For Newbs: How to Blog-Tools

While you could go your whole blogging career without using any of these tools, you will soon find that these tools will make life a little easier (and maybe a little more interesting) for you.

Traffic Counters

Traffic counters keep track who visits your blog. These counters range in complexity and usefulness. The simple ones only count the number of people who visit your blog while the more comprehensive ones will tell you how they found your site, how long they hung around and even what pages they looked at. This information allows you to see what content on your blog is drawing in the traffic and tailor your blog accordingly.

Most bloggers use Sitemeter, Statcounter or Google Analytics. All three are free, easy to use and offer detailed information about your website’s traffic.
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30 Days of Hell-Mormon Housewife VS. Gay Adoption

Last night I watched a show called “30 Days”, a TV series created by Morgan Spurlock. If you don’t remember, that’s the guy that only ate Mcdonalds for 30 days, recorded the experience and turned it into a hit documentary called Supersize Me. The show was picked up by FX and began airing in June 2005. 30 Days aims to take people out of their comfort zone and immerse them in situations that challenge them at some level. For example, one show had a hunter live with a family of animal rights activists for a month.

The show I watch was titled “Same Sex Parenting”. The issue up to bat? Gay adoption. The show paired Kati, a Mormon housewife and mother of two adopted children, with Tom and Dennis Patrick who had adopted four boys out of foster care. Based only on her religious convictions, Kati believes that gay adoption is wrong and that children need a mother and a father. For 30 days she lived with the Patricks to get a firsthand look at the issue of gay adoption and same sex parenting.
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Craigslist Job Scam-Internet Solutions Corporation

Previously I had written about my car breaking down. Well that incident really set me back. Because I wasn’t able to continue to commute back and forth, I had to quit my job. Since then, I’ve working hard at finding an office job in my area which has not been easy. The town I live in is not that big. In fact, most of the people that live here commute to D.C. So the limited job availability coupled with the fact that whatever job I get must be accessible by the bus system has made the job hunt a bit of challenge.

So when I saw the following advertisement on Craigslist for my area, I thought I had lucked into something good.

Click image to get a larger view

However when I emailed the person for more information, I received the following form letter in reply:
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How to Set Goals and Achieve Them

The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score. -Bill Copeland

Goal setting and achievement is a necessary part of living a fabulous life. Goals give us purpose and meaning. At the simplest level, goal setting gives us something to do. Without goals, we would wander, aimlessly, through life going wherever fate decided to take us. For some people, this is good enough. For the majority of us, though, this leads to an unsatisfactory life filled with work we hate and people who aggravate us.

But goal setting does more than lead us towards more fulfilling lives. Goal setting helps us filter out distractions and make better decisions. For example, you want to buy a house within two years. The desire to achieve this goal would inspire you to spend your money more wisely. Instead of splurging at a fast food joint, you would make the frugal choice of taking lunch to work and investing the money you saved into a high interest savings account.

Here are a few things that I’ve learned about goal setting that I think will help you in your quest to shine your light and live a fabulous life.
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Streamlining the Business

There are many lessons that the universe wants to teach me but the most pressing one, I think, is the value of focused effort. I’ve been putting a lot of thought into my business and the strategy that I should take to grow it to the level that I know I can take it. I have so many ideas and I made the mistake of believing that I can do them all at the same time and they would all be wildly successful.

The truth is that I only have enough time and energy to focus on one. This was a hard fact to face. I want to work on all of these ideas floating around in my head but my mind, my heart and my life are not in a place where I can do that. I’m trying to leap over tall buildings when, in actuality, I’m only able to walk around them.
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Types and Topics

Blogging Motivations

As mentioned several times before, it is important to understand your motivations for blogging because those motivations will influence your decisions on how to best position your blog for success. Blogging for money requires a different strategy than using a blog as a medium for socializing.
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Getting Started

The only things you absolutely need to start blogging are time, inspiration and a blog. In this article, I will discuss the pros and cons of two options for getting your blog online.

Blog Providers vs. Self-Hosting

The fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get a blog is to sign up with a blog provider such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com or Vox. With these types of providers, everything is done for you. The software is installed, the blog is set up and many have a variety of themes to choose from so you can personalize your blog a bit. The only thing you need to do is start writing.

While this may seem like an ideal option, there are several drawbacks to third party blog hosting:
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Overview

The official definition of a blog is that it is an interactive Internet journal in which entries are published in reverse chronological order. The term “blog” is the short version of the word “weblog” which was first coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997 and was soon after shortened to the well known version by Peter Merholz of peterme.com.

Brian E. Redman created the first blog when he started up his Usenet group mod.ber. In this group, Brian and his friends wrote about the interesting things they found while surfing the Internet. It wasn’t long before the novelty of this new media format caught on and people, like Justin Hall, began using it to share their daily lives with others in the web world. Like a small country town suddenly exploding into a metropolitan city, blogging has since evolved from being a hobby of the uber geeks into a public megaphone for anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection.
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