wayne on July 5, 2008
Not only was the past week busy for me, but I also learned and discovered a few things about myself that I thought I would share with everyone as part of my weekly update.
I've been trying to push myself hard these past months. One goal I made for myself is to have a post prepared for every single day. While I have succeeded in doing that for some time now, I've come to the realization that the thoroughness and quality of these posts have been a little lackluster. I don't want to write entries just for the sake of meeting this goal, which could easily happen when in a pinch. I know I can do better than what I've been doing, so I've decided to push myself in a different way.
I need to slow myself down and put more focus into what I'm writing. As such, my posts will not be coming every single day like they have been. Yes, I may find something that piques my interest and do a quick write-up on it, but for the most part however, I will try to put more focus into each and every post I do.
With that said, let's take a look at the prior weeks activities.
Last Week in Review
The whirlwind that was the prior week started with a post about my tattooed 'tosies' as Dana Wyzard at Life Is Good blog has so lovingly called them. Side note: If you have some time, you need to read her blog. She's quite funny and entertaining.
Gary at Threescore Plus Ten tagged me with meme about seven personal things nobody knows about me. It give you a little insight into my head and some things I've experienced. Perhaps a little too much.
Monday's post was written out of frustration of the constant need to change a password on a system that I need to use, but I feel doesn't need to have a forced password reset trigger in place.
Later that evening, I had scaled down my 30 minute Skaterbuilt video in response to a request from CDevroe, an evangelist for Viddler, to create a shorter version so that it might have a better chance to make it to the homepage. I hopped on that opportunity and spent some time that evening to create a 3 minute version of the video showing the highlights of that day. I hope to see it reach the popularity it needs to make it to the homepage on Viddler.com. You can help by visiting the video post on viddler and commenting, favorite it or adding it to your social networks. Thanks in advance! My hope is that more pool owners will open their pools for skaters when they are going to be re-plastering the pool anyway.
The post on July 1st found me playing around with the PollDaddy.com survey tool. I have already done a poll to test things out, and thought I would give the PollDaddy.com survey a whirl. What do you think of these tools from PollDaddy after having seen both the poll and survey?
I received a joke on one of the social sites I frequent from someone that didn't really read the joke, or they felt it was alright to spread around. I made a big deal of this because I felt it was important to do so. While I did have some internal conflict about posting the joke and continuing the spread of a hate filled joke, I came to the conclusion that the context of the post would explain why I did so and help to perhaps improve our world in some minor way. I didn't want my opinion to be the only one, and people stepped up and spoke out about it. I can only hope that this post will serve as a reminder that we should always question our actions and weigh the goodness of something before sending things out across the Internet. It takes each individual to censor themselves when they feel something may not be appropriate to the good of the earth.
This goes back to my mothers advice of thinking before speaking, but now for the digital age, thinking before posting.
Wednesday's post found us looking at yet another way we might save ourselves from financial ruin due to rising gas prices. We can't import our own gasoline, but we can add another gas tank to our vehicles to be able to carry more. Thus making a trip across the border for border-close residents more feasible. We can always protest.
Final, we ended the week with the 4th of July. Unable to really think of a 'good' post, I found that Rose at BloggerTalk.net was running a 4th of July Memories and Canada Day post contest. This made me think of all my 4th's and I decided to share my memories of a 4th of July that really impacted and changed my life in many ways in the hopes that others can learn from my own stupidity.
I'm happy to report that I've survived this years 4th in tact, and with significantly less hearing loss. We had a party here and many friends came over with their families and allowed us to provide them what we hoped would be a good time. I feel we pulled it off. No one got hurt and everyone seemed to be smiling and having a good time. If you happen to have been at our party and are reading this, give me a shout out by leaving a comment.
I had a good time setting off fireworks and lighting sparklers for all the kids with my neighbors flame throwing torch lighter.
Yesterday's drinking and festivities are the main reason this post was posted this late in the day. :) I can't wait for next years party!
Changes on the blog
With each passing week I've been adding and changing things on my blog. Most are all quite visible to everyone that frequents my blog. This week has seen what I think to be the most significant changes so far. Here's what happened:
- Top Commenter's - I added a widget to show some love to those that are the most frequent commenter's on my blog. It is these people that create a sense of community here as well as give some well needed alternate perspectives on what I write and my own personal views. So thanks to each one of you for taking some time out of your day to give your opinion. I hope you find some value being in the top commenter's list.
For any new people that happen to read this, please leave a comment where you feel you can add to the topic or to provide your perspective on it. Being in the top commenter's list gives a link to your site on every page of my blog if you provide an http address with your comments.
Because I now have this in place, I will no longer be including a link to each and every commenter in my weekly updates like I have in weeks past. I hope that people will want to be on the top commenter's list and that I'll see an increase in new users commenting on my blog. So please, leave me a comment, it's the nice thing to do. :)
-
Bookmark this site and Share this post with others - Perhaps the most significant improvement I think has been the addition of the AddThis widget from
AddThis.com. I've used this widget on other sites of mine, and for whatever reason I didn't think to add it here. If it wasn't for
Pixelhead mentioning that I should add it, it may not have been there for weeks longer.
I was emailing with Pixelhead on a few topics, one being the possibility of my
Skaterbuilt video showing up on the homepage of Viddler.com. He made some sense to me when he said that I should add an easy way for visitors to my blog to bookmark my pages on various social sites, thus opening up the possibility of even more hits through the users social networks. How could I have not thought of that myself? This is one thing that happened this week that caused me to reevaluate my goal to provide a daily post.
I implemented two different versions of the AddThis widget. The one located in the top right of every page provides a way to bookmark the site in general,
www.waynejohn.com, as does the
Technorati Favorites bookmark widget. The AddThis widget found at the bottom of each post allows the user to bookmark the post they are currently reading.
I also added a
StumbleUpon bookmark widget since I am a frequent
user of StumbleUpon and like what the site provides.
If you happen to read a post that you find amusing, helpful, insightful, for any other reason you may have, please use any of the social bookmarking services found on the Add This widget to bookmark it on any social sites you might use.
I'm going to enjoy the rest of the evening relaxing a bit. Maybe take in a movie, but I sure as hell will not be having anything to drink. I had enough yesterday for three months of parties. It's time to take it easy for a while and focus on my bike riding. Which, by the way, has not been all that great these past weeks. The tattoo made me skip riding my bike to work to allow my foot proper time to heal. No need to get all sweaty footed and possibly infect it. Now that things are settled though, I think I'll be ready to give it another go.
Take care and have a great and prosperous week!
Wayne
