blogging

Searching for Success

I’ve written this blog pretty much every weekday for about ten years now, give or take. (Actually I just went and checked. My ten year anniversary will be January 17th. Coming right up!) And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in that time, it’s that there’s no way to know ahead of time when a post will be successful or not. I can spend an hour on a post. Pour out my feelings on the page and really put in a ton of effort. The resulting post might be fantastic in my opinion, but the moment I hit “publish”, it’s […]

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Social Media Ettiquette

I post things on Facebook. Quite a few things. And I keep my privacy settings “public” because I’m happy to have strangers see what I write and think. For the most part, it works wonderfully. People can share my posts easily, and I enjoy the variety of views and conversation that follows. But. Every now and then, it breaks down. I’ll have people show up to the party who don’t really want to talk or listen. They just want to lecture or say why everyone else is wrong. I’m fine with even that, as long as they generally stick to

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You Never Know Who’s Reading

I’ve been writing this blog for quite some time now, but I still never quite get used to the fact that people actually read it. Not that I’m surprised when comments come up on Facebook or here, but in real life when people come up to me and say they were reading what I’d written, my first instinct is somehow always panic. I stand by what I write here, of course, but I’m always worried I said something I shouldn’t. Somehow, the feel of an online forum is distinct from an in-person discussion. I don’t know why it is, but

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The Silent Majority

I have a routine I like to go through each day when I’m online. It’s not always in the same order, but there are sites I like to check out, just to make sure I know what’s going on. One of the things I almost always do is check in on my blog statistics to see how the previous day fared. Some days, the numbers are surprisingly high or low, and I’ve given up trying to easily predict which posts will get me eyeballs and which will fly under the radar. (A lot of it rests on the algorithms of

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A Look Back at 2014

And here we are at last: the end of another year. This one seems like it’s been a bit crazier than most. I thought I might take some time on this, the last day of the year, to look back at a few of the . . . livelier events of the year as portrayed on my blog. Maybe I’ll have something to add in the way of perspective. Who knows? And at the same time, if you missed any really good posts by yours truly, perhaps you can catch up on them now.) Ready to take a walk with

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