Shine readers we love: Manage Your Life

My favorite thing about Shine since we launched a year ago is reading the smart, helpful, and often personal posts by our readers and regular contributors. Many come and stay for awhile, some drop in every once in a while, some leave and some come back. But Lylah Alphonse has blogged on Shine, first on Work + Money and more recently on Manage Your Life, since the beginning. And, oh, what a welcome voice she is in a space where we share ways to get through the day a little saner, a little smarter, with our priorities in tact and our life running as smoothly as possible.

Lylah writes The 36-Hour-Day blog on Work It,Mom! a wonderful online community for working moms, where she is managing editor. Her full-time gig: Writer and editor at The Boston Globe, no idle day job. Oh, and she is the mom and stepmom to five kids, ages 1 to 14. In her spare time (heh), you can find her writing for her personal blog, Write.Edit.Repeat.

Lylah loves about blogging what I think most of us love about it: “…the sense of community, and the immediate interaction you can have with your readers…I love being able to read and respond to comments, and to see what, for print, would have been the 'follow-up story' to be published days later develop in the comment section in a matter of hours as readers weight in on a blog post.”

There are so many reasons I love reading Lylah's posts, and the list starts with her excellent and dead-on writing. She writes from experience as a woman handling an over-full work/home plate, but she never complains and she never pretends that she has it all figured out. Sharing her experiences and advice, we have a better shot of working through our own overstuffed days with some needed perspective and some invaluable support. She knows what the juggle is all about.

We are so happy she finds time to blog on Shine, and here’s why she does:

“I enjoy being part of the community, and it feels good to be able to contribute posts that may help someone who is in a situation similar to mine. The best thing about the Manage Your Life section is that it covers so much ground, and by posting to it I have a chance to share what I've learned with many women -- and glean information from them as well. We all have so much to offer one another. Shine gives us a chance to share and communicate in a way that we couldn't just a few years ago. I'm excited to be a part of it as it continues to grow!”

There is no way I can call out all of the wonderful posts on Manage Your Life (and Work+Money and At Home before it) in the past year, and that is the shame of this humble attempt to thank all of the Shine readers who have come and continue to come to make this the unique community it is. I often say, a good day on Shine Manage Your Life is a day when I feature members’ well-written, from-true-experience and from-the-heart posts. So, keep them coming!

Micki LeSueur blogged at the start of Shine, sharing her sharp-witted look at the world of work and raising a family frugally at a time when maxed-out credit cards were the norm. More recently, firedfornow came on to share her experiences after being laid off and inviting others to share theirs. Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin have dispensed excellent, valuable advice to women who are seeking to return to the work force—a place many women will find ourselves at some point in our lives. And, we’re very lucky to have Marci Alboher here, writing about the way we are working in the new economy, blogging on Shine about career transition and digging up unparalleled job-search advice.

So, here’s to many more years of sharing what works in our work and home lives, and what doesn’t. That’s what this community, this corner of the Web for women, is all about. Blog on!