How to Start a Blog for Your Baby

As a new parent, it’s not always easy to find time to record a baby’s early life in their baby book. Create a blog for your baby to help you to complete the missing information in their baby book later and give them an interactive window into their early childhood as an adult.

Choose a blogging website and sign up for a free membership. There are many blogs to choose from. Find a blog that is easy to use and one with enough features to suite your tastes. Consider making the blog private and only sharing it with your spouse. Keep the whole project a secret from your child until they are much older. It will be a sweet and unexpected surprise for your son or daughter to receive access to so much information about their childhood. Verify that you are able to download backups of the blog to your computer and do so frequently.

Take lots of digital photographs of your baby. A mobile phone with a built-in camera is extremely handy for this. Remember that pictures taken with a camera phone will typically be low resolution and perfect for displaying on the blog, but will not make good printed photographs. If you wish to print many of the pictures that you take of your baby, buy a decent digital camera and keep it close by at all times. If you take mostly high resolution photos of your baby, use a photo editing program to make lower resolution copies to post to the blog because they will take up far less space and load faster in your web browser.

Post interesting and detailed blog entries every day. Write as though you are speaking to your child directly. Don't write, "Ate applesauce for the first time today." Make the post interesting and discuss things that were happening, not just with your child, but also with family members and friends whom they will be able to relate to later in life. Don't share any negative or personal feelings about anyone and don't talk about your problems or worries. Keep the experience positive and upbeat. You can also add brief clips of current events, but remember not to just link to other web sites. Most websites change constantly, so you'll want to make snapshots of pages or find files that you can save on the blog or link to. PDF files are a great format to use for capturing pictures and text in a single document because they display the same way, no matter which browser you use to view the file.

Upload short, compressed video files or sound clips to the blog. This will require additional equipment, like a digital video camera and the appropriate editing software, but the results are well-worth the investment. Your child will one day have the ability to watch their first steps or hear their first words by simply logging into the blog, which will be far more interactive than their baby book could ever be.


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How to Write Articles while on Vacation

Just because you go on vacation, you don't have to forfeit valuable writing time. Prepare wisely so that you will always have the appropriate writing tools available when inspiration sets in.

Make the most of your tiem away from work. Vacation is a time for relaxation and for doing as little as possible. When your mind is at rest and free from distractions, you can put it to good use by thinking of ideas to write about. How often do you find yourself thinking of great article topics, but you are unprepared and have no viable means to develop them into complete articles? Prepare yourself to write while on vacation or simply away from home by taking along equipment that will allow you to record your thoughts in a format that is easy to convert and upload to your preferred content resource web site.

Buy a laptop or netbook PC. Lower priced laptops and netbooks have made mobile computing accessible to a larger segment of the population. Many professionals need a full-featured laptop in order to conduct business while away from the office, but writers who simply want to record their thoughts at a moment's notice, should consider a lower cost netbook. The netbook fills the need for mobile word processing without imposing a huge expense. If you are fortunate enough to have a laptop or a netbook, you should have no trouble creating quality content on-the-go. Wireless Internet access makes online publishing convenient because you don't have to wait until you get home to make your work available to the world.

Don't leave home without a means to record your thoughts. If a laptop or netbook is out of your price range, consider purchasing a lightly used PDA, like a Palm Pilot or an HP iPAQ mobile computer from an online auction. Portable keyboards are available which are compatible with PDA's. It is even possible to type entire articles using a stylus and on-screen keyboard. That's precisely how this article was written. While it is a labor of love and quite tedious, it will be easier to transfer at a later time than a hand-written document.

Use whatever means you have at your disposal to record your ideas. When no digital solution is available, you may find yourself using an old-fashioned method: pencil or pen and paper. If you think ahead, you can make even this format easier to transfer to the web. Hand-write the article using only printed letters, not cursive and try to write as clearly as possible. If you scan this page later using a scanner with OCR (object character recognition), then you may be able to convert it to a digital document with only minor corrections, thus saving you a lot of time and typing.


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How to Spend Time with your Family and Still Write Articles

Writing articles for websites like eHow, Bukisa, and Associated Content is a great way to express your thoughts and to also put some extra money in your pockets each month. Just like any activity, writing articles needs to be added to your schedule in a responsible way so that you don’t neglect your family.

Budget your time wisely. Writing articles for websites has become a popular way for writers on every level to express themselves and harness the power of the Internet to generate traffic and ultimately revenue for their work. Writing can consume a large portion of your time and can draw your attention away from other responsibilities. Like any other activity, time for writing should be isolated into its own time slot in order to allow time for other activities.

Experiment to find the best time of day for you to write. The most obvious time to write articles is late at night after everyone in the house has gone to sleep. By then, your chores are done and the house is quiet because everyone is sleeping. The problem with late night writing is that you could begin to lose more and more sleep and you don't typically have anyone to tell you when it's time to go to bed. If you are going to stay up late on the computer, set an alarm for yourself, but nothing audible or you'll wake everyone up.

Utilize break time and down-time. If you have access to a computer at work, you could use your break time or lunch time to write an article. The only problem with this is that if people see you sitting at your desk, they may think you are on the clock and approach you with business. Don't start writing articles on company time. It's dishonest and you shouldn't lose your job, while working on secondary income. If you can afford it, a laptop or netbook is a good investment because you can take it to a quiet place outside the office and write.

The most important thing is to use discipline and spend writing time for writing and family time for family. If you want to try both, you could brainstorm with your family for ideas and they could help you write articles, but if they aren't interested, then don't impose it on them. Everyone has different tastes.


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