Last year I wrote about two different situations where the VA community grouped together to help one of its own. One was when a VA shared on her challenges and others rallied round to help her. The other was when I, myself, was going through a family tragedy and so many once again, rallied round to support me and let me know they were there in my time of need. Well, another need has been highlighted by one of my team today and it relates to the Victorian bushfires that most of the world now … [Read more...]
Intel Centrino – a Notebook to play with
Over the past few weeks I've had the privilege of playing with, and testing, an Intel Centrino 2 powered notebook. It has a great easy to view widescreen, is very compact, slim and lightweight, and easy to use. This one has Windows Vista installed on it and OpenOffice suite. It also has 4gig ram. I wasn't able to carry out my normal daily activities on it as it didn't have the software I use every day (MS Office 2003, ACT!, Quickbooks, Dreamweaver) for my regular client activity and it would … [Read more...]
Friday Finds
My favourite RSS feed reader is Google Reader and I have it saved as one of my home pages in my browser. It allows me to read blog updates at times that suit me (like over breakfast for example) although I never fully keep up with them these days. I've subscribed to a lot and some have more than a few updates weekly - some several a day. The RSS feed is also useful for some of the chat forums I belong to as I can see what's been discussed without logging in and then I can choose to respond to … [Read more...]
Are you a Virtual Assistant who wants to blog?
Blogs are a great way for sharing information and encouraging interactive discussion with your audience but many new VAs find the concept daunting and see it as just one extra thing in a long list of things they need to learn and get up to speed with. I've recently written a book called "Blogging Basics" and it is exactly that - the basics of how to blog and why you would want to blog. I've made it available at my SOHO-Life blog for all subscribers. If you pop over there you can read the … [Read more...]
Friday Finds
Google Reader has become an excellent tool for me to use and over breakfast each morning I can glance through all the latest posts that have come in the past 24 hours. You can even read forum discussions and then go and participate if there's a topic of interest to you. Or, if like me, you like to find out about the Top 100 Hot New Releases at Amazon.com you can also check their feed daily. That's how I found out my own book had reached #23 for its genre late June - it happened overnight … [Read more...]
How this Virtual Assistant began blogging
I was asked to investigate blogging for a client early 2005 but I didn't really understand what it was about. So I set up my first blog at Blogger for my VA business to explore it. I had to put in a calendar reminder weekly to force myself to do it and I often had no idea what to write about - I would pick out a word from a jar of cards I had just for a topic. Later that year I decided to set up a family one instead of my annual Christmas newsletter. I put up photos, wrote about my family but … [Read more...]
Friday Finds
Didn't get my normal interview up this week - just waiting on more to come through. But if you're a VA with a client who would like to participate, or perhaps you are a client who uses a VA and would like to participate, please do get in touch with me via the contact form on this blog. Thank you also to everyone who sent me their messages of condolences (over 40 of them) and comments on my family site this week after the loss of our beloved 16 year old cat, Beauie. He's been a faithful and … [Read more...]
Blogging is healthy
My hubby gets Scientific American and he photocopied an article for me from their June edition. The full article isn't available online but some of it is and I thought I'd share it with you. Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. … [Read more...]
VA Blog Update
Regular readers would have noted not so regular posts here over the past 3 or so weeks and that sometimes posts and comments went missing and then reappeared. We had a hiccup early July with a cpanel crash and have been limping ever since. This weekend my web guy shifted all the sites I manage to a new machine and we hope (and pray) that this will sort the problems out and I can get back to regular blogging. It has been rather disconcerting to write posts and publish them, only to find they … [Read more...]
