Things I Wish I Could Do
Everyone has said the phrase, “I wish I could do that!” I know I have. I have looked at other people with awe and perhaps a little envy as they demonstrated amazing ability to play sports, dance, act, write, paint, sing or perform math problems with apparent ease.
What is interesting to note about wishes, is that our wishes change with our ages.
As a young child, I wanted to climb the tall trees on Sunset Blvd. in San Francisco. All my brothers were excellent tree climbers and had forts strewn along the avenues. The tops of some trees connected to each other by long arching branches and they could scurry across the tops and exit the sky via a different tree. I really wanted to join them since I was quite the tomboy, but my fear of heights prevented me from trying out their experience. If that didn’t prevent me, I guarantee that my older brother would have read me the riot act and threatened me for trying to play with his friends. Read more
DMOZ – Open Directory Project (Get your site in their directory to improve your rankings)
Raising your rankings happens a number of ways. Remember using WebsiteGrader for evaluating how far reaching your voice is being heard globally? Well, in your website’s report it ought to mention which search engines you haven’t registered with. If you have checked your site’s report card shortly after hanging your shingle and registering with all these online directories like Yahoo, DMOZ and the like it’s time for you to pour a Guinness and go sit outside on the patio. Better yet, open up your calendar and enter a date 60-days or so in the future to return to these directories to check if your site got listed. This all takes patience, my friend. And the reward of patience, is patience.
Once your site submission has been received a DMOZ editor will review your submission for inclusion in the directory. If it gets accepted into the Open Directory –and that may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search, etc. –all due to the fact that each of these search engines has their own agenda for checking with DMOZ. Read more
Blogging to Your Target Audience (“My what?”)
The goal of blogging is to have a target audience that returns daily or weekly to read your posts because they can’t get enough of what you have to say in writing, photos, products, tweets, videos or podcasts. If you can define your target audience, you can define all aspects of your blog with ease. The more specific you get, the easier it may be to write your blog. I say “may” because you may be able to identify your audience with ease but the discipline of writing doesn’t come easy to you. Well, Grasshopper, the journey of 1,000 posts starts with just one post…then another. Here’s a hint: Don’t look at the long term task of getting 250+ words entered into a new post every day/week for a whole year, rather, look instead at just getting 1 sentence built and adding another.
Always, always, always write about what you love. It has to come from your heart –where your fondest emotion lies for subjects near and dear to you. Don’t you dare get caught writing about something you know nothing about or could care less for unless you state very clearly that you are exploring new territory. It’s too easy to fact check on the web and get caught out. If you ever get caught out, be the first to step up to the plate and confess. Besides, confession is good for the soul! If you can admit you were wrong, you will preserve your integrity and build more trust, but never do this intentionally as it could backfire and people can smell manipulation from a mile away. Read more
Metadata Blog Description – The long and short of it by WebsiteGrader.com
What I really wanted to say…versus…what I have to say in 150 characters or less. Are you one of those people, like me, who love to talk? It has to be the Irish in me; I could go on forever! Thank goodness for rules and guidelines about how to set up these blogs to optimize them. A quick test at Website Grader will help you do just that. When you get your report which analyzes your website –from meta tags and headers to domain info and Google rankings, you will have a better idea of how well the global market will find you. Read more
WordPress Theme “Vertigo 3 Column”
The lovely design of this site is based on Brian Gardner’s Vertigo 2-3 column layout. I downloaded his design, unzipped it, opened up the images file and opened the blank logo and header templates into Photoshop and reworked the logo using one of my own oil paintings. I created a color palette of colors to match the rose and then wrote down the hexadecimal numbers for the colors I wanted on my website, so I could go in to the WordPress CSS script which controls the colors of the font, background, lines, hyperlinks and more and change Brian’s original colors. Formerly, this is something I would have asked my tech savvy husband to do for me, but I thought, “Hey, there are octogenarians out there on the web blogging about how they set up their own site, so if they can do it, surely I can too!” Here are some tips on changing your CSS style sheet so you can customize your site. Read more
