Back Home Again: a BlogHer recap

I  suppose officially BlogHer ended Saturday night. I’m just getting around to talking about it today–it’s been a long couple of days on re-entry.

The highlights and most important things I realized are summed up nicely on Grown In My Heart. Meeting those women in person, sharing meals, brainstorming and getting reprimanded by hotel security–well, it bonds people.  That was absolutely the best part of the weekend.

Networking with others was also a great part of the weekend–meeting other bloggers and companies that “get” the online community, was fantastic. Seeing my friends from Hallmark, and celebrating Christmas in August was magical.

The two actual workshop session which were most helpful were the two relating to resume writing/online profiles and offline networking for online people.

The expo halls were overwhelming, but a lot of fun. After sorting through all of my swag, I have come up with a list of just a few things I want to talk about in the future.

I also came home with so many reusable shopping bags that I really have no excuses–I can never use another plastic shopping bag again.

And as a little present for anyone who stops by this week, here is a coupon code for you from  Soap.com ( a new, drugstore/household product site, related to diapers.com):

15% off your first order on Soap.com with the code: BLOGHER2010


Two Things You’ll Want to Check Out if You’re Going to BlogHer ’10

Honestly, I haven’t thought too much about BlogHer. At first, it was because I knew that it signaled the end of summer. Two days after returning from NYC, is “Back to School Night” at MaM’s little school.

Noiw I haven’t thought about it too much because there is so much more to think about.

Except that BlogHer is going to be an even more important experience for me now that I am unemployed (ok. that word is hard to type)

Grown in My Heart, as a collective, have been planning for BlogHer. Her are two links you’ll want to check out–the giveaway is open to anyone going to BlogHer, and I can’t wait to put names to faces at the luncheon!

http://www.growninmyheart.com/blogher-giveaway

http://www.growninmyheart.com/meet-us-at-blogher

If you are going or if you aren’t…..if you had 48 hrs in NYC, what would you do???

All I know about Internet Bandwidth

So last week I hit an error message when I logged on here, at my little  internet home. It was a message I hadn’t seen before, and honestly the first error message I’ve ever gotten since switching to WordPress last year.

It included the words “bandwidth”, which made me pretty sure that this was a hosting issue, not anything I could solve on my own. Lucky for me I am on a first-name basis with my hosting service, eh??

I emailed my friend and internet server host, Dan, and I was up and rolling in minutes. Later that week at dinner, we talked about what happened.

Turns out, for the first time in Gotchababy history, I had exceeded the bandwidth he’d allotted me. So I asked how that had happened, and he took me into Box Crush headquarters for a peek at my server stats to explain. I’m probably missing a few key elements, but here’s what I got from our conversation:

Bandwidth is the space on his server each website takes. Each website has an amount that is preset for each month.

Articles or blog posts, along with images, on the front page of your blog/website take up a certain amount of bandwidth. Each time a visitor comes to your site,  she takes up that amount of bandwidth. So the more traffic you get, the more bandwidth you use. The more posts you post, along with more images, the more bandwidth you use.

So let’s look at last week:

I posted about the Jr.’s birthday with photos.

I posted about Father’s day with photos.

I participated in IComLeWe, which bumped up my traffic.

I also participated in Works for Me Wednesday, which bumped up my traffic.

Kind of a perfect storm for using up bandwidth, especially toward the end of the month.

It’s still not as easy to measure as, say, user minutes on a mobile phone, but it does make a little more sense– did I miss any key points, Dan???