MarloElaine » marloelaine

Happy First Blogging Anniversary!

Marlo — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 05:32:03 +0000

It has been one year since the inception of this blog. This post marks the 75th entry on MarloElaine.com. Blogging is much harder than we thought, even with two people contributing articles. We are always looking for interesting topics to write about. We’d love to hear your suggestions.

Here are a few highlights and stats for the past year:

A Netscape Anchor pinned our article on the Family page, which tripled the normal visitors.
Several pages of this blog have received Google’s blessing of a PageRank of 4.
First comment: submitted by Erwin (a fellow blogger).
Post with the most comments: Sharing Google Writely Invites with 26 comments.
Total number of unique visitors to date: 14,743.
Total number of page views to date: 25,671.
Mentions from several prominent sites: Baby Center, Parent Hacks, Parent Dish (formerly Blogging Baby) and Deep Jive Interests.

Thanks to all of our readers. Here’s to many more years of blogging!

Getting Naked on the 5th

Marlo — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:10:06 +0000

MarloElaine.com will be participating in CSS Naked Day. What this means is that you will be viewing the blog without the CSS enabled.

Please don’t be alarmed when you see something different this Thursday (4/5/07). Nothing should functionally break. All the articles and links will be intact. I’m using a theme created by a talented designer so I do not foresee any issues. I’ll also be using Guff’s WP: Naked Day plugin to automate the “stripping” process.

If you are planning to participate, be sure to sign up on the site.

No related posts.

Wet Paint

Marlo — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:27:44 +0000

What you see here is the result of evaluating several Wordpress themes out there. This blog has been around since April of 2006. It was about time for me to freshen up the look and functionality of the site. I chose the Cutline 1.1 theme because of its clean look and easy to update stylesheets. I wanted a fast loading site which displays the content in the most direct way possible.

What’s new?
On the backend, I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.1. This upgrade included some security fixes along with some nice to have features. I’ve added the popular posts section on the sidebar to show first time visitors the site’s best content (all of them of course were written by Elaine).

Where did that go?
I’ve removed a few plugins such as the Ultimate Tag Warrior. This was a nice to have feature which wasn’t being used by majority of our readers. It gave the old design “web 2.0″ kind of look, but frankly it just added clutter to the site. It actually increased the load times of this blog. You may also noticed that the YPN ads have been removed from the sidebar. They were not doing anything except take up much needed space.

For those of you who are first time readers of this site, here’s a screenshot of the old design:

Please provide your input on the new design in the comments section below. Does it suck? Something not working correctly? Is there a feature you miss? Please let me know. Just remember I’m not a web designer so my creative talents are somewhat limited (hence the generic header title).

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging….

Subscribe to MarloElaine.com

Marlo — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 03:53:37 +0000

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