Stephanie Fishman - How She Does It - Secrets from a Geneamommyblogger

To say I am blown away is an understatement. Or maybe it is just that for some reason Stephanie speaks right to my heart. This is one of the often unwritten benefits of blogging. 


You. Meet. The. Most. Amazing. People. 


Stephanie is one of them. I love her and I haven't even met her. She lives in Ohio, but I hope we get to meet someday soon. She is constantly challenging herself to do her best and encourages me (and others) to do the same. Once you read her take on the Geneamommybloggers' series and the rest of her wonderful blog, Corn and Cotton: My Family's Story, you will want to meet her too. Go on now, head over there and read it. Then leave her a glowing comment! 


Happy Monday!


Scrappy Gen
Let's Remember!

Advice for New Bloggers - Learning to Blog

Welcome to the blogging world. Every day new bloggers start blogging and today it's you. I just visited your blog and was excited about several things I read. You have some new ideas that will be popular across the genealogy community. Here are a few suggestions for making it easy for the community to access your content and participate in your conversation.

Display: Make sure your blog layout is clean and easy to read and navigate. Backgrounds can be decorative, but should not detract from your primary content, which is print and images. Text is easiest to read when it large and dark on light. Take a cue from e-readers. Their popularity relies on e-ink and the ability to re-size the print for all eyes. 

Communication: After I read that post about...I tried to follow you, but couldn't find any way to do it. My favorite ways to follow currently are through Twitter and Google Reader. If you would put some nice big buttons at the top of your sidebar for following you on Twitter and for subscribing to your blog with an RSS feed, that would make it easier to keep up to date on what you are posting. Some readers will want to receive updates from your blog by email, so while you are at it, add a subscribe by email button.

Conversation: Blog readers want to meet you. Make sure you post a little about yourself. You don't have to submit your dna, just introduce yourself as if you were at a party and meeting someone for the first time. Once I know who you are, I will be much more likely to participate in a conversation with you through your comment sections. 

Learning to Blog is a process. I have only been blogging for a year, my blog is far from perfect and I am still learning. These bloggers have given me invaluable advice:

DearMyrtle

GeneaBloggers

ProBlogger

I encourage you to look at their sites; make note of their designs and layouts and check out the different communication options they offer. Read or watch their tutorials for new bloggers.

A New Blog: My favorite new blog, which perfectly displays all of the aforementioned criteria is Susan's Genealogy Blog. Susan's layout is pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate. It is decorative without being fussy. She offers multiple ways to keep up with her blog and gives us a peek at who she is. Plus her content is king, or queen, A+. 

If you need help making your blog more reader friendly, just let me know. Writing the content for your blog is just half of the fun. Talking with your readers and fellow bloggers is the other half. I want you to have all the fun you can!

I can't wait to meet you!

Happy Saturday!

Scrappy Gen

Let's Remember!

How She Does It - Secrets from the Geneamommybloggers

How She Does It - Secrets from the Geneamommybloggers will post daily at 7 AM Eastern 

beginning tomorrow, October 15, 2011. Don't miss a day! 

Over the summer I took a hiatus from all of it; genealogy, research, writing, blogging, social media, everything. The truth is that I was floundering. It began last spring, when our family schedule got busier than ever. The girls both made it to national competitions in horseback riding, one daughter was playing softball, our son was playing baseball, my husband was traveling and then we added a family member, our precious exchange daughter, Zhazgul, from Kyrgyzstan. Do you remember the secret? 

And then my beautiful friend, Suzette, suddenly and unexpectedly passed away.

She had been sick with the flu and pneumonia and had been improving daily, but it seems that God had other plans for her and she left our earthly world. Losing her was tough. Missing Suzette and connecting with Zhazgul was overwhelming, but it was also a gift. Instead of wallowing in my grief, I held my loved ones closer and focused on cooking and caring for those who needed me.

All summer I kept throwing my balls in the air and trying to figure out which things I had been doing that I wanted to keep doing. Of course, I want to do it all; become a professional genealogist, help others with their own family history research, continue my education, blog, attend genealogical events and stay involved in social media communities. But, and this is a big but, not at the expense of my family’s health and happiness, at least until my kids are all eighteen and out the door. How can I do it? How can I find a balance between blogging and researching, between researching and cooking, between cooking and tweeting?

Inspired by the recent movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It, which I have not had time to see, I am hosting a guest post series, How She Does It, Secrets from the Geneamommybloggers*, here at the The Scrappy Genealogist. The successful women, who will be telling it all, are raising kids while also working in the field of genealogy, blogging about genealogy (frequently on multiple blogs) and actively participating in genealogy events and social media communities. They have graciously and generously agreed to share with us how they do it all.

For the next week, each day (or almost every day, these are geneamommybloggers after all), check back here for revelations from a different blogger. I feel so lucky to have been able to get a sneak peak of what they have to say. Their attitudes are universally uplifting and inspiring and they will make you laugh until you cry. Really, these women are that amazing! Whether you are a g.m.b. or not, you will enjoy reading about their daily lives.

Happy Friday!

Scrappy Gen

Let's Remember!


* Geneamommybloggers expression first used by Elizabeth O'Neal at Little Bytes of Life, 26 September 2008

Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog - Time Management

April 13th will mark six months since I started this blog, The Scrappy Genealogist. For all of this time, my biggest challenge has been blog article planning, specifically planning out my posts several weeks in advance. There are lots of other busy geneabloggers, who have jobs, children and other non-genealogical and non-blogging time drainers. I know I am not alone when a whole weekend will be drained doing something like watching my beloved daughter at a horse show.

What I want to know is how do you do it? How do you continue to blog through the chaos? It must involve a good plan. My current one involves a paper planner, but it isn't working. My paper planner has become a great and valuable catch all for blogging ideas, resources and other bits and pieces I pick up from genealogical journals and magazines. My paper planner is not doing its intended job, or rather I am not using it to plan. Does anyone else share this challenge?

If you don't share this challenge and are an organized blogger, how do you plan your blog posts? Have you found a book, website, blog, software program or other resource that is particularly helpful or without which you cannot plan? Would you share your method with me and other beginning bloggers?

Here are a few articles about blog planning to get us started:

a four part series on blogging at The Blogging Bistro

"How to Tame Your Blog with an Editorial Calendar" at joannefaith.com

2011 Blogging Calendar and Planner at BlogEnergizer.com

I hope some of you will take a few minutes to share your challenges or words of wisdom. This Scrappy Genealogist will greedily gobble up your words and hopefully become a better or at least more organized blogger.

Happy Monday!

Scrappy Gen

Let's Remember! 

Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog - I found my idol!

Image via Wikipedia

While browsing the internet this afternoon, I clicked a link and, *!BLAMO!*, I found the most amazing blog, Family Stories! It is written by blogger, Caroline Pointer, from Houston, Texas. What do I love about Caroline's blog? The layout is clean and well delineated. The banner is the best one I have found so far in the family history blogging community. Her content is interesting and funny. She has done a great job making her links and buttons appealing. In addition to this well crafted blog, Caroline writes several other blogs, including For Your Family Story, which is a resource for anyone needing assistance with genealogical research. 

After looking through For Your Family Story I had to do a lot of positive self talk and remind myself that I have only been blogging for five months. Once I picked myself up, I sat myself back down and really looked at Caroline's blogs to figure out what I liked and what I could learn. In addition to my likes listed above, I would like to add that her tone is very friendly and welcoming. Even though For Your Family Story exists to generate business, it is first and foremost helpful and personal. Her sites (in terms of offering genealogical services) are where I would like mine to be in a couple of years. Would it be stalkerish to say that I think I have found my genealogical idol? 

I learned about several cool blogging tools. The first thing I am trying as I type and that is a service called Zemanta. Check it out if you are interested. I will post a review in a few days.

Has anyone else found a genealogical blogging idol? Tell us why are they idol worthy.

Happy Sunday!

Scrappy Gen

Let's Remember!

More Blogging for Beginners with DearMYRTLE: Great Tips and Tricks

If you haven't had a chance to listen to DearMYRTLE, well, you must. Her voice is a pleasure to hear. She must not sleep as she does so much, but she sounds so calm as she walks us through the technical steps to make adjustments to our blogs.

She held the  live webinar, More Blogging for Beginners, today on GoToWebinar. I learned several new things:

1. how to add a print friendly button

2. how to get rid of the Blogger bar at the top of the blog

3. how to back up my Blogger account

There are many more tips and tricks in this webinar and it should be available later today at Legacy Family Tree. If you purchase the CD for $9.95, you will receive a handout with detailed instructions to go with the webinar. There is also a bundle available, which combines the first Blogging for Beginners CD with this CD at a discount of $17.90. 

Thank you to Legacy and Geoff Rasmussen for hosting this helpful webinar!

Hope you are having a Wonderful Wednesday!

Scrappy Gen

Let's Remember!

Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog - Taking a Screen Shot in Windows 7

Learning to blog has encouraged me to add many new skills to my toolbox. Today I finally figured out how to take a screen shot. This probably seems quite simple to most, but was challenging for me. Now that I have done it myself, I would like to share this trick with you in case you are similarly mystified.

Taking a Screen Shot in Windows

As you know, I love to edit photos. Providing a screen shot, a picture or capture of my computer screen, while editing a photo would help me explain the process. These directions apply only to Windows 7. If you run another operating system, just search Google for how to take a screen shot in your operating system. 

1. Go to the page of which you would like to take a screen shot. This could be a web page, a program page (such as Lightroom or Microsoft Outlook) or even your desktop. 

2. Once there, click on Start then All Programs then Accessories. Under Accessories, choose the Snipping Tool. The Snipping Tool will open and the screen you wish to capture will appear grayed out. 

3. Using the cursor, drag the area you wish to capture. Instantly a window will pop open displaying the area you have selected.

4. Within this window there are several tools for editing your screen shot or capture; highlighting, writing with different pens and erasing.

5. Once you are satisfied with your screen shot, you can copy it, email it or save as any of the following file options; png, gif, jpg or htm.

The Snipping Tool is something I will use frequently so I chose to pin it to my taskbar. Just go to the Snipping Tool under Accessories, right click and choose Pin to Taskbar or pin to Start Menu. 

That's it. Pretty easy! Don't you think? 

Happy Snipping!

Scrappy Gen

Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog - My Visit to Second Life

Who knew? Who knew that blogging was such a social activity? It turns out that blogging by itself, simply talking about your own story, photos, whatever, isn't the whole deal. Blogging is a reciprocal thing, more like making friends than making speeches. 

Blogging is more than sharing, it is about making social connections. Finding others in the blogging world who share the genealogy passion, who appreciate the work involved and who willingly share both triumphs and failures has been a gift. This gift I try to return by commenting on other blogs and by taking part in group activities like the Carnival of Genealogy and daily blogging themes from geneabloggers.

Blogging has led me to get more involved with other online social venues, Twitter, Facebook, Technorati, GenealogyWise and last night Second Life. Second Life should have a drum roll after it. It is self described as the 'world's largest user created, 3-D virtual world community". I will have to take their word for it. After DearMYRTLE's meeting about her January Organization Checklist in front of the Family History Centre, I was exhausted and had to go to bed. Just learning to walk in a virtual world can be challenging, unless you are eleven years old and adept at video games. Now that I have had a good rest and some time to ponder my experience in Second Life, I give it two thumbs up.

• GET STARTED: It is easy and free to join Second Life.You will create a user name that will be your name in Second Life (hoping I can edit mine) and choose an initial representation of your virtual self. In my case I was a bald goth with stiletto boots. Not sure how that happened, but my advice to you is, even if you do not like your initial virtual self, DO NOT try to change your clothes the first time you visit. I didn't know what I was doing and ended up almost naked in the Family History Centre. I kid you not, when I say that it felt like a bad dream while I was scrambling to figure out how to get dressed. 
• PRACTICE:  Do not wait until 30 minutes before a meeting to join. Do it now or while you have some spare time :) and start in the Welcome Center. There you can learn how to walk and do other basic things, like change your clothes, etc, before you show up at a genealogy meeting filled with professional genealogists.
• GET INVOLVED: There are many social activities scheduled in Second Life, including Ol' Myrt's monthly organizing meeting, meetings discussing brick walls and a monthly virtual APG meeting. You can see the schedule for the UGG, the Union of Genealogy Groups here. Virtual social networking in Second Life is a great solution to the cost in both time and money of physically traveling to meetings.

There is still a tremendous amount for me to learn, but I am excited about the possibilities for meeting other genealogists, learning, collaborating and...making friends. If you would like more technical information about joining, see DearMYRTLE's page here, where she certainly isn't bald or goth or called Myrtle.

Will you join me?

Scrappy Gen

Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog – What is Technorati?

Time to celebrate! Technorati approved my claim, which means my blog exists (thank goodness) in their universe. Still I wonder what it means for The Scrappy Genealogist blog.

A search for the question “What is Technorati?” brought me to a blog post by The Design Intelligencer. It explains that Technorati is a directory for blogs and gives practical information about how to use it. 

Technorati is a social media website through which blogs can be searched and receive ratings. This time when I searched their site for genealogy related blogs, 627 blogs popped up. Each blog is given an authority on a scale of 1 to 1000. The highest rated genealogy blog had an authority of 493 (out of 1000), while the lowest had an authority of 1. I couldn't help myself (could you?), so I searched for The Scrappy Genealogist. Actually first I searched in the blogs with an authority of 1, but it wasn't there. Okay, I thought, it makes sense if it doesn’t have any authority at all yet, but surprisingly it was there with an authority of 126. What?

I just started blogging. How could I have a relatively high authority among the genealogy blogs listed? To try to find the answer I did a little digging. None of those I consider to be the big genealogy related bloggers are listed. Uh, oh...do they know something that I don’t? In fact, I only recognized a couple of the blog titles. Although the big names are absent from Technorati, there are lots of wonderful blogs registered, which would be fun to browse.

What I think is that Technorati can be a useful forum for getting your blog read, something that the big names don’t need. A search on Google for the term genealogy nets 31,500,000 results. There is no way my blog would be found in that ocean. To me Technorati is a smaller pond with a lot fewer fish, where if you work hard on posts relevant to your subject, your blog can get noticed and read. Getting noticed and read can only be a good thing.

Next up is Technorati Tags, the whole reason I signed up for this Technorati adventure in the first place. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Scrappy Gen

Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog – Blogging Made Easier with Windows Live Writer

Getting set up to blog with Blogger is quite easy. Happily I even figured out how to insert a blog banner in a size that fit my blog. After creating my masterpiece in Photoshop Elements and finding that the original seven inch wide banner was far too big, I resized it to a tiny three inches wide by one inch tall. It fit perfectly!

Finding an alternative way to create blog posts has been far more challenging. As you might guess from my love of photos and scrapbooks, I am a visual person and like to play around with how things look. The blog writer in Blogger is quite adequate, but didn’t offer me enough variety and is a bit cumbersome when it comes to adding images. I noticed that Microsoft Word 2007 has an option to create blog posts which includes an assortment of features for presenting images in different creative ways. More importantly there is the option to just click a button to post your blog to your choice of blog service providers. Great, I thought, I can write, edit and enhance my blog posts right here in Word, then upload them to Blogger, easy as that!

Actually it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. The trouble began after I spent quite a long time writing my first Photo Clues post about the Glasgow postcard. Microsoft Word 2007 would not allow me to connect to Blogger. After spending much of  a frustrating day reading all I could find about the issue on both Microsoft help and Blogger help, I came to the conclusion that the situation is beyond help. It seems there must be some kind of incompatibility, which is beyond my limited technological ability. Even copying from the Microsoft Word and pasting into Blogger did not work. Blogger was unable to save the text without errors. One commenter in the help section mentioned using Windows Live Writer, so off I went to check it out.

Windows Live Writer 2011 is now a locked item on my task bar. I love it! It is a free application which you can download at explore.live.com. It is part of Windows Live Essentials, which means there are a lot of other components that will download with it unless you deselect them. I only wanted Writer as I already have photo editing software installed on my computer so I unchecked all of the other options, but some of them did look useful. After downloading and opening the new program, it was a simple matter of logging in to my blogger account and I was ready to go!

There are two options for publishing from Windows Live Writer 2011. Publish to the blog or publish as a draft. I highly recommend publishing as a draft. There were a couple of things I needed to do once I got into Blogger itself, one of which was returning the paragraph space breaks which had disappeared upon upload. Overall I am very pleased with the added versatility and cost (free) of Windows Live Writer and will be exclusively using it to create my blog posts, unless of course I am blogging from a strange computer, which could happen.

Hope this was helpful!

Scrappy Gen

Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog

Blogging daily Monday through Friday is my goal. This week has found me woefully short of my mark. Perhaps it will be a good idea to write posts in advance to be filled in when life gets in the way. If you are a genealogy blogger (or a blogger on any subject for that matter) and have been doing this for a while, do you do this, or do you use a different strategy altogether? 

Thank you!

Scrappy Gen

Scrappy Genealogist Announced at GeneaBloggers

Thank you to Thomas MacEntee and GeneaBloggers for announcing my blog on October 23 in his weekly roundup of new genealogy blogs. Thank you also to the many GeneaBlogger members who have chosen to Follow Me. I feel like I have guardian angel GeneaBloggers now. Sharing about genealogy and even writing on a regular basis are both new endeavors for me. One of the biggest reasons I have started this blog is to get myself writing. It has never been a source of confidence for me and is one of the biggest hurdles I am facing in my journey to becoming a professional genealogist. I welcome any and all comments; the good, the bad and well, maybe not the ugly. My skin isn't all that thick. 

Thank you again! 

Scrappy Gen

GeneaBloggers Saves Newbies

Blogging for newbies...that's me…there is help for us out there in cyberspace! Last night I connected with an online blogging community called GeneaBloggers. The founder and owner, Thomas MacEntee, sent me an email suggesting that I add a Followers link as well as the GeneaBloggers badge to my blog and sent me to the GeneaBloggers website to learn how to do it. Lo and behold, the site offers a resource page as well as Bootcamp for GeneaBloggers and I have started working my way through the helpful topics. Thank you GeneaBloggers for offering this supportive website!

One of the aids that GeneaBloggers offers is a group of daily blogging themes. There are so many family stories, hunts and finds I am excited to share, but where to start? Blogging themes appeal to me as a good starting point. Today is Monday and so my blog post later today will relate to the theme, Military Monday.