Good Naija Girl is back!

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Good Naija Girl

Welcome back to Good Naija Girl! I missed you (really), and I hope you missed me too (otherwise I need to get a new hobby!). How have you been? Hope your 2013 has been swell so far! Happy Valentine’s Day too…hope you feel the love today from everyone you come across.

If you’ve liked my Facebook page (and please, do!), then you’ll know that I’ve been having m-a-j-or issues with my web hosting. These issues started in June of last year when I switched from my host of six years (four years for this blog) to save some money: big mistake! First my site would go offline, with a message that the account had been suspended, then near the end of last year I lost five months of blog posts and your comments!!! Well that is behind me: I have a new reliable host and thanks to Google reader I was able to retrieve the lost blog posts. I’m still working on recovering your wonderful comments and I had been delaying the relaunch for that, but it’s February and 2013 is not waiting for anyone.

One of the things I was most proud of accomplishing last year was publishing my Love and Learn series. Using my first relationship as an example, I shared some of the lessons that I learned. The relationship didn’t work out but I hope the lessons will be helpful to someone else. If you have some time, please check the entries out (unfortunately, you won’t get to benefit from the comments of those who read the entry several months back):

The other great thing happening is my sister is getting married! I first announced it in a Thankful Thursday post and now the year when it all goes down is upon us! Planning a wedding from a distance is not an easy thing. Even harder is moving your life across the world, and my baby sister will be doing just that! It hasn’t really sunk in yet but oh my goodness it won’t be easy for our family to be separated by that distance!

Finally, I want to apologize to the people who signed up to receive a Christmas card from me last year. I was so stressed (I know, I’m a big baby) over the lost blog entries and comments that I didn’t get my act together to get those cards sent in time. Unlike 2011, I cannot blame NiPost for anyone who was expecting a card but didn’t receive one! I’m sorry. I hope the would-be recipients will forgive me.

So tell me, what is new with you?

Trying to be less hard on myself

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Good Naija Girl

I was going to talk about the Nigerian Independence Day party that I and the other members of the local Nigerian association executive planned, but this is important. I hope anyone who can relate will join me in changing their frame of mind.

I tend to be really hard on myself. I’ve been told this my entire life. For example, I have been blogging since November 2002 and since 2003 I’ve wanted to design amazing websites to house my blogs. I spent many sleepless nights reading instructions online and trying to make it work, first with a blog software called Movable Type, then over the last five years with WordPress. I shed a lot of tears (I do that when I get frustrated) and I’ve called myself all sorts of names over the years (stupid, dumb, incompetent) because I never seemed to pick up web design stuff to the level that I wanted.

The thing with content management systems or blogging software is that you don’t have to learn how to design a website to use them: you can use existing templates as is, or tweak them to look the way you want them to. Most bloggers do this, but because I like everything difficult it seems, I am determined to learn how to design an amazing website. I have wasted countless hours over the last few years trying to become this amazing designer who could do everything from designing a logo to creating the structure of the site (using html) to figuring out the styling of the site using CSS, to learning php and javascript, and on and on. Despite wanting to learn these skills, I refused to pay to take courses because I’m cheap and didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars to learn something that technically I could learn online, for free, but you know what they say (Time is money). And other people were “self taught” and doing amazing things, so why did I need to take a course to be halfway decent? The thought that I needed a course made me feel even more stupid. Needless to say I’m not that far from where I was three years ago when I put together the design for this site.

So what’s my point? I just visited the website of one of the web designers I’ve admired for years and right on her site it says that she doesn’t do all the stuff that I have been trying to do (coding and programming), and I don’t think she does much graphic design either. She is a web designer, and she contracts the work she can’t do to experts in those areas, while she serves as the web designer and leader of the project. Seye had told me that most web designers or developers don’t do everything, or if they do, they rely on the work that others have done before them, instead of starting from scratch each time and reinventing the wheel. I heard him, but I never really believed it. It’s like I thought he was just telling me that to make me feel better about my lack of skill. Well, now I believe.

Another area in my life where I am hard on myself is with regard to life accomplishments. I tend to downplay my accomplishments, while giving the accomplishments of my peers more weight than my own. For example, most of my friends are married with children and live in lovely homes. Sometimes I look at my life and I feel like my accomplishments pale in comparison. But then I was reminded that most of my friends never had the chance to be a homeowner as a single lady, nor had to be responsible for a mortgage, house-related payments, and car payments on their own, so while that doesn’t make me better than them, it should make me recognize my accomplishments and not downplay them when they are pointed out to me.

So if there’s something that you’ve been working hard to do, that maybe you admire someone else for doing, give yourself a break if you’re not doing it as quickly or as easily as that other person. Maybe you just don’t have all the facts. If you’re trying to launch a business and you see someone who seems to have accomplished what you want in a shorter time, before you decide you must be stupid and decide to give up, ask yourself if perhaps the person you’re admiring quit their full time job to launch this other business, giving them more time to spend on the business. Or maybe they have fewer demands on their time while you have family to take care of. This kind of thinking represents good ways to cut yourself some slack if you’re known for being hard on yourself, but don’t use them as excuses to stop working your butt off!

Maybe you won’t have to work harder, only smarter. Like me with the web design work, you may need to explore other ways to accomplish your goals, even if it requires investing money, especially if time is something you don’t have in abundance.

It’s not easy to change one’s mindset, but none of us are too old to learn new tricks.

On domains and related geekery

Posted on April 1, 2009 by Good Naija Girl

The wannabe computer geek in me is excited to see more members of blogville buying or otherwise obtaining their own domain names. Instead of writing from http://crazynaijachick.blogspot.com for example, the blogger is writing from http://crazynaijachick.com. A couple of bloggers have asked me about my domain http://goodnaijagirl.com so I thought I’d put this up.

So why would you decide to buy your own domain?

Well, to be honest, unless you plan to take over the world with your blog, creating an empire like Dooce has (she earns an estimated FORTY THOUSAND US DOLLARS PER MONTH (source) through ads on her site, not that I’m impressed by that whatsoever) or diversifying into a website offering a plethora of services and information, there may not be any real value to owning your own space. One main advantage is having complete control over how your site looks (as long as you can afford to pay someone to implement your vision, or if you have the skills to do so on your own).

There are some cons to having your own domain name though, most of them related to the expense. First, you have to pay annually to own the domain (the website address, crazynaijachick.com in my above example). The cost is actually not too prohibitive, but the fact that you have to pay each year makes it seem more like you’re renting it than owning it. All you own at this point is the website address. You don’t actually have a place to store information.

And that’s where the more expensive part comes in: if you decide to run an actual website from your own domain, you have to pay a hosting company monthly or annually to rent server space to hold your entries, images and whatnot (unless you have a friend who will let you host your site on his or her server…I need to find a friend like this). So, if you’re an occasional blogger or just starting out and not sure if blogging is for you, you can see how buying your own domain and paying for hosting can be a waste of money.

HOWEVER, let’s say you are writing a book, and you want a place to send your readers once you’re published or even before you get published. You want a place to provide updates on the progress of the book, write about other parts of your life or even about the book writing process and create lots of buzz about the book and its author. In that case, it may make sense to for you to buy a domain name that is either your name, your book’s name or any combination thereof. For all the budding writers out there, it might be a good idea to check and see if your desired domain name is still available to be bought when the time is right. To be honest, you don’t need your own domain to do any of the above, but if you’re trying to build a brand or an identity, it might be a good idea to go in this direction. This is because when people hear you’re published, they’ll be likely to search for you online at Yourname.com rather than trying to figure out if it’s Yourname.blogspot.com or Yourname.wordpress.com. Of course, if they use google they won’t have that problem at all!

I personally have a habit of buying domains because I like to own things. I started this blog at a free site (http://goodnaijagirl.wordpress.com) but quickly felt limited by what I could do. I think domains to me are what tattoos are to some: apparently the latter can be addictive. With your own domain you have more flexibility. If you have a flair for web design, or you know exactly what you want and you want the power to design every inch of your site, then you must look into owning your own domain.

So who on blogville has their own domain? Off the top of my head in alphabetical order we have:

Afrobabe
Bella Naija
Jide Salu
Nigerian Curiosity (one of two domains)
RocNaija
Shona Vixen
Solomon Sydelle (the second domain!)
Vera

There are many others!

And let me not kid you: once you own the domain and are paying for hosting, the fun begins as you are faced with the learning curve of actually developing a website, using a CMS or building something from scratch, all of the stuff that keeps me up until the wee hours of the night trying to figure out. I’m praying God sends me a webgeek for a boyfriend or husband :).

(Oh: if you want to check if a particular domain name is up for grabs, there are countless places to check online. If you’re stuck, try Whois.net. If you want to know if a particular domain is available, just type the desired address (example crazynaijachick) into the third box, click Go! and all will be revealed.)