It’s Friday. TGIF time. Corporate drones are getting ready to kick back with margaritas, radio stations are queuing up “Bang the drum all day” for afternoon drive-time, and emails are getting signed with “have a great weekend!”
As for patently unemployable me, I’m battening down the hatches and planning survival strategies for the weekend.
I’ve long felt that I treat weekends and weekdays “backwards” from the way the rest of the world does it. Partly because I’m an introvert and HSP, partly because I run my own business, partly because I have kids.
Here’s what “backwards weekends” look like for me: My work time (weekdays while the kids are in school and the Professor is at his day job) is my creative time, my moneymaking time, my online-socializing time, my marketing time, MY time. I get to throw myself fully into my best work and my online world(s) while I have the house to myself. And I love it and need it.
Sure, sometimes I hate it too (when I’m overcommitted, or overwhelmed, or spinning my mental wheels…). But I get to create and work to my own rhythms (and in whatever clothes or lack thereof I feel like).
Then the kids come home and I want to be fully present for them, so MY time officially ends (even if I am still trying to finish stuff on my computer while they’re in the next room). And on the weekends, EVERYONE IS HOME ALL DAY. By Sunday evening, I am really really ready for everyone to be gone and leave me alone to do MY work again.
So sometimes I feel like a curmudgeon and a bad mother (long weekends, for example. And ohmygod it’s almost Christmas vacation and I’m frankly dreading it). But sometimes I don’t. And mostly it’s OK.
And then sometimes there are weeks like this one.
Monday night both kids were throwing up all night. Which meant the Professor and I were up too, soothing children and putting extra loads of laundry in.
Tuesday they stayed home from school and I spent the day monitoring input and output of a non-HTML variety, finishing up the extra laundry, and scrubbing the toilets. Brief escapes to Twitter and a generous post-shower slather of Aardvark Essentials Second Wind potion kept me sane.
Wednesday they went back to school, which was a relief because I was prepping for a Really Important Meeting and collecting beta-tester feedback for my next product (if your ears just pricked up, you may want to sign up for my Invitation List). But halfway through the day, the school called to tell me my son had broken out in hives, so I rushed to pick him up, get him home and into a baking-soda bath and dosed with Benadryl. I still don’t know what caused it (he’s never been allergic to anything as far as I can tell).
Thursday, shortly after they went to school, it became painfully clear that I was getting sick, so I dosed myself up with acetominophen and bismuth, took a nap, and was completely useless for the entire rest of the day, feebly sipping my Sprite and gingerly chewing my crackers.
And today, Friday, TGIF to the rest of the world, is a National Holiday. Both of my now-perfectly healthy kids are lounging around reading and playing computer games while I write this. I’m hoping I won’t get any sicker before I get weller, and oh joy, I just discovered the toilet in the hall bathroom is leaking.
So, yeah. This weekend is going to be one of the hard ones.
Would I rather be a corporate drone, though, looking forward to a work-free weekend? Don’t make me laugh too hard, please. If I had a “regular job,” I would have had to take at least two and a half days off this week, a week that only had four workdays to begin with. So I’d be just as behind, down three sick days, and hoping I’m not about to be downsized.
Nope, I’ll take the life I’ve chosen, backwards weekends and all. I’m allowed to be grumpy about it sometimes, because most of the time I love it to pieces.
What about you? If you’re running your own business (and that definitely includes part-time freelancing and other side-hustles), how do you treat your workdays and weekends?
Image by pvera on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License
AWeber introduces Subscribe by Commenting to the Web Form plugin
Specifically, this feature adds a simple checkbox to your blog comment form. If a commenter checks the box, the commenter is treated the same as someone who fills out your AWeber subscription form: They will receive a confirmation email message asking them to click a link to complete their subscription.
Want to see it in action? It’s on this very post! If you’re reading this in a feed reader or in your email, swing by the original blog post to see my shiny new checkbox.
It’s super-simple to activate on your own blog, and I’ll show you how in a minute.
First, let me be perfectly clear that the AWeber WordPress plugin does not automatically subscribe commenters to anything; they have to check the checkbox and complete AWeber’s double-opt-in confirmation process. You cannot set the checkbox to be checked by default (that would be a pretty clear violation of AWeber’s stated privacy policy, after all).
Commenters can subscribe with one click
I activated the new feature as soon as I heard about it, because I figure if someone is interested enough in my blog to leave a comment, and they’re not already subscribed to my Weekly Web Tips, I might as well give them a really easy way to subscribe without filling out another form or clicking through to another page.
Here’s how to activate this feature on your blog:
First, navigate to Settings –> AWeber Web Form in your WordPress dashboard. Assuming you’ve been able to connect your AWeber account to your installed plugin as described in my instructions for configuring the AWeber WordPress plugin, here’s what your plugin settings now look like:
The two checkboxes here are checked by default. The “Allow subscriptions when visitors comment” is the important one here. Leave it checked to give commenters the option to subscribe.
A note about blog registrations
The second checkbox, “Allow subscriptions when visitors register to your blog,” is irrelevant for most of us, because you shouldn’t even be allowing registrations to your blog unless you have a good reason, such as a membership site. To check this setting on your site, visit Settings –> General in your WordPress dashboard, and verify that there is no check in the box labeled “Anyone can register.”
On the other hand, if you do have a membership site and you want to add your members to an email list at the same time they sign up, this is a super-simple way to do it. In this case, you’d want to UNcheck the first box, so that only new registrations to your blog, and not blog commenters, are added to the membership email list.
Remember that you can’t autosubscribe people, though, so you will almost certainly have members who register but don’t bother to check the box and thus don’t receive your emails. So you’ll want to have a backup method to ask those members to subscribe.
Anyway, here’s a shot of my saved settings for the AWeber WordPress plugin after I chose my list and edited my promotion text (the very same text you’ll see next to the checkbos on the comment form of this post…infinite meta loop alert!):
Limitations of the AWeber WordPress plugin “Subscribe by Commenting” feature
The plugin only allows you to connect one AWeber list with your comment form, so if you have more than one list, make sure you choose the one most relevant to your blog commenters sitewide to add to your comment form. You can switch lists and re-save after you’ve selected one in the drop-down menu, but remember that the new list will now apply to all your comment forms. There’s no way to let commenters on different posts subscribe to different lists.
There’s also no way to let commenters subscribe to one list and blog registrations to another — both checkboxes are connected to the same list. So if you are contemplating the membership-site option, you won’t be able to also use this plugin to add newsletter subscribers from your comment form.
Even with these small limitations, the new “Subscribe by Commenting” feature is a welcome addition to the AWeber WordPress plugin.
Comment card image adapted from Boonerator on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License