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Use Labels Effectively

If you are using Blogger or Blogspot as your blog platform your option is to create labels at the bottom of your blog post. It is important to use this feature to help search engines sort your posts and for users to navigate to other blogs of interest.

Label Name Selection
Choose keywords as your label names. I like to use all lower case for my label names as then my words will match more potential search queries than proper case or all capitals. Sometimes even I forget, but try to stick with lower case

Labels as Navigation
I’ve worked on some blogs where we pre-select labels and only use this labels as we are using the labels as a type of blog navigation. This is a good idea if you are really working on SEO tactics and are employing a ghost blogger to one help give them focus and to prevent label bloat.

Choose Labels Judiciously
If you are having trouble with Blogger publishing your posts, it is time to change your label program. Get in and delete labels, regroup posts and chop your label bloat. Blogger simply has real trouble in publishing custom FTP blogs where you have more than 20 labels. Watch your publishing screen if you are having trouble, you will see that every time you publish Blogger has to reload all your labels and appears to get hung up here if you have lots of labels on your posts. If you have four, five or more labels on each post, Blogger will definitely have problems with custom FTP publishing.

WordPress Categories
This is somewhat the same as Blogger Labels. However in WordPress you won’t have the publishing woes that Blogger custom FTP does when you get a lot of categories on your blog. Still keep in mind some of my tips about navigation, capitalization, and keyword use.

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Control Your Kids Computer Time A Review

I have been using ComputerTime from SoftwareTime to control my kids access to the computer and wanted to tell you a bit about this great software. First I am not being paid for this review. I am a paying customer.

I decided after I found my kids on the computer nearly 12 hours on Saturday and at midnight after I had gone to bed that I absolutely had to install some limits and not work on the honor system. I wanted the ability to assign a daily limit and to override it easily if I wanted to.

I tried a few programs and ended up buying ComputerTime from SoftwareTime. I have four kids computers for each one. I was able to buy the family pack and to install it for about $39.99 on all four computers. With ComputerTime I am able to set a time limit for each day, a start and stop time, and to create additional time tokens. These time tokens all an extra amount of time (of your choice) and I personally award them for extra chores and to get more homework done.

When the time limit for the day is approaching the user will be warned and then when time elapses, they will be logged off and will not be able to log back in again. For me, the administration control panel and its ease of use was the reason that I chose the program over others. I am able to login as administrator at any time without having to log them off as Window’s users to make a change.

Having control over the amount of time that my kids spend on the computer has been great. No longer are they spending the full weekend online gaming it out, but they have a real life not only a virtual life. For my kids age 11, I allow 15 minutes of computer time on weekdays. This allows them to check email and to email grandma. I allow two hours of time on Saturday and Sunday. If they have a homework assignment on a weekday and need more time, I have set up time tokens and give them a code to input to allow one hour of computer use. For my teen, I allow more time as he has more homework.

ComputerTime has allowed me to finally have control over the time my kids spend on the computer and to have new family time instead of having to fight the computer for their attention. If you have kids on the computer and if you feel that gaming is getting out of control, if chores are not being done, if they cannot log off when you ask as they just have to finish a game, now’s the time for you to get ComputerTime too! Just click my blog post title to get it and have a free trial. I feel that it is a valuable and well-priced piece of software.