Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

There are some major changes that are going to happen to this blog that I’d like to announce:

1. This blog will be moving to a new domain name and renamed to “Productive Flourishing.” There will likely be some hiccups, but I hope you make the switch with me.
2. Most of the ads will come off of the blog. I instead will have a spot for products and services that I either use or think will add value to your lives.
3. I’ll probably go through two different themes - the first to transition from the one you currently see, and then the final one that I either design and create myself or design and have someone else create.

I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I’d rather not have to lose what Google rank and familiarity I already have, but I think the move will make me more comfortable with the stuff I write about. The ads coming off are mainly because they slow my blog down, get in the way, and are a distraction to all of us.

I appreciate your continued support.

There’s a common knowledge story kicked around about “The Triple Filters Test.” Sometimes it involves Socrates and other times it involves an Arab scholar, but the truth of the story is the same. Here it is:

In ancient Greece, Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem.

One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, “Do you know what I just heard about your friend?”

Hold on a minute,” Socrates replied. “Before telling me anything, I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”

Triple filter?”

That’s right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you’re going to say. That’s why I call it the triple filter test.

The first filter is TRUTH. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”

No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and…”

All right,” said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of GOODNESS. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?”

No, on the contrary…”

So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, but you’re not certain it’s true. You may still pass the test though, because there’s one filter left: the filter of USEFULNESS. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?”

No, not really.”

Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?”

Most people leave it at that and assume that the story is just about the information we spread. The real truth behind it, however, is about the information we seek and create.

Imagine how different the world would be if we only chose to seek or create information that was true, good, or useful. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a bit can probably figure out that it’s the test that I’ve been using the whole time.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on one of the sites below. Thanks for sharing your time with me, and I appreciate your support!

This article was featured in The Fourth Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life.

Photo credit: Lauren

I’m trying to save all of my metablogging posts ’til Friday, since if I wrote about all the stuff related to blogging that I’m thinking about, I’d probably write as much about blogging as I do anything else. That said, we’re off!

Michelle at Bloggrrl wrote today about something that has been on my mind more and more recently. Basically, it’s about the use of our blogs and who should be the primary focus.
Continue reading →

I had a forehead slap moment last Tuesday when I was proofreading a letter my wife had written to a military officer. She’s doing some research on families of Army National Guardsmen who have deployed, and she needed to write a letter to an officer to keep the research on track. She asked me to proofread it because I can put on the military hat and look at her writing through the eyes of the person she was writing for.

So I put on the hat and took a quick look at the message. She wrote it in Mail.app, and all I initially saw was about 10 paragraphs composed of four or five long sentences. No headings, no sub-bullets…just a lot of paragraphs and a lot of big words. The alarms went off, because I knew there was no way in hell that her letter was going to be read thoroughly. It was just too unapproachable for her audience, and furthermore, he likely would have been reading it on a Crackberry.

I begin to restructure the message a bit, and noticed something very interesting: the key point to be gleaned from a paragraph was at the bottom of the paragraph. I thought about it a bit more, and it dawned on me: that’s why people have trouble reading academic writing.

Look at some of the better posts you’ve read online recently and see how they flow. They generally start with a key idea at the head and have a few sentences that flesh that idea out. Lists are paradigmatic of this structure; an item is introduced and qualified, an item is introduced and qualified, rinse and repeat. Slap an introductory paragraph (which starts with the key idea of the post) and a concluding paragraph (which may still start with the key idea of the post) and you have the post structure that makes up 75% of most blogs, this one included.

Academic writing is usually just the opposite of that structure. We’ll start with a transition sentence that gets the reader from the previous paragraph into the one we’re currently on. We’ll spend a few sentences constructing and qualifying the idea and finish the paragraph with the topic sentence. Non-academic paragraph structure descends from key ideas to their supporting ideas, whereas academic paragraph ascends from supporting ideas to the key idea. So, when people feel like they have to wade through an entire paragraph to get a point in academic writing, it’s because, in fact, they do have to wade through the entire paragraph to get to the point.

For a case in point, look at the structure of the following paragraph:

Aquinas’s motivation for advancing the Doctrine of Double Effect comes from his absolutist ethical perspective. One of the counter-intuitive results of absolutist ethical systems, in general, is that they deem as impermissible acts that many reasonable people find intuitively permissible. If one is never allowed to harm another person, then an agent cannot defend herself in cases where she is threatened, despite the folk intuition that people are morally permitted to defend themselves when they are unjustly threatened. Aquinas is attempting to make room for folk intuition while still holding onto the idea that it’s wrong to harm people–so he moves the discussion from what one does to what one intends to do. So, it turns out for Aquinas that the general moral prohibition against harming other people is, at best, misstated; the general moral prohibition should be against intentionally harming other people, and his theory attempts to flesh out conditions for something counting as an intentional harm.

This paragraph is an excerpt from one of my more readable philosophical essays. You can probably figure out that the paragraph before this one talks about Aquinas’s absolutist ethical perspective. The sentences in between are run-ups to the final point that “the general moral prohibition [against harming people] should be against intentionally harming other people.”

I have looked through a few representative samples of academic writing and my writing is not idiosyncratic in structure. It’s a product of the academic culture, and we train people to write this way and reinforce that training through the academic rewards structure.

I worry, though, that we are doing them a disservice, for we are training and rewarding a writing style that doesn’t translate well outside of our ivory towers. Furthermore, we may be doing ourselves a disservice, since we then have to struggle with our own writing once we’re out of the academic bubble.

It took me awhile last week to translate my wife’s letter. (I dropped it into a word processor to save it as a PDF, and it wound up being 2.5 pages, single-spaced). In the end, we compromised and just bolded the key idea, since there was really no way to restructure her letter without a massive rewrite. The ironic thing about the letter was that it was a very, very well written letter…if it were going to an academic audience.

I’m at an all time high for RSS readers (don’t laugh at my meager numbers, or do if it makes you smile), and I think that’s probably one of the only measures to determine how well a blog is doing.

Some think that traffic is the real way to measure how well your blog is doing, but I don’t. There are all sorts of ways to increase traffic to your blog…some credible, some not so credible. Merely getting traffic is not what I’m interested in; otherwise, I’d simply talk more about sex, sports, or celebrities (the latter is probably just a conflation of the former two, in reality).

What I’m interested in is sharing ideas with others, and yes, having other people interested in the stuff I’d like to share. So that some of you have decided to pick up the RSS feed indicates that there was something here that led you to think it’d be worth your while to read about in the future.

Before I get to the question you know is coming, I’d like to say a few things:

• First, I really appreciate the time you’ve already taken to read and subscribe to this blog.
• Second, your readership, comments, and impressions will continue to mean more to me than the trail of people that may follow. You are the ones who are really giving this blog a chance.
• Third, I will likely lean on you more than others with feedback, since your judgment is not influenced by fads or popularity. Simply put, you’re not here because of a blogstorm.

All that said:

What is it about this blog that enticed you to subscribe?

I wish there were a convenient way to pay you for your comments, because I’d probably give away $.50 or a $1 for your feedback, which would be the physical equivalent of buying coffee or a candy bar. However, I’m willing to pay you back by (a) answering a similar request or (b) picking up your RSS feed and reading it. Note that I have no way of tracking (at least that I know of) your subscription back to you, or else I’d pester you by emailing you.

Feel free to comment on this post or by going through my contact page if you’d prefer to keep it private. I really appreciate your consideration.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or submitting the post to StumbleUpon or Digg. Thanks for giving me a little slice of your time.

Whew! It’s been a busy week of reading and writing. Below I’ve catalogued some of the posts I’ve read this week that either got me thinking about something or made me chortle. Yes, chortle is actually a word.

Leo gives 31 Ways to Find Inspiration for Your Writing. While reading his post, it dawned on me that the problem is not that I have too little inspiration to write, but rather that I have too little time to actually do the writing I’m inspired to do.

A major issue that I’m having is that I spend a lot of time working on the different projects I’ve got going in my life and I’m having difficulty finding the right Work-Life balance. Caroline’s article on How to Find the Right Work-life Balance was really helpful on this matter.

The goal for me is to shift from more low-value work (i.e. stat tracking) to more creative work. And if I can make my creative work faster, I can get more high-value stuff done. Scott over at Scott H Young gives some great insights on How to Speed Up Highly Creative Tasks that helped me reevaluate some of my work processes.

Speaking of creative and destructive forces, Amy at Quiet Rebel Writer has written an insightful post about Making Your First Draft Crappy. Because, well, a crappy first draft is something you can work on, but an empty data file and broken dreams are only good for high counseling bills.

Of course, sometimes you need to be destructive, too. For me, keeping all of my data files in the right place is more difficult than you would think. I drop things I’m actively working on on my desktop, and all the other brain dumplings go into a Brainstorm folder. I’ve been needing to tidy things up for a bit, and Mark’s 5 Tips for an Organized Computer is really helpful on that front.

And then, sometimes you just need to laugh. William’s (who I’ll affectionately call Mac) post on 7 Crazy Web Sites for Escaped Mental Patients provides just that forum. Seriously, watch out for his rise on the blogosphere, and help him out by running over there and pestering him to keep writing. I’ll warn Mac that the massive volume of traffic from my twelve readers may shut down his blog server.

Other noteworthy bits:

• Merlin Mann actually posted some original, insightful commentary that harked back to the days when he used to blog. Talk about a guy stretched too thin…
• Gary Gygax died yesterday. That probably only has meaning for a few people, but the man who gave a creative social outlet to nerds worldwide should be honored. RIP, Gary, and we’ll see you in Greyhawk.
• This week has been this blog’s best week on record. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by and given me a little of their time, and I look forward to hearing from you all in the future.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or submitting the post to StumbleUpon or Digg. Thanks for giving me a little slice of your time.

Dustin posted an article about Personal Productivity in the 21st Century over at Lifehack. I was going to comment on it on the blog, but my commentary got a bit long, so I decided a trackback would be better suited.

As I blog more and more and try to get more traffic, the “cash value” of the ideas I’m thinking or writing about becomes more and more of a nagging question, and, honestly, that scares me. Some things that we write and think about just shouldn’t be monetized or driven by the market. So I get stuck on this one: I hope this blog provides genuinely valuable content to people, yet at the same time I sometimes just want this blog to be about the playing with ideas.

The greatest issue I have with my own personal productivity is not getting things done, but rather figuring out which muses to chase and which to let go. Dustin’s comment about rigid scheduling vs. park sitting rang rather true on this one, because if I were to plan my day down to the 15 minute interval, I’m rather sure that some of the most creative and important ideas that I would have would die on the petard of the schedule. Yet, if I don’t stick to a somewhat realistic schedule, I generate more open projects that I’ll never close.

Lastly, when you shift from being an hourly or salary worker to a knowledge worker, there comes a point in which it’s hard to figure out what your time is worth. On some days, when the muses or flow is with me, one hour of writing, brainstorming, or idea generating can equate to days or weeks of thinking. A further complication, related to the first issue, is that it becomes hard to determine whether the process of generating ideas just to generate ideas has a certain value or whether it’s the generating of relevant, useful ideas that is valuable.

I’m going to run into this problem much more here in the next few months when I take a full-time Guard job for a while. The reason I will likely be hired for it is because of my creative, out-of-the-box but insanely efficient skillset; I’m a bit unorthodox by military standards, but I’m known to generate excellent products (this is not what I think about the products, but rather what my colleagues and superiors think about what I create). But I’m not sure that they’re ready for me to tell them that I’m going to need time to sit outside on a park bench so that I can come up with the product that they want. They want the product, but they don’t necessarily like the way that I come up with the product. Oh, that I live in so many different worlds!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or submitting it to Digg, StumbleUpon, or some of the other social networks. I appreciate your time and support.

I’ve been looking around for different plugins or widgets that created a Most Popular Posts space on my blog. I spent some time looking and never found anything that seemed about right. But I wanted to get that space up on my blog so that I could point new readers to posts that other readers liked.

I tried the Popularity Contest widget and liked the amount of data that it provided, but a) I’m too dumb to get it to work properly, b) it doesn’t capture the full spectrum of what I think makes the posts more popular. Maybe once I figure it out a little more I’ll activate it.

Until then, I’ve created a simple text block in my sidebar that does the job. If you’re new to blogging and want to do the same type of thing, here’s how to do it:

Compile the data from whatever sources you use.

I like Wordpress’s Stat counter because it doesn’t log your activity, which throws off a lot of other counters. When you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of readers, your activity on your blog can skew your results dramatically (which is one reason Popularity Contest currently doesn’t work well for me.)

Determine which five of your posts are the most popular

Why five? Three posts are not really enough, but ten is a bit too much for young blogs. Plus five is a really easy number of great posts to focus on, which is likely why Darren at Problogger recommends Five Pillar Posts.

Create a lists of those posts in your html editor

It should look like this:
<ul> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/most-popular-page.html/"title="Title of Most Popular Post">Display Name for Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/second-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/second-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Second Most Popular Post">Display Name for Second Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/third-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/third-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Third Most Popular Post">Display Name for Third Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/fourth-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/fourth-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Fourth Most Popular Post">Display Name for Fourth Most Popular Post</a></li> <li><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.example.com/fifth-most-popular-page.html/');" href="http://www.example.com/fifth-most-popular-page.html/" title="Title of Fifth Most Popular Post">Display Name for Fifth Most Popular Post</a></li> </ul> <p>

You should be able to copy the text above and fill in your domain name, urls, and Title. Save this file and keep it handy so that you can make easy updates without recreating the whole file.

Create a Text Widget in Wordpress

• Go to your admin page, Click on “Presentation” in the top bar, then Click on Widgets in the Buttom Bar.
• Scroll down and create another Text Widget. You may already have some in your Sidebar, but this should create another in the “Available Widgets” section on this page.
• Grab that new text blog and place it in your sidebar where you want it. I recommend that it go either before or after your recent posts somewhere within the top two or three of your widgets. Having it at the top like that means that your readers see it without having to scroll down, thus making it more likely that they’ll click on it.
• Click on the box that appears on the widget after you place it in the sidebar

This creates a box that has a title box and a code box. In the Title box, enter “Most Popular Posts” or whatever you want to title of this box to be. Copy your code from above into the code box.

• Exit out of the widget by pressing the “X” on the widget. Don’t worry, it saves what data you put into it.
• Press the “Save Changes Button.” This is important, because otherwise Wordpress won’t apply your new widget to your webpage. You’ll get a dialog that says “Sidebar Updated. View site >>”.

Click on the “View site >>” hyperlink to make sure it worked.

This will take you to your home page. You might have to click on a page that you don’t have cached, since cached page may not immediately display.

You’re done!

Doing it this way is not the easiest, most efficient way to do it, but it carries with it some advantages:

1. It places your human judgment to the forefront.

Sure, there are programs that can provide the data for you, but in the end I think it’s best to consider that but then make the decision yourself.

2. By not automating the task, it makes you pay attention to some nuances that you may miss if you have a program do it

I learned which titles and trends made some posts more popular than others, so that now when I review what I write, I consider what made other similar posts popular.

3. It allows you to assess information from the many different sources that a single source may miss.

For example, having your feeds run through Feedburner may alter the stats from one particular program or script.

4. It allows you to move posts higher if there were unrepresentative periods of activity.

Some of my earlier posts from last year have pretty high page counts, but I don’t necessarily want those pages to now represent what I’m doing.

One last thing to consider is that your most popular posts will likely stay static for a long time if you post them above the fold. Readers will continue to click on them and read them, which means they’ll continue to do well on all of the different measures you’ll be looking at. Of course, one post that gets Dugg or Stumbled will change all of that, but those types of occurrences usually have pretty dramatic effects blog-wide.

Update: This post originally said “contact page revised.” It should have been “about.” Sorry for the confusion.

I’ve just redone my about page. It’s been lame for a long, long time, and since I’ve noticed more people looking at it, I decided it was time to rework it.

You can check it out here. I’d really appreciate any constructive feedback on it if you could drop me a line.

Warning: The bio is kind of long, but (I think) no longer than it needs to get the narrative point across. Thanks!

I’m starting to focus more on getting new readers for this blog, and I’ve run into the same wall that new bloggers often run into. It goes about like this:

In order to get traffic, you have to be start getting links and readers. But to get links and readers, you have to have traffic.

It’s as messed up as trying to get loans from banks: if you actually need the money, they won’t give it to you; but if you’ve already got the money, then you don’t need them to give it to you.

rssHugger may help out with this problem. Like most social bookmarking sites, they have a registry where you add your blog and list what it discusses. Helpful, but nothing new there.

They also have a Top100 list that shows how many people have viewed your site using their service. That one is a bit more helpful with gathering the snowball traffic. Blogs at the top of the list get more views because people want to know what’s going on at the blog, and since they’re getting more views, they’re getting ranked better. The same snowball effect, except this time it’s working for new bloggers rather than against them.

rssHugger comes in two versions: a paid version (for $20) or a version that you get for reviewing their site on your blog. Both versions are the same, except one costs time and the other money. You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m doing the review.

If you’re needing some more readers, or would just like to try out a new service, head on over to rssHuggerand give them a look-over. Help out rssHugger, and let them help you out.