabbing a margarita.

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nuts and bolts by michelle