Brutis is Guest Posting

For all my new readers, let me introduce our dog - Brutis.

I wrote a post up about him a little while ago, that can be found here.

But today, he is over at Alison & Justin's blog, blogging about himself.

Well I helped him because his typing is terrible.

Click on over to see what Brutis has to say about himself (and maybe me).

Looking for a Guest Poster

We are 1 week away from holidays! 
I can't wait, one week until we head back to the trailer and I can have Baileys in my coffee every morning, and there is a rule about needing a drink and book in hand no later than 2:00pm everyday!

But that also means I am going to be away from the Internet and my phone for a week, so I have a few posts that will be auto-posting, but I am looking for a guest post or two.  Anyone want to volunteer? 
Here are the topics your post could be:

• Parenting / children
• Food (recipe, cooking tip, etc)
• Book review

Leave a comment if you want to guest post and we can chat from there.

Heritage Park Review

Swing on over to Family Fun Calgary where I have written up about our day at Heritage Park.

Minivan Stiletto Facebook Page

So I have finally jumped on the bandwagon and started a Facebook page for Minivan Stiletto.

When I first started blogging, it was only for friends and family to see pictures of the kids, but now I am trying to take my blogging to a new level, talking more about parent related stuff and of course throwing in my mix of book reviews and recipes too.

So as more and more of you readers are not friends with me on Facebook, I thought I would set up a page where you can see blog post updates and various other things - and of course this makes it easy for you to share the page with your friends.

Please head on over to Minivan Stiletto on Facebook and "like" me.

And to make this momentous occasion, I am doing my first ever give-away!

As soon as I get 50 Facebook likes, I will draw a winner to recieve this:

All homemade by me:

• Apricot Reisling Jam (Summer 2011)
• Epic Weekend Salsa (Fall 2011)
• Strawberry Rhubarb Jam (Summer 2012)

A Public Service Annoucement for Bloggers

It seems like everyone and their dog has a blog, and if they don’t have a blog, they have started one.One thing I have noticed about this is the super high fail rate.

Is this because everyone thinks they have something to say but then realize no one is listening?

Or is it because people realize just how much time you have to dedicate to a blog to make it a success?

Whatever the reason, I have seem quite a few friends recently start blogs only to get a few posts up and before I know it, 6 months have passed and no new posts.

Now, I am not saying I am any better, I have gone through my periods of no posts, it is just an observation I have made recently.

But I did want to give a little tip to some bloggers I follow out there (and I think might follow me).

The biggest annoyance I have with blogs is word verification. 

Word verification pops up when someone tries to comment on your site – on blogger if you don’t turn it off.  Apparently this is to prove that I am a real person commenting on your site and not a robot.

Please, please – TURN IT OFF!!  Is your blog really that popular that you are getting robo-comments all the time and you have no time to manage them?

I took a screen shot of a friends blog I was going to comment
on today - see how much fun that word is to figure out - and
honestly - that is an easy one.

Check out some of the big blogs out there – they don’t have word verification set up?  Why?  Because having word verification is annoying as hell and it stops people from commenting.

That’s right folks – you might enjoy trying to decipher those cryptic words, but I hate it. I often get them wrong and have to re-try – and so, when I see that pop up – I often cancel my comment.

Check out how many comments the Pioneer Woman got on this
post - 48,023 - and no word verification!

Oh, and don’t even get me started on blogs that need to approve my comment before it will appear on the site – I will save that one for another day.

Anyone else with me?  Or am I the only one who does not like word verification?