I’ve been lucky enough to go to quite a few conferences in the past few years. With each I learn something new. I’ve been to SEO, social media, wiki and technology conferences (I know, I’m a big geek), but BlogPaws was my first blogging conference. What made it all the more interesting is that it was the first conference that The Pet Wiki sponsored.

This might not sound like a big deal to most people, but for me it sure was. It meant that I needed to set up a 6 foot long table. I had never done that before. I don’t have a table cloth with a fancy logo just lying around to throw over a table, like a lot of the other sponsors did (they had obviously done this before). I had to get inventive.

Luckily I was traveling with my family. That’s right, I didn’t come from home, I came directly from a family vacation in Orlando (which was great, by the way). Everything that I needed to do for the conference I had to do on site. It was a bit nerve racking, but I luckily have the most supportive family EVER. They helped me come up with ideas for making the table fun and inviting. I am very thankful to them for helping me out. We pooled our resources and came up with something to be proud of.

The first thing we did was plan a bit ahead. I knew that I wanted to give stuff out at the conference. Since The Pet Wiki is an information and community site, I figured why not give out information? With the help of a very talented graphic artist named Ossa, we had bookmarks printed for “Why Do Dogs Bury Their Bones?” and “How Does Catnip Work?” They came out really nice.

Besides the bookmarks, I felt like doing a bit more. Ossa came through for me again (and on a very tight schedule) to make mini cookbooks for people to take. There are a lot of recipes for pets on the Wiki, so it just seemed like a natural choice. Now I thought of making a poster of what The Pet Wiki is, and how to use it, but instead I decided to put it on the inside cover of the book. I figured that people might pass by and look at the poster for a couple of minutes, but if they were to take the cookbook with them, they’d have the information there to read at their leisure.

I’m not sure if this was a good idea or bad idea, but I just couldn’t help myself. I used half of the book to promote my blog, Vegan Start. Veganism is something that I am passionate about, and I felt that pet people were the type of people that might be interested in alternatives to animal products. It seemed like a natural fit, and I hope that some people walked away with a little more knowledge and some very yummy recipes that they can make for their family.

With the cookbooks and the bookmarks, the table was still way too sparse. My brilliant daughter came up with the idea to let the animals do the talking. She created adorable posters with the animals asking the questions. Luckily she’s had experience in things like this before and knew exactly what to do. We bought poster board and she drew on them, glued them onto foam boards and cut them into interesting shapes to give more life to the table. They came out fabulous.

We also made 5 batches of sugar cookies and the girls decorated them with animal motifs. No two were alike. They came out so cute. At first I wondered why no one was eating them. I finally figured it out. Since it’s a pet conference, people were afraid that they were dog treats. Once we put up a sign that they were for human consumption, they started going. Most of the other tables had food for pets. I think that we were the only ones to have for people, so that threw them off a bit.

And of course we had a computer handy to show off the site. It was so exciting to be able to show off our new homepage. It’s been a work in progress forever. There’s nothing like a deadline for making it happen. I like working with talented people. I enlisted Ari, a very talented webmaster, that I used to work with. It was so nice to have it up and show it off.

I got so much great feedback from the conference. For people that were already familiar with The Pet Wiki, it was so nice to hear that people enjoy using the site. For people that didn’t know about it yet, it was great being able to tell them about it, and about how it can help them.

Besides all that, it was great seeing the people that I know from Facebook, Twitter and blogging. It was a great crowd of wonderful and passionate people. I look forward to doing it again!

On a side note, another great thing that I was able to do was to pick up a painting that I had commissioned from a very talented artist named BZTAT. I’d seen the progress that she’d been making on the painting on Facebook. Seeing it in person for the first time at the conference was amazing. Those pictures on Facebook just didn’t do it justice.

BZTAT spoke at the conference about a project that she is working on to spread awareness of the link between animal abuse and domestic violence. Okey’s Promise has been set up as a public art initiative that will be moved around to six different cities to help make people aware of this connection and what to look for to keep women and children safe. It’s meeting people like BZTAT that makes going to conferences like this so enjoyable and inspiring.

My friend RivkA died on Friday. She was only 44 years old. She died of cancer. A lot of people die of cancer, but what was really special about RivkA is about how she lived with cancer.

RivkA had a very interesting way of dealing with her illness. She would set up chemotherapy dates with her friends. I know that sounds really strange, but she was even able to take a negative like chemotherapy and turn it into something fun. She would enlist friends to join her for a day of shmoozing at her weekly chemo sessions. It was a great way for her to catch up with friends. It’s so true that our lives are so busy that we just don’t make time for the people that are important to us.

It’s unfortunate that it sometimes takes something like cancer for us to make the time. I know that there are a ton of things that I push off until tomorrow or later or indefinitely. I hope that I can learn from RivkA to do things right away. That there is no time like now.

These dates are the source for the title of her blog, Coffee and Chemo, which went way beyond being a blog about cancer. Instead it was a blog about being a person. RivkA didn’t let the cancer rule her life. It’s not that she didn’t do everything medically possible to treat herself, it’s just that it wasn’t the focus of her life. What was important to her was to be a mom, a daughter, and a wife and to help others with their battles as well.

With this whole vegan thing, I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of person I want to be. What do I want my legacy to be? How do I want to leave the world after I’m gone? What contributions do I want to make to be an inspiration for others to follow?

RivkA, it’s hard to believe that you’re really gone. Everyone you touched is lucky. We will all miss you.

It’s a real problem. Having a website all about animals is bound to have some effects on your attitudes towards animals. It’s not that I haven’t always loved animals – I grew up with animals and they have always been part of the family. I knew that I had a lot to learn before I started this endeavor, but I didn’t realize how much it was going to effect my life.

Through The Pet Wiki and all the wonderful people that I’ve met through social media, I’ve learned a lot of horrible truths about how the animals that we put on our plate are treated and raised. It’s one of those things that a lot of people just don’t want to think about. I know that I didn’t. Until I couldn’t not think about it any more.

Not only have I become vegan myself, I’ve dragged half my family into it too. Since I do most of the cooking, it only seems fair that I’ll only cook what I am willing to eat. They are totally cool with that. As a matter of fact, all my kids have decided to become vegetarians. My husband is the only real hold out (and he may be bending).

To make sure that I don’t piss off my family too much, I’ve been making recipes that duplicate the food that they are used to and love. That’s an easy way to go. As long as they get their beloved comfort food, we can all be happy.

I’ve decided to start another blog all about my vegan journey. It’s called Vegan Start, and I think that I’m already off to a pretty good start with a chocolate chip cookie recipe.

The finished product - Omer's Scratching Post

I have been a big Thesis fan for a while now. It makes blog design so easy that almost anyone can do it. Thesis, by itself, looks pretty good. This blog is basically bare-bones Thesis. I really want to change things up here, but haven’t had the time to actually figure out what I want it to look like.

Not so with my other blog (or should I say my cat’s blog?) Omer’s Scratching Post. Omer is basically the mascot of The Pet Wiki, and the Scratching Post is a place for him to share his opinions, talk about pet related issues, and to let people know about stuff happening in his life and on The Pet Wiki.

Recently I’ve been making some big changes. At least the changes look big. With a few custom modifications to Thesis, everything looks great. You can make these modifications in the css and php in the custom folder that Thesis provides, but you don’t even need to do that. Just add the Thesis OpenHook plugin and you can edit the css and php directly from WordPress.

After you install the Thesis OpenHook plugin, you’ll notice some new menu items under Appearance in the left menu. We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s start by trying to customize the background of your Thesis theme. DYIthemes, the creators of Thesis, do a great job explaining how to do just that. They give you a whole starter kit and walk you through the steps. The only thing that I’d change about their instructions is that instead of making modifications to the css and ftp’ing it back and forth, you can modify the css by clicking on Thesis Custom Styling in the left menu. It’s much more convenient to use.

For Omer’s Scratching Post, I wanted add a custom graphic of my kitty and his scratching post. The first thing that I did was create an image to use. I’m working on a budget and I don’t do all that much graphic work. Instead of buying a copy of PhotoShop (which is excellent software for creating graphics,) I opted to use Paint.net.

Paint.net is one of those little known, but very useful applications. It’s a very powerful image editor and it is absolutely free. If you’re nice, you can donate money to help out these very talented developers. Think of it as good karma to do so.

Now it’s time to create your graphic. Figure out how many pixels you’re using for your columns, and make your graphic that width. I chose to make the height on the graphic 200px. You can choose whatever suits your site best. I layered a few pictures of Omer (and you guessed it) his scratching post. I added a bit of text and viola! New header created.

The following brilliant information and css code comes from Logos for Websites:

Now that you have your image you’ll need to ftp it to the correct place on your site. OpenHooks can’t help you here. Upload it to /wp-content/themes/thesis_15/custom/images.

Click Thesis Options under Appearance in the left menu. Make sure that “Show site name in header” and “Show site tagline in header” are checked under Display Options, Header. If they’re not, select them and click the “Big Ass Save Button”.

Now we can go back into the css and modify it to use your new image. Click Thesis Custom Styling and add the following:

/* This line sets up our clickable background image based on the site title’s link */
/* DIY: Adjust the height & width attributes to reflect the actual size of your image */
/* DIY: Change the filename of your image to reflect the actual header’s file name */
.custom #header #logo a { display: block; height: 200px; width: 928px; background: url(‘images/YourImage.jpg’) no-repeat; outline: none; }

/* This line gets rid of the site title & tagline by casting them out to far left field */
.custom #header #logo, .custom #header #tagline { text-indent: -9999px; }

/* This line collapses the vertical space of the tagline so that there isn’t unnecessary white space after the header image */

/* This is a bit of a kludge, but it seems to work. */
.custom #header #tagline { height: 0; }

/* This line removes the padding from the header so that the background image sits close to the nav menu, the bottom border of the header, and the sides of the content */
.custom #header { padding: 0; }

That’s it. You’re all done. It’s amazing the dramatic results that you can create with very little work. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you got it up in running in an afternoon instead of a week.

I’ve been having fun. To set up my blog just how I like it, I’ve been looking for useful widgets to add. There are a ton of great ones out there. Here’s a list of my favorites:

• Akismet – Spam is a huge problem with any blog. The amount of spam seems to grow every day. Akismet does a wonderful job of separating the good from the junk. It is a must for any blog. Akismet comes bundled with WordPress and only needs to be activated. You can get an activation key from WordPress’s site.
• Add to Any: Subscribe Button- Originally, I was looking for a widget that would allow people to subscribe to my blog by email. The Add to Any: Subscribe Button gives me that and more. This allows readers to get new posts in a bunch of different ways. It goes beyond RSS and email and updates subscribers by Twitter, Facebook and more.
• All in One SEO Pack - This is another no brainer. I bought the Thesis theme for the SEO benefits. If there is another tool out there that can help with with my Search Engine Optimization, I’m in. This plugin allows me to set tags I want per post to get the best optimization possible.
• Dandy ID Services – I want people to connect to me in as many ways as possible. Dandy ID is a plugin that puts all my social media accounts in one place. It doesn’t take up a lot of room and the icons add a bit of color to the page. The only caveat is that you need to create an account on Dandy ID. It’s worth it. One thing that I would like would be to add a title to the widget. Maybe in the next version.
• StatPress SEOlution – I like to know where my traffic comes from. StatPress SEOlution gives a wonderful breakdown of where the traffic comes from. The charts are beautiful. The metrics are understandable, which is more important than anything else. Very well done.
• Sociable - I’m a sharing kind of person. If I see something I like, I like to tell others about it. I wanted a widget that would make it easier for people to share the information that they find useful. Adding Sociable puts social media links on each post, taking away all barriers to sharing.
• Twitter Widget Pro – I am a heavy user of Twitter. Twitter is an amazing tool to connect better with people. I want people to know what I’m doing on Twitter, and Twitter Widget Pro is the best widget out there. Everything is configurable. I run multiple Twitter accounts, and this is the only widget that allowed me to install multiple accounts on the same sidebar. It looks great.

There are a ton more wonderful widgets and plugins out there. These are my favorites for now, but the best part of plugins is if there is something that you’d like, wait a while. Someone will develop it. Ask on the forums. If you come, they will build it.

Update: A couple of things that I forgot to mention is that all of these plugins are free. They also can be easily installed from inside WordPress – no ftp client need. Enjoy!

Deep breath… My blog is now on renareich.com. This is a big step for me. I am now in full control of how the blog will look. It’s very exciting. All that I needed to do in the end was (under tools) export the blog as xml and then import it into the new blog. Piece of cake. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes and I now have a backup of the blog as xml on my hard disk.

There are still a lot of things that I’d like to do to the way it looks. I’ve added a bunch of widgets to help out with a bit of the customization. I’ve added my picture, my tweets, tag cloud, archives, etc. Some of these things I was able to do on the old blog, but some are completely new. I’ve been trying to get more into the social media aspect of the blog. See all that those icons below this post? If you like what you see, share it with your friends. Look over to the right. If you’d like to see what else I’m up to, check me out on FriendFeed or Facebook or LinkeIn.

The next customization of this blog will probably be the header, background and fonts. Although all the information that I want is now showing up, I’ve only done a partial facelift. Now it’s time to get colorful. It should be fun.

I’ve been playing around with a number of themes on the new blog site – I want to have it up and ready before I do the big switch – and it seems like Thesis wins out. I’m one of the cheaper people out there, so for me to plunk down $87 for a theme is a big deal. There are so many free themes out there that it just seems silly to actually cough up money.

Why did I decide to use Thesis? The clincher for me was the SEO enhancements that have gone into the design. It’s the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) rule. The less clutter on the page, the better chance that Google has to indexing it. That’s key. Thesis does just that – it keeps the html code clean.  I could make the site as pretty as I want, but that won’t bring traffic.

There are plently of other bells and whistles that come with Thesis, like the ease of modifying the page layout and the ability to set font and font size from drop down menus. That’s cool. I’m still playing around with it to understand the full power of the theme. I’m sure that I’ll have more to say about it when I have more experience playing with it.

I did it. I made the decision to move my blog to my own website instead of writing on WordPress’ site. It was a hard decision to make, but I knew that I had to do it eventually, and now is as good a time as ever.

I wasn’t able to get the domain name renalive.com – it’s not being used, but someone owns it. I tried to contact them to see if they’d be willing to sell it, but alas, no response. I’ll be using renareich.com. It’s not as cute as Rena Live (I always really liked that name,) but it’s all mine.

I’m using GoDaddy for hosting. I’ve been surprisingly pleased with the service. It was really easy to set up and install. So far, that’s all I’ve done with it. I’ll need to export the database from renalive.wordpress.com and import it into the new database that’s been set up.

I’ve been debating about what theme to use. I’ve heard such wonderful things about Thesis, that I’m pretty sure that’s the way that I’m going to go. I’m doing a bit more research on what I need to do, and I hope to be up and running soon. The reason that I’m at all hestitant to use Thesis is that I like the idea of being able to just install something that looks pretty and not think about it. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have to come up with a design, which scares the heck out of me. It’s a learning process.

In my Digital Storytelling course, they introduced me to Wordle. Here is the Wordle for this blog: