Glamumous: May 2007

Exactly one year ago, we moved to this "new house" and were blessed with a front door on the ground floor, lovely neighbours and most of all, a huge garden space for the kids!

For over ten years, we'd been living in a first floor flat. Sure it was roomy and in a nice part of town, but with the kids it was hardly desirable. Especially when Hubby dearest and I married and my step-children began to stay each weekend. When little Angel came along, it was almost unbearable. There was nowhere safe for the children to play; no green space to admire, and certainly no area to sit out in the sun in the summertime.

I'm so glad to be here!

Last summer was something of a frenzy and we barely had time to relax and enjoy our new home. Between decorating, clearing the jungle in the back garden and our two-month trip to Tunisia, there was barely any time to cultivate a garden. This year, we've had more time to enjoy the outdoor space: we had the garden turfed, created a space for plants and installed a fence to keep prying eyes away from our precious ones. We even bought a sand pit and playhouse for the kids. And for the first time in my life I've been able to grow things from seeds. I feel so proud of what we've achieved!

What I love most is the change I've seen in the children: they all seem so much happier, even on rainy days like today. And they're developing a wonderful interest in plants and the environment; especially my little man, who today insisted we go to the garden centre so he could buy a plant with his pocket money!

I thought he would have chosen a Venus fly trap, which he could feed with the ever increasing number of huge spiders that plague our lounge. Luckily, the garden centre didn't have any in stock. I say "lucky" because I can't stand that he picks them up and lets them run all over him! It's not that I'm scared of spiders: I just have a strange fear of them crawling on my feet...

Anyway, he settles on a seedling cucumber plant, and little Angel insisted she got in on the action by nursing a cherry tomato plant back to the car. It was so sweet watching them water their little seedlings, and give them pride of place on the kitchen windowsill "because mummy, it's too wet for them to be outside just now!"

In this last year, I've seen my little seedlings blossom and flourish. I love to watch them grow...

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These days we're bombarded with advertisements for the latest (and supposedly, greatest) cleaning products on the market: washing up liquids, laminate floor cleaner, toilet limescale remover... The list is endless!

What such adverts fail to tell you is that there are essentially five natural ingredients you can use to keep you entire home clean and bright. Much better for your purse strings, and better for the environment too! So I present to you my list of five essential natural cleaning products, which can save you pounds on your monthly cleaning bill, and make you feel so much better that you're helping to save the planet by using them:

White vinegar: a natural disinfectant and cleaner; can be used to make windows and glass shine! Reduces mineral and lime deposits, and can be used to treat stains.
Lemons: traditionally used for cutting through grease; also great as a deodoriser and fragrancer.
Olive oil: a wonderful alternative to furniture polish (see Tracy's post for a great example).
Bicarbonate of soda: when mixed with water, this forms an alkaline solution which is great for all round cleaning (such as surfaces, fridges, floors, etc). Use neat as a scourer with a kitchen sponge, or form a thick paste for stubborn stains. Combine with vinegar for an extra strength cleaning solution.
Borax: a great disinfectant. Dilute in water to replace your usual disinfectant for mopping or cleaning nasty messes. Can also be used to clean toilets, clear drains and as an insecticide.

And here's some examples of how these essential ingredients can be used for all your cleaning needs:

All purpose cleaners:

Dissolve 4 tablespoons of bicarbonate of soda in 1 litre of water for an all purpose cleaning fluid.
Add a few slices of lemon for a pleasantly fragranced washing-up solution
Mix to a paste with water and a few drops of vinegar for really stubborn stains or burnt pans.

Disinfectants:

Mix half a cup of borax with five litres of hot water and clean with this solution (be sure to wear rubber gloves as borax is quite strong and can harm your delicate hands!). For a fragranced disinfectant, add some of your favorite herbs, steep for five minutes and strain; alternatively fragrance with a few drops of your favorite essential oils.
2 tablespoons of borax, lemon juice and 2 cups of hot water can be combined to make a great antibacterial surface cleaner; decant into a spray bottle and use like a regular disinfectant spray (much cheaper than branded chemical solutions!

Glass cleaning:

Equal parts vinegar and water in a spray bottle make a great window cleaning solution (use more vinegar if your windows are really dirty). Buff to a shine with crumpled newspaper.
Alternatively, use 1/2 a cup of lemon juice and two cups of water, and apply as before.

Toilet cleaner:

Flush the toilet to wet the bowl, and sprinkle with bicarbonate of soda. Spray on vinegar and leave overnight for best results and scrub with a toilet brush to clean and deodorise your loo. For stubborn stains, leave the solution overnight before scrubbing, to make it gleam!

Drain cleaner:

Pour 1/2 to 1 cup of bicarbonate of soda down the drain, followed by 1 cup of vinegar. Leave to foam for a few minutes, then flush with boiling hot water. Does exactly the same as expensive drain cleaning solutions!

These are just a few of the ways you can clean your home using inexpensive, natural products. For more ideas, take a look at these hints and recipes.

All of these ingredients are cheap to buy, and could be purchased from your local supermarket (try a hardware store if you have trouble sourcing borax). You can also purchase great value natural cleaning products online from Soap Kitchen Online.

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Hubby was rather wild when we received the electric bill a few weeks ago. He wasn't impressed yesterday when we had the gas bill...

"We always use more heating/lighting/gas for the cooker/etc in winter," I tried to explain. But still, our monthly payments have increased by more than 100%.

It's time to cut down on our use of these facilities. So I've been reading up lots about how to use less energy in the home. Not only does this cut down on bills, but it also helps the environment as we use less fossil fuels! So here's a few of the best tips I've found. I hope they help you reduce your costs and environment bill too:

Use low energy light bulbs. Many companies offer these for free to help reduce the cost to the environment. We were actually given a pack for free by our local housing authority; you can also buy packs of 2-3 from "Poundland" stores.
Turn the washing machine temperature down to 30 degrees as much as possible. You'll save 25% of the electricity cost for heating the water, and most coloured washes are still cleaned just as well.
Switch off appliances at the wall plug, or unplug them altogether. Appliances such as TV's and DVD players still use energy when on standby mode. So when not in use, make sure they're not eating into your bills!
Invest in double glazing if you can. Okay, I know this is an expensive job, but you'll really notice a difference. Our old apartment had double glazing, and it cost so much less to keep warm than it did at our new house (until we had the new windows installed). In the long run, you'll save a lot of money!
Draftproof your home: letterboxes, ill fitting doors and windows can all become more efficient by installing draft-proof fuzzy tape. Many local authorities in the UK will do this as a free service (or very cheaply) if you make an application; in many cases, this includes cavity wall and water heater installation.
Invest in a washing line and some pegs! Tumble dryers use up so much electricity to get clothes dry. I've barely used mine at all these past few weeks. In fact, only once because it rained solid for three days...

When I discover some more tips I'll be sure to post them here. In the meantime, you should also check out these websites for more information on reducing your bills/making your home a more environmentally friendly place:

Technorati Tags: energy efficiency low+energy light+bulbs saving+money electricity gas bills environment

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I used GoDaddy to register my domain name, as this company seemed the cheapest dot.com domain provider, and also because they supply a free email address and basic hosting account with each domain, which has come in rather handy.

However, I'd read quite a few complaints about using GoDaddy for custom domains with Blogger hosting, so I was rather careful to make sure I did everything correctly!

Please do note that you can only link your site as http://yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com. Not both. It just doesn't work that way. My advice is to use the www prefix, and if you can make a simple redirect page in your host root, as I'll explain later

I followed Blogger's advice to the letter, and everything works fine. Here are the basics of their tutorial, or you can read the whole thing yourself on this page.

Buy your chosen domain name and create your account.
Once your domain has been registered, log in to your control panel, and choose to "manage domains".
Click on the area marked Total DNS Control, and then on Total DNS Control And MX Records.
Look for a record prefixed "WWW". If there isn't one, add a new CNAME record; if there is one, you'll need to edit this record instead.
Insert these settings exactly as they are described! For the "Name" type "www" (as in www.yoursite.com). For the Host Name, you need to enter "ghs.google.com". Don't change or enter anything else except for these two functions. If this is a new CNAME, click "add". If you are editing an existing CNAME, click "update" and "continue".

Before you link this domain to your Blogspot blog, you may well want to check that all the settings are correct. To do this, you'll need to "ping" your new domain and ensure the host points to ghs.google.com.

If you're a Windows user, this is quite simple to do using the "command" feature. Windows 98 and ME have a "command prompt" program in the start menu; Windows XP has the "run..." feature, which brings up a box; simply type in CMD, hit enter and you'll get your command prompt.

Then all you need to do is enter the following:

ping www.yourdomainname.com

substituting yourdomain.com for your domain name and suffix. Hit enter, and see what happens. It should look something like this:

Pinging ghs.1.google.com [72.14.207.121] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 72.14.207.121:
bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=247
Reply from
72.14.207.121: bytes=32 time=89ms
TTL=247
Reply from 72.14.207.121:
bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=247
Reply from
72.14.207.121: bytes=32 time=86ms
TTL=247
Ping statistics for 72.14.207.121:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received =
4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip
times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 85ms, Maximum = 89ms, Average = 86ms

Notice that the ping recognises that my site is hosted with ghs.1.google.com. This means that I can (and indeed, have) followed the next step in telling Blogspot my new domain name. If you don't notice the host is registered as Google, wait a little longer before following the next step.

Log in to your Blogger control panel. In the settings section, click on the publishing tab. Near the top of this page, you'll notice "publish to a custom domain". This is what you want to do.

When prompted, enter the domain name you have directed to the ghs.google.com host, including the www prefix! Continue, and you should see that your new settings have been saved.

View your blog to ensure everything works and looks okay. Don't worry if at first you get a "404 file not found" page: it can take a few days for DNS settings to propogate across the whole internet. You can always switch back to Blogspot hosting and try again in a day or two. When this does work okay, you'll see your blog exactly how it is normally seen, with the exception that your new domain name is in the address bar. Blogger takes care of all the inter-blog links, page titles and such for you, and even redirects traffic from your old name.blogspot.com address to your new www.yoursite.com address! This is great as it means it's unlikely you'll lose traffic or page ranking stats.

Now here's the awkward part: as I mentioned earlier, you can only have http://www.yourblog.com or http://yourblog.com. Not both. Blogger/Google simply haven't recognised that this may be important, and only offer the function of linking one address to your blog. But in a strange way, this is good: you don't have to worry about having two seperate blogs listed in Technorati, for example.

I advised that you use the www prefix for a good reason. Many domain providers offer a single page (often called a "holding page") with each domain name. This will show when you type http://yourblog.com, even though www.yourblog.com will link to your Blogger blog.

So make use of it!

If you are able to edit the HTML, you could create a redirect page to automatically redirect visitors to your www address. That way, you won't lose any visitors at all. To make the page redirect to your www address, you need to insert this code between the head tags, substituting "mysite.com" for your domain name. You can do this using an HTML editor (I prefer Notepad).

The part content="0; means that there is no pause before the browser is redirected. You can change this to "5" for example, to give a 5 second pause if you also want to include an explanation for the redirect in the body of the page. It is also a good idea to include a hyperlink to your www address in the body of the page, just in case the visitor's browser doesn't recognise the redirect command.

If you look at my redirect page at http://glamumous.com, you'll notice that there is an 8 second pause and an explanation for the redirect. Play around and see what works for you!

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Trackbacks are a way of linking blogs to each other when referencing another blogger's post. They're quite useful and interesting to use, but unfortunately Blogger has not yet made this an inherent feature of the new Blogger software.

As an alternative, I decided to install Haloscan on my blog, to enable trackback links. So far, I've found Haloscan to be very useful! It has a feature where you can automatically install Haloscan comments and trackback features into your Blogger template, which is great for those who have a classic template and don't wish to use Blogger's comments system.

Unfortunately, I don't fall into either category: my template is now heavily modified, and I do want to use Blogger's comments! So I tried to install only the trackback links. Big problems there...

To cut a (very) long story short, I believe I have found the way to do this. Here's my step by step guide to what has worked for me:

Get yourself a free account with Haloscan

Once you have your account (and most importantly, your username), open your Blogger dashboard, then click on Template>Edit HTML. Ensure "expand widgets" is ticked.
Just before the closing head tag, insert this code, being sure to replace "yourhaloscanusername" with your appropriate UN:

<script src="http://www.haloscan.com/load/yourhaloscanusername"
type="text/javascript">
Then add this code where you want your Trackback link to appear, again replacing the username:

<a class='comment-link'
expr:href='"http://www.haloscan.com/tb/yourhaloscanusername/" + data:post.id +
"/"' expr:onclick='"HaloScanTB(" + "\""+ data:post.id + "\"" + ");return
false;"'><script
type='text/javascript'>postCountTB('<data:post.id/>');</script></a>
I included this just after the comment link as in the following example:
<b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'> <a
class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl'
expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><b:if
cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1
<data:top.commentLabel/><b:else/><data:post.numComments/>
data:top.commentLabelPlural/></b:if></a>
</b:if> </b:if><a class='comment-link'
expr:href='"http://www.haloscan.com/tb/yourhaloscanusername/"
+
data:post.id + "/"' expr:onclick='"HaloScanTB(" + "\""+ data:post.id + "\""
+
");return false;"'<script
type='text/javascript'>postCountTB('<data:post.id/>');</script></a>
Preview your template first to make sure everything works okay. If it does, then save your template and begin to receive your trackbacks!

Please let me know if this modification works for you by leaving me a comment below. Happy trackbacking!

Technorati Tags: haloscan trackbacks blogger

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As you can see, my Rounders4 template now has extra sidebars to the left of the main column. This has been the most difficult, and yet most satisfying customisation I have made to my Blogger template yet!

I won't explain every detail as this would make my post extremely long and boring, so instead I'll just go through the basics of the process in order to give you the general idea.

I copied the CSS relating to the layout of the sidebars, and made this unique by substituting "sidebar" for "left-sidebar" wherever found. So this:
#sidebar-wrapper {width: 240px;float: left;word-wrap: break-word;overflow:
hidden;}
Became this:
#left-sidebar-wrapper {width: 220px;float: left;word-wrap: break-word;overflow:
hidden;}
Note that I also changed the width of the sidebar wrapper, as I didn't want it to be too wide!

I then added the new sidebar to the left of the main template by ading the following lines of code just before the "main-wrapper":
<div id='left-sidebar-wrapper'><b:section class='sidebar' id='left-sidebar' preferred='yes'/></div>
Finally I changed the width of the #outer-wrapper and #header-wrapper elements to include the width of the new sidebar.

After much tweaking of margins/background images/widgets and such, I finally have the template you see now. It wasn't easy, but I think it was well worth the effort!

The only "problem" I have with this template is that things look odd when I alter the layout in my dashboard: it looks as though the right hand sidebar should be displayed underneath the main section, but it doesn't... To make sure everything worked correctly in all browsers and screen sizes, I did check with Browsershots.org (a free and rather useful service), and everything seems perfect ion all formats I have previewed.

If you would like to use my template for your own (New) Blogger blog, please get in touch and I'll send you the basics as XML.

Technorati Tags: blogger+template customizing+blogger blogger html

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Today I began to wonder if courtesy is slowly disappearing in our society. I like to think that I have good manners, and that in turn I have taught my children a good set of moral values. Unfortunately I cannot speak for the rest of society, and was today downright disgusted with the actions of my social "neighbours"...

On the route of my "school run", there is a stretch of road which passes by an area of social housing for the elderly; it's well signposted to direct drivers to be more cautious in the area as the elderly often cross this busy road on their way to the local park. As I was driving through, I saw two ladies waiting to cross the road. Suddenly, one of these ladies (who incidentally was aided by a walking frame), collapsed at the kerb.

I immediately pulled over to see if I could offer any help. But the car in front of me actually sped up, swerved around the scene and didn't seem to pay a second thought to the welfare of the poor lady! And if that wasn't bad enough, at least two pedestrians changed their route to avoid the scene. No "Are you alright?/Can I help?". No courtesy whatsoever!

Thankfully, the lady wasn't injured, though she did seem rather shaken by the incident. I helped her up, and luckily a nurse from the nearby care home (I do hope this is the correct term!) had seen the incident and offered to sit with the ladies after I gave them a lift back to their house.

This incident made me think of all the other times I have seen people ignore the "rules" of common courtesy: it seems that young people rarely give up their seats on public transport to those older than them; few drivers slow down to let others pull out of a junction. And the amount of times shop assistants have seemed so surprised when I say "thank-you" for helping me pack my bags...

I've always believed in the saying: "what comes around, goes around". Perhaps people are becoming too busy in their own lives to consider how their actions and courteousness affects other people. Yet if everyone could take just a few moments from their busy schedule to do just one courteous thing for a stranger every day, I'm sure the world could become a better place to live in!

cour·te·sy n. pl. cour·te·sies
a. Polite behavior. b. A polite gesture or remark.

Technorati Tags: courtesy| manners| society| observations

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