Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Is my site loading a little faster?

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Please tell me my site is loading a little bit faster. Please?

Late yesterday evening or early this morning I noticed that my blogs were hanging and not loading well at all. It seems that the blogcatalog widget was having trouble loading. In fact the blogcatalog site wasn’t loading either when I went to visit it.

I got fed up with waiting as much as ten minutes for my sites to load. So I went and took the mybloglog and blogcatalog widgets off my sites. I know they’ve each slowed my sites in the past and I know that this blog in particular can be slow loading.

I also realize that my sidebars load before the content. I’ve tried every way I know how to change my site so that the content loads first, but every time I try to change it my whole blog crashes. This theme just does not want to do anything but have the sidebars load first.

It might be time to change the theme.

So apart from the sidebars loading first. Do you think my page loaded a little bit faster when you visited today?

Please say it did.





Anyone interested in an Internet book exchange?

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I enjoy reading. Each night or rather since I’ve become quite the night owl as of late each early morning I go to bed and I read a little bit of a novel.

It seems that no matter how tired I am I can’t sleep without reading a little bit. Even if it’s only a paragraph or a page. It’s like reading is my sleeping pill.

I read enough books that I should borrow them from the library, but I don’t. I like having books when they come out and you can’t always get a new book at the library as you are competing with everyone else that wants to borrow the book.

So I buy my novels and every once in a while we’ll go to a used book store and turn in our books. We get some money back for the books. No where near what I paid for them originally, but it helps.

Do you enjoy reading? If you purchase your books what do you do with them? Do you save them for garage sales, throw them out, lend them to others or turn them in to a used book store like we do?

I just had a great idea. I tend to read horror novels, detective type murder mysteries and other thriller adventure novels. Perhaps some of you might be interested in trading books back and forth? I’d send you five novels and you could send me five that I haven’t read?

I say five, but it could be any number. I figure five is worth sending when you add in the cost of postage. Certainly you wouldn’t want to ship too many at once or the cost of shipping them would be too high.

If anyone’s interested in doing something like this let me know. Maybe I could set up a book exchange group.

BTW I do realize this contradicts what I said about borrowing a book from the library. I just thought this might be a good idea.

Know of any good beauty, clothing or home decor affiliate programs?

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Ok I need your help.

I’ve gone and started a new blog. Well I bought the domain back in April and I’ve slowly been working on the site. I’m not yet ready to reveal the site yet, but I will tell you that it’s a shopping blog where I talk about great products for the home, beauty products, clothing, home decor items and well … you get the picture.

I’ve lined up some affiliate programs for the site. I mean if I’m talking about products I might as well throw in a few links here and there and maybe make some money right? So I’m looking for online clothing stores that have good products to talk about and affiliate or partner programs.

Actually it doesn’t have to just be clothing stores. It can be any kind of online affiliate program or store that has products for the home, bath and beauty, decor and so on.

I don’t plan on making a site full of affiliate links or anything. It has decent content, but as I said if I can hook up with some good programs that will benefit my readers and myself I might as well do it.

So if you know of any great partner programs please feel free to let me know about them. I’m all ears.

Who’s linking to you?

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Do you ever check to see who’s linking to you?

I think one of the great things about having a blog on your own domain and using WordPress to run it is the ability to easily find out who’s linked to you recently just by checking your dashboard.

Of course, the WordPress dashboard gets it’s recent links to your site from Technorati, so even if you are using a free blog platform you can check who’s been linking to you by creating an account and adding your site to Technorati. You can also do a Google search by putting this phrase “links: ” in front of your full site url.

I run several blogrolls and my sites are also listed on several blogrolls so I end up seeing new links each day.

Do you occasionally visit the sites that you’ve found linking to you? I do. I don’t always leave a message, but I visit quite a few of them. I’m also thankful for all of the links I seem to be receiving too.

It’s time to start thinking about Halloween!

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You may think it’s a little early to start thinking about Halloween, but it’s already the end of August and I know people who start planning what they’ll do next Halloween almost from November 1st.

It’s a big deal.

I mean really. If you celebrate Halloween it’s one of the only times of year when you can truly be someone else. Dress yourself up, even take on a slightly different personality and get out there and have a good time.

In one of my career incarnations I was a makeup artist. I suppose I still am as I have the training behind me. As a result of my skills I was always quite popular come Halloween. Friends and family would come over to have me do their makeup and add some special effects to their costumes.

I guess you can tell that Halloween is still one of my favorite celebrations. I haven’t actually started to plan this years Halloween celebration, but I suppose it’s time to start thinking about it.

zombie.jpg The Costume Cauldron has a huge variety of Halloween costumes and items to decorate your home with, in fact it’s said that they have 14,000 Halloween related items.

They have everything from Sexy Halloween Costumes, to kids costumes, costumes for couples, movie or celebrity related costumes, funny costumes and so on. Just about anything you can think of really. They even have theatrical makeup and accessories to complete your look.

I think the year that I had the most fun helping people with their costumes was the year we all dressed up as the living dead or zombies. I had a lot of fun doing the makeup for that. The Costume Cauldron has a great zombie rot costume that would let anyone look like the living dead!

outhouse.jpgMy sister always had great costume ideas.

One year she had me help her dress up as a tampon. Unfortunately it was supposed to be a used one! Another year she went as a turd. Yes you heard me right.

Now I didn’t search all that hard for one of those types of costumes but I did find an outhouse costume! Isn’t that great?

If you enjoy Halloween as much as I do visit the Costume Cauldron and see if you can find something interesting to wear this year.

I’d love to hear what you might be dressing up as!

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