Tag Archives: blogging

Blog

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses.

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(You know when you write “excuses” three times it starts to look funny)

I write to give you three very good excuses as to why you have been left bored this week with mostly postings of research info and not much of my own personal thoughts this week.

  1. I recently switched positions at my work, but that has meant doing my old job and my new one both during this week (and likely next week). It’s caused some very long days, but I’ve enjoyed them a lot. My mind hasn’t been able to wander to other things so I haven’t had much to write about, nor the energy to do so.
  2. As I’ve mentioned, Soulforce’s visit to Wheaton College is coming up next weekend. I’ve been posting alumni stories as I’ve gathered them and posted them at Overflowmag.com. It’s been a very exciting project and it’s gotten a LOT of traffic, and hopefully some more will come before the events next weekend.
  3. This one is obvious:
    mindy

I hope you can understand. I’ll post some more this week if there is time. I might just start posting some old writings I’ve dug up recently. We’ll see.

Blog, podcast

April 9th, Weekly Update podcast

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The latest and greatest from Trying to Follow, now in podcast form. This 15 minute update fills you in on this week’s blog post and let’s you know if you want to spend time checking more of it out.


or download here.

For quick links to the stories:

And please leave your comments on the post, or if you like to talk leave a voicemail:
(775) 370-6924

Blog

I want to write a book

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One of my goals since High School was that I wanted to write a book before I finished college. I think I saw the popularity of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and thought, “I can write something like that” (not content, but quality).
My College Diploma came in the mail last summer officially calling an end to my college days and permanently marking that goal is “Incomplete.” If sulked in the defeat enough, and now it’s time for me to get up and try again. I want to write a book.
I think the longest papers I’ve ever written were 13 pages each (one in high school, one in college). The idea of writing something that qualifies as a “book” is intimidating to me. At the same time, blogging has helped me to see that it is very possible. My guess is if I just took everything that I have currently written on this blog it would make a decent sized book. If I can learn how to remain focused and have a clear goal in mind I think I can accomplish this.

A few things I would ask:

  1. Please give me a lot of feedback on my writing, I appreciate people’s thoughts and encouragement.
  2. If you have any advice or guides on how to go about this I’d love to hear it.
  3. I’m wondering if self-publishing or finding a publisher is the way to go, any ideas?
Blog

ads?

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I thought I’d inquiry my readership before I come to a decision on this.
I don’t spend an insane amount of time writing, but it would be nice to have some compensation. I currently have google adwords at http://iamnotashamed.net and they result in a check every once in a while. I’ve been considering putting the ads on here as well.
All that would mean is the simple text ads in the side bar and sprinkled through out the post. Hopefully not too distracting to regular readers, but a good financial option for myself.

Is anyone horribly opposed to me putting ads on this site?

That being said, would anyone consider “subscribing” if I made a subscription type of posting series? I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe sponsorship would be a better term. Like a small donation every so often from my regular readers? I’m not sure about that because I personally don’t like paying for anything (problem I know).

Hoping to hear my readers thoughts.

Blog

my thoughts on the site currently

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I’ve gone a good three months without spending too much time boring you with self-evaluation of how the site is going and things of that nature, so now the time has come again. Here is a list of things I’d like to share in no particular order.

  • Last month we were averaging well over 100 page views a day and nearly that many unique visitors. This is a definite increase and sign of new readership. Also, there are about 20+ current subscribers via email and RSS (according to feedburner) which is also a great increase.
  • According to my new stats tracker these are most popular posts this month:
    Most Popular Pages (by visits)
      Blog Page/Post Visits Comments
      Jesus and Immigrants: The Gosp… 108 0
      Journal of Christian Nursing I… 92 6
      5 Steps to Record a Skype Call… 78 1
      About ariah fine. 77 0
      free-will vs. predestination: … 57 2
  • As you can see my “About Ariah Fine” Page is one of the most popular, which made me realize I should probably spruce it up a little bit. I’ve added a few things but there’ll be more to come.
  • For the one or two people who don’t visit the site (use rss or email) I’ve added a little audio intro message on the sidebar, a myStatus section, a feature article spot, and one or two other things.
  • We officially have a Podcast Hotline that you can call and leave messages on (or if your interested, call and I’ll podcast with you). I’d LOVE to get some messages from those folks that read my blog, but I don’t know you at all. Please call and leave a message (don’t worry I won’t answer): (775) 370-6924 [first person to leave a message get’s a free t-shirt]
  • You’d be impressed by some of the google searches that this site shows up on the front page for:
    tniv
    “geez magazine” Chicago
    Justice Clothing
    Radiant Magazine
    stores with sweatshops
    would take nothing for my journey now, maya angelou summaries
  • I think I’m getting ready to fix up the top banner on here to something more personal and significant.
  • Comments on my post have been lacking, which makes me anxious to try and write something fairly controversial. any ideas?
  • I’m unsure whether people are currently enjoying the one post a day thing, or if you would rather I write more?

That’s all I can think of at the moment, but I’m sure there is more that’ll come later.

Web Links

Tech Friday: Bookmarklets are so cool

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You’ve all used and become quite familiar with “bookmarks,” but I’d like to introduce you to some tools that will rock your world: Bookmarklets. They are like Piglet is to pigs, similar in nature, but smarter, talking and half dressed.

The best way to explain bookmarklet’s is to just show you some of my favorites. They function just like bookmarks, but they are more like an arsenal of tools cause they do cool things. If you like one, just drag the link into your toolbar. Here are my current can’t do without bookmarklets.

  1. Library Look-up: This is nice little bookmarklet that makes it easy to browse Amazon looking at books and with one click see if it’s in your local (for Nashville folks) library. It pulls the ISBN number from the site and checks in the library catalog. (If you live someplace other then Nashville you can find or make your own here.)
  2. %5cn’+pjwTitle+’%5cn

    %5cn’+gS5aUb+’%5cn

    %3c/textarea%3e

    ‘);void(close()) }”>QUOTE: This one is essential for you frequent bloggers. I tweaked a similar bookmarklet so it works specifically for WordPress

    html and it also has “From [title of the page your quoting from with hyperlink]” above the quote. Making quoting easy.

  3. imageshack. It keeps you from hogging other people’s bandwidth to show pictures. (Please don’t use this for ill)
  4. TinyURL: Takes the huge long url of the site your looking at and makes it into a TinyURL in one click, saves the cutting and pasting time.

Those are the ones I use regularly. If your looking for more you can find many at bookmarklets.com

Blog

Some reasons why I can’t find the time.

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I keep on having aspirations to post all sorts of long and thoughtful thoughts on this here blog, but the time keeps on slipping away. Here are a few of the things keeping me busy:

1. Work, and thoughts and research about work-related stuff.
2. Cutting up carrots, doing dishes, and cooking chicken.
3. Getting the oil changed.
4. Cleaning my desk.
5. Working on my taxes.
6. sleeping in.
7. going to bed before midnight.

There is time on the horizon though don’t you worry. And I have this feeling that when I do post again, you’ll be there. Now that is a comforting thought.

Blog

Increased web traffic

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I’ve been struggling with whether or not I’ve been posting too much and I’m interested in hearing your feedback.
I did take a chance to look at some other feedback, my webstats.
Minus the weeks where I forgot to add the webstats code, it seems like I’ve averaged a little over 100 unique visitors a week (I’m not quite sure how it defines unique). Anyways, this week we had over 248 unique visitors, 578 page views, 136 first time visitors and 58 returning visitors. That’s not too bad, at least better then what I was looking for.

But seriously, What do you think of the amount of posts this week?

Blog

At least one new years resolution.

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For my faithful readers. This is my new years resolution for you all to see:

Become a better blogger.

I know there is a big difference between a personal journal type blog (like my xanga is meant to be) and a more professional, thoughtful, and informative blog (like I’d like this to be). Truth is I’m not very good and doing the later and I could use some help. I’m going to make an effort in that direction this next year. Maybe I’ll develop a solid and interested reader base. Maybe not.

For now it’s time to work on another goal, go to bed earlier.

Blog

Performancing for Firefox

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This is my first post from my cool new tool Performancing. 
Basically I’m writing in the bottom half of my firefox browser, like this:

What is so great about this is it makes it easy to blog about something from another website and easily view what you are writing and cut and paste as necessary.  It works for a number of different blogs so you might want to try it out. What’s great is that you can easily post the same post to three or four different blogs if you wanted to.

[performancing] via Lifehacker