I read in People magazine that Rosie O’Donnell took the month of August off from updating her site Rosie.com, because she felt the need to spend some time unplugged. She and her partner have four kids, I can certainly understand that! I have decided to do the same thing for the month of September, except I’m not going to stop blogging, I’m going to stop accepting new assignments.

See, I love doing product reviews so much that I have a hard time saying no. And I’ll be honest, I love getting products to review! When I get an email offering me something really amazing for free, in exchange for writing my opinion about it on one of my blogs, I have a hard time saying no. I think I’m afraid that if I do say no, the PR firms will just move on to the next person and forget me. Which probably won’t happen, but it’s one of those insecurities that I have.

So for the month of September, I will be working on catching up with all the reviews I have to do. I have boxes stacked up in my living room and my husband says it’s starting to look like the back room at Fedex! It will be a big weight off of my shoulders if I can just get caught up finally.

I spent hours last night, into the wee hours of the morning in fact, and then more hours again after breakfast today trying to get a new theme working on MomReviews. Why a new theme? What was wrong with the old one? *sigh* People, I don’t know what it is. Table for Five runs just fine. The only reason I ever changes themes on that blog is that I get bored looking at the same one day after day after day. MomCooks runs fine, the theme I’m using isn’t even technically current with the newest version of Wordpress, but it runs just fine so I don’t mess with it. And this blog gives me no trouble at all.

But MomReviews? I just don’t know what it is! I find a theme I like, I get it all customized the way I want it with my sidebars and everything, and without fail, I will log in one morning and find that something has gone all wonky. This last time, I found a theme with colors and details that I just loved, but it had two really narrow sidebars. A friend spent who knows how much of her personal time tweaking the background image and widening the sidebars, and for a while, it looked great! And then one day, I realized that there was a tag cloud sitting up in the header! I didn’t even have the tag cloud widget dragged into either sidebar. I kept taking more and more things out, and yet there it was. Finally I found a really generic theme and slapped it on there just so my readers would have something normal to look at.

But I got tired of looking at the generic theme, so I tried going back to the other one. I combed through every single theme file until I found that the footer.php file had tag cloud code in it. I took it out, saved, refreshed, and that darn tag cloud was STILL THERE. So I went off a new search for a new theme. I ran through pages of Wordpress Themes until I found one I liked. It was clean, simple, nice colors, but it had a Flickr photoset embedded in one of the sidebars, and the photos? Were of an Asian girl wearing almost no clothing. NICE. Just what a blog about products for kids should have I took that code out - and the whole dang sidebar disappeared. I put it back in, and tried again more carefully, making sure I was deleting any div tags or anything, and again, taking out that Flickr code made the sidebar disappear. GAHHHH!

Finally at about 1:00 AM this morning I found another one that worked, and a friend who was up chatting with me on MSN Messenger helped me get my banner image installed. I got a few hours of sleep, and then after breakfast, I set to work getting the sidebars fixed. While the theme does use widgets, it also has some things coded into the sidebars. And once again, taking them out messes everything up. *bangs head* Without switching to the freaking WP Default theme, I don’t even know what to do! You’d think after three years, I wouldn’t have these kinds of problems.

Isn’t that a great title? It’s not mine though, it’s the name of an Audio Course you can buy that teaches you how to manage all your incoming email. And while I’m sure it’s a useful program, I don’t have $47.00. I found the link from this blog post from Chris Brogan, “Inbox Taming for Busy People“. Which is also a great title.

The problem I have is that I have so much coming in every day that it gets buried. Brogan suggests setting up separate email addresses, one for general messages, one for personal messages, and one for signing up for newsletters and RSS feeds and such. My problem is, having more email addresses doesn’t help me remember to CHECK more email addresses!

But I need to do something, because I have emails coming from PR firms and advertisers that are getting lost in the slew of incoming messages from MyBlogLog and Twitter and EntreCard. I remember a time when I didn’t even understand WHY people needed email!

Okay, this is completely politically incorrect, and WRONG, but also, so funny.

Click this link from Spill

bwahahahaha!

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’ve upgraded all my blogs to WP 2.6.1, and so far I’ve noticed that my blogs are loading much more quickly. I continue to thank the blog gods for the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, because now I don’t break my code every time I upgrade like I did when it was a manual process

I finished tweaking the new theme on MomReviews, so far it seems to be loading correctly each time with no sidebar weirdness, so I’m happy with it for now. But since I get bored with themes quickly, I’m sure I’ll be looking for a new one soon! Speaking of MomReviews, I’m giving away a BeLight Diaper Bag over there so stop over and enter.

In my sidebar is a button for BuyBlogReviews.com. I bid on three jobs over there today, two of which involve being sent a product to review first plus getting paid a little cash for your time. I haven’t had experience with their customer service yet, but if you are interested, check it out by clicking that button. I don’t think I get paid anything if you do so there’s no obligation

Have a great weekend everybody!