I have this idea…

I’ll be keeping this post at the top for a few days, feel free to look below for regular MII business. There’s a shiny new post, I promise! Click on the link, and save yourself the scrolldown. Or scrolldown, if you’d rather, it’s suit yourself day here every day.

 

I blame Mel’s (of Stirrup Queens fame) phenomenal organisation of so many damn fun bloggity events for giving me ideas.

Well, actually only ONE idea, I lack imagination.

Admittedly, a slightly grandiose idea, quite possibly above my station in the blogosphere as a persistently jacked off, disgruntled, whining infertile. I hope I can get away with it on the grounds that I, let’s be honest, desperately need a very distracting task to keep my mind from devolving to the stubborn barrenness of my womb.

You see, it’s all about my needs at Chez MI, as per usual.

Inspiration (or possibly procrastination, given that small matter of upcoming final exams) has hit and I’ve begun to entertain the crazy thought that maybe I could get off my lazy butt and organise a little something myself. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Don’t answer that.

Hoping desperately that I’m not about to bite of more than I can comfortably chew and offend you all with my devastating inefficiency, let me share my Cunning Plan.

Drum-roll, please…..

The Great Blog Cross-Pollination.

See, isn’t it just fantastic?

I bet you’re all inspired, yes?

No?

Oh.

Then let me explain my Cunning Plan.

This all comes from the observation that, out of the zillions of fantastic blogs you all write, I only know and regularly visit a subset.

I’d like to get to know more of you, after all a girl can never have too many fellow infertiles to bitch to about recalcitrant reproductive systems.

I am aware that clicking though blogrolls would achieve the same end, but the way I propose would be more fun.

The executive summary?

Essentially, the net effect for those who participate would be that on a nominated date (Friday the 9th of November), instead of your own usual post, you swap posts with another blogger.

This would all be clearly signposted in the title that the post is ‘guest’ , of course, and with a hyperlink to your own post, existing as a ‘guest’ post on the swapped-blog site. 

The goal is cross-pollination of bloggity goodness.

Visitors to your site get to visit another (hopefully fresh and new) blog without even the bother of all that clicking their mouse, let alone typing a URL. Nifty, huh?

As an added bonus, they can have the fun of guessing the identity of the mystery guest blogger is in the comments section.

I wonder how many of us will pick a familiar writing style in a new home?

If you’re frowning in confusion, let me break it down as to how it will work:

• Firstly, those who’d like to join in post a reply to this post with their name, blog URL and email address. Also add if your blog is avec or sans Rugrats (children/pregnancy) so I can match up kid-kid and non-kid-non-kid blogs. I don’t want to offend any sensibilities.
• Secondly, I will compile the list of participants and email you (in about a week) with the name, email address and url of your matched blog cross-pollinator.
• You then both compose your usual post for the date (Friday the 9th of November) in question and email each other the post text, or, ideally the code for the post text.

You can access the code for your post in most blog programs by clicking on the ‘view html’ or ‘code’ tab (to give Blogger and WordPress examples, respectively). Copy that and email it if you can.

I’ve tested emailing code between Blogger and WordPress and it seems to work. If finding the code is too tricky for you, simply compose your post in your usual blog program and copy it into your email and send it. That should also work okay, if my experiments are to be trusted.

Just please, please, please don’t use MS word to type your post as it seems to create an ungodly amount of irrelevant tags that will have your cross-poster cursing your name if one breaks.

• On the Cross pollination date (Friday the 9th of November, if you’re not keeping track), post the swapped post you received via email with the following additions:
• The title ‘A guest blog entry, bought to you by the Great Blog Cross-Pollination’.
• A request at the bottom of the post to guess the identity of the cross-pollinated blogger in the comments field and a link to their blog URL to find your post for the day. That way your regular readers can find you, even if it’s not your usual location.

That’s it. I hope I just made sense.

Voila, Blog cross pollination.

If you’re feeling all snazzy, also feel free to lift/upload the file for the bumblebee logo to stick on your site (the one below should open the file in a new window for you when you click on it to make things as easy as possible), and link this post to it. I, unfortunately, lack the technical know-how to confidantly post the code for the linked bumblebee at the top but if any of you have clever ideas on the latter, let me know.

Here (with a grain of salt) is what I think to be the code for the linked bumblebee. It works to generate a linked Bee for me if I insert it in the ‘edit code/html’ window of the editor (not the regular visual/compose window), but I’m not sure about other platforms. Just replace the [ and ] with < and > , of course:

[a rel="attachment wp-att-365" href="http://missionimpossibleinfertile.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/i-have-this-idea/" mce_href="http://missionimpossibleinfertile.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/i-have-this-idea/"][img width="299" src="http://missionimpossibleinfertile.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/blogxpol1.jpg" mce_src="http://missionimpossibleinfertile.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/blogxpol1.jpg" alt="blogxpol1.jpg" height="276" style="width: 291px; height: 234px" /][/a]

I realise that this post may simply prove, for once and for all, that I am not one of the cool kids and fizzle out to the chirping of uninterested crickets, but tohellwithit, I thought it was worth a shot.

Are you in?