

This week we catch up with Billy Doidge Kilgore (aka Wrap Daddy) to find out how this stay-at-home parent uses blogging as a creative outlet, in addition to caring for his adorable son Henry. Every day on the blog he invites readers to join him on the parenting learning curve, and maybe find a little bit of humor in everyday life.
This week we catch up with Yanique Chambers, of Kiddie Matters. Chambers is a mom of three and a clinical social worker dedicated to sharing creative ways to help develop children’s social skills, emotional skills and quality of character.
Regular visitors to Mamapedia may have noticed we recently removed Lists from the site. There were a few reasons for this decision. First and foremost, we want to keep the community focused on questions and answers and Voices posts. Reviewing site usage and page visits revealed Lists only made up 0.02% of the site’s pageviews. Put another way, for every 10,000 pages viewed on Mamapedia only 2 of them would be Lists.
Secondly, the Lists were a prime target for spammers. By removing the Lists we reduced the ability of spammers to affect the items appearing on your homepage. The “Moms Are Talking About Right Now” section of the homepage previously displayed any recent List activity, which was almost always spam. We removed those items and replaced them with more questions and one additional Voices post.
Whether you are a professional author, blogger, or even if you’ve never been published before -if you have something interesting and relevant to say we’d love to hear from you!
Here are some guidelines you should carefully follow when submitting your article. When you’re ready simply click the link at the end of this post.
Article Submission Guidelines
> Bring your point of view to the attention of a vast community of Moms eager to read and discuss your words.
> Bring site traffic from our site back to yours -allowing new visitors to discover you and your site.
> Raise the stature of your site by being published on one of the largest, most reputable, and most active Mom communities on the web today.
Once you are ready please submit your article by clicking on the link below. We will review all submissions and notify you within 30 days if your article has been accepted.
Due to the large volume of submittals we receive we are unable to reply to each submittal. Please remember that a great many factors are considered when determining which articles get accepted, so even if your article is not accepted it is not necessarily due to quality or value -It just may be that it is not for us at this particular time.
Thanks very much for your submission -we look forward to reading your article!
One of the ways we want to improve the content on Mamapedia is getting you, our users, to post questions as questions and make sure they are unique. Until recently there was no easy way to do that. In fact you weren’t even encouraged to do that. As a result the same questions have been asked again and again under very generic titles. For example, a search for “potty training” returns nearly 13,000 questions. The top 10 matching search results are all questions that used “Potty Training” as their title. Unfortunately “potty training” is a broad topic and not a question. If you read the top 10 potty training questions, they can be boiled down to three distinct questions: “At what age should you start potty training?”, “Can anybody recommend good potty training resources?” and “Does anyone have suggestions on how to handle potty training?” We could probably review the 13,000 potty training questions on the site and come up with a list of ten posts that cover 80% of the actual questions.
Starting today when you ask a question you will notice a few changes. First, you are encouraged to actually ask a question rather than post a generic subject. The text field previously labeled “Subject” is now labeled “Question” and the hint below that field now explains you should ask a question. The updated system also requires each question to contain at least three words.
After you enter your question a list of the top five similar search results will appear. Please take a look at those results to make sure your question hasn’t already been answered. Doing so should help you get your answers more quickly and will reduce duplicate questions on the site, helping everybody.
Finally, the text area formerly titled “My question” is now labeled “Additional details”. Use that text area to enter additional details specific to your question.
Sticking with the potty training example, here’s how this could work. In the question field you might enter “Does anyone have advice for potty training a 3 year old child when daycare won’t help?”. After reviewing the list of top five related search results, if you still want to ask your question you could continue by entering the following into additional details. “My three year old son goes to day care five days a week. We’ve been working on potty training for two weeks. He does great on the weekends but when he comes home from day care we seem to have lots of accidents. It seems like day care is making him regress. Has anybody experienced this before? What did you do to solve it?”
Nothing on the updated web page, other than the three word minimum on questions, will prevent you from posting your question. Even if there’s a duplicate question, you can still post yours. We don’t want to limit your ability to ask whatever questions you may have. We’re just trying to make search results more relevant so you can find what you’re looking for more easily.
Hopefully you will find the new “Ask A Question” process helpful and easy to use. Over time we think it will assist you in getting higher quality answer more quickly and easily.
Welcome to the new Mamapedia blog! I’d like to extend a big hello to the entire (3 million +) Mamapedia community on behalf of Get It. For a little background I’m Jacob Peebles, CEO / Co-founder of Get It. Late last year we acquired Mamapedia, LLC with a great deal of excitement and anticipation on where we could take the community and its awesome and lively user base.
So why the message now, many months later? Well, we’ve been heads down getting our arms around the system and putting a large amount of effort into bringing the technology from 2009 into 2015 (that’s like going from a Motorola RAZR flip phone to an iPhone 6:). It’s a large endeavor, and as many old and diehard Mama’s know, Mamapedia was once part of Mamasource, a mom-focused deals site. So there’s a lot to unravel along the way, and we are working daily towards doing just that.
We have a number of improvements right around the corner, and are listening to all the chatter on the site. Please stay patient as we work to release a new and vastly improved experience.
Again, we can’t be more excited about what’s in store for Mamapedia and its community, it’s time to give it the attention it deserves.
Thanks,
Jacob Peebles
CEO / Co-founder