I have had a lot of questions asked of me lately as to where I have been. I admit I have been awfully quiet lately and a lot has been going on in Linuxland that I haven’t covered. I have always been a family first kind of person and we have had some medical emergencies that have required 100% of my time to be focused on getting my family and children healthy and happy.

That said I will be back to posting as time allows soon. In the meantime I would like to open up the blog to guest posts. If you are interested in getting your article or commentary posted here at linuxchic.net leave a comment on the post. I will send an email to your email address that you leave when you register here and give you follow up information. You will need to register as a user if you are interested rather than use your OpenID to comment. By guest posting here you will be allowed to include your links and URLs to drive traffic back to your blog. I would like to feature several posts per week for the next few weeks until I can get back to it full-time.

Again, thanks for your loyalty to the site and you understanding during this time.

Every so often I get all kinds of sidetracked here at linuxchic.net and wander away from tech and nix and wind up posting stuff like blog tips and such… well, no more (blog tips anyway). I’ve decided to fully utilize my blogagory.com domain and dedicate it to the topic of blogging. This is a pretty big topic so I suppose it will end up encompassing such things as social networking and new media as well, but only as it applies to a blogger. To make a potentially long blog post short, head over to blog(a)gory.com and read about blogging (the URL doesn’t actually have the parentheses in case you are confused) . Stay here or listen to the alternageek.com podcast to read/hear about tech, gadgets, nix, and open source. Want to hear random life rants of mine? That’s what my Twitter and Vox blog is for. Why so many blogs? Because sometimes you just don’t give a crap about my issues with pajamas in public or my opinion of the blogosphere (there it is, I used the word!) and you are visiting linuxchic.net just for the ‘nix stuff.

This post has moved to blog(a)gory.com. Read it there

UPDATE:

I have gotten emails from both Jeremy Write of b5media and Rick Calvert of BlogWorld regarding this blog post and the issues I encountered prior to the conference. Both were very helpful and generous. It’s wonderful to know that people are listening and working to resolve the hiccups that occur when planning a conference. The conference is only four days away and I am still looking forward to it.

Now, if only my Moo stickers that I ordered over three weeks ago would arrive. ;)

I am participating in Blog Action Day 2007 on three blogs this year which means three posts about the environment. If you haven’t heard of Blog Action Day, the website for the event best summerizes it:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blogging on three blogs today means I need three topics since I would really rather not just repost the same snippet everywhere. Three blogs, three different focuses, one general idea. I came across an email from Eco-Libris about replanting trees for every book you read and immediately found my topic for Linuxchic.net. (more…)

I signed the Linuxchic.net site up today for Odiogo. Odiogo “automatically generates podiocasts from textual content structured in RSS feeds. The end-result is a high-fidelity computer-generated voice file”. Swanky. Basically I sign up for free as a blogger and tell it where to find my RSS feed, it then takes my posts and converts them into audio files so they are like “mini podcasts” or what they call podiocasts. I added their Wordpress plugin to put a listen button on the top of each post and pointed it to my Odiogo feed number. I now have an RSS feed with text AND audio as well as a fancy subscription page with ready made links. There is a little ad at the start of each audio file, but hey, it is free. I was impressed with the clarity of the computer generated voice. It remains to be seen how it handles all those Web 2.0 names. Try it out and let me know what you think!

YourOnRamp is a new community designed for women looking to re-enter corporate America.

For women that have taken time off of work, often to raise children, many find that coming back to the work world is difficult, and is often hard to find companies that are family-friendly, and equally as difficult to find a balance between work and family. YourOnRamp is looking to be an online resource for these women, offering news articles and other editorial content, along with a career coach and a social network for the purpose of getting women back on track. Most of the basics are present for typical social network functionality, including personal profiles, blogs and forums.

Read more about this at Mashable

Just to be that obnoxious person, I am re-blogging the blog post from Mashable about bloggers blogging about - what was I talking about again? Oh yeah…

A trend: sometime every Saturday afternoon Eastern Time (now), tech bloggers run low on real news, and a story about bloggers themselves gets an unnecessary amount of airtime. On Sunday, it rises to a rabble before dying down as the Monday news starts coming in - call it Navel Gaze Sunday if you like (or circlejerk Sunday if you don’t). A brief history of the past 3 Navel Gaze Sundays:

Read the post in it’s entirety at Mashable. Hope we get some more tech news soon to blog real posts again… ;)