Showing posts with label my fairy blog mother. Show all posts

Feedburner- Making The Switch

If you are a blogger, you may have already heard that as of July 1st, Feed burner will no longer work. 
Honestly, I didn’t even know what Feed Burner was. (Still don’t).

If you have the widget that says
 “follow me by email” or  “Subscribe by email”. 
It will no longer work unless you get a new platform. 

What does this mean? It means readers that have subscribed to follow your blog via email will no longer get updates on new post and new readers will not be able to opt in to get your new post via email. 

I started getting worried and didn’t want to lose my followers. I want to get the full benefits to my knowledge on my blog. 
So I contacted my Fairy Blogmother also know as Linda of Life and Linda



She has been transferring bloggers old feedburners over to Mail Chimp. This is the best way to go and Linda knows all about web design and what's best for everyone. 

For a small affordable fee, she patiently walked me through what I needed to do on my end to get things ready for the transfer.
I had to make an account on Mail Chimp which was an easy task then I went to my feed burner and downloaded my email followers. This was easy too, and wow, I did not know that many people were subscribed to my blog. I was tickled over this. 
She has a blog post HERE explaining it better than I can.

I gave her permission to administer my blog and she did all the hard work and now I have a nice new widget on my side bar. There is nothing else I need to do. My subscribers will continue getting post emails and new readers can subscribe to get an email every time I post a new blog post.  

If you are reading this from an email right now, 
you may not see the side bar on my blog page. 
To see this, just click on the blog title.

My side bar includes some other small things to read, advertisements, announcements, follow options
and even a tip jar if you’re feeling generous. Haha. 

Will you be making the switch? Let Linda know and she will have you fixed up in minutes. 



New Blog Look

Guess what? I won! Yes I entered to win a free blog make over at over at life and linda and two days later I got the memo that I had won!

 

I now have a "My Fairy Blogmother". 

So, what do you think? 

It was about time It got a face lift and I was planning on eventually giving it a redo but there is only so much you can do from Blogger itself. They have some nice templates but I like my own personality to show through mine. Frankly, I was just too lazy to mess with it. 

Linda contacted me via email and got some ideas of the look I was going for and it took off from there. 
I even learned a few things along the way. 

Did she make it look great or what!? Be sure to visit her site and see example of her other blogger designs.

My blog is not the only thing that got a new look today. My butterfly bush got a nice trim and decor. My daughter came for a visit and we made an Easter tree. We also baked cookies.

 

My daughter is an adult and lives out on her own. Living 30 minutes from us, she manages to visit every few weekends. When she comes home, my mommy engine goes full throttle. I fix her meals to eat, we bake, shop, tell stories and laugh a lot.... And yes, I have to throw in those life lectures (maybe to much). No matter how old she gets, I somehow can not let her grow out of those fun childlike traditions we have during the holidays. 





Need A Makeover

I have been putting a lot of thought into giving my blog a makeover. I have been blogging for seven years now using the same template. I can't believe I've let this happen. I like change.
I have changed my colors and back ground photo before, but not the layout.

I'm skeerd I will not like it or that it will mess up my other past post. I'm not real smart on the whole "backing up my blog thing", which you need to do before you make any changes, just in case.
However, I could and would figure it out.

Then this happened. I found a blog makeover giveaway over at life and linda. She is also known as "My Fairy Blogmother". I signed up. Maybe I will win. I'll know by Sunday. Fingers crossed.

If I do not win. I may go ahead and tackle it myself. Blogger has introduced some new templates and clean looking layouts. I just don't know if I want the type of layout that readers have to click "read more" to move on to the rest of the story. That's what it seems everyone is doing now. Well see. I think I'm pretty good with HTML codes once I get into them. That's something MySpace (before facebook) taught me years ago when I used to help my daughter set up her site. MySpace was all by HTML codes. Now I know why older folks leaned more toward Facebook. ha!

So, I'll sit here and wait to see if I win a blog makeover.
Either way, be prepared to see a change coming soon to my blog look. Don't worry, The name and link with stay the same. Just the layout will look different. If I don't chicken out first it will be sometime next week.

I hope in the process I do not lose anything. Wish me luck.