February Edition of the Better Life Blog Carnival

Welcome to the February Edition of The Better Life Blog Carnival. This is the first edition of The Better Life Blog Carnival in 2010. This edition includes 15 articles all aimed at helping you live a Better Life. If you have any topics that you'd like to see covered in the next edition of The Better Life Blog Carnival or any other blog carnivals we run here, future post ideas, or just comments in general, feel free to add them to the comments below. Submission links can be found towards the end of this post. Without further adieu here is the February Edition of The Better Life Blog Carnival....

DIY (Do It Yourself)

ICH presents .018 DIY your own t-shirt scarf posted at Insert Catchphrase Here, saying, "How to make your own great t-shirt scarf a la Necklush!"

Tabitha Mcivers presents Top 10 Hilarious DIY Home Projects Gone Terribly Wrong posted at Construction management degree. Who hasn't had a do it yourself nightmare?

Learning And Teaching

mrrob presents 20 Awesome Web Tools For Teachers & Professors posted at Teaching degree online.


Kristie Lewis presents Beyond CliffsNotes: 100 Free & Useful Tools for When Time’s Running Out posted at Online Colleges.org.

Shopping

Wise_Bread presents When they Say Extreme Deals They're Not Kidding posted at Wisebread.

Matthew Paulson presents New Regulations for Gift Card Holders posted at American Consumer News.

Mark Aucamp presents Freecycle is like eBay but it's FREE posted at Money Saving Tips.

Money & Income

Another Somebody presents 8 REAL ways to make extra money in 2010 posted at Another Somebody.

Time & Stress Management

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Contending With Time posted at Mad Kane's Humor Blog. Madeleine gives you her advise with a laugh and a smile!

JL 4 Media presents 55 Ways to Deal With Stress and Annoying People posted at Live Life to the Fullest, saying, "To help you ease the burden and cope in such hell of scenario, here’s a list you can laugh on or take into consideration. It may not solve all your stress away, but I guarantee that after reading, you’d be smiling."

Career

Nissim Ziv presents Career Aspirations: Examples of Career Aspirations posted at Job Interview Guide, saying, "This article provides sample of career aspirations for people who want to set up their career road-map. People’s career aspirations can be categorized into limited number of types."

Life & Relationships

Debbie Dragon presents Get Some Gratitude in Your Attitude posted at Empowering Mom.

Wren Caulfield presents The fence that makes good neighbors needs a gate to make good friends posted at True Adventures in Money Hacking. Do you know your neighbors?

Other

Tyler Tervooren presents Multiple Intelligences: Why You?re A Green Rock Star but Suck at Saving Money posted at Frugally Green, saying, "Ever wondered why you're a natural at one thing, but a complete dunce at another? According to the theory of multiple intelligences, it makes perfect sense. You see, there are actually 8 different ways that anyone can express the intelligence that they possess and the commonly accepted ones, well, aren't necessarily all that common. Find out how you can identify what your natural learning styles and intelligences are and how you can use them to teach yourself better personal finance habits even if you hate numbers and suck at math by following my own case study."

Billeater presents Technology Keeps You Safe and Keeps You at Risk posted at Billeater. Some good ideas to keep you safe in your various online activities.

That concludes the February edition of The Better Life Blog Carnival. You can submit your blog article to the next edition of The Better Life Blog Carnival using our "Submit an entry to “The Better Life Carnival” carnival submission form. Past posts and future editions can be found on our "Blog Carnival index for “The Better Life Carnival”blog
carnival index page. Look for the Family Life Blog Carnival coming in March as well as our our other regular posts.

Photo credit: First light courtesy of timobalk.

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Are You Using Tumblr?

Are you using Tumblr? I've been using Tumblr for a few years now and recently have become more interested in it as a Social Media tool and medium.


What is Tumblr? Tumblr is a Social Media tool that some people would classify as micro blogging (see wikipedia entry on blogs). Micro blogs are characterized as blogs with posts that are typically shorter than many blogs. Operating a microblog allows you to be creative and express yourself without all the maintenance and set up associated with some of the more formal blogs. With Tumblr it is easy to post text, share links, quotes, pictures, videos, and so on and you generally don't need to be a coding expert to use it! In the picture below you can see some of the things that you can post and you can do it by just pushing the icon pictured of what you want to do.

Dashboard View of Tumblr

I first discovered Tumblr via Zenhabits. I tried to find the article that I first read about it there, but my search resulted in too many returns to locate it. Leo Babauta was (and still is using it) as a way to share links and other interesting things with his readers. I decided to use it in a similar fashion. In fact in the second picture you even see a picture of Leo Babauta next to something he posted on Tumblr that was in my dashboard view when I did the screen capture recently.

Readers can subscribe to your RSS Feed

One thing that I find interesting about Tumblr is that it allows you to "follow" other tumblrs. If you look at my dashboard screen shot (the second picture) you can see that I'm following 8 other "Tumblrs", so whenever I sign in I can see what they have published recently. If you find something interesting you can easily "reblog it" maybe adding a comment or two or an explanation of why you found that particular item interesting. I also like that there is an RSS feed that people can subscribe to (middle bottom of the third screen shot)

Archive View

I also really like the Archive view that you and your readers can have of what you've posted (see forth screen shot above). Months where something was posted are in bold and can be clicked on. You get a picture of all the things posted in the period selected, allowing you to quick scan or find something that you're looking for. Tumblr can also be linked to Twitter and you can post to it via Ping.fm.

If you've been thinking about starting up a blog, maybe you can set up a tumblr and see how you like that before taking the plunge with the usual blogging platforms.

Do You Want People To Follow You On Twitter?

Over the last few months I've been looking at websites and blogs a little differently. If I happen to run across something that I like, then I wonder if that author or website is on twitter or some of the other social media sites that I use. The question then becomes do you want people to follow you on twitter?

As I've been reviewing submissions to the blog carnivals published at Systems-Overload the last few months, I've been looking at the websites of those people submitting articles to see if they were on Twitter. I've been surprised at how many websites I've been to that don't provide any buttons or links to their social media profiles. You might have reasons for not wanting the public in general to know what social media or network sites you're using, which is understandable, but if you don't make this information readily available, you might be missing a good chance to market your website or blog and do some networking as well. I'd think that if you go to the trouble of setting up a blog or website that you'd want to be able to interact with your readers. Maybe you've been so busy that the thought didn't occur to you to set this up?

I'm not a web-designer and I get annoyed when I have to play around with html code, so I can understand if you've put off making this change to your website or blog. I did a couple of searches for buttons/badges, first Twitter, then Facebook, and finally social media buttons. Here are a few websites that you can use to make buttons to link to your social media profiles.

• Twitter Buttons
• EasyTwitterButtons.com
• twitter buttons
• SocialMediaButtons- I've seen Twitter and Facebook buttons here
• Social Networking buttons from makeuseof.com
  
• Buttons Hut- I've seen serveral buttons here including Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and many more
• There are lots of other sites, so feel free to do your own search!

If you'd prefer not to use buttons or badges, how about simple links to some of your social media/network profiles that you'd like to connect with your readers at? While you can place them anywhere on your website or blog, I'd suggest that you put them near the top your website, in a sidebar, at the bottom of your site, within your "about us/me" or your "contact us/me" sections. Ideally you want this to be something that people see right away or can easily find. Since most people don't feel that they that that much time, if they have to hunt too hard for it, they won't, and they're less likely to find you at Twitter, Facebook, or any other profiles that you might like to connect with people at.

There are probably millions of reasons why people want to be "social" on the web or maybe it boils down to only a few, but why not let the visitors and readers of your website or blog know where they can find you and connect with you online? If you know of a good site for social media buttons or badges feel free to mention it in the comments.