Just a friendly reminder… If you’re a regular reader of this site (or would like to become one), you might be interested in subscribing to the Raising4Boys RSS feed. In case you’re not familiar with RSS it’s a means for syndicating frequently updated web content.

You can subscribe using any of a number of web-based or standalone RSS readers. Subscription buttons for a number of popular RSS services can be found in the left sidebar as well as at the end of each individual post, and here’s the direct link to the RSS feed. If you’re interested in keeping track of comments left on this site, then check out the comments feed.

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Just a quick note to say that we made it back from vacation this past weekend. All told, we drove 2900+ miles over the span of 12 days, with most of that being concentrated in the first and last two days. Needless to say, we arrived home a bit worn down - in fact, we’re probably more tired after our “relaxing” vacation than before we left. Anyway, we’ve been busy settling back in over the past few days.

Oh, and thanks everyone that contributed guest articles in our absence! We really enjoyed reading the submissions, and hope that you did to. Things around here should be returning to normal shortly.

With that said, we hope that you have a happy and safe 4th of July!

And we’re off! By the time you read this, we’ll be well on our way… We’re headed out for a relaxing (and reasonably long) summer vacation that will involve a little better than 1300 miles driving in each direction (plus some local miles at the far end). I’ll have intermittent internet access, so I’ll try to pop in from time to time. However, most of the writing that you’ll see over the coming days was contributed by a handful of guest bloggers. To all who contributed, thanks for your help — and be sure to watch this space… You’ll soon see your name in lights!

Just thought I’d point out that I’m also looking for guest bloggers over at Raising4Boys. See the call for submissions for more details.

We’ll be out of town on vacation for the last 10 or so days of June, and we’re looking for some guest bloggers to fill our shoes… This is an open call to readers, whether or not you run a weblog of your own. Here’s what we ask… Submissions should be on topic (i.e., parenting-related) and properly formatted for publication (I’m thinking here mainly of links).

We’re thinking mainly of parenting tips/suggestions or otherwise useful bits of information, but we’ll also consider cute or funny anecdotes.

Articles should be your own work - please don’t rip off someone else’s writing and try to pass it off as your own. While we’d prefer completely original content, we might consider republication of your own work. We’ve never done this before on this site, so we’re not sure what sort of response (if any) we should expect.

What’s in it for you? Fame and fortune, of course. Actually, that’s not true. While there might be a small amount of fame involved, there really won’t be any fortune. Here’s what we’ll do: (1) properly attribute the writings to you, and (2) provide a link back to your site (if you have one, and assuming that it’s both non-spammy and family-friendly) right off the bat, at the top of the article. We’ll also provide a link to your RSS feed or an about (or welcome) page if you provide us with one.

If you’re interested, simply send your submissions to us via our handy-dandy contact form with the following subject: Guest Blog Submission. Please be sure to tell us: (1) whether or not you’ve published this elsewhere, and (2) the name (or pseudonym) that you wish us to use when acknowledging your efforts. Please also provide us with a link to your site, your about/welcome page and/or your RSS feed if you’d like those included in your acknowledgement. Title suggestions are also encouraged.

We can’t promise that we’ll publish every single submission, but we’ll try to run anything that is both coherent and on topic. Please note that I reserve the right to edit submissions prior to publication (mainly for grammar, typos, or perhaps a tiny bit of style). Also note that, once published, your work will become a permanent part of the Raising4Boys Archives.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop us a line via our contact form. Thanks.

If you’re reading this message, then it means that you’re now accessing Raising4Boys from the new server. During the move we also took the opportunity to upgrade to the newest version of WordPress (the software that runs this site). While we’ve tested things fairly thoroughly and hope that we have the bugs worked out, it’s always possible (likely?) that something’s amiss.

If you notice any problems, please leave a comment at the end of this post, drop us a line via our contact form, or shoot us an e-mail (use ‘4boys‘ at this domain for the address).

Please also feel free to leave a comment letting us know that you’re able to see the site on the new server.

Update: We had some database problems, and we thus lost any comments left from Saturday-Sunday evening. However, everything’s working great now.

Just a quick note to let you know that we’re in the process of moving Raising4Boys to a dedicated server to improve speed/stability. We’ve already made the move over on FiveCentNickel, and are just waiting for the DNS change to propagate. Once everything is said and done, we’ll post a note on the new server — until then, you’ll see this message, and you’ll know that you’re accessing the old server. The only minor issue that this will cause is that comments left after I dump the database, and before y’all start hitting the new server will be lost.

See you on the other side!

In looking at our site stats, we’ve noticed that a number of people arrive here from search engines look for answers to fairly specific questions. In some cases, those answers can be found in one or more articles within our archives, but in other cases they can’t. Thus, we’ve decided to periodically pluck out some of these questions and spend a bit of time answering them.

Alternatively, if you have a question that you’d like for us to answer, please drop us a line. We love getting e-mail from readers, and we’re also always on the lookout for good article ideas. We can’t promise that we’ll tackle your question, but we’ll do our best to accommodate your interests.

As always, these articles will be categorized by subject matter, but they will also be cross-referenced in the Parenting Q&A category.

Just a quick note to say that we’ve implemented a new strategy for blocking comment spam. We’ve tested it out over at FiveCentNickel and it seems to be working well with no negative side effects, so we’re rolling it out here, as well. If you have any trouble leaving comments, please let us know so we can get things straightened out. Thanks!

Just a quick note to fill you in on a few things…

First of all, we love reading your comments. This is a big part of the reason that we’ve had a leader board over there in the right sidebar for quite awhile now. The purpose of the leader board has been to give some recognition to those of you that are contributing, and to give a link back to your site if you leave a URL when you comment. Instead of tabulating things over the entire history of this site, however, we’ve decided to shake things up a bit and change the leader board to reflect a 30 day moving window. So… If you’ll look over in the right sidebar, you’ll now see a list of “Big talkers” from the past 30 days. It’s currently pretty easy to get onto the list, so have at it.

Second, we’ve recently switched our comment spam filter, so if you leave a comment and it doesn’t get through, please contact us so we can rescue your comment and train the filter.

Third, we’ve modified the right sidebar to improve usability. This has involved removing some of the advertising, adding in a “Recent articles” section, and modifying the “Recent comments” section such that it now includes a snippet of each comment rather than just the title of the associated post. This is the way it used to be, but the old plugin caused some glitches with the overall site layout.

Finally, despite having switched over to full-text feeds a bit over a month ago, it’s come to our attention that our RSS feed has recently been cutting of after the ‘more’ tag, forcing you guys to click through to get our full content. This certainly wasn’t our intention, and we finally figured out that this is the default behavior of full-text feeds on WordPress 2.1 (to which we upgraded a week or two ago). The good news is that there’s a third-party plugin to fix this ‘feature.’ We’ve installed it, and everything seems to be back to normal.

Oh, and special thanks to Nate and Jeffrey of SavingAdvice.com and PFAdvice.com for modifying their commenter plugin to allow for comments to be tabulated based on a running window of arbitrary length.

As always, if you’d like to subscribe to the Raising4Boys RSS feed, you can do so by copying the feed url and pasting it into your reader of choice, or by using one of the handy subscription buttons that can be found at the end of each post or in the left sidebar. You can also subscribe via e-mail by using the form below.