Social media resources can make your life easier. They can help you keep track of topics for your posts, schedule publishing in advance (such a time-saver!), even remind you to return to online conversations.
Welcome to the first in an occasional series about WordPress, blogging, email marketing and other things geeky.
Many of my clients, readers, and colleagues — the Magnolias West tribe — are doing their online businesses and blogs on a WordPress site. And since I’m passionate about all things geeky, I’m going to share some of the awesome WordPress secrets I have learned and continue to learn — there’s a lot to know! I teach this information one-on-one and in Facebook groups all the time; and I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with you. None of the links in today’s post are affiliate links; I’m simply sharing the tools I know about, use and love.
All the solutions I suggest can, beloved, be implemented by you, or by your awesome web-savvy virtual assistant (VA), or [ahem] you could call me; I can help. If you have questions about any of this stuff, let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to help you understand.
Servers are unstable (they’re just computers), and just because you’re paying for hosting doesn’t mean your site is protected enough by your host to recover everything if your site crashes. Your site is self-hosted, right? Which means its url is yourawesomebusinessname.com, not wordpress.com/yourawesomebusinessname. (If you haven’t made this change yet to a self-hosted site, please do — you get a lot more functionality, and you have a more professional domain name), and if you need help doing this, please get in touch with me.) Many of us, me included, buy cheap shared web hosting when we’re starting out, and servers can go down. Just like that. Often. So you need to have a backup scheme in place.
Consider this scenario: Your site is on cheapsocheaphost.com and boom! — they go down. For days. How empowered would you feel if you could find a better host (more uptime, managed hosting), and in a matter of a couple of hours have your last backup (less than a week old) to the new host, change the settings so that the interwebs see your new site, and move on! The way you do this is to have a backup plugin that automagically backs up your entire site every week (because you told it to do so), keeps a copy on your web host, and to cover your butt in a most elegant way, makes a copy to another cloud independent of your host (also because you told it to do so) — I send my copy each week to my Dropbox. The two most popular backup plugins these days are Backup Buddy (annual fee, which I use) and Back WP Up (free and fee versions available). Please, get one and set it up.
I was working yesterday, and had the whole afternoon blocked off to complete the materials for my new VIP Deep Dive Virtual Retreat (coming soon, I’m so excited!!), and then to write this article. When I stood up to stretch I could feel just how bad my shoulder and neck pain had gotten. Even though it was burning, I had been trying to ignore it for hours. I knew I could have sat down with my back massager and given my aching parts some love. I could have rolled it out. But that truth-telling inner voice, my true essence, had a better idea. 
I clearly heard my inner voice reminding me of the Thai massage place I had learned about the week before. I called, they had an opening, and I got my stuff together and headed out.
And sometimes the best way I can do that is to take the radical act of being really kind to myself. Even though I have So.Much.To.Do! Even though I lost so much time to illness over the summer, and am still healing, on many levels. Even though it’s challenging for me to let go of working, of doing, and to relax into being. Sometimes the best teaching I can offer looks a lot like relaxing, slowing down, and letting my true essence be healed, made whole, so it — that beautiful true essence inside me — can shine through in the right way, at the right time, for the right people.
To celebrate making it through a colonoscopy and endoscopy yesterday with no more than the expected level of trauma, I thought I’d jump in and participate in the “20 Things You Might Not Know About Me” blog tag started by April from Blacksburg Belle. April began this blog tag experiment to build community among bloggers — so we can connect more and get to know each other better.
Before I dive in to my 20 things, let me explain about the photo.The colonoscopy and endoscopy were held at Dignity Hospital (aka St. Mary’s Medical Center) in San Francisco. I’d still like to know how they dare call themselves Dignity while making me wear those socks, and that gown. Dignity? Not so much! 
Answer: Five-four–ish.
Answer: Even when I’m somewhere I’ve never been before, I am almost never late. I have a built-in talent for knowing just how long it takes to get from here to there.
Answer: People who use overly decorative fonts in their blogs. Beloveds, these fonts with curly bits and excessive thick/thin differentiation are designed to be used sparingly, in headlines; not as your text font!! I’ve taken to using a web developer trick — inspecting an element and changing the text font to something readable if I want to read a story that otherwise might cause too much aggravation and squinting — don’t make me avoid your blog; make it readable! [Read more…]
Do you have a gratitude practice? Do you write your gratitudes in a journal? Do you share them with others? In email to a small circle? In a blog, like this one, to the wide world?
What moves you to express gratitude? And, more importantly, what does the awareness and expression of gratitude do for you? For your sense of wellbeing? For your level of commitment? For your smile-to-frown ratio? For your joie de vivre? For your ability to savor this moment, and the next one? For your acceptance and serenity?
I’ve been a gratitude-list writer for ten years now. Started in a daily email to my first business coach (her idea, most certainly not mine!). Each and every day I’d write a list of fifteen things for which I felt grateful, even when it was a ginormous stretch. Turns out to be one of the most valuable investments in time and energy I’ve ever made.
I’ve written about the fabulous results of a gratitude practice a lot (one article here, as a guest post for my friend Sharon Rosen), about how gratitude enables you to create what the Buddhists call more wholesome habits.
I love the neuroscience of this! Basically (very basically), here’s how I understand this to work: Your disappointments, your regrets, your bitterness—after a few zillion repetitions, you get habituated to negative thinking. What may have started as a sincere response to something challenging, or as a protective reaction to trauma, becomes habit. You groove habitual pathways in your thinking that color everything with the gray projected by that black cloud that follows you around above your head.
“If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.” — Rabbi Harold Kushner
I have an announcement. Ta da!It’s been 30 weeks now since we’ve been sharing our gratitudes together in the Magnolias West Gratitude Challenge. Which makes this a very good time to ask you to share how this practice is landing for you.
Oh, and this is open to anyone of my readers who has a gratitude practice (yes, even if you haven’t been doing the Challenge), so jump in!
I’m inviting you to write a guest blog for me. You can write an article that answers the questions above, or anything you’re moved to share.