How do you clean up after the holidays?  For us, it is a tad more interesting.  Madison’s birthday was yesterday (she turned 5!), so we always have the quick cleanup that needs to be done from the time we get back from visiting Wisconsin and her birthday party.  I usually get about a week if we are lucky.  Since we have the basement now, Bill let me keep up the Christmasy decorations, but we did pull down the Christmas tree.  I need as much room as we can get, and this is pretty much the only way I was going to get it.  I figure everybody will hang out downstairs for her party just like they did for Christmas Eve.  The sad thing is that we are the only one on the block who still has their outdoor lights up.  Now, we don’t leave them up till June or anything, but it seems that it is kinda odd that on 8th of January that everyone has packed up everything already.  Now, I’ve slacked this week, and I have to get all my cleaning done tomorrow with the kids underfoot.  This should be interesting.  My sister is arriving tomorrow, so its not quite the end of the world if she’s the only one who sees my non-clean house.

How do you clean up?  Do you have a set plan?  Do you just do a little bit each day?

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I’d like to start by saying that I didn’t want to cut his hair.  I like the little curls he had in the back of his hair.  I thought they were cute.  However, everyone and their brother was bugging me to cut his hair.  When everybody else was getting their hair done on Sunday, I thought there would be no better time to do this.  Now, you can’t tell how curly from this picture, but it was pretty bad (and cute).  Will has such fine hair, so I did not want to do a buzz cut.  It would look like he had no hair if we did that (especially if we were in a low light situation which a lot of my house. We have corners in our house that we get about as much light as tea light candles give off). Bill agreed, so at least, we didn’t have to fight over that.  When we got home, Will was due for a nap and was not in the mood for pictures.  However, I did get this one.  This is Will with his new haircut.  What do you think?  (Bill thinks he looks like a little man.)

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We just got back from another weekend up in Green Bay.  I had a wedding shower on Saturday for one of my cousins who gets married in six weeks.  Everybody had a great time.  Since my parents only have dial up, I don’t bring up my laptop computer which means I am behind with both my blogs and my emails.  I am slowly but surely catching up, but I probably won’t be completely caught up till tomorrow.  I plan on going to bed soon.  However, I just love this picture.  I took it while we were at the Wildlife Sanctuary this morning (will be writing a review on it over at My Road Less Traveled By soon).  The kids loved the ducks and geese there.  We also checked out the buildings that are located there, and they had a blast.  Somehow, Bill managed to get two mosquito bites.  I think I am going to be going to bed shortly, so I’ll update some more tomorrow.

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I leave on Wednesday for this. I am starting to get super excited. Granted, it isn’t going to be as good as going on a royal caribbean cruise. However, a couple of days of no husband and kids is a good thing, right?    I checked the hotel out online, and it looks awesome.  This whole trip just looks like it is going to be a ton of fun.  I have already emailed and talked to several of the other moms who are going to be there.  Everybody sounds really cool.  I love that they are giving us time to blog while we are at this event.  Now, do I bring my Kodak camera?  LOL

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I know I have talked about how much I love Entrecard.  They are a great way to drive traffic to your blog and have a great community.  Today, some cool changes took place and some not so cool changes too.

First, the cool changes.  Now, you can see how many times a person has dropped their Entrecard on you.  It also lists your last 5 posts that you have done on your blog.  Both are very cool changes that I think are great.

Now, onto the not so good changes.  The change that I absolutely hate that happened today (without any warning) is that you can only drop 600 cards per ip.  Now, if you have one blog this is no big deal.  However, if you have more than 2 blogs in the system (I have 3), this royally screws you.  How?  Normally, you can drop 300 cards per account you have.  Since I have 3 accounts, I was dropping up to 900 cards a day.  Yes, I actually do read the majority of those blogs I was dropping my cards on (not everybody updates daily or weekly).  It would take me several hours a day to do.  However, the traffic that I received from that made it well worth me doing.  By looking at my entrecard stats, I can definitely see the difference in my traffic depending on the number of cards I dropped.  More cards = more traffic.

Now, this not only effects me.  This effects every person who has more than 2 blogs in the system.  If I drop evenly between my blogs, I will drop only 200 cards per blog.  I am losing out on potentially 100 more drops (if everyone reciprocates).  If this is the case, this blog will never make the top three spots nor will my other two blogs since I won’t be able to reciprocate everyone who drops on me.  I am also going to assume that the top three blogs are people who only have a single blog in the system.  If that is the case, they will be dropping 300 cards to my 200 on a daily basis.  Tell me how I ever catch up to the lost traffic.  The top spots got there by dropping 300 cards daily.

This change effects anyone who uses a shared computer and/or ip to do their drops.  Husbands and wives won’t be able to both have accounts and not effect each others ability to drop.  People won’t be able to drop (or be limited) from work if anybody else in the building does Entrecard.  And heaven forbid, if you have to use an internet cafe or library to drop.  Who knows if somebody already used up the 600 drops off those ips?

What’s the reason for this change?  Well, according to Phirate (one of the head guys of Entrecard):

It’s not a penalty, it’s just our only real rational response to people creating multiple “spam blogs” and going nuts dropping a thousand + per day. Unfortunately, some legitimate users will get caught in the cross-fire.

Well, go after the spam blogs.  Set up a system where the blogs have to be 30-60 days old and have 10 posts or so.  That should weed out a bunch of them right off the bat.  I would think they would rather be able to say that they have 7,000 good blogs in the system instead of 6,000 good and 1,000 not so good.

Another issue with this is that it is pretty easy to change your IP.  If you use AT&T like I do, it is simple (just a pain in the butt to have to do everyday).  I won’t go into how you do it, but if I know how to do it, the spammers definitely do to.  Also, another way around this is to use a proxy.  Again, if I figured this out, so can the spammers.

Entrecard, I love your system.  It does exactly what it is suppose to — it drives traffic to my blogs.  However, you are hurting the very people who make the system great.  I would think that you would want your best users to be able to put more of their quality blogs into the system.

If you agree, please let them know.  From the few people I have talked to like Jenn, I am not the only one who doesn’t agree with this change.  Entrecard has made tons of changes based on what the users want.  I am hoping that the users can bring about change again.

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