Bloglovin’

Bloglovin’ is a great app that allows you to subscribe to blogs you like, regardless of what platform they are on.

My blog is on WordPress, which is very good at letting you follow other blogs on WordPress, but if there are blogs on other blog platforms then it can be quite difficult to follow them as easily as it is on WordPress. Bloglovin’ changes that. Instead of going to loads of different sites I have bookmarked in my web browser, I just log onto my phone and see all the blogs I have subscribed too.

It tells me if they have posted any new blogs and gives me a preview of the blog. If it is something I would like to bookmark and read later, I can edit it to mark it as unread. If it’s a post I’m not really interested in reading, I will mark it as read. That when I am looking for a particularly blog I am interested, such as a recipe, I don’t have to spend ages trying to work out where I had seen it, because I know it’s in one of my unread blogs, which are marked on the left hand side of my screen.

I also use it to track that my blogs are being posted correctly, because sometimes I have planned a month of blogs in advance and I just want to make sure they are working.

If you are interested in following me below (so it looks a little less embarrassing that I am the only person following my own blog) you can do so on the link below. Or if you are just looking at a more convenient way to organise blogs you love to read. Click the link below!

Match.com

Recently I was pressured by someone to get out there and start dating again. To be honest, I am happy as I am and I am not unhappy being single. I am at a busy juncture in my life and right now I just don’t have the time for a relationship. I should never have listened to the person in the first place but I guess I had a moment of weakness. I ended up joining a dating website, more specifically Match.com.

To say it was an interesting experience was an understatement, after the first weekend (2 days to be precise) I wanted to come off the site and I submitted a request to get my month subscription money back. I stayed on the website for until the next weekend because Match.com had not processed my request. Eventually they did and I was able to get my month subscription money back. If you do try a dating site read the terms and conditions, normally you have 14 days to rethink your subscription and change your mind and get a refund.

It’s not really until joining Meetup and Match.com that I experienced how Sexist some people truly are.

I wanted to share some of the messages I got whilst on the site for a week.

Person A: Can I ask you a ? Xx

Me: yeah

Person A: Can u c my pics x

Me: yes i can

Person A: Give us a kiss x

Person B: Hey Emma loving the pic looking amazing are those eyes genuine Dior or are Matalan getting loads better? So how did you end up on here Emma because you stand out on here like a Ferrero Rocher in Aldi. Not much to your profile either luckily for you Peter Andre told me all about you and I agree with what he said Wow Wowa wow Wowa wow. So Miss Emma how’s your week going? X

Person C: If you were a chicken, you’d be impeccable

Person D seemed to think all women were just obsessed by fashion and that was the only thing there tiny little minds could get their head around. A woman’s life therefore revolved around making themselves look pretty for a Friday and Saturday night, so naturally the person wanted to know what I would wear on such an occasion.

Person E asked why I didn’t have much on my profile and asked if I liked being mysterious. I jokingly agreed. His reply was to say that the thought of me being mysterious made him currently very hard and he was looking for a life partner and I would be that person.

The person that scared me the most was Person F. Person F was a journalist and he told me what he did and then asked what I did. As I was getting fed up with some of the people on the site I didn’t want to go specifically into detail with what I did, so I made a vague comment. This guy then went off on one saying I was rude. I replied back that he was incredibly rude and I didn’t want to share the details of what I did. He accused me of being childish, so I told him what I did and showed that I was very intelligent and had a clear career path in contrast to his rude assumptions about me. I then blocked him on the sight – only for him to stalk me on Social media and contact me through Facebook. This was the final straw and I couldn’t stay on the website anymore.

But there are also the wolves in Sheep’s clothing. Person G seemed really nice and sweet, gone through a divorce quite young because his wife cheated on him and he was a single parent. Only he wasn’t quite, he co-parented and had his daughter three and a half days a week. This would be reduced when she started primary school. He then moaned about all the women in his office who constantly take time off, because as a single parent he used his holiday to look after his sick child and basically the reason women didn’t make enough money or get promoted was because they were lazy slackers who constantly took time off because they couldn’t manage their children properly. And it has nothing to do with not all men taking an active role in their child’s life after the breakdown of a relationship and that sometimes women are the only caregiver in their child’s life. He seemed a nice guy until you got to know him.

It’s not the most fun experience I have ever in my life. There were many others that made comments but these were the ones that really stuck out. Another really prominent feature is that there on men on there who clearly have no interest in getting into a relationship and just want to get their leg over as many women as possible and they maybe see a dating site as a classic way to get potentially vulnerable women to sleep with them. It’s a really sad reality that dating sites aren’t always a nice place.

Will I ever use one again? No!

Duolingo

Duolingo is available as both a website and an a free app for mobiles and tablets. It is an app that allows you to learn a language and I have to say it is absolutely fantastic. I love this app. It’s easy to use, no advanced knowledge of the language is required and it is brilliant thought out.

You start with either a basic level or you can take a short test – the test will then place you where it thinks you should go.

Duolingo is like a tree. you start off at a base and translate sentences which are broken down into lessons. Once you’ve finished all the lessons in a particular skill – that skill turns gold. Once you have completed a line of skills – a new line of skills appears. Each skill is a particularly topic – these start off easy like Basics and progress to harder ones like clothings, education and Verbs: Modal and Idioms.

The website and the app are slightly different and I recommend you use both. Firstly the app has a word pairing feature which I really like, it also has a sentence builder from preselected words. The website has an answer against the clock feature – which is really good at building up association with a word.

If you don’t understand something there is a forum where you can make a comment and others can help explain something to you. There is also (online) a skill overview which talks about the particular skill and gives you an overview of the grammar rules. The main why you learn with Duolingo thought is through try and error – like a child does.

The app is designed designed to get you from going from a complete beginner to relatively comfortable with a language. It doesn’t help towards giving you conversational skills – but it certainly helps you build up a vocabulary and increase your understanding of grammar. It’s not a complete programme for learning languages and you really do need to supplement it with other ways of learning a language. However considering it’s price tag (or nothing) it is certainly one of the best free ways to improve your language.

Meetup

I just thought I’d to a review of a website I’ve been using for a couple of months. Meetup is a site designed to organise different group events for people to meet up. Each group can have a particular interest and the idea is you join a group with people who like the same interests as you and you go on social events together.

I have joined a couple of meetups and since joining I have now become an organiser for one of the groups.

I have eclectic ideas and a lot of them I do not share with my friends. There have been things I have often wanted to go and watch at the cinema, or historical places to visit – but my friends have not been interested in going. I am also learning German, so it is nice to meet people who speak German to get use to hearing German and begin to understand it – after all you cannot learn a language on your own.

It’s a nice site, because if I feel like doing someone one night and none of my friends are available I can always see what’s going on within meetup and join a meetup. I’ve met some really lovely people in the process and have had a few good trips out meeting people who have the same interests as me.