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For those who were bothered by it, confoozled.com is no longer white on black. Yes, I'm aware that the masthead still says December. LOL. Still lots more changes in the works, including a possible likely change of shade for the infamous confoozled purple and green! I will get back to monthly masthead making once the makeover is further along.
Another reminder to those who receive posts via e-mail, that you must re-subscribe using the form in the sidebar. I am not allowed to subscribe you myself. The old e-mail notifications will be shut down soon, so make sure you do this!
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What? A second post in one day? After not writing for almost three months?
Well, thanks in part to the comments I got here and on Facebook regarding my previous post about the future of this blog, I figured out what I'm going to do. As I mentioned I don't have an abundance of time to devote to the blog anymore, so its rebirth is going to take place in stages, over who knows how long... I'm not even going to offer an estimate of when it will all be done. When it's done, that's when. :P But when it is all done, it will be simplified, resulting in a lot less work required of me, yet keeping the site fresher than it has been in a long time.
The first stage, though, is already in motion. I am switching the e-mail delivery of my blog posts to a third party service called Feed My Inbox. This is important: If you still want to receive confoozled.com posts in your e-mail, you will need to subscribe again. Look up in the sidebar; the subscribe form is still in the same place and looks exactly the same, but now points to the new list on Feed My Inbox. Enter your e-mail address there, and then click the confirmation link they will send to your inbox, to keep receiving posts.
Feed My Inbox will send you posts once a day, at a set time, rather than immediately after they are posted. This may seem like a step backward, but you'll be glad, because soon there will be many posts here every day, as all of my Twitter posts (tweets) are going to be automatically imported here. If you really want more immediate notification that I've written something, you really should use Twitter and/or Facebook to follow me.
I will keep the old, instant e-mail notifications active for a while longer until I'm sure everyone has subscribed to the new system, but please do so ASAP!
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I know I haven't written anything on this blog in a long time... again. The truth is, I've moved more toward sharing my life's moments, and opinions, on Twitter and Facebook. The posts there are short and to the point, and not something I feel like I have to set aside time in my day for - I have a thought, I post it, and it only takes a few seconds. I also like that on Facebook I can control exactly who can and cannot read each individual post, so if I want to complain about work, or family, and not have people connected to them read it, I can. The majority of my messages are publicly viewable on Twitter, but occasionally I want to write something a little more private, and using the social networks instead of this blog allows me to do that.
But I have put a lot of work into this site - it's my baby - and I don't want to just let it die. So I'm at a loss as to what to do. Is there some way I can turn it into something other than a blog? Or do I keep it as a blog and just post a lot less frequently than I used to? Is there honestly anyone reading this that hasn't connected with me on Twitter or Facebook, or both? What are your thoughts?
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Today I made a couple of changes to what you see at the bottom of posts on confoozled.com. First, I removed the star rating widget. Hardly anyone was using it, and I realized that I need to write what I want to write, not what I think others want to read. Second, I added a few new sharing buttons for specific social bookmarking / sharing networks, in hopes that seeing these familiar icons will make people more likely to click them. I am aware that the counter above the generic "Share" button is missing right now... this seems to be a problem on ShareThis' end, not mine. And finally, the Facebook widget where you can "Like" any post and see which of your friends have liked it.
If you think there are other buttons I should add, let me know!
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She builds a URL shortening engine, of course.
It's not something that I really needed to do. I just wanted to. It's what I've been doing to relax during my free time for the past week or so. Writing HTML, CSS and PHP code, and learning all sorts of web server tricks to make things work the way I want them to, is my way of zoning out.
And hey, now I don't need to worry about my shortened and encrypted links disappearing when other URL shorteners experience database failure or go out of business. As long as I have any web sites online, I'll have foozUs. It only cost me a couple of bucks for the domain name, and my existing web hosting account allows for up to ten additional domains at no extra charge.
Ahh. That was fun. 
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Have you noticed the rating widget on confoozled.com's entries yet? I'm trying to get a better idea of what type of content really interests my readers, so I've installed a five star rating system. I'd really appreciate it if you'd go back and give each of my posts over the last couple of weeks an honest rating, as well as any new posts going forward.
You'll have to view each post live on the site to see the rating widget. It will not show up in your feed reader or on LiveJournal or Facebook. To vote, just click the star corresponding to the rating you wish to give - for example, if you wanted to rate a post four out of five stars, you would click the fourth star from the left. The stars will turn color as you hover over them, and the text beside them will indicate whether you would be rating the post as "bad", "boring", "OK", "good" or "excellent".
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Crap. In all my hating life I completely forgot about the masthead contest and making a September masthead. Unfortunately, I didn't get any idea submissions that I liked - and I think some people missed the point: that I was looking to avoid the obvious themes of the month. So I've gone with my own idea. For those who can't see it, the background photo this month is a herd of elephants somewhere in Africa. A two-week ad spot to the first person to correctly identify why I chose this photo.
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A couple of slight tweaks to the site today as I move further away from the focus on making a profit online. I have left Entrecard and removed the widget from the sidebar. In its place I have listed a couple of ways you can help confoozled.com pay its own bills, along with a link to a page which describes more options in that department. I got rid of the cheesy banner near the top of the sidebar which used to link to said page, because I think most people's brains are trained to dismiss such images as ads, thus you don't even see them.
You might notice that the confoozled.com arcade has been removed from the list of ways you can help the site earn money. This is because it was becoming a nightmare to maintain and keep all of those games from eating up all of my server space, as well as the fact that in the time it's been online, it has earned me all of three cents. I have to earn $100 to be paid, and it's just not going to happen. The arcade is still online right now, but I will eventually take it down. I might replace it with a simpler version, so if you play the current arcade and have any favorite games you'd like me to keep around, be sure to let me know.
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I've been doing a monthly masthead (header image) for confoozled.com for two years, and I'm starting to run out of ideas for them. I always choose a background photo that is somehow related to the month in question. For the first year I focused on the obvious major holidays when there was one, but now I'm trying to avoid repeating that. The exception of course is Christmas - I love Christmas, thus the December masthead will always be a Christmas image.
Sometimes I go with a lesser known holiday; for example, my very first masthead, for September of 2007, was in honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Unfortunately, it seems I did not save a copy of that masthead before replacing it for October. I may also honor a cause that is meaningful to me, either with the background photo, or with an awareness graphic, such as the pink breast cancer ribbon I added to the October 2007 masthead.
Other times the theme of the masthead may be something that is happening in my life that particular month, and its meaning may not be immediately apparent unless you are reading carefully and paying attention. One example is this past June. Since I would be spending the first week of June visiting my family in Oregon, I chose an Oregon image: the bridge at Multnomah Falls.
Brooskey turned one year old last August, so for that masthead I made a timeline of photos showing his growth in his first year.
And then I did the same thing for Vixen when she turned one in October.
Anyway, it's time to start working on this September's masthead, and I'm stuck. I did the pirate theme in 2007, and back-to-school last year.
![[September 2008 masthead]](http://www.confoozled.com/masthead/2008/09/640.gif) So I thought I would have a little contest in honor of two years of these monthly headers. Use the contact form to send me your idea for a masthead theme for September. It should have some demonstrable significance to the month; if, for example, it's some obscure holiday, include a link to information on that holiday. I don't need a photo, but if you have one you'd like me to use, and you have the right to give me permission to use it, send it along. (If the photo is online somewhere, give me a link, otherwise just let me know you want to send one and I will reply with my e-mail address to send it to.) Any photo submitted needs to be at least 1250 pixels wide, and keep in mind the extremely wide panorama that the subject needs to fit into. Submit your idea and optional photo by 11:59pm EDT on August 24, and within the next couple of days I will select my favorite idea and do my magic. The winner will be publicly announced on September 1 when the masthead goes live.
The prize will be a one-month ad run for your web site, blog or business in the confoozled.com sidebar. I will contact the winner as soon as he or she is chosen to obtain the ad image and target URL. The ad will run from September 1 through September 30.
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So here's the deal. I've been neglecting confoozled.com a bit lately, and I'm going to start writing more often again. But, I'm no longer going to make it such a high priority to post every single weekday. One year after starting it, I've decided to end my experiment in making money online. There are a few reasons for this, which I may or may not go into in a later post, but suffice it to say that combined with my regular job it was too much work and added too much stress to my life. Now, I'm not going to stop earning money online completely. I'll still write sponsored posts from time to time and participate in other activities to earn some extra spending cash. I'll keep my affiliate accounts open, at least those that will still have me after the passing of a new anti-affiliate Rhode Island law. But I will no longer aggressively pursue new sources of online income, nor will I attempt to pull in more and more new blog readers solely for the purpose of increasing ad revenue - which is why I won't post fluff every single day to keep confoozled.com on all of the recently-updated blog listings. I'll only post when I actually have something to say or share, which I'm sure will still be plenty to keep you, my loyal few readers, entertained.
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The Blockbuster gift card giveaway has officially ended, and the winner is... Alysha! I've already contacted Alysha directly, and as soon as she sends me her mailing address her gift card will be on its way. Thanks to those of you who entered, and keep playing at the confoozled.com arcade!
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There's only been one entry into the Blockbuster GC giveaway so far... don't you people want free movie rentals?! If you're worried about registering on the arcade, don't be. It's hosted on my own server, and the only person who will ever see your personal information is me. I'll be perfectly honest and tell you that the purpose of this contest is to get people to register on the arcade so that I can send out updates on the best new games, and keep you coming back to play! Because if you don't play, then I don't make money, and I have to at least make back the $45 I spent to get it up and running. Actually, scratch that... I have to make $100 to even get paid, so you guys have some serious time wasting to do. 
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Just about everyone shops online these days. I do, for several reasons: 1) it saves me waiting for someone to be available to take me to a store Chris doesn't like to shop at; 2) it allows me to shop privately for gifts and surprise purchases; 3) it's easier to find things online when I don't know where to start looking; and 4) sometimes what I need isn't in stock in the local stores. There's another cool benefit to shopping online. Thanks to affiliate programs, you can make sure a percentage of the money you spend goes to a blogger or other web site owner whose work you appreciate.
I've created my own online mall full of stores where I am a registered affiliate. If you want to help me make some extra money, you can bookmark the mall and start there whenever you plan to purchase something online. Actually, I recommend you shop around the same way you always do and decide where you want to make your purchase so that you'll get the best deal. Then close all browser windows to that store (make note of the item number or something which will help you find it again quickly), visit my mall, find the store you've chosen, and click the banner shown there. Once back in the store, find your item and complete your purchase as usual.
Of course, what if the store you've chosen isn't available in the mall? It wouldn't surprise me a bit, since I only add stores manually, when I have a reason to. But I can add almost any store you want, so long as that store 1) has an affiliate program, and 2) hasn't outright rejected my application for affiliate status (some of them do... oh well). If you e-mail me requesting a store link during business hours, chances are I can respond to you fairly quickly - and then that store will be there for the next person! Some stores approve affiliates manually and will take longer; if that's the case I'll let you know, and then you can decide whether to wait or just go ahead and make your purchase without crediting me. Either way, when/if I do get approved, the store will be added to the mall for future purchases. You can also sign up to get e-mail automatically whenever new stores are added.
If all of this doesn't sound like far too much work (I promise I've tried to make it as easy for you as possible!), I would be very grateful to anyone who chooses to use my affiliate mall. Of course I don't expect you to credit me with every purchase you make if there are other bloggers and web site owners out there you want to support as well; by all means, spread the love around! In fact, if you yourself are a site owner who participates in affiliate marketing and are interested in exchanging purchases (i.e. I'll shop your mall if you shop mine), please don't hesitate to contact me!
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Spring is here and many television shows will be ending their seasons soon, which at least in my house means more movie rentals. Lucky for you, I have a $20 gift card to Blockbuster Video to give away to one lucky confoozled.com reader. All it takes to enter is three easy steps:
- Subscribe to confoozled.com via e-mail, if you're not already. (The subscribe box is over there in the sidebar.) If you're already subscribed you can skip this step.
- Register an account on the confoozled.com arcade. Registering lets you play unlimited games, comment on games, and receive occasional e-mail updates about new games and other arcade news. Make sure you check your e-mail and confirm your registration.
- Leave a comment below confirming you want to enter and (optionally) listing any additional entries you've earned. Please leave your comment on the contest post on confoozled.com, not on Facebook, LiveJournal, or anywhere else you may be reading this. Additional entry opportunities are listed below.
Remember, you must complete all three steps to be entered.
Here are a few ways you can earn extra entries into the drawing. Each action is worth one additional entry, and you may only complete each action once.
- Blog about the contest. Post must be in your own words, not a copy and paste from this page. Include the post URL in your comment.
- Tweet about the contest. Include "@HelloKit" in your tweet so I'll see it, but not as the first word (which may prevent some of your followers from seeing it, if they've chosen not to see replies to people they are not following). You must have at least one person (besides me) following you for this to count. Include your Twitter username or a direct link to your tweet in your comment here.
- Become a fan of confoozled.com on Facebook. Let me know you've done this in your comment, and make sure you give me your real name so I can match you up on Facebook. (If you don't want to post your real name here, you can send me an e-mail.)
Entries must be in by midnight US Eastern time Monday, May 4, 2009. Winner will be drawn later the same day. I am not setting any restrictions on entrant location, but please make sure you can use the gift card - i.e. you have a Blockbuster in your area and they accept gift cards sold in the US. (I don't honestly even know if they have stores outside the US; that's your responsibility to find out.) To comply with COPPA, you must be thirteen years of age to enter. Apart from that, anyone is eligible to enter, regardless of where you work, who you're related to, or what you ate for dinner. 
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I love Flash games - you know, those fun little time waster games you play online? And now there's a new place you can go to play them, and help confoozled.com make a little money along the way. The games on the new confoozled.com arcade are completely free to play, and are supported by short video ads which play before each game begins. There are a lot of fun games, more added automatically every day, and even more available... so if you'd like to see more of a particular type of game, just let me know!
The arcade is not running perfectly yet and some games seem to just load a blank page. I don't know why this happens, but I can fix it by deleting and re-adding the game. If you encounter any of these, please let me know the title of the game and I will take care of it.
Have fun!
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The page I promised on ways you can help confoozled.com become profitable is now up. The first couple of options are super easy things you can do which don't cost you a cent. From there it goes to helping confoozled.com with purchases you were going to make anyway, on down to more direct ways to contribute if you feel inclined to do so (which I certainly don't expect).
I've also made some changes to the sidebar. Make sure you're checking it out now and then when you're here, because you might find some interesting stuff!
On a note related to all of this, I have to get something off my chest. There seems to be this sense of entitlement people feel when it comes to things on the internet, and I find it really disturbing. Back in November I addressed the rumor of a monthly fee for Facebook. That was just a rumor, but my point was this. Facebook has spent a lot of time and money to give people something for free. And don't tell me you don't value what they give you, because I hear people saying all the time how addicted they are to Facebook. And if Facebook were not able to continue to support itself on advertising alone, I value what they offer and would gladly pay a reasonable fee to continue using it.
Just recently I saw something even more appalling - a Facebook group for people against advertising on Facebook. So now not only are people unwilling to pay directly for what Facebook offers, they want to eliminate their only other source of income. It's like these people think that Facebook somehow owes them this free service they provide, but don't deserve to make any money for their efforts.
Another free service I use is Entrecard. It's a service that allows bloggers to gain exposure for their blogs by trading advertising with other bloggers. Just like Facebook, the costs of providing such a service add up, and those who work hard to give people something like this deserve to get something in return, too. So Entrecard recently introduced a paid advertising feature, where about half of the time, the widget on a member's blog will display a paid ad instead of the free one the blog owner has approved for that day. This is not only to help cover Entrecard's operating costs and compensate their staff, but also to allow people to turn the "credits" they earn from the system back into cash (something people have been demanding for a long time).
Now fortunately, after Entrecard responded to initial feedback and made a few policy changes (such as allowing any member to opt out of displaying paid ads on their widget without penalty for doing so), the majority of the reactions I've seen to this change are positive ones. I certainly am thrilled that I am going to be able to cash out the credits I've earned instead of using them to advertise on other blogs, since I haven't found the traffic I receive to be the kind that sticks around. But there are still some who are flipping out over the change, saying things like, "I like Entrecard but I'm not going to pay* to use their service," and, "Why should I help Entrecard make money?" (*The writer stated that allowing Entrecard to display paid ads on his widget was like paying them.) At least in this case, all the writer manages to do is display his lack of intelligence, especially when the only responses he can come up with to people who disagree with him are cheap insults (did you know I sound like a communist, and am one ugly ass woman to boot?).
Why should you help any company that provides you a free service to make money? Well let's look at it another way. Why should they give you that service? Why should they put in all of that hard work, and spend tons of their own money, to give you something for free, when they're not going to get anything back? Why should Facebook help you find old friends, and give you a place to share your life with them and countless fun games to play with them? Why should Entrecard pay upwards of $1,000 per month to support a network that lets you advertise on other blogs for free? Out of the kindness of their heart? Now who's the communist?
Everyone deserves to get something in return for their efforts. And in a capitalist America, that something is going to be money in some form, whether you pay it to them directly, or just tolerate their efforts to make it from other sources. Nothing in a capitalist market is truly free; everything has some kind of price. No one owes you anything with no strings attached.
As I've said before, I know that my blog is not something that provides a lot of value, and I don't expect most people to be willing to spend money to support it. What I do expect is that people be supportive of my efforts to earn something back for the hard work that I put in. Like most things on the internet, the only way I can do that is through advertising. If you don't want to see ads, by all means, use an ad blocker. No one pays for pure ad views on a site this low-ranked anyway. But don't ever suggest that I don't deserve to try to make money, that I should not expect anything in return for the time and effort I put in here.
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Well, I definitely learned something from the responses to my survey on supporting blogs. What I learned is that people don't believe in supporting them, period. People believe they have a God-given right to partake in a blogger's hard work, be entertained, informed, and intellectually stimulated by what we write, and never give anything back. How dare we expect anything in return for all of the hours we put in? "Just shut up and keep writing," is what I'm hearing.
I can't do that. I already work a full time day job for which I am underpaid. I was never looking for my blog alone to make me rich, but I've been trying to find ways for it to bring in just a little bit of money, just enough to make it worth the time and effort I put into it. Advertisers want nothing to do with me since Google says I'm worthless, and readers don't want to contribute either. So it's not worth my time, the time it takes away from my friends and my family, to continue writing here.
After all of my attempts to make an online income while still remaining honest and ethical have failed, I've discovered that the only real way to make money online is in the spam industry. Companies will pay me all kinds of money to trick my audience into giving them personal information, signing up for trial traps they can't get out of, and buying useless "revolutionary" products that are actually less effective than those that have existed for centuries. That last one is the doozy - these companies get such a kick out of scamming you that they will actually pay me more than the full price of the product, just for the satisfaction of knowing they sold you a useless piece of cloth that absorbs less liquid than a towel half its size!
Therefore, as of today, confoozled.com the blog is no more. I'll leave it up for a while for nostalgia's sake, but when the domain expires I won't be renewing it. I must focus my energy, from now on, on more lucrative online ventures. Yes, I am going into the spam business. Click here for more details on my new business plan.
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No time for a full post today, just a quick techie site update. I published some design changes I'd been working on to confoozled.com today, and hit a couple of small hiccups, so if you happened to stop by during a particular twenty minute window today, you probably noticed that everything was wonky (technical term, I swear!). Everything should be fixed now, so do let me know if you see anything weird.
Scratch that - if you see anything weird, first try refreshing your browser while holding down the shift key on your keyboard, to force the browser to reload the page and all associated files. Then, if it still looks weird, let me know.
This wasn't really a redesign - the site should look pretty much the same. It was more of a code restructuring, to make the site appear more consistent across different browsers, and simplify things to make changes easier in the future. And there are some changes to the sidebar coming up.
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Back in August, we celebrated my 300th blog post on confoozled.com with my very first blog contest. It had taken nearly six years to get to 300 posts... and now, not quite six months later, I've hit 400! I've worked hard to try to post one entry every weekday, and most of the time I succeed. This week I tried to make up for the fact that I missed posting on Tuesday (Wednesday's post was supposed to be Tuesday's; I just didn't finish it in time) by posting twice yesterday. And from that experiment I learned that one post per day is definitely confoozled.com's sweet spot; no one read the second one. So, I will still make every effort to post every weekday, but never more than once in the same day, even if I miss a day.
Also, I know I never got around to posting a December online income report. Both December's and January's numbers will be posted in February.
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Friday evening after work I turned on my home computer to do a few things. Shortly after booting up, it shut itself down, never to turn on again. We think it was the motherboard that gave up the ghost. Fortunately it is still under warranty, as I only just got it last Christmas. But, it's a big hassle of a process, obtaining a RMA number, shipping it in to the manufacturer and waiting for the replacement to be shipped back. So, I don't know how long I'm going to be without a computer. I have Chris' computer set up at my desk, but without all of my software, blogging on a daily basis is going to be difficult. I'll post as much as I can, but please bear with me until I get my own machine up and running again!
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![[October 2007 masthead]](http://www.confoozled.com/masthead/2007/10/640.gif)
![[June 2009 masthead]](http://www.confoozled.com/masthead/2009/06/640.gif)
![[August 2008 masthead]](http://www.confoozled.com/masthead/2008/08/640.gif)
![[October 2008 masthead]](http://www.confoozled.com/masthead/2008/10/640.gif)
![[photo of me]](http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/7fe9c3e52fcd03d2253441f7ddc89ab3.jpg?size=144)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/albums/userpics/10001/thumb_img_0986.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/albums/flood2010/thumb_IMG_0112.JPG)
