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I’ve been having fun going through plugin lists at one of my new blogs and came across one that is promoted as one that people won’t want to install but should anyway. Why? Because it’s designed to notify next of kin of the existence of your blog should something happen to you.   To quote what they say:

Next Of Kin is the plugin we don’t want to install. It handles what happens after we die. It monitors your own visits to your wordpress system, and will send you a warning email after a number of weeks (of your choice) without a visit. If you fail to visit your blog even after that, the system will send a mail you wrote to whoever you choose. All time intervals and messages are customizable. This plugin is useful for those that want their blog to out-live them, and serve as an online memorial. Even without use of this plugin, all are recommended to make sure someone can handle their website in case of emergency. By Tzafrir Rehan.

You can get this plugin at http://tzafrir.net/nextofkin/.

Having experienced a loss in our own family last year and the challenges we went through trying to determine what presence she had online and where, and how to contact her friends, etc, then something like this is probably worth considering – at least for your blogs.  Not sure if the social networking tools have anything like this in place yet but it will most likely be a worthwhile addition.

Does make you think about what information or records you should have available, just in case, doesn’t it?  I have a client list easily available for family members or a close associate to access should something happen but a list of all my social networking tools and memberships?  Perhaps I need to set up a small database or something.

Tags: by Kathie Thomas
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On a forum I belong to we were discussing the benefits of self-hosted vs free-hosted blogs, in this case with WordPress. One of the members was worried she might lose the increased readership she’s been getting over the past few months if she made a move now. And the reason why a move was being discussed was because another member had highlighted that free-hosted version of WordPress doesn’t take kindly to paid advertising and links being on their free supported sites. They are supposed to be non-commercial.  So, the information below gives an outline of the benefits of shifting to paid hosting for WordPress blogs.

If your traffic is increasing then it’s all the more important that you have your site where you have control.  There are things you need to think about:

• On a free hosted site there are restrictions on what you can do and limited templates.
• On a free hosted site – who is backing up your blog?
• What happens if your blog disappears?
• Do you have that content backed up?
• I have heard of people on Blogger.com whose blogs disappeared and some of them were not recovered. I haven’t heard of that at WordPress but I don’t hang around the forums there.  Don’t want to scare you but I do want you to think about this and explore the options available to you. If there is a backup system there, then that won’t be something to worry about.

The reasons why I like to have control on a paid hosting site:

• I can use whatever templates I wish – I just have to research to find them and then upload them, and activate them.
• I can install any plugins I want to use.
• I can make any modifications I wish, including background colours, text, etc.
• I can place advertisements on my blogs without worrying about whether I’m allowed to or not.
• I use a domain name of my choosing without wordpress or blogspot in the address.  Domains that relate to your keywords help a great deal.
• I have a regular backup operating so backups are emailed to me weekly (there’s a plugin for this).

You can divert your free hosted blog to your self-hosted blog – I have done this with blogger. The reasons I do this are:

• So someone cannot take over my old address and use it for their spammy efforts
• So that existing audiences can still find me and update their address list
• So that audiences at the free site can still find me when surfing through blogs.

I first decided to do this with my VA blog about 3 or more years ago – it was a scary thing to do but I did it and am really glad because that blog now carries my main domain address and my audience has grown and my PR (Google page rank) as well.  I discovered that someone took over my old blogger address because I didn’t think about it in those days and they were selling stuff that had nothing to do with being a VA – lesson learnt.  These days when I test blogs on Blogger and then shift them, I make sure I add a message on the top post of the new address and there is a redirect code you can put in html which takes people to the new site in a few seconds. I haven’t tried that with WordPress free site but even if you can’t put the redirect code you could certainly leave a message to say you’ve shifted to a new home address.  And the import feature in WordPress does work quite well to shift old posts if you wish to do that.

I hope that the above information will also help you in your decision making if you have been considering a similar move – whether it be from Blogger or WordPress free hosted sites.

Tags: About Blogging, Blogger, Wordpress by Kathie Thomas
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There is so much information about Twitter out there these days and once you get into it, you’ll find that the number of followers will increase quite quickly (definitely daily) and that the more you are following, the more you’ll have to tweet about.  It’s definitely a great marketing tool. Just today someone who follows me responded to someone I don’t know who wanted to learn about the Virtual Assistant industry. They replied to the tweet and added my username @kathiemt which alerted me immediately to the conversation.

I contacted the other lady to find that she has a granddaughter looking to work from home before she has her baby and the VA industry would be perfect for her.

Now, if I wasn’t on Twitter and the first lady I mentioned wasn’t following me, then she wouldn’t have been able to refer someone else to my VA network.  Works really well and is just another example of a referral based network in action.

Now Twitter isn’t all about referrals but it is about building relationships and getting to know what others do. And it’s great for viral marketing.

I thought this article by Naomi Trower about Viral Marketing with Twitter a good one to share with you.

Tags: Social Networks, Twitter by Kathie Thomas
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Recently a client has been having challenges with their Outlook file and then they sent me an image of a message they’d received because Outlook had stopped working.  The pst file was over the size limit.

I had explained previously the importance of deleting from the Sent folder, archiving regularly and generally maintaining the file but I guess it’s something that just isn’t thought about regularly and in fact, not until it crashes.

Unfortunately Outlook does have file limitations (you can’t let it go on forever) and whilst some say that 2gig is the recommended size I encourage people to consider keeping it at 1gig or less.

I restart a new pst file at the beginning of every year. Quite easy really. I rename the outlook.pst file to the year it’s for, i.e. outlook2008.pst (when Outlook is closed) and then when Outlook re-opens it will automatically recreate outlook.pst because it can’t find the other file.  You can then use the import/export function to import your contacts list and any other folders you created which need to be kept.  But don’t import the whole old file – otherwise you’re back where you were before.

This article at Microsoft will give you more information should you need to do further exploration.

Tags: Business Operations, Working Online by Kathie Thomas
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