Having your health without wealth isn’t a lot of fun, but it’s probably even worse to have wealth without good health. Life is all about balance and that’s the theme for this week’s blogosphere tour!

Darren Barefoot starts out with an interesting tale about how someone on Reddit became an author overnight. It started out as a story on the AskReddit section, but it has since grown to have huge potential as a full e-book or physical book. Behold the power of the Internet!

Neil Patel of Quick Sprout offers the Mark Zuckerberg guide to building great Facebook profiles. Many people aren’t leveraging the popular social network to its full potential. To do that, you need to attract as much attention to yourself as possible and, hopefully, it’s the good kind of attention.

Buzz Bishop turns to the world of tumultuous finance, discussing his experience with managing his TFSA. He initially invested in safe stocks like Apple and Lululemon, but in going for the homerun, he saw nearly a 50% drop from peak to valley. If you’re going to manage your own portfolio, perhaps it’s best to keep it simple and think long.

Jennie Yuen turns some conventional wisdom on its head. We’ve become an overly medicated society, so have common pain relievers become more detrimental than useful? They’ve been linked to all sorts of negative side effects, including nausea, unusual fatigue, and easy bruising, as well as (ironically) headaches and joint pain.

Michael Fortin has a deeply personal story to share with us about his mother. She’s a fiercely loyal woman who would kindly help anyone who asked. Her health has taken a turn for the worse, reminding Michael that life is precious and we should all live every day as if it were our last. You never know when that could very well be true.

Twitter is a fantastic tool to use for marketing your company, its products, and its services. It’s a great way to get the word out about what you do, as well as about any specials or promotions you may have. However, you need to be mindful of when you send these out.

The time of day can have a dramatic impact on the relative success of a “promotional” tweet. If you have a restaurant that largely caters to the late night crowd, it’s unlikely you’ll get much attention by announcing something at 8am. Sending out the message at 9pm may not be the best either, since these people may already be out.

There is no such thing as the perfect time for every tweet. Instead, it depends on a number of factors and that’s why you should track the relative success of your tweets. If you are sending out a link, use different tracking URLs and send out the tweets at different times of the day. After several of these, you should start to see a trend emerge as to when the tweets are the most viewed and when the links are clicked the most often.

As with any other aspect of marketing and advertising, getting the right metrics can make a huge difference on whether your promotion succeeds or fails. And the time of day for a tweet can play a huge role in that.

When you run any kind of blog, it’s important that you update it on a regular basis. This also means that it helps when you have an ongoing list of post topics, ensuring that you always have something to write about.

Saving these topic ideas as “draft” posts, sometimes with some quick bullet points to jog your memory, can be very helpful, but it’s not always convenient to access all your drafts. That’s where the simple yet effective Drafts Dropdown plugin comes into the picture.

Created by Crowd Favorite and Alex King, well known names in the world of WordPress development, Drafts Dropdown grants you faster access to your draft posts and pages. Assuming that you are logged in, you can see the drafts pulldown menu from every page on your blog via that gray toolbar that stays persistent across your site. It’s that simple.

Head on over to the WordPress Plugin Directory to get the FAQ, installation instructions, and screenshots for this plugin. It is also there that you can access the free download link. The current version is compatible with WordPress 3.2+.

When the recession hit the international economy a couple of years ago, many people who had previously held comfortable positions were suddenly laid off. For many, this represented an opportunity to get into business for themselves.

An article in the New York Times last month documents the experiences of some of these people who went from white collar workers to small business owners. While their original jobs were seemingly stable (plan A), the move to small business ownership has been quite rocky (plan B).

It’s a rude awakening for many who see small business ownership as a way to gain more control and more freedom, since entrepreneurship can oftentimes bring greater stress and longer hours. As such, some of these people are now looking toward possible plan Cs, especially since the financial stability of owning a small business isn’t quite the same as getting a steady salary from a conventional job.

There is absolutely something to be said about sticking it out and fighting through the rough times. It is only through perseverance that you can achieve any real success. At the same time, you also have to recognize when changes need to be made and the move to plan C may be the right thing to do.

One of the worst things that can happen when you are working on an important project is to suddenly experience a power outage. While a standard surge protector will protect your computer against surges, it is not at all useful when there is a power outage.

For instances like that, you need to invest in a UPS or uninterrupted power supply. Essentially, these devices work like surge protectors, except they also house an internal battery that will keep supplying electricity in the instance of a power outage. This particular example is the CyberPower CP850AVRLCD, which offers 850 volt-amps or 510 watts of power.

Depending on the power needs of your computer system and its connected peripherals, this will have a varying battery life in the case of a power outage. It also comes with intelligent LCD diagnostics, allowing you to monitor everything from that display. It is ultra quiet and comes with nine outlets, as well as protection for your RJ11/45 and coaxial connections. This is great for workstations and personal electronics.

This model is currently on sale on Amazon.ca for $100.98, which is 15% off the regular price and includes free shipping. If you need more or less power, Amazon also has other CyberPower UPS offerings for you to consider at varying price points.

Creativity and inspiration can come from all sorts of different places, but you still need a place on the web where you can collect, store, and display your inspirations. Many artists prefer to use BlueFur web hosting for this purpose.

One such visual artist is Sharon Erlichman, based out of Toronto. She does both painting and photography, providing two distinctly different venues for expressing her creativity. On her website, you can look at both types of artwork with extensive galleries, complete with social integration for sharing with your friends.

The Dreamscapes paintings are quite phenomenal, as are the architecture photos. A fuller gallery of these images can also be accessed from the site, as well as her artist statement that offers insight into her creative process.

Do you use BlueFur to host your websites? Let us know and we can feature you in a future blog post. Send an email message to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website URL, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.