I’ve turned into a Google Monster, which sounds like I grew fur and got a gig on sesame street, but in reality it just means that over the past 7 months I have increased my daily Google inquiries to a slightly insane amount and there seems no end in sight.

I thought I knew what I was in for. You get pregnant, you have all the pregnancy symptoms people talk about and then at the end you painfully push out a crying baby. But every day I think of about 800 new questions and I can’t understand how my Mom survived a pregnancy without trusty Google to hold her hand.

The majority of my questions run along the lines of “is this normal?” because there are LOTS of gory symptoms you never heard about in Gym class and some that even the baby books don’t cover. Is it normal for blue veins to appear all along my torso? Is it normal for my nipples to look like that? Is it normal to throw up only when I eat something orange-coloured? The shared stories and anecdotes on the various pregnancy forums and medical sites have been beyond helpful.

Being a first time parent also leads to many questions asked of my friend Google as well. What is the difference between the free prenatal classes at Peel Region vs the expensive ones at the hospital? What the hell is a birth plan and do I need it? Is a TENS unit for pain relief any good in labour or is it not strong enough? What kind of stroller is best? Do we donate the cord blood to research, or a public bank? I counted and I have already Googled 14 things just today.

One thing I want to pass on here, though, is that even though Google may be a wealth of information, I know I cannot take anything I read on the net as fact. There are some questions I need to save for my Doctor alone (when he isn’t whirling in and out of our 3-minute appointments), but Google has helped me find some truly great pregnancy forums and hear stories of real deliveries and connect with others in the same boat as I am, which is a comfort I can’t imagine doing without.

How has the Internet helped or changed YOUR birth experience? Or did you give birth before the advent of the mighty web and how did you cope? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

But it’s not from Etsy.

Etsy Sellers have been asking (crying, shouting) for an RSS feed for our shops that is useful to us. For the unaware, an RSS feed for an Etsy shop is like a news ticker that will notify anyone following it when you post a new item. But an RSS feed is useless if it doesn’t entice your followers to click through to your shop, or if it provides so little info about the new listings that people stop bothering to look at it. The current Etsy RSS feed is just that – a boring list of your item titles and descriptions with no picture of the item and no price. A fine format for news, not for a shopping site.

Enter akendall1, who is not actually an Etsy Seller, he is an Etsy Member married to an Etsy Seller (soapdeli, to be exact) and I guess he figured getting involved with Etsy was his only chance of ever seeing his wife again, a lament many an etsy spouse can relate to. He wrote a beatiful app that gives you an RSS feed address to replace the Etsy RSS address that will show your listed items including pictures, prices and (wow!) an “Add to Cart” button right in the feed! And it somehow grabs my shop name as Sixth & Elm, not sixthandelm as the Etsy RSS does – much nicer looking.

How do you get this fabulous feed? The address for your “superfeed,” let’s call it, is hosted on the Google app engine and to access it you just use http://etsyfeeder.appspot.com/?userid=5034807 (replacing 5034807 with your Etsy user ID number) as your Etsy RSS url instead of the one you get from your shop. It is true that anyone subscribing to your feed via the button in your shop will not see this new feed, but you can promote the new feed address on your blog or twitter to get people to follow it, or import it into facebook, twitterfeed, indiepublic or any widget that accepts an RSS feed import. Please see the accompanying forum post on the new app, which includes info on what to do if you get a server error the first time you try to go to the address (just hit reload a few times – it means your shop is big).

Hello? Etsy Tech? Are you taking notes?

To ensure that your Etsy items are showing up in relevant product searches, you must periodically upload your items to Google Base. I didn’t know about this, but I have been hearing a lot about it on the Etsy forums, so I did some digging and found this on the Let’s Ets website:

Google Base is a service that lets you tell Google about the items you have for sale. After your items have been loaded in, they will appear above the normal search results for relevant Google searches. Our GoogleBase formatter takes item details from your Etsy store and converts them into a format that Google understands.

So, the info we upload will be included when someone makes a Google Product Search (www.google.com/products):

Or above a regular search as a “teaser:”

Let’s walk through the process for doing this using the handy formatter provided by Let’s Ets:

1. Go to www.letsets.com
2. In the “Google Base Formatter” box, enter your Etsy username and click “Fetch My Items”
3. Scroll down to “Step Two” under your item list and click “Download Bulk File” to download this list as an XML file. A window will Pop-up asking you to open or save this file. Chose “Save to Disk” and chose where on your computer you would like to save it. If you have your computer set to download directly to your desktop, then you will not be given the option to save anywhere and the file will be ready for you on your desktop. If you are given a choice of where to save your file, make sure it is being saved as an XML file (.xml). It should automatically save as an XML file named after your username. For example, mine would be sixthandelm.xml
4. Go to www.google.com/base
5. If you do not used GoogleBase before, go to the right side of the screen and choose “Data Feed” from the options available (“One Time,” “Data Feed” or “API”)
6. Sign in with your Google Account, or create a new one if you do not have one yet. If you have a Gmail, blogger, or Picasa account (or a few others) you already have a Google account.
7. Accept the Terms of Service, if you agree with them
8. Fill in whatever profile items you want, such as your website, and click “Next”
9. It will take you to the next step automatically if this is your first upload, but if not, you will have to click on the “My Items” tab and chose your Data Feed, or “New Data Feed” if you didn’t get one made yet.
10. Set up your Data Feed: Chose the Country (we will need to use United States since our file has the items listed in USD) and chose “Products” for item type. Product items will need to be updated every 30 days (or earlier if your items change quickly) or they will expire. Chose GoogleBase for the feed type and enter the name of the file in the “Name of Feed” space (For mine I would put sixthandelm.xml). Click “Register Data Feed” at the bottom of the page.
11. On the next page you will see in the middle column Manual:upload file – Click on the upload file link. Browse to your saved XML file and click “Upload and Process.” The status column will change to “Processing,” which will take a few minutes to a few hours to finish. You cannot use the scheduler, listed above the manual upload link since Etsy’s RSS feed does not give images (or prices, I think).
12. Once the feed has finished processing, the page (when you refresh) will show either “Success” or “Failed” (or a Partial Success message). If the upload was successful, you can now click on the “My Items” tab and view your active items. If it has failed, but sure to click the details link next to “Failed” to find out why. Help can be found in the GoogleBase help, or by searching the Etsy forum for “GoogleBase Errors” to see problems other sellers has come up against.
13. When you want to repeat the upload, in 30 days (or less) you can keep the same file name and data field name and GoogleBase will just replace the old data, saving the number of clicks for each item as it recognizes that the new upload is a renew of any repeat items.

All Done!!

I know you’re there. I see you on my feedburner, can list you on my sitemeter. I know you’re reading this and I would love to hear your thoughts through your comments, so I have added two new plugins to this blog to help encourage some comment-love from you all.

CommentLuv is a cool little plugin that I have activated but have not had the chance to try out yet (because no one has left a comment since I activated it an hour ago) that will list the title of your latest blog post under your comment by grabbing it from your feed. This adds a little free advertising for your blog when others read my comments and if they see something interesting they can click on the title and be taken right to your site! Cool eh? You can opt out of this when you leave a comment, if you like.

NoFollowFree is a controversial plugin that I have installed nonetheless that removes the “no follow” attribute from the link to your blog you provide in your comments. Not sure what all that means? the No Follow attribute prevents the link to your blog that you leave in comments being added to the list of incoming links for your site (like the ones used to calculate you Google or Alexa page rank, or your Technorati authority). It is controversial because one could theoretically inflate their link score by leaving a ton of comments, but I have included it because if you leave me a comment I think you should get a tiny reward and besides, I don’t think any of my subscribers would try to inflate their score, and I would un-approve your comments if I thought you were. Like the activist group says: “Fight Spam, not bloggers.”

So here is some incentive for you lurkers to leave a thought or two! And yes, I am guilty of lurking too, but I am working on it! I plan on leaving a bunch of comments in future to help share the love.

At first, it was hard to work out how to feel about it all, until I stopped trying to figure out how to feel and just let myself feel whatever emotion came. The first emotion to come was sadness and a deep sense of loss. Trying to tell myself it was impossible to miss something you never had was pointless, because the hopes and dreams we had for the little life in me were so strong it felt like they had crossed the barrier from intangible thoughts into real things, something we could see and touch… and lose. It was our first one, the first pregnancy, and it was jarring to see the ball we had started rolling toward making our own little family stop suddenly at the crest of the hill.

I ran the gambit of emotions then: guilt, despite being told that a life lost this early was a life doomed from conception by its own genetic code; apprehension, about what was to come next, medically and emotionally; surprise, at the number of women I know who have endured the same and were able to share; gratitude, toward the family & friends who offered support and advice; acceptance, that this was not avoidable and fated in the stars, or the genes or the heavens or wherever this stuff is decided, and finally, determination to not let this set back our plans for a family any longer than medically necessary which sounds clinical, but it helped to have a “goal.”

So I guess this post probably explains my blogging absence over the last few weeks, but now that things are clearer I want to share as much of my experience as I can for those enduring the same. I am the type of person who will Google something to like this to learn about other’s experiences and the stories I read did me good so I would like to post my own and offer a forum for others to comment on anything sort of related. Since all the girly details are not for the faint of heart, I’ll be posting my stories about the medical and emotional progression on a separate page, apart from the main blog and will post the link once I get it up and running. I encourage everyone who wants (warning boys, if you pale at the word “menstruation” you’d better stick with the TSN website) to post their comments or stories too.

One night, about 7 years ago, while crying on Sarah’s shoulder about a break-up (or some similar teenage tragedy) so said a simple thing to me: “It gets better.” That was all, but it was the most encouraging thing to hear while my head was full and my heart was sad and it felt like it would hurt forever. I had already heard countless encouraging comments from everyone but this simple thought stuck on because it was simply stated enough to poke through my grief-induced stupor, and because when you feel sad it feels like it will never end and that is scarier than the loss itself. So I repeated to myself “It’ll get better.” And it did. Hang in there.