I just ran across this post on Pro Blogger called the 8 Useful Tips for Building Your Mommy Blog Into a Business written by guest writer, Mom Grind. She gave sage advise such as acknowledging that your blog is a business. I didn’t get this idea into my head until I filed my tax return this year and had to declare income from blogging. I hadn’t realized up to that point that I really do now have a business on the side and it’s called blogging! How awesome is that?

I’m nowhere near the caliber of the mommy bloggers mentioned in the post, but I hope someday I could be. If you’re a mommy blogger and you want to get beyond talking to yourself on your blog, check out the tips for building your blog and click on the referenced links you just might learn something. I did.

I’ve had themes and templates on the brain for the last few days since I changed the template here and on my food blog. I think I’ve got both sites to where I like them now.

AdSense Problems
My only problem now is, for some reason page impressions from my food blog and this blog for AdSense are not showing up. My food blog generates quite a bit of traffic and it usually delivers a few clicks per day, giving me a few cents at least. But since last weekend when I changed themes, I’ve gotten zero revenue from AdSense from that blog. I’m trying to figure out what could be wrong since the template that I am using is supposed to be optimized for ads including AdSense. I’ve changed all the referring codes to mine, so that should be it, right? If anyone has experienced this problem before, please let me know how you fixed it.

Code Diving
I came across this post on 5 Tips for Finding the Perfect Blog Template while I was looking for a solution to my AdSense problem and found the tips to be very sound. If you are thinking of changing the way your blog looks but can’t afford a custom website design, these tips are a great way to kick start hacking your own template.

I had never heard the term ‘code diving’ before, and for some reason it just amused me to no end and I had to blog about it. It’s a very apt term, and one that I have learned to do early on. Especially when I don’t really know what the codes mean or purpose, I just like the results they produce. ‘View Source’, ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ is how I coded many of my themes. Who knew it was called ‘code diving’!

TechTreak.com is having a July Carnival and they are giving away several prizes:

* $100 cash via paypal
* 1000 entrecard credits
* 125×125 banner(sidebar) for a month($20)
* One Text Link Ad(Featured Section) for a month($10)

What do you have to do to win? Easy. Earn multiple entries by:

1. Subscribing to to the feeds via email - 5 points
2. Blogging about the contest - 10 points
3. Stumble the post - 15 points
4. Leaving a comment

There’s also a bonus prize. If you want to know what it is, visit the contest details at:
TechTreak.com Blog Carnival

Inspired by the new template I just installed for my Blogger blog, I decided to update the theme for this blog too. This blog is self-hosted and runs on a Wordpress platform, so since I was going to change things around, I decided to go ahead and upgrade my Wordpress to the 2.5 version too.

Wordpress Upgrade
Wordpress just released the 2.6 version, but I didn’t want to upgrade that far yet as I hadn’t really seen too many feedback on that version. I had read after version 2.5 was released that people lost data on their blogs after they upgraded. Then I read on the forums that a way to avoid this is to disable plugins first then do the upgrade. Luckily, I didn’t have many plugins installed on this blog yet, just the ‘share this‘ plugin. Back to the upgrade, it was actually quite painless. All I did was sign into my web host which is BLUEHOST.COM and go into Fantastico. All my websites that are in need of upgrade were listed and all I have to do is click on the website, choose which version I want to upgrade to, and that’s it!
…click here to read more