Of balances between link building tasks and content building and WTF with WordPress

After reading in the partners forum that some folks are seeing spikes in traffic, I figure I'd better do something besides the web 2.0 profiles and posting in forums and no-follow ezine article links.

One of our tasks had been to make a list of top sites in our niche: forums, blogs, companies, etc.. So I started there and got the basics of my links page started. Then I wrote to each site the good old "Hi, I've posted a link to your site, I'd love a link back."

Then look at the backlinks to THOSE sites and see if I can get some of them, also. Two directory submissions, plus check on a submission from about a month ago. Oh, good, that one is in.

Then on to post some content and get all flustered about the Word Press side bars again. I hate them.

Since I got the site theme, I cannot get the sidebars to do what I want when I want. At some point I settled for one side bar for all pages, but then that got tweeked out again. The default side bar never shows in categories that have no defined sidebar. So I have to go in and define every single category side bar to have a side bar that isn't WP default.

So I found yet another subcategory that isn't pulling the default menu and I have to go put in menu widgets. Well, I also realized that product reviews are in one category, and the related products are in another. Can't have product specific menus in the review category, since all other reviews are in that category.... and this is what it's been like for months now.

On the good news side, I did have a first sale. Still hoping Q4 can recover the year's costs.