This weekend is the Blissdom conference in Nashville, where hoards of women and the unsuspecting dude will meet Tanis and her sparklecorn walking cane, so in honor of that I thought we’d talk about how to bedazzle blog posts and comments. Why? Because sometimes you need flair, and sometimes you’ll want to use this for COMMENTS. You can do almost anything is a blog comment, if you know how.

Now, making text change in a post isn’t all that complicated. Most blogging platforms will give you the tools to do it with a click. If you already know all of this stuff, please enjoy Unhappy Hipsters and have a great weekend. If you don’t, won’t you join us in class after the jump?

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Sunday is allowance day at our house. Every week, we sit down for dinner and half-way through the kids ‘gently remind’ us that they haven’t received their allowance yet by saying, “Hey, you owe us $5.” They do this because they realize that we’re A) old B) not elephants and C) off our fish oil supplements, and therefore have the memory of your common household door-stop.

Luckily for us, our eyeglass prescriptions are up-to-date, so we can see the mountains of boxers and socks piled up on the couch, the pencil shavings cleverly swept behind the trash can and the obscure hieroglyphics adorning the walls. And we giggle at our silly children and tell them to eat more broccoli.

It used to be that they were paid by the chore. If I’ve learned anything about men all these years, it’s that the way to their heart is through their wallets. You want a man to do something? Pay him. Payment, of course, negotiable by age and relationship to you. My boys never wanted to be “good helpers to their momma!” like my daughter does…they wanted Pokemon cards. Lots and lots of Pokemon cards.

We had a massive dry erase board hung in their room with a column down the left of all the chores we’d like them to do, and a row across the top with the days of the week. It went a little something like this:

People, I write. I never said I could draw.

It taught them word recognition and addition and a little self-reliance. They filled out the chart all by themselves; I simply shelled out shiny quarters and head pats at week’s end.

But now that they’re older, they’re not contracted laborers anymore…they are salaried employees. I’m not trying to get them in the habit of doing chores by bribing them anymore, I’m trying to instill the concept of a work. And if you don’t do your job, all of it, bitch don’t get paid, yo. So the days of “X chore=X dollar” are over, and the days of “You have five days to complete these four tasks” are upon us. They don’t do all four? They don’t get their allowance. Period. I suck.

But Captain Selective and his first mate, Memory, choose to forget this every week and instead take out the trash on Saturday night and then wait with hopeful hearts and outstretched hands for magical golden coins to fall from the sky. I keep trying to tell them that magical coins only fall from the sky when strangers wearing bedazzaled tights break into their rooms at night and steal their teeth, but for some reason, that just gives them nightmares. However, months weeks of no allowance are taking their toll, and my kids are starting to fight back. They are hoping against hope. They are getting cocky.

I found my oldest son’s locker dry erase board hanging on the fridge, offered without comment, on Monday morning after he went off to school.

“Allowence: Put under magnet. I’ll get it later.”

Maybe the boy can’t spell for shit, but he’s got ’strong-armed negotiation of the terms of his own existence’ down to a silent, arrogant artform.

Stronger. Faster. Less copyright-infringinger. For way less than six million.

{As always, this blog is designed by Judith Shakespeare. Well, at least until I ruin it.}

After the jump, my personal opinion on the Big Five blogging platforms is all laid out, in less than two million words. Maybe. Really, if you are happy with your platform, don’t click through. Instead, go look at the most beautiful woman to ever grace this planet, and watch the damn video at the end. Bring all the Kleenez.

And now, the world’s longest blog post…..

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When I started blogging, we didn’t have anything at all like we have today. Seriously. Widgets were just methed out short people. Mobile browers were assholes who walked past your store and never bought shit. All we had was a bunch of html, time, and each other.

And we helped each other. Zomyboy taught me how to do this and this to words, because god knows there wasn’t a button for it. I spent months googling for instructions on how to do this. (Hover over it.) I ruined code, reset it, ruined it again, reset it again, and eventually learned how to basically code all the functionality I wanted into my blog.

And then social media was born, and we taught each other that, too. I think I was the first person who asked Greeblemonkey what Twitter was and didn’t get their neck punched. She and Christine were my first two friends, and they @’d me and dm’d me and basically guided me through the rocky terrain that is social media.

Of course, I went and quit it eventually, but still. I came back, and as of last week, Greeblemonkey is still teaching me how to use that fucking website.

My point is that we all used to help each other. You found a new blog tool? You told all your friends how to use it. You saw someone who needed to knowhow to do something? You showed them how to do it.

It seems like now there’s more of a feeling of entitlement about the whole thing. Like, I’m not going to share my tricks with you because I paid for/earned/slaved over a hot html code for them. Meanwhile, I have friends that don’t know how to do anything at all in the back-end of their blog, and don’t even realize that they could know all of this, easily. We don’t talk about how we blog, technically how we do it, anymore, and we’re the ones supposedly revolutionizing the medium. I actually once heard a blogger say that if you didn’t subscribe to ProBlogger, you weren’t a real blogger and had no business here.

Huh?

Maybe I don’t have the attention span to read ProBlogger. It really takes a certain breed. But maybe you do, and he’s sharing all of that knowledge for free, and you’re drinking the kool-aid, so why the fuck are you judging me and not just paying it forward?

*ahem*

So, I’m going to try a little something out. I really don’t know a lot, but I know a little, and I’m going to share it. You got a tech-question about blogging? Hit me. There’s no stupid question except the one you don’t ask. Or, where are your keys? They’re under the 2nd couch cushion, just like they always are. Every Friday, we’re going to get our elbows greasy answering your questions and learn something about the machine behind the machine.

Lesson one: Always hover over links and images. You never know what you’ll miss. {This lesson brought to you by the letters X, K, C and D, who inspired me to learn how to use sub-text}

Lesson two, for tomorrow: Which blogging platform is the right one. Like, for you.