Once upon a time Suite101 paid it's writers, then they stopped. A lot of writers left, some stayed.

Now Suite is offering to pay writers again. But!... they want quite a lot for the money. You are to maintain the topic on top of the actual writing. This means responding to emails, keeping a running and moderated forum and so on.

The articles you write are to be word perfect (that means more than just spellchecked on MS Word). They are to be at least 400 words in length and you are to publish at least 10 articles over the course of a month. This is more than two each week. It doesn't sound like much but if you are doing this regularly you will run into dry spells and times when you just don't have a second, third, or tenth article in you. However, you can get a guest writer, assuming you can find one.

They guarantee a pay of $75 a month, for the first three months. After that it's $1.50 per 1,000 page views. So it will depend on you generating traffic, which of course, benefits Suite and yourself anyway.

Is it worth it? I'm not sure. It would be a lot of work and no sure pay. Especially as they have a history of stopping pay. Risky, yet I'm still reading it. :)

A little blog to help you put all those naughty thoughts into words.

Myself, I am burnt out from the adult side of writing. I wrote a column for two years, weekly, on Adult Backwash. I thought it would be a good way to meet men. It didn't really work out that way.

From that experience however, I have learned that I don't want to meet men who are into Internet (or any other really) porn. Sure, look now and then. But guys who are overly absorbed by the stuff seem to have left reality behind. I think having it so easily and readily available ruins them. They can no longer really function as a man. Instead they expect women to all be porn stars. Of course, we are not. Have no real interest in body surgery or starvation and we certainly have more going on in our lives than to just be available for sex at the drop of his pants.

Anyway, like it or not, that's my take on the whole writing for the adult market thing. Would I do it again? Maybe, if I was sure it was a women only site. I could write erotica for women. It makes me feel kind of cheap and icky to think of men reading it though. I don't think they really get it.

Ezine, blog or just plain everyday website, how do you know which is which and what makes it one or the other?

From the Dmoz category descriptions:

Ezine: An e-zine is the electronic form of a magazine, delivered via the Internet through the web, by e-mail, as a PDF file, or some other commonly accepted electronic form. It shares many of the characteristics of a paper magazine. It will have a regular publishing schedule: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.

It can accept submissions, which are then approved and edited by an editor or a staff using an agreed upon editorial process. Or it could be produced by a small group of writers.

An e-zine will typically publish only a small selection of the work submitted to it, setting a tone for the zine.

Weblog: A weblog (blog) is a cross between an online journal and an ezine. Weblogs must have links to other websites, they also need a commentary on the sites. Blog entries must be dated.

Weblogs are personal surfing diaries -- daily or weekly lists of links that the writer thinks are interesting.

"Personalized news isn't about going to excite and getting words that match your keyword. It's about going to a person you trust. Personalized." -- Sabren

Weblogs come in two major flavors: Weblogs, which are more link-oriented, keeping track of news in a particular topic area; and online journals, which emphasize more of the writer's own thoughts, opinions, and daily life. Both need to be updated on a fairly regular basis in order to be included here (at least three times a week).

Zines and Websites don't seem to have a description, or any one category. Instead they are listed by subject matter.

I think that leaves ThatGrrl.ca: WordCraft as an ezine then. But, I don't accept submissions or work with any other writers. As of this moment I also don't have it sorted into it's own section on the site. I created 3 index pages: Inspiration and Creativity, Internet and Publishing and Business and Home Office. But, there is no one page I could say is WordCraft itself. I still have Writing Prompts, Quotations and my Author Blab pages up too. But, they are all seperate, joined in a sidebar but not on any one page I could refer to as a seperate identity from the site in general.

I read Jakob Nielsen's top ten website mistakes. None of them really impressed me. I've seen it all as an editor, reviewing submissions for Dmoz. What really irks me as just another warm body looking at a site is the lack of contact information on most sites now. Everyone has given into paranoia about privacy and fraud. It is harder and harder to find a way to contact a company or site owner. Often I just wanted to comment about some small thing. No big loss for me. However, in putting up a site I would assume corporations want to be accessible to consumers. What good is all that information if consumers can't give or get feedback or more information should they have questions or problems.

Anyway, I liked this page of Nielsen's site. A guide to About Us pages. You also need to know fresh ideas about having contact information in ways that foil those who want to abuse it. I have done something like that on my own site. But, in my case, I'm not selling anything. Sure, my services but no one has ever asked for those. I have to get out there and get myself working, it doesn't come to me.

Anyway, seems I just typed that... Happy site designing!

See me blabber at LockerGnome:

LockerGnome: Web Developers LockerGnome: Windows Fanatics

Now, if only no one finds out how clueless I really am....

Do you ever stop feeling like a fraud, or that you're just acting like you have a clue and soon everyone will find out and point out to you what a clueless old woman you really are. Forty still seems old, I'm mostly over the shock now, but not quite.

I'm surprised at the feedback I'm getting. I post something clueless and people email me back with ideas and suggestions. It's very kind of them.

Right now I am fighting the browser wars on my computer. Trying Firefox, MaxThon, Crazy Browser, SlimBrowser and another which I can't remember the name of at the moment. Anyway, as much as I like the tabbed browsing which is missing in MS IExplorer, I must have my StumbleUpon and Google toolbars, functional. I miss them when they aren't there.