Web Design and Development by Shazia Mistry

WordPress as a CMS

2009-07-24T20:40:05+00:00

WordPress has been synonymous with blogging for the past couple years, and as a publishing tool it has done exceedingly well. As a content management tool, it offers simplicity, flexibility, and is extremely customizable.

Even though WordPress is a free tool, the community is so huge and dedicated, and it is so well supported that as a CMS, WordPress outperforms many of it’s competitors.

How to make small accomplishments when you feel overwhelmed

2009-07-22T03:34:16+00:00

Becoming a single parent definitely came with a lot of challenges, but becoming a successful work at home single parent, I am discovering, might be a bit of a miracle!

There were a lot of times that I got so overwhelmed with trying to balance my workload and my kids that I felt like I could possibly suffer spontaneous human combustion! Well, perhaps that’s a little exaggerated, but you know, I was close to that!

Once I realized that I needed a better strategy, I started making lists (I am certainly not a list person). I made lists of everything that I needed to do – I included household chores, and kiddie duties as well – but the problem was that some of those tasks took such a long time that I was never able to finish about 90% of the things on my list!

I may have read this somewhere, but I don’t remember (don’t credit me, and thanks to whoever thought of it!), but I decided that I would spend 30 minutes on each task. This worked pretty good because even if I didn’t finish a particular task, at least I was making progress on each thing I had to do. I also started feeling much less overwhelmed because it was no longer inundating, gigantic, hours of work, but small bite-sized chunks.

Would love to hear other ideas on reducing that “overwhelmed” feeling when working on a multitude of things at once!

Coming back to life

2009-01-29T23:50:55+00:00

Once upon a time I thought that I was a person who had it all together, you know, I was pretty confident that I knew who I was, what I stood for, how I felt about life. As it happens, I didn’t really have it as together as I thought, and it’s wonderful, in a way, how life really teaches you the lessons that you need to learn – although most of the time, not in a nice and friendly way.

I’ve spent the last year learning much about myself, about life, about sacrifice. A very unlikely and unfortunate set of events cause me to go from being “sorta-happily-married-with-kids” to “newly-un-hitched-with-kids” in one very fast, somewhat dizzying blink of an eye. A set of events that literally made me feel like I was malfunctioning, or broken, or like I was expelled from my universe and I no longer knew where I belonged. That feeling lasted a very long time.

So long in fact, that I had to say sorry many times, to many people, about many things.

But, as we all know, life continues to cycle on, we grow and we recover, or at least those things that hurt us becomes a part of who we are, enabling us to feel compassion and empathy, and somehow gives us strength to move on.

Long story short, I am back (I hope) to business! And with some great news, I will be at the Blogher ’09 Geek Lab, which seems like it will be totally awesome, and I look forward to seeing many, just as awesome, people there!

PS. This website is not fully functioning yet, but I’ll get there soon. Wish me luck!

On BlogHer ‘08

2008-07-24T11:56:33+00:00

I was lucky enough to be part of a panel at BlogHer, FAQs for beginning bloggers with Michelle, Melanie and Nelly, who were all very amazing co-panelists.

We received great feedback from attendees, and I am glad that it was a beneficial session to those that attended.

I put together an outline of a few beginner WordPress questions, and brief answers: Beginning with WordPress

And Nelly was kind enough to make our shared resources document available at the Webgrrls website: Blogging resources