Postcards from the Funny Farm

Limiting yourself to 3 priorities on your “todo” list can really make you more productive. I had a lot to do today. In fact, it was so much it was quite overwhelming. I decided to take on my pool first. It has this very odd looking green algae growing on the sides and bottom in some places. My week last week was so busy all I did was look at it grow. Today I had to sweep it off with a brush. It took me about an hour. Anyway, this post isn’t about my tough life cleaning my pool :) I wanted to talk about prioritizing in direction of goals.

The human mind can only take in about 3 things in one sitting. For that reason, you shouldn’t make lists longer than three. That doesn’t mean all you will get done is 3 things, because those can be like categories. ie;

1) Chores (pool, floors, clean out car, paint girls’ room, etc.)
2) Computer (write post for www.damienriley.com, comment on blogs, look up vitamin deficiency info for Postcards … etc)
3) Exercise

You get the idea. Reducuing my lists and priorities in direction of 3 goals (or less) has helped me achieve many of my dreams in life. Also, sometimes it just gave me that “I DID IT!” deep breath and feeling when I went to bed at night. Without goals, you’ll never get anywhere. But without priorities (3 or less I recommend) You’ll just get overwhelmed. It’s kind of like trying to put on a steering wheel with no steering rack.

If you’re like me, you love the mall and its food court. There are 10-15 choices on what to eat every time you go there. “What the heck do I get?” is the question I always ask myself: Kun Pao Chicken? Pizza at SBarro? McDonalds? A sub? With the shining neon signs and the wonderful aromas all mixed around me, I have really hard time making a choice.

Blogging is often the same way for me.

With so many items begging for my attention, what should I write on? I have literally sat for 20-30 minutes before in front of my laptop screen before unable to decide what was worth writing about. So how do I handle this? Simple … I limit my choices. I have gone through after 400 posts and analyzed the tags and categories I assigned the most. Then, I’ve made those into my categories and resolved to blog within those most popular, and obviously the ones I like to write the most, posts. Then, for myself not for my readers, I developed and wrote down 4 kinds of posts that I write on this blog. They are:

1. Journal entries,
2. PayPerPost (or blogging for hire),
3. Howto and Reviews, and
4. short “Tumblelog” styled posts or “asides.

Now, I don’t get as overwhelmed. I ask myself if I have done too much of one or the other and it makes it easy for me to limit my choices in what to write on. This frees me up to focus completely on blogging quality posts. If you watch kids learning and playing you will see the same thing in both instances: they are focused on one thing at a time. Note the picture of my daughter learning and playing below. But we aren’t kids anymore. We can’t blog it all. As bloggers we must be disciplined and choose to have only one item in front of us at a time. All other things are a distraction to good blogging.

How do you discipline yourself to write good blog posts?

This is a continuation of my prior article on categories. It seems I’ve gathered more information on tags and I feel it would be helpful to my readers’ seo if I shared it. We are moving toward a tagging net generation more and more it seems. Wordpress now has internal tagging and I read about it being on other platforms. So what is the difference between tags and categries? The simple answer is: tags are a lot of work!

As a Problogger article points out: Categories are linear filing of your blog posts and tags are “granular.” This means your posts have better seo if you category and tag them as opposed to just categorizing them.

If you look at human communication from a distance you hear dissonant terms pop up within any given conversation. Someone may be talking about transportation and throw in Osama bin Laden as a related anecdote. Someone searching for a post on him might not reach that article in a transportation category unless it was tagged. I hope that made sense.

Since Wordpress 2.3 came out I have started the often tedious process of tagging all my old posts (well, the most popular ones anyway). The simple tagging plugin as well as the advanced tagging plugin are a big help for this since they generate clickable suggestions. From what I can gather, Google will crawl up to 50 tags without flagging. This means you shouldn’t worry about having too many tags. I would be concerned #1 in the tags’ relevance to the content. After that I would look for the most common tags both internally and externally as suggested by the plugins. Do you spend time tagging your posts?

The blogger over at Writing Aspirations makes some hefty points about blogging in 2007. Some I agree with, and some I am on the fence about. At any rate, it inspired me to share my history with the internet and writing, it’s been a long road that some bloggers might find helpful, if not interesting. Here we go:

I started writing on a personal website in 1995. I started it free at Geocities, and I didn’t even have my own computer. I accessed the page through California State University Fullerton’s computer lab. As I recall they had MAC’s. I’ve since become a PC guy. Geocities separated sites into categories based on broader interests. Because mine was literature and writing (I was an English major in my last semester at the time), they gave me an “Athens” addy. I remember advancing through the other websites and finding sites ranging from highly busy with too many graphics moving to standard written sites where the personal webmaster seemed more conservative. I remember my first webpage was a diatribe on what my named meant (Damien) and a history of how the “Omen” portrayed it in a false bad light. Seems like 100 years ago! Geocities had an extensive help system that taught me basic html, ie: item in bold and how to make a link, colors, pictures, etc. It was web design for the average joe, and I used it to post the little things going on in my life (and occasional big ones). It was so exciting to learn new tricks, like how to post an animated GIF next to something, how to use a background image, etc. I sent my updated pages with “ecolumns,” as I used to call them, to family and friends on my address list. It was a great way to connect with the people I knew and loved. While with Geocities, I also learned a lot of code secrets from Dynamic Drive.

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I discovered phpBB forums.? These replaced owner’s manuals and personal websites. I was, at one time, a posting member of 20 forums. My handle was “jeeptravel,” and you could find me in a search posting on anything from High Desert issues to plumbing to Jeep repair. They were great, but my interest waned when posts seemed to be lost after a few replies. There was no permanence to forums, it got boring. I guess it depends on the forum you frequent, but the ones I went to seemed to dribble down to a core of members that weren’t always as interesting as the technology of the forum made you think. This is an important point when considering the blog question of 2007. I started a few forums of my own through PhP. When you purchase a personal website from a server host like Top Class Host (one of the best and cheapest I’ve found), they automatically include “fantastico” which allows the user to instantly install a forum, blog, or any number of awesome sql database driven items. I use them now to host my blog. Specifically I use WordPress software included in the hosting package. I pay $6.95/month and it is well worth it for the freedom of tweaking I have with my blog and storage on my website. That brings us to the state of blogging in 2007.

Before starting my own “not free” hosted site, I blogged off and on for several years at blogger.com

blogger.com is an awesome free service, but there are MANY great free blogging services out there to check out. Here is a list if you are interested (not in order of anything special):

Live Journal
Yahoo! 360
Windows Live Spaces
Bravenet
Geocities
wordpress.com (The free version/ web-based)

The list could go on and on . . .

Now for my point (sorry for the long history, thanks for reading this long).

Speaking to the question of the blog phenom being a passing fad: I must answer with a cop-out, yes and no.

Yes, the trend of signing up for a free blogging service and writing posts like “Yikes I broke a nail,” will inevitably fade out.

It will grow boring for folks just as MySpace has begun to fade in its popularity. The veneer of technological “wow” will wear off (hmmm three w’s in a row) and these folks will either A) continue to keep their blog as a way to communicate with contacts, or B) Shut it down or abandon it in favor of some new technological toy (I don’t know what that will be just yet).

On the other hand, I must reply “no,” it is not a passing trend because great writers are using it to create “ecolumns” for family and friends more than ever before. It is, in essence, a literary renaissance revival. Everywhere across the globe people are writing. It is a phenomenon of communication . . . like the free website was with geocities and other providers but on a WAYYYYY wider scale. Those who remain blogging through 2007 will be those people who are both good, thoughtful writers AND who are also internet savvy. You have to be with blogging. Keeping up with terms like “trackback” and “ping” is a tough endeavor, if you don’t like computers. But a little interest goes a long way.

So what will the blogosphere become? Here’s my image: A highly and daily more refined set of regular posters who enjoy writing about the world, either in a narrowly defined category, or in a “personal blog” format AND who are internet savvy.

It has been said that topic specific blogs are the only ones that will flourish in the future. I disagree. I think the personal blog and the topic specific ones have their place and there is plenty enough audience out there for the good ones.

~~~~Blog Carnival Submissions below~~~~

Corey presents Web 2.0 posted at myopiniononeverything.com.