I love to blog, obviously. But I also love to take photographs. Sadly, that’s something I haven’t done a lot of these past two years, as I’ve been rather busy, but I’m trying really, really hard to get back into that. In fact, I’m going to pause this blog entry right now to go take a picture of my adorable kitten, who is lounging on my desk.

There. I’m back. I feel so much better now that my finger has depressed my camera’s shutter button. Here’s the photo I took, by the way:

Anyway, while there are dozens upon dozens of question & answer style memes available for blogs, I don’t see nearly as many for photography! Here are the ones I do know about, however:

• Camera Critters (Saturday)
• In My Neighborhood (Tuesday)
• Lensday (Wednesday)
• Macro Friday (Friday)
• Mellow Yellow Monday (Monday)
• One Little Word | Captured (Saturday)
• Straight Out Of The Camera (SOOC) Sunday (Sunday)
• The Simple Things (Sunday)
• Sweet Shot (Tuesday)
• Thursday Challenge (Thursday)
• Wordless Wednesday (Wednesday)
• You Capture (Monday)

Do you know of any others? Please share if you do!

Thursday 13: Thirteen must-have WordPress plugins

1. @Reply – allows you to do Twitter-style replies to people who leave comments on your entries
2. Akismet – awesome spam protection
3. BM-TrackPing – separates pings and trackbacks from regular comments (very useful when organizing giveaways and selecting winners!)
4. CommentLuv – share the commenting love!
5. Comment Timeout – automatically close comments after X amount of weeks/months. This is especially great if you have a giveaway for baby shower games, and don’t want people entering after the contest has ended.
6. CR Post to Ping.fm – send notifications of new blog entries to Ping.fm
7. Custom Smilies – should be self-explanatory
8. Flickr Manager – makes adding Flickr photos to blog entries a no-brainer
9. Math Comment Spam Protection – more spam prevention
10. Search and Replace – run “find X and replace it with Z” queries from the admin panel
11. Spam Karma 2 – awesome spam prevention
12. TTFTitles – use fonts to generate custom title images
13. WP-PageNavi – add numbered pages navigation to your posts

I know it’s Friday, but since I meant to do the Thursday 13 yesterday, I’m going to go ahead and post it today: elements of blog layouts that make me cringe

1. Skinny layouts (IMHO, a blog-containing element should be no narrower than 450px!)
2. TyPiNg LiKe ThIs (does anyone still do that?)
3. Javascript rainbow links. Seriously? 2002 called, they want their crappy coding back.
4. Me / You / WWW links. They’re cute… but in a legwarmers & mom jeans kind of way.
5. Run-on sentences and lack of paragraphs. I don’t read blocks.
6. Clashing colors.
7. #EEE text on an #FFF background.
8. And while we’re on the subject, #222 text on an #000 background.
9. Lack of contact information. If you don’t want to cough up your email address, at least provide a contact form!
10. Itty bitty text. 9px or larger, pretty please.
11. Links whose colors aren’t that different from general text colors. How can I see your link to Quoizel lighting and shingle grinding if they blend right in with the surrounding text?
12. Pre-made templates that feature absolutely no customization. At least put up your own header image or change the color around.
13. Disabled comments. I want to comment!

I maintain a lot of blogs, so it’s imperative for me to always have something to talk about. When I run out of stuff to talk about, that’s when it gets ugly. And it’s those times that I wish I had something more “pre-set” to do, something that didn’t require so much of my own creativity and effort! But in any case, since I do blog quite often and on several different blogs, about all sorts of things (everything from the best prenatal vitamin to great water, I take advantage of memes to help me with content production. A blog meme is a themed set of questions or writing prompts to help you create a blog entry or get it started. One of the most well known meme out there is the Friday 5, but there are many other memes available as well.

Speaking of which, a great meme resource is The Daily Meme!