Books On Child Discipline

Posted on March 13, 2011 by raisinghappykids

There are numerous books available telling you how you should bring up your kids. Ironically many of the books seem to be written by authors who have no kids themselves. As a parent I find that most frustrating.

E-books

OK here’s a list of some of the more popular e-books. I won’t review each one here as each will appeal to different people. My suggestion is to click on each in turn but don’t decide until you’ve had a look at each one. You will see the sales page for the product. If you want to get one of these then the benefit of an e-book is that you could be reading it within a few minutes, also that they all come with money back guarantees in case you don’t like it (double-check this! in case they have changed).

Hardcopy books

Here are the most popular child discipline books, according to Amazon:

You can read the reviews for each of these on Amazon (click on the link to be taken to the appropriate page). The reviews are from people who have bought the book themselves, which I find gives the most useful information.

Recommended Websites

The following websites are good authorities on kids, parenting and discipline:

There is also a wealth of information on squidoo. Here’s one to look at, and you can see other recommended pages with squidoo from this page.

If you find a good resource that I haven’t listed, please let me know in the comments below!

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Baby Temper Tantrums

Posted on March 13, 2011 by raisinghappykids

Knowing how to deal with your little treasure when he kicks off with a baby temper tantrum can be hard. When it happens for the first time it’s a shock and when it’s an ongoing occurrence you find yourself wanting answers.

Babies don’t have a whole lot of ways to communicate, so a tantrum is often the only way they can get the message across that something is wrong. Try to avoid them happening at first, by studying what happens leading up to them. Chances are it will be from lots of different things but hopefully you’ll be able to tune into the various demands.

The most important thing to do at this time is to make sure your baby realises you are there and realises you care. If you catch it early you can get the baby to focus their attention on something else. A rattle, car keys (yep – can’t beat the rattling car keys), or if they’re in their pram just a change of scenery could do it. My son was captivated by trees. If he was distressed while we were out you could park him under a tree and as soon as he saw the leaves moving above him it was like he want into a trance.

For more advice about dealing with baby tantrums, take a look at the following article on http://www.squidoo.com/baby-temper-tantrums. There are a few more articles from the same author, covering general parenting advice for babies, toddlers and old kids as well. A lot of the advice for older kids actually applies to babies as well surprisingly.

Finally, it might be helpful to realise that crying can be very therapeutic for a baby. I didn’t realise this until I read about the research into tears and how they include a hormone which is an indicator of stress. It’s made me think a little differently about crying for my older kids too.

The study compared the tears from emotional stress to tears from physical pain and found that there was a clear difference between the two. It seems that tears are a great way to get rid of the stress hormone, so it would seem that crying is how babies and kids let off steam, much like the way adults do sometimes.

Source: Posted in Parenting | Leave a comment

Internet Marketing Articles

Posted on February 27, 2011 by admin

If you know of Potpiegirl, then you’ve probably seen her advice to publish internet marketing articles to 3StepAds.com, Unique-Article-Database.com, and Writers-Block-Unblocked.com.

Unfortunately while one of these is currently working, the other produces 404 errors and the last doesn’t allow new registrations.

No doubt due to excessive spam.

Good news though – this website is now open for article publishing. To avoid the problem of spam this is on an invitation only basis. However if you would like to post your articles here and thus get a free backlink from a blog (which every good search engine loves), then send an email to matt @ mattsnotes . com with the subject “Sign me up”.

Let me know which sites you want to promote and I’ll register you.

Obviously no spam, porn or anything like that.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Raising Happy Kids

Posted on February 27, 2011 by raisinghappykids

All parents want happy well-adjusted and sociable kids. Also every parent wants a nice child as well. There are lots of resources available to help with parenting, including parents, social groups, friends, as well as blogs, websites  and books.

There are lots of great articles on squidoo on the subject of how to raise children including that one :-)

When it comes to child behavior there are many books on child discipline that address this issue with the latest research.

The best book on this subject that I have found is the Happy Child Guide. Hope you take a moment to look at the links on this page and that they help you to raise happy kids.

Thoughts of the day:

 

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The importance of meta description

Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin

I recently made a change on my hotel comparison website, www.hotelsearchengines.net to re-engineer the internal processes and make it more manageable. This is the website that I hadn’t touched in 18 months that was still generating lots of visitors, but wanting to increase it further I thought I should make some changes.

Everything looked fine after the upgrade, the site was loading much faster thanks to the use of a CDN (content delivery network) and using CSS sprites. That was until yesterday when I noticed my daily revenue dropped by about 50% of the average for the past month.
Thinking hotels are seasonal I left it at that, but fortunately I was checking the site in Google’s Webmaster Tools and noticed that I was getting hits for a new keyphrase. Typing this into google I saw that was #1 for the new phrase (yay), but the text that google was showing for the site didn’t look right.

To my horror I realised that my upgrade had inadvertently dropped off the meta description (and keywords) on all the pages on the site! Yikes …

I’ve put it back now and I’m hoping Google will visit the home page again soon and pick up the change. In the meantime I am running at 50% revenue.

Makes you think … meta description is very important. When you find your site in google (any page but specifically the home page) does the description look right? If your meta description is too long then it will be truncated. If you have none then Google will do its best to grab some text from the site somewhere.

Suggestion: Take a look at your google results. If the text isn’t perfect, change your meta description today

Posted in Websites | Leave a comment

Installing Seagull projects on Hostmonster

Posted on January 22, 2011 by admin

I am a fan of the Seagull framework and the last time I checked, Hostmonster was the cheapest webhost provider that allows unlimited websites, domains and traffic.

The only limitation for Hostmonster is the number of files which is capped at 50,000. This is a problem if you install multiple copies of a framework with their own copies of the pear libraries. To get around this I install the websites under ~/www and the seagull libraries under ~/seagull/lib-0.6.8. I include the library version so that I can use the latest library on the current project I am working on without affecting the existing websites. When I go back to update the other websites I bring them forward to the latest version too.

So here is how to install a new Seagull website using the above structure.

1. Download the latest Seagull bug fixes and rename for the new website:

$ cd /home/myuser/seagull
$ svn co http://svn.seagullproject.org/svn/seagull/branches/0.6-bugfix
$ mv 0.6-bugfix mywebsite

2. Set up a vhost entry for the new website pointing to the new directory. If you’re not using Arch Linux the paths may be different:

$ vi /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>    
ServerName mywebsite
DocumentRoot /home/myuser/seagull/mywebsite
mywebsite
ServerAdmin me@me.com
ErrorLog /home/myuser/logs/mywebsite-access_error
CustomLog /home/myuser/logs/mywebsite-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

3. Set up an /etc/hosts entry for mywebsite pointing to 127.0.0.1

4. Install seagull by browsing to http://website. Note that the database name needs to be myuser_mywebsite, as all hostmonster databases are prefixed with myuser_.

5. Now move the www directory and reconfigure seagull and apache:

$ mv /home/myuser/seagull/mywebsite/www /home/myuser/www/mywebsite

$ vi /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>    
ServerName mywebsite
DocumentRoot /home/myuser/www/mywebsite/www
mywebsite
ServerAdmin me@me.com
ErrorLog /home/myuser/logs/mywebsite-access_error
CustomLog /home/myuser/logs/mywebsite-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

$ vi /home/myuser/seagull/mywebsite/var/mywebsite.conf.php
# $conf['path']['webRoot'] = '/home/myuser/seagull/mywebsite/www';
$conf['path']['webRoot'] = '/home/myuser/www/mywebsite';

$ vi /home/myuser/www/mywebsite/index.php
    //$rootDir = realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/..');
    //$varDir = realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../var');
    $rootDir = '/home/myuser/seagull/mywebsite';
    $varDir = $rootDir . '/var';

6. Move libs up a directory so it can be shared

$ cd /home/myuser/seagull/mywebsite/
$ mv lib ../lib-0.6.8
$ ln -s /home/myuser/seagull/lib-0.6.8 lib
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How to build a profitable website

Posted on December 28, 2010 by admin

There are three ways, as far as I can tell.

1. Get a website host, a great wordpress theme, bookmark submission software, search engine optimization software, learn about all the tools google and others make available, and go from there.

2. Sign up to Site Build It! For US$299/pa they will provide access to all the tools you need.

3. Go into partnership with me. I will take care of all the technical stuff for you and provide coaching in how to build a profitable website. For the low cost of nothing, you can get started today. Email me – matt @ lindesay . com.

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Posted on December 22, 2010 by admin

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Cheap UK Boiler service and CP12 for £25

Posted on December 4, 2010 by admin

I read on Property Hawk (www.propertyhawk.co.uk) about the latest deal from Homeserve. As of a few weeks ago, they are offering a landlord’s gas safety certficate and boiler service for only £35.88. One of my properties is already covered by EON boiler care, which includes a CP12 and service but I was keen to put the others on this plan as soon as possible before they pull it. A CP12 / service normally costs me £70 so this is a good deal.

The idea is that you sign up and pay the £35.88 which covers you for one CP12 & service during the year.  You can nominate when the service will happen and they will contact you 14 days in advance to book a time.

They operate throughout the country, but not for all types of boiler. It needs to be a mains-supplied gas boiler and there are some makes they don’t cover. I don’t have the full list but can tell you that Biasi, Baxi and Potterton are ok, and Housewarmer and Heatline are not. If you have a different one give them a call before you sign up. There is nothing on the website about this so best to call first.

So £35.88 is a great price, but if you sign up through topcashback then you get £10.10 cashback. All cashback deals are not guaranteed, but I can see it listed on my account so it looks promising. Curiously it let me get away with one cashback but when I tried to list a second and third property there was an error and it said to call instead. I suspect this is because it matched up my phone or address. To get multiple cashbacks I’d suggest putting the property address as the postal address and then calling up to change it later. Not sure if that would work but worth a shot.

The website says that other appliances are not covered, only the boiler, and for additional appliances there will be an extra cost. This was contradicted by the Homeserve call centre though, who said you can have up to 6 appliances included.

I’ve signed up for 4 properties but not had any serviced yet so can’t comment on how good the actual work is. But for £35 (or £25) for a CP12 I’m hopeful.

Posted in Landlords | Leave a comment

Setting up scanning software on Arch Linux

Posted on December 1, 2010 by admin

As part of my paperless office, I need to be able to scan a pile of paperwork. I want to leave the paperwork scanning while I do something else, then save the resulting documents, which may be single or multiple pages.

Ideally I’ll get one piece of software the both scans and allows the documents to be split out. But it looks like they don’t all do that so if it’s easier to use one program to scan and one to split then that’s ok as well.

First of all I check out wikipedia for lists of available software. This is my normal approach when looking around at options. Couldn’t find anything under scanning software though. Presumably everyone in Windows uses the software from the vendor and there are not many Linux ones?

So some random googling and I have my list:

  • sane – command-line. Nah – I want something graphical.
  • XSANE – I’ve looked at this before and can’t handle the complicated interface. Not recommended for most users as the old “X” style interface is not very intuitive.
  • xscanimage – skipped this one for now. Sounds like it would be the same as xsane.
  • Kooka – not actively developed so not a good one to back.
  • gscan2pdf – I liked this a while back but found that an update to perl in Arch Linux around August 2010 meant that I could no longer load pdf files for splitting. Installed it in November 2010 and it won’t start any more. I suspect it’s not supported too well at the moment, although it is cool so I hope someone will pick it up. Uses xsane in the background. It has an option for ADF but never stopped so I found specifying the number of pages worked better. Still getting:”Invalid header block at offset unknown at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/bin/gscan2pdf line 2029″ when opening an existing file. It does OCR as well which could be useful so I have enabled that.
  • VueScan – not open source so excluded from my review.
  • gnome-scan – standard component of Gnome apparently. I use xfce4 so it’s not there by default. Doesn’t want to install either so that one’s out.
  • scanadf – Not supported by HP scanners, according to the HP website.
  • simple-scan – I like it! Nice and simple for a single document. No features for extracting parts of documents though which I need to be able to do. Perhaps I could use a second application for that?

Editing pdf files (Thanks to www.cyberciti.biz/tips/open-source-linux-pdf-writer.html)

  • pdfedit – can extract text from individual pages but not extract full pages.
  • scribus – it crashed loading my 20 page pdf.
  • open office – nope – can’t see a way to load pdf. It wants to convert it to ascii when I try to load.
  • flpsed – doesn’t let you extract pages.
  • gimp – good for extracting a single page probably, but not a multi-page document within another multi-page document.

After all the analysis, it looks like the solution for me is gscan2pdf. I’m still not able to load existing files in which is a shame, so once I scan I need to export the pages right away. Looking on the bright side at least this means I’ll get onto it straight away and not procrastrinate.

Some other interesting links I found along the way:

Posted in Arch Linux | 1 Comment