Market My Novel

 2010 didn’t start off amazingly well here at Market My Novel.

I could give you a lot of excuses why. I was burned out, I launched a new blog, was looking for more freelance work, etc.

The real reason? My blog wasn’t working.

That’s right. Miss Social Media Diva had a blog program that didn’t work, and it was all thanks to a few little plugins that needed to be updated.

Without these upgrades I had to hand code nearly everything. Sometimes the hard break codes would vanish and I’d have to reinsert them several times until they stuck. This took up so much time – and caused so much aggravation – that I just let it go and worked on other things.

Normally, I upgrade my plugins like clockwork. However, I discovered the hard way that these little babies were paid plugins tied to my blog transfer last year. It wasn’t very expensive, but it was an expense I hadn’t planned for. I tried to work without them, but that didn’t work, either.

I was also seriously aggravated at myself for not anticipating this expense, too. I had tried to ask every question tied to the transfer that I could think of, but still didn’t think of them all. (I think I was mad at myself more than anything. You know how that goes when you try to plan things out financially.)

With $1K in dental and eye doctors expenses I have to finagle (Is that even a word?) in my budget, I just put it off… and put it off…until finally one day I couldn’t take it anymore and ponied up.

Now, my blog is running smoothly, coding itself and making my blogging life that much nicer. It was definitely worth the money.

Finally, all of these ideas and links and stories I’ve wanted to share, I CAN share –  without the hassle.

The morals of this story?

Whenever you ask questions about Web design, you will NEVER think of everything, no matter how hard you try.

Your blogging will suffer if you don’t have a program that works. It is better to pay up fast and keep content flowing, than to let things slide. 

If you are on WordPress, update your plugins regularly! If you start to have issues, go back and uninstall the last plugin you added and see if that is the issue.