2012 In Review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 25,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals
2011 In Review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 28,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I’m Honored To Accept…
I would like to thank Ted for recently nominating me for the Versatile Blogger Award. What an honor!
If I accept (which I do), the rules are that I have to share 7 things about myself, and then nominate 15 fellow bloggers for this award. Both difficult tasks. I’m sure my regular readers already know pretty much everything about me, and now I have to come up with 7 more things? I thought about skipping this step and just taking questions from my readers, but then decided to just think about it until I could come up with seven useless fun facts (or boring facts) about me. Or old facts, if you already know 😉
1. I’m only 11 months and 5 days older than my sister.
2. I love medical TV shows, but I can’t watch the “gory” stuff and hold my hand up to cover most of the screen until the scene is over.
3. I set the cruise control on my car every time I drive somewhere. Of course it’s set at what the speed limit is.
4. I had to repeat 7th grade and 9th grade. (I guess I should clarify that I failed 9th grade, but transferred to a different kind of school and went on to 10th grade).
5. I really want a tattoo, but I’m too chicken to get one.
6. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 26.
7. I enjoy assembling furniture.
Now to nominate 15 bloggers. I follow so many blogs that it was difficult to keep it down to 15 (20 would have been easier!)
So here they are – in alphabetical order! – because: a) You’ve been here from the start, b) I value your friendship, c) You inspire me, d) You make me smile/laugh, e) I love your blog, f) some of the above, or g) all of the above 🙂
I realize that some of you have already received this award, and any of you may decline it, but if you accept, please see the rules above.
1. Amy
2. Brian
3. Dalia
4. Deanna
5. Doreen
6. Holly
7. Karen
8. Kathy
9. KCJewel
10. Marcie
11. Michael
12. Montucky
13. Rebecca
14. Robin
15. Scott
Making this list made me realize that my blogroll needs to be updated!
2011/266: Bonus – Freshly Pressed!
Oh my goodness, one of my posts was chosen for WordPress’ Freshly Pressed!!
Seeee???!!!! 😀
I am honored…. Thank you, WordPress! ♥
Wanted to add the following from the WP Support page, for my fellow WP bloggers:
Five Ways to Get Featured on Freshly Pressed
Each weekday, we hand-pick and promote approximately ten new blog posts to the Freshly Pressed section of the WordPress.com homepage. These posts represent how WordPress.com can be used to entertain, enlighten or inspire.
Why should you care about being featured? Well, let’s put it this way: Getting promoted to Freshly Pressed is a major traffic win because WordPress.com receives a high volume of page views. And, we have a feed set up so people can subscribe to Freshly Pressed. Why do we do all this? It’s our way of saying we like you. We really like you.
So, by now you might be wondering how to get featured. It’s all about the content. Let’s look at five guidelines that will increase your chances of landing on the homepage:
1. Write unique content that’s free of bad stuff.
Each post that makes it to Freshly Pressed contains original content created by the user. Bad stuff includes (but isn’t limited to) plagiarism, hate speech, fear-mongering, adult/mature content, copyrighted images that belong to someone else, spam or content that’s primarily advertorial in nature.
If you reference material from other sites, be sure to give credit where credit is due. Use quotation marks or block quotes when quoting others, and include links to any articles you mention.
2. Make posts visually appealing.
Although not every topic can be illustrated, we believe most blog posts can and should have a visual element. We love original photos (the bigger the better!), but if you don’t have any of your own, be sure to properly credit the original source (Zemanta takes care of this for you). Video rocks, too.
It’s also a good idea to keep paragraphs short so that readers won’t feel overwhelmed by huge chunks of text. Breaking up your content with headings is another way to make lengthy posts less daunting.
3. Add relevant tags.
We find new posts by surfing the tag pages. If you don’t use tags, we can’t find you and how sad would that be? Also, don’t use tags that are too obscure (“beauty tips from the ancient world”) but rather more general tags (“beauty,” “history”).
4. Cap off your post with a compelling headline.
Your headline needs to stand out. Avoid swear words, excessive punctuation or vague statements. We love a clever headline, and that’s often the reason we click on your article in the first place.
Examples:
Good headline: I Won the Lottery And You Didn’t!
Bad headline: U Loserz, i WON!!!!!11!
5. Aim for typo-free content.
We know, we’re human, too — errors happen. We recommend using our proofreading feature before publishing posts. If you’ve got a few typos but we really like your post, we may ask you to fix them first.
So, that’s it! Once you’ve been promoted, you’ll receive an email from us, and you’ll also notice your page views and comments increasing. Enjoy the ride! You deserve it!
2009/303: She’s Back!
Back to blogging, that is! So be sure to check out Melissa’s blog from time to time. She would really appreciate it if you left her a comment, too.
(Hey Doreen, when is Buddy getting his own blog?)
Announcing….
Melissa’s blog!
Got it all set up for her, and she picked a template she liked…. and she just posted her first picture!
She’ll be blogging from my computer for now, and I set up her blog, so all comments come to my e-mail address for approval/review.
Printing Your Blog
Doreen has done most of the legwork, trying to figure out how and where to print a WordPress blog, but I wanted to post some steps/instructions for anyone who is considering turning their blog into a book (including myself).
Unfortunately Blurb does not support WordPress anymore, but Doreen was able to find BlogBooker, an online service that will turn your book into a PDF file that you can upload to a self publishing site like lulu. (BlogBooker is free, but they accept donations)
- To get the PDF file, you must first download the export file from your blog. To do this, go to your dashboard, click on Tools, and choose Export. Choose your options and then click the Download Export File button and save to your computer.
- On the BlogBooker website, click on the PDF link at the top and simply follow the instructions.
If you only want to make part of your blog into a book (i.e. January 1-December 31, 2008), the bad thing is, that the export file will contain your entire blog, and unless you have Adobe Acrobat (not just Acrobat Reader), there is no way to edit the PDF file to only include specific dates for your book.
BUTI have found another option that will let you keep your original blog intact, and at the same time delete the posts/comments/pages that you don’t want to include in your book. I’ve tried is this morning and it worked!
- What I did, was register another WP blog and named it The Daily Click 2008.
- I deleted the default posts.
- I went to my dashboard and under Tools, chose Import, and imported the export file from my original blog. On my first try, only the posts until June were copied, and I started to delete them all so I could start over, only to realize that it seems to take a while for all the posts to show up. Of course by that time it was already too late and I had to import the export file anyway.
For some reason I ended up with some duplicate posts and a ton of duplicate comments and I spent ALL DAY, deleting the duplicates, along with some unimportant posts and everything from 2009. Not sure if that’s some kind of glitch or if that happened because I imported a second time, so if you go that route, you may want to take the time to double check just to be sure. - Now I can download the new Export file and submit it to BlogBooker for a PDF file of my 2008 Blog Book.
I’m still not sure whether or not I will actually get it printed. I’ll have to see how many pages it will be and get a new quote from lulu.com. Unfortunately they’re not exactly cheap if you want a nice book in color. Greg might just kill me if I spend $100+ on a blog book! 😉
The End
Wow. Has it really been a year already? 366 days of at least one picture a day!
It was great, keeping in touch with old friends through our blogs, and making so many new friends along the way.
I want to thank all my loyal readers….. my old and new friends, and those who lurked every day (you know who you are 😉 )… for making this such a great blogging year. They say Time flies when you’re having fun, and this past year flew by at lightning speed.
New Year’s Resolution…
… to start and KEEP a blog! Going to make it easy on myself (I think) and do a “picture a day” blog. Please check back on January 1st for the first picture.
The Daily Click 