This has been an interesting week so far, and I’ve learned a few things, which is always good.

1. Remember to check incoming links.

I post to all of my blogs using ecto - it’s one of my favorite things in my “blogger’s productivity toolbox”.

But posting via ecto does mean that I hardly ever log into any of my blogs using Wordpress’s wp-admin, and so I hardly ever see the Dashboard. And I find that the Dashboard is a much better way of seeing at a glance who’s linking in - better than stats, because you’ve got to click a few levels in sometimes to find anything.

But if you don’t check the Dashboard often, since it only shows the most recent links in, you miss things.

So I just discovered that I had missed Teli’s tagging me with the Five Successful Habits tag earlier this month. And as a result, I’m a little late now to join in on Aaron’s Simply Successful Secrets group writing project at Today is that Day.

The good news is that there are some great reads in the Simply Successful Secrets round-up.

(And Teli, I’ll still play, in a later post!)

2. Remember to check Adsense code, especially when you’re co-blogging with someone.

I’m still feeling a little red in the face about this one. I recently changed over the theme for GadgetChick, where I co-blog with my friend Chrissie.

We’ve been doing very well in the past couple of weeks in terms of ramping up our visitor count, and then one day she asked me how the Adsense was looking. It turned out she stopped seeing impressions for the channel she had set up for GadgetChick since I changed over the theme, and assumed that I had gone with one code to make things easier.

I said, “I’m doing okay. What about you?”

And that’s when I learned she had seen NO impressions. A hurried look at the code revealed that the publisher id that was showing up for Chrissie’s posts wasn’t her publisher id.

It wasn’t mine, either.

To make a long story short, when we had first set up the blog, another friend of ours was involved, but she never ended up blogging with us. And when I changed over the theme, I switched over the WRONG Adsense code - instead of Chrissie’s publisher id, we were using our other friend’s publisher id on all of Chrissie’s posts.

(We’re all friends, though, thank goodness. So all’s well.)

Now when I make any changes, I immediately shoot Chrissie an email. Just in case.

3. Blogging is a fast-paced world. Checking in on favorite feeds regularly is a good thing.

I’ve been busy the past few days, so didn’t get to do any feed reading for myself - which meant I didn’t touch my folder of feeds from blogs that blog about blogging (that’s quite a mouthful!).

So I was a few days late catching Darren’s post Social Bookmarking and Networking - How Involved Are You?, which was in answer to a question I had recently asked him about how to figure out what sites I should spend my energy on.

But the good news is, I’m there now, and it’s a great read. Lots of comments in answer to the question that Darren posed, and I think now that I need to just experiment with different social bookmarking and networking sites, and go with the ones that work best for me.

4. Backups are good. Backups are fabulous. Backups are incredible lifesavers.

Not entirely blogging-related, but my brand new HP desktop crashed on me over the weekend. It was quite a scramble getting set up again on my old computer while the new one goes into the shop.

(Thank goodness for warranties.)

The bad news was that I hadn’t been in the habit of backing up everything. The good news was that it was a strange sort of crash, and I was able to back up everything before it was too late.

Which is a good reminder for me to set up my database backups for my newer blogs.

So all in all, it’s been a good week. A busy week. And I learned a few things, too.