Money Blue Book

I just installed my Feedburner code to see how many people have actually subscribed to my new baby blog since I started not too long ago. For those of you beginner types who don’t know what Feedburner is, it’s one of the more popular feed reading applications out there. It allows you to pull news and postings from multiple sources into one location so you don’t have to manually visit every web or blog site. Of course, it would still be very nice if you came by the site manually!

Time to Say Hello

When I looked at the number of people that have already subscribed to my site’s feed, I was quite astonished to see a number greater than zero. Of course, my number is still humorously low, but I thought it would be nill since I haven’t begun promoting it yet. The prevailing wisdom is that if you want your blog to take off in subscriber-ship, you need to increase your community participation by posting comments on other people’s blogs and making yourself known to the blogging community. I haven’t gotten around to it just yet but it’s high up on my to do list. I just moved into this domain months ago and I’m still busy setting up the site and getting into my blogging groove.

But I will definitely be doing that in the near future. Right now, I am just trying to focus on writing my regular entries. I love writing and discussing my opinions on issues, but blogging is hard work, especially for me since I do this part time. Any other part time bloggers out there? Suggestions on how to prevent blogger’s cramp or blogger’s block would be much appreciated!

I am starting this site as a personal finance and investing blog. I plan on staying on topic, but on occasion I may stray a bit into technology or entertainment related subjects that interest me. I’ll try my best to keep my diversions and ramblings to a minimum, or I might simply somehow find a way to connect it to the subject of money. I’m sure my readers will help keep me from going off on a wild tangent.

The purpose of this site is to provide me an online space where I can write about my personal finances and share some advice about financial planning and my opinions on various money matters. While I want to discuss the more serious personal finance subjects, I also want a place where I can share some of the more light hearted news and bargains that I discover on a daily basis. Sometimes the offers and deals are so good that I just have to share it with people. Once I get my blogging rhythm going, I also plan on posting regular entries on freebies that I come across on the internet.

I am using Wordpress to power my blog. Even though Wordpress is very user friendly and makes blogging relatively easy even for novices, I have discovered that it still does require a decent amount of programming and computer knowledge. This is particularly true if you want to customize your site, and install the various bells and whistles to enhance it.

Thankfully, for the last few days I’ve had a substantial amount of time to teach myself the ins and outs of Wordpress and blog design. But I think I’ve been spending more time editing Wordpress code than I’ve been researching topics to actually write about. I should be able to start writing in a few more days.

This whole beginner blogging experience has been very enlightening and quite fun.

I recently have been experiencing trouble with my new web host provider, Host Monster. For several days now I’ve had to call their technical support telephone line to report that my site was experiencing tremendous lag or that my site was completely down. I even suggested that they move my site onto another server since I suspected the server I was on was likely experiencing substantial traffic due to another website. I knew there was no way my site could be the reason the server was experiencing lag. I just don’t have much traffic yet.

Only after several telephone calls and persistent nagging did the problems finally get resolved. Now that the site is running smoothly, I can breathe a sigh of relief again.

I would still recommend my host provider to others, but I think if you don’t want to take a chance, you should probably stick with more popular and established web host providers like Go Daddy, or the one that I use – Dreamhost.