Pet peeves

Yesterday, when I was browsing Craigslist, an ad I've seen before caught my eye. It was for a website with a list of locations and reviews of Denver area dog parks, so I decided to check it out.

The site was awful. It looked like a free site, for one thing, and the layout sucked. But the content was also really bad. One of my pet peeves is overuse of keywords, and this site had it in spades.

Feeling nice, I clicked on the email link in the Craigslist ad and sent a nice email, saying that someone had clearly given them bad advice on how to handle keywords, and offering to give them a few tips on how to make the content better. Know what I earned for my generosity? An email asking me to donate my services to rewrite the pages, since of course, it's a "nonprofit website."

Enter another one of my pet peeves: People who try to get free work out of writers by claiming they are a nonprofit. The really annoying thing was that the website had ads plastered across the top of every page, so it's not unprofitable for lack of trying! Failing to earn any ad revenue doesn't make you a nonprofit, honey.

I responded and let them know in no uncertain terms that I wasn't going to be taken advantage of, but that the offer for some advice was still open if they wanted to take me up on it. Did they? No, of course not.

Which brings us to my biggest pet peeve of all: People who put crappy content on the Internet, know it's crappy, and don't care.

What are your biggest pet peeves?

A top freelance blog - really, me?

I am a bit behind in reporting this astonishing award. As usual, I've been quite busy. A great deal of it has been how frequently I've been riding my horse — in the last two weeks, I stayed home from several trail rides, and was amazed at how much more work I got done when I did.

Anyway, I recently received an email notifying me that Swan's Pond has been chosen as one of the 2010 Top 40 Freelance Blogs. Granted, I am number 39, but still — what an honor! And especially considering how sporadically I've been posting lately!

Speaking of which, now that I feel like I'm getting my schedule under control, I am going to try to start posting regularly again. I have some good posts planned, and I am going to try for two or three posts a week to start!

Thanks to Emma Lee at AwardingTheWeb.com for the Top Freelance Blog award!

Coming back from holidays

Coming back after a long weekend is always so difficult! Michael took Friday off, and since I have a hard time working when he is home, by default so did I. When I sat down last night to make my to-do list for today, I had such a hard time getting my mind to switch gears.

We didn't do much to speak of over the weekend, just mainly relaxed and enjoyed ourselves. Neither of us are big partiers or even particularly fond of fireworks — having a dog who is terrified of them makes it difficult to enjoy the holiday. We usually spend the evenings trying to soothe Grace, and I like to head out to the barn to check on Panama around firework time.

I did go for trail rides Sunday and Monday mornings, and we spent some time this weekend with family (my mom came over Friday night, and Michael's parents came over last night). But if it's this hard to come back to work for me, I can imagine how difficult it must be for those who like to party all weekend!

How did everyone else celebrate America's birthday?

A writer's administrative duties

I had a rather harsh reminder recently not to ignore the administrative duties that comes with being a freelance writer. I used to be on top of my email inbox at all times, but in the last couple of years I have gotten pretty lax about filing client emails and deleting unimportant ones. As a result, my PST file got so big that it locked me out Saturday night.

And unfortunately, since I've also been lax about backing up my work files, I didn't have any recent (as in, newer than 6 months ago) backups.

So I spent about 15 agonizing hours trying to rescue my PST file without trimming off too much of the valuable data it contained. Every time I trimmed it, I also had to scan and repair it, so the process took a while each time. By trimming a megabyte at a time, I finally got a workable file with 10MB trimmed off.

I got lucky and it doesn't seem like I lost much, if anything at all, but I will need to be careful in the future so that it doesn't happen again. This means, however, that I need to be sure not to let myself get so busy that I don't have time for administrative tasks. I found those and housework (especially laundry!) are the first to go when I get really busy, because I sure as heck am not giving up my time with my horse. What do you give up first when you get busy? And how do you manage your time so that the tasks you don't prioritize as high still get done?

Good idea, bad writing

One of my favorite horse blogs, Fugly Horse of the Day, featured an Examiner.com article today. The premise was great — she applied to several horse rescues with made-up financial information, pictures of a property that's not hers, and even a picture of a starving horse she doesn't own. It was a great idea for investigative journalism: One rescue actually approved her, while one only denied her when they saw the picture of the horse. As she pointed out, she could have taken pictures of a beautiful property and a gorgeous horse, and they would have welcomed her with open arms, without ever checking that the property and the horse actually belonged to her.

(I'm linking to Fugly's post, by the way, NOT to the Examiner.com article. You can get there from the blog post if you want to read it, but I don't want to contribute inbound links to that site. Not that it'll make a difference, but still.)

Like I said in the title, great idea... Bad writing. The article was littered with grammatical errors, and lots of bad decisions about when to capitalize. (Seriously! Why do some people capitalize everything that seems remotely important to them?!) The writing also lacked some pizazz — the story was told pretty straightforwardly, but wasn't very compelling unless you really really care about horses. It was a great example of how poor writing can ruin a perfectly good idea.

Furthermore, I'd venture to say it was the wrong forum for investigative journalism. As much as Examiner.com likes to characterize themselves as made up of citizen journalists, I suspect they probably don't allow their "writers" to post anything negative about businesses. They are not a newspaper, so there would be too much pressure on them to take it down.

My irritation with the article made me realize that to me, poor writing trumps what site you write for. Really, if you want to write for peanuts, that's okay. Whatever. Just don't write like you are writing for peanuts!

Associated Content: SOLD!

I've been meaning to update my blog, really I have, but at the moment I have my hands full keeping up with my client work. Thank you to everyone who voiced encouragement on my last post, and know that neglecting my blog right now just means that I'm trying to focus on my other responsibilities.

Anyway, I'm blogging tonight to report a headline, hot off the press (so to speak), that I thought would interest many of my freelancers:

Denver-based web-content firm sold

Yahoo is buying Associated Content for $100 million. (Funny, AC may not believe in paying their writers much, but they sure want top dollar for their business.) Since Associated Content was Denver-based, it's big news here. I wonder if there are any local employees who will be losing their jobs over this — I know AC hires local people for their editing positions, as I interviewed for a position when the company was fairly new, and a freelance friend of mine worked there as an editor for a short time. Plus, an old high school friend of mine knows programmers who work for Associated Content in their Denver office. (They at least are well-paid, although that doesn't say much for the company, in my opinion, as it indicates how poorly they think of writers as compared to code monkeys.)

The Denver Post article includes a blogger's quote that questions Yahoo's decision, pointing out that they are polluting their content with some pretty low-quality stuff. But I can't help but wonder if AC's new owners will be able to raise the standards — and the pay — enough to salvage their reputation.

What are your thoughts? Most of us agree that low-paying freelance work has at least a minor impact on the industry as a whole — and some would argue the impact is pretty major. And Associated Content is a pretty major force in the industry, as it is the longest-surviving content site that I know of. With that in mind, do you think Yahoo's acquisition of the company will be a good thing or a bad thing for the industry in general?

Coming back is hard to do

As many of you know, I've had a difficult month. Heck, in some ways it's been a difficult year. After force-feeding my cat Prince for 5 months, we had to put him to sleep on April 15th. (Now I have yet another reason to hate Tax Day.) And that was following a week that I completely lost thanks to a burn-induced infection in my hand.

Needless to say, April wasn't a good month. I haven't had the heart to finalize the numbers yet, but preliminary counts show I made only about half of my normal income — which would make sense, considering I was out of commission, either from physical complaints or from grief, for 2 weeks out of the 4 ½ that made up the month of April.

Even though that's all over now — my hand healed long ago, and although I still miss my kitty from time to time, I think about it less frequently and with less intensity than I used to — I'm finding it hard to come back. Even though I technically went back to work on the 19th, I've been working only sporadically since then, with a lot of wasted hours and even days.

Yesterday Lori Widmer wrote a post called Do You Have What It Takes?, meaning what it takes to freelance, of course. I've never doubted that I do — I've never minded working late and pulling the occasional all-nighter in exchange for a more flexible schedule the rest of the time, and that sort of thing. But this last month, I've had to wonder: Do I have what it takes? How have I made it 4 ½ years?

I know it's been a pretty extreme month. Most of the time you aren't going to have an infection in your hand followed by having to put your cat to sleep. But we all know how bad luck can all hit at once. Unfortunately, I'm terrible at planning ahead, and I had no reserve to fall back on. My clients have been pretty understanding, but then again the show must go on, and deadlines must still be met. Sometimes I wonder, if this train is going to keep chugging onward, if it's going to roll me right under the wheels.

I'm curious whether my other full-time freelancing friends have had similar experiences, or if it's just me. Have you ever doubted your decision to freelance? Have you ever wondered how you'll make it through some crisis or another with your career still intact?