Blog Entries

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit

2008-10-01T17:37:38-04:00

Every month, many EntreCard droppers list the people who have dropped the most cards on them during the preceding month. Two months ago, I simply cut and pasted the list from my statistics page. However, people who are very concerned about Page Rank, and there are a lot of people like that on EntreCard said it would be much nicer if I linked directly to their blogs, especially since as of this writing, I’m listed as having a Page Rank of 5.

I can see the reason for that, but I tend not to worry too much about Page Rank, or other rankings. I’m much more interested in content. So, instead of providing a list of top droppers, I thought I would approach things in more of a narrative. Last month, I highlighted one blog that I’ve found via EntreCard that has been a top dropper, that I’ve really enjoyed reading.

This month, I’m going to do things a little differently. First, I want to highlight Wisdom Hypnosis. Old Wall Street friends of mine are flipping out when they look at the financial crisis our country and the world is currently facing. I’ve offered some of my thoughts on this here and other places. (For more on this, you might want to read the interview I did with Cecilia from a Cleveland Real Estate Blog. Cecilia is another person that I’ve met through EntreCard, although she wasn’t a top dropper on me this month.) With all my Wall Street friends so stressed, it is great to see Debbie writing posts about Coping with Fear and Worry, as well as Playfulness and Silliness.

Another way of dealing with stress is eating, and if there is a city in the United States that seems like it would be stressful, it seems like it should be New Orleans, although it doesn’t make it to the top ten in the list that Cecelia has on her blog. Perhaps some of that is because besides thinking about the aftermath of Katrina, when I think about New Orleans, I also think about great food, great music, or to go back to what Debbie was writing about Playfulness and Silliness when Coping with Fear and Worry. So, I was pleased to see that New Orleans Food was another top dropper. Their most recent post is about an Easy Shrimp Pasta Recipe With Basil, Orzo and Feta Cheese. Unfortunately, I’m allergic to shrimp, so I’ll have to pass on that. However, I can easily see putting on a few extra pounds from all the wonderful food they describe on that blog, so for people concerned about that, let me highlight another top dropper, Paul’s Health Blog.

Another way of dealing with stress is to have pets. There are many wonderful pet blogs out there, and one of my top droppers this month was about a beautiful white cat named Luxor.

There were other blogs that dropped a lot of cards on my this month, but I especially wanted to highlight these blogs, as fitting into a bigger picture about what is going on in the lives of people across this country and around the world.

Thanks, everyone.

Confronting the Blank Page

2008-09-14T19:23:12-04:00

I’ve done a lot of writing today. Most of it has been for mailing lists, and nothing seems to fit for the blog. Other stuff that I’ve written will make a good blog post when I have some time to sit and think and pull it all together. Yet other than an automated post from ma.gnolia, I haven’t written anything for the blog today, and I feel compelled to do so.

Both yesterday and today, I wrote some long detailed personal emails that I was fairly pleased with. They required some serious thought and good wordcrafting. It felt good to write that way, and I’ve been thinking about my posts on the blog recently. Some of them have caused me to think as I put my words together, but a lot of them have been pretty light.

To a certain extent, that is okay. If I was having serious, weighty discussions all the time, I’d probably be even more boring. Yet I like to engage in serious discourse when I can.

I’ve also been speaking with the folks at sezWho, trying to get their post and comment rating system working more reliably on Drupal. They seem to have fixed most of the problems, although there are a few outstanding minor problems.

With that, I’m starting to get people to rate my blog posts. My welcome blog post has received six ratings, for an overall rating of 4.0. There really isn’t much of anything in the blog post, and perhaps people are using it to rate the blog overall. My most recent Wordless Wednesday post also received six ratings with an overall rating of 3.8. It was a picture of a German Chocolate cake that Fiona and I made for Kim for her birthday. As is common with Wordless Wednesday posts it received a fair amount of comments as well.

Yet my more serious post, the day before about discussions of the nature of authority on a mailing list that I’m on, received three ratings, for an overall score of 2.3. It received one comment, which didn’t really address the main theme of the post. Yet this post stimulated great discussions on two different mailing lists. I wish people who disagreed with what I wrote would leave comments about what they disagreed with, instead of simply giving it a poor rating. I also wish that sezWho would make it easy to see who has given which ratings, and what other posts they’ve rated. Without this, the ratings seem arbitrary and don’t really help to build either community or help further the discourse. I’ve suggested this to the folks at sezWho and we’ll see if this comes in a future release.

So, I sat down, I didn’t have a clear direction of where I wanted to go with today’s blog post, but, in order to stay with at least a post a day, I managed to crank out something. I hope it was interesting and/or informative. For me, the discipline of forcing myself to post every day, has been beneficial, and I think I’m improving as a writer because of it.

What do you think? What should the balance of light and serious posts be? How do we build community and discourse around our blogs? Do you have goals or other things that help you write regularly, or improve your writing?

Labor Day Rabbits

2008-09-01T20:29:08-04:00

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. The old saying is that you should say “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” before getting out of bed on the first day of every month. Instead, I start off the first blog post of the month this way. In addition, it is Labor Day, and I want to wish everyone a happy Labor Day.

Another growing tradition amongst the EntreCard droppers is to list the top droppers on your site at the beginning of each month. Last month I did that, but used links going to EntreCard. One person noted that my blog has a page rank of five, which many EntreCard droppers would love a link from asked why I had linked to the EntreCard link, instead of directly to the blog. Well, I tend not to think a lot about page rank, and I wanted to just do a quick link to the top droppers.

However, keeping this in mind, this month, I’m doing things a little differently. I read through the list of top EntreCard droppers on my blog, and chose on that I really like.

Prodromus is a blog with the tag line, “A Forerunner to the Future… Why We Need to Become Energy Independent”. I’ve joined discussions about politics on that blog. I don’t see eye to eye with the writer on a lot of topics, but there is enough common ground, and I believe mutual respect, that we can have good discussions about the issues.

So, there is my link for a top dropper last month. Check it out. Meanwhile, I’m going to try and catch up on everything after my weekend away camping.

Bloomsday morning with EntreCard

2008-06-16T09:16:39-04:00

My copy of Ulysses next to my computer, I set out on my EntreCard guided cyberwanderings. It is 7:41 and I already have had seventy-two people drop cards on me. Twenty-eight are from people that visited via the fifteen different ads that I have running.

I shift around some ads, and find that I am the most popular ‘Lifestyle’ site and 83rd overall. I have about 300 credits I plan on using first thing this morning so I go to search the most popular inexpensive sites. I turn on Pandora to provide a musical backdrop, and Nanci Griffith’s “Simple Life” comes on.

The first blog to catch my attention is The Quiverfull Family Blog. It is described as Musings on Christian family living, Christian book reviews, homeschooling, homesteading, recipes, home business and more!.

“Quiver Mamma” reviews The Captive Princess - A Story Based on the Life of Young Pocahontas (Daughters of the Faith Series) by Wendy Lawton. As a blog providing Christian book reviews, it is not surprising to find Quiver Mamma talking about Pocahontas’ faith journey.

I stop to think about my own faith journey, as well as my journey today. I wonder if Quiver Mamma will stop by and read my blog. What will she think of my political commentary? She seems like a perfect example of the people I wish political bloggers would engage more with.

While I read Quiverfull, the price of an advertisement has increased. Someone else has discovered this site and placed an ad. Even at the increased price, it is worth it and I place an advertisement. Yet in the confusion, I end up not following the advertisements from Quiverfull’s blog.

Entrecard is running slowly this morning, so between my writing and EntreCard’s slowness, it may take me a while to get through all the drops I want. The next site that I visit is the Ali Star Fan Club Website. I have no idea who Ali Star is, glance at a few pictures and move on.

Advertising on the fan site is My Big World of Crap It talks about makeover time for the website, anger management, and ‘Wank’ In just a few clicks I’ve taken a long trip from Quiverfull.

Reap Money Online brings me to my first “Serena” post. Serena is a little girl with neuroblastoma. Many of the blogs are writing about Serena and my mind wanders to another child that battled neuroblastoma, Alex. I think I first heard about Alex’s Lemonade Stand, on a kids show on PBS. I love it when people use blogs to work for a better world, whether it be Quiver Mamma talking about children’s books that talk about the importance of faith, this blog, talking about uniting to fight cancer, or the blogs of my political friends. They are all much closer related than they may think.

Though helping raise money to fight neuroblastoma isn’t the what you would normally expect from a site like Reap Money Online. Normally, there are posts about website colors and layouts; useful hints, but very different.

RMO leads me to Wedding Cake Hints, pictures of pink wedding cakes with chocolate bows, snapshots in the family album. This leads me to Musuan. There is an option to read content, a list of top EntreCard droppers and an EntreCard ad. There are lots of sites like this out there. They seem to be more about gaining credits instead of gaining readers, so I oblige, drop my card, and move on.

Musuan leads to Cromely’s World Cromely asks how negative we are, talks about limits of the Presidency and fails to capture my interest. Next comes Rambling On; camping, finals week, going shopping. Splinters talks about music. The Daily Bits talks about jetpacks and blogging and Monkey Fables and Tales, a popular site which advertises extensively on EntreCard proclaims that they are a doofus. Unconventional Marketing Blog announces the winners of their latest contest and that tornados suck. Amy Lilley Designs has some old pictures of cats and flowers.

This chain of sites fails to hold my interest, so I go back to my list of sites for potential sites to advertise on. Hit-or-Miss has the EntreCard ad buried and doesn’t really capture my attention. The Prague ConnectionAlyCat’s WeightWatchers Blog talks about motherhood and losing weight, another part of the palimpsest.

I glance at Nordic Walking US and decide it is time to post my first entry of EntreCard Bloomsday. I’ve only dropped around 20 cards in the first half hour and placed a few ads. It has drastically slowed down my EntreCard dropping, which is perhaps a good thing, but I do need to get on with other things

How does all of this affect my writing style? I look at recent blog posts. The better blogs incorporate real life, births, schooling, graduation, wedding, fighting diseases and trying to stay healthy, with what we can do as people, work together to spread our faith, fight cancer and get politicians elected that will work for us to address these issues. I try to do some of this and find that recently, my posts have moved even further from pure niches of politics, news, technology, and related subjects.

EntreCard’s Ulysses: A prologue

2008-06-15T23:09:23-04:00

It is often said that enough monkeys typing for a sufficient period of time will produce the works of William Shakespeare. I sometimes wonder if they would produce the work of James Joyce first.

People have then gone on to compare these monkeys to bloggers and noted that the work of the blogosphere is nothing like to work of Shakespeare. However, if you look closely enough, you might be able to find hints of Joyce.

It has been over twenty years since I lived on a sailboat in the Hudson River next to New York City and read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I don’t remember the details all that well, but one part has stayed with me. It was Judge Woolsey’s ruling on lifting the ban on Ulysses. There was this wonderful section that goes:

Joyce has attempted -- it seems to me, with astonishing success -- to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions.

Ever since reading that, I have pondered the plastic palimpsest. These days, I’ve wondered about it in online writing, in the political blogs, and in the blogs that I find on a typical day wandering around, not Dublin, but the Blogosphere.

My cyberwanderings have shifted over the years. For a while, I primarily used BlogExplosion and related sites as a means of strolling from one blog to the next. Then, there was a period when I followed the recent readers as enumerated by sites like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog. Now, when an interesting tweet shows up on Twitter, I follow the link. I still use these sites from time to time, but currently my wanderings are directed most substantially by EntreCard.

I look at sites of people who have dropped cards on me. I look at the most popular sites; those that are most popular overall, and those that are most popular in categories that interest me. I look the sites of the most prolific droppers; those who have dropped many cards on me, as well as those that have dropped many cards on others who list their top droppers. I look at sites where I am running, or have recently run advertisements, paying particular attention to those sites where my advertisements have been most successful. I look at sites that have chosen to run ads on my blog. From all of these sites, I follow the advertisements to other sites and before I know it, I have visited my daily allotment of three hundred sites.

All of this forms a plastic palimpsest which I would love to capture. June 16th is Bloomsday, the day that Leopold Bloom wandered the city of Dublin. Can I capture any of my fleeting impressions and weave them into an interesting story? Perhaps not of Odyssean or Joycean stature, but interesting nonetheless?

It is already Bloomsday in Ireland as well as much of the EntreCard world. For me, Bloomsday doesn’t technically start for an hour, and then there are the long hours of the night, so I shall sleep and see what I can write in the morning.

Wandering through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, and EntreCard

2008-06-01T09:54:01-04:00

Perhaps the Internet hasn’t really changed things all that much from when I was in high school over thirty years ago. Back then, the thing to do was to go down to Spring Street to hang out and see friends. There were two competing hangouts, Colonial Pizza and Pizza House. Each one attracted specific cliques. There were also places to just hang out on the street and events at the college hang out at.

Instead of hanging out with a specific clique, I would wander from one group to the next. I always felt like a bit of an outsider, an interloper, but was usually accepted, even though I might not have been told all the inner secrets of the cliques I visited.

College was much the same as I would drift from one gathering to another on the weekends. I probably came a bit closer to finding groups that I identified with, yet the pattern was the same. I found myself enjoying the works of Hermann Hesse with themes of the solitary wanderer, and one of my best friends from college often compared our relationship to that of Siddhartha and Govinda.

Some of the discussions of the past week have brought me back to these thoughts as they relate to the Internet, another recurring theme for me. The announcements of the lists of credentialed bloggers for the Democratic National Convention have riled many of my friends. It seems to many of them that felt they were rejected because they were in a clique different than the clique selected to cover the convention. As the wanderer in the group, I suggest that people try to step away from their cliques.

How many people do you know that read just DailyKos, or local progressive political blogs? How many people do you know that read just the right wing equivalents? What about the Mommy bloggers who only read other Mommy blogs? The members of Tribe.net? Salon.com? The search engine optimization folks and the make money quick online folks? The pet bloggers?

It seems like the different cliques from high school and college years ago have replicated themselves in the blogosphere.

Now, if you are a Mommy blogger or a pet blogger whose goal is simply to talk about how your little one is doing and you are happy that your friends and relatives are hearing the stories, then this post is not for you. You have found your place and it is a very good place.

Yet if you are a political blogger or a marketing blogger, I want to toss this out as a challenge to you. What are you doing to expand the circle of people listening to what you have to say?

Part of the power of the Internet is that it enables more of a discussion. How much are you reading what others have written? How are you incorporating this into your own writing? When you use tools like BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, EntreCard, StumbleUpon, Wordless Wednesday or others, are you stopping to pay attention to what others have written, or are you just leaving your mark or collecting points to drive traffic to your site? Are you staying with your clique on these sites, or making new connections.

BlogExplosion is set up nicely for expanding connections. You are randomly taken to different sites and have to stay at the site for at least thirty seconds to receive your credit. While your there, you might as well read the blog post, and maybe interact a little bit with the site. I like visiting sites on BlogExplosion that have EntreCard and MyBlogLog. It provides a double or triple win as I drop my EntreCard and show up in the recent readers list.

When I use MyBlogLog to explore the blogosphere, I normally follow the links of recent readers. It matches my style of wandering and often seems to put me in touch with people that wander in similar ways. I’ve learned a lot from these new friends. Sometimes, I will visit people who have added me as a friend in an effort to keep the friendships active and alive. Other times I may search for people who have been tagged as interested in a specific topic if I want to spend time within a specific set of communities.

My use of EntreCard is similar. Typically, I click on the advertisements from one blog to the next, until I finally reach a blog that I’ve already read. Sometimes I start off from the people that have recently dropped cards on me. I try to visit as many of these people as possible. I also try to visit those who have dropped the most cards on me. Sometimes, I go to the advertising section and check to see that I’ve dropped cards on the most popular. However, if I’ve followed the chains of advertisements, I usually catch these sites anyway. I like to make sure that I visit the site of whomever is advertising on my blog as well.

I’ve gathered lots of EntreCard credits and am just starting to use them for advertising. So far, I haven’t had a lot of luck with my ads. Should I advertise on the hugely popular and hence very expensive sites? Should I advertise on the less popular and less expensive sites? Should I advertise on new sites? I’ll explore different strategies.

The problem with all of these ways of visiting other sites is that it takes time. Do I take time away from Second Life? Do I spend more time in Blogexplosion or EntreCard? How do I balance the time visiting other blogs with writing for my own blog? I try to get at least one post up every day.

Even the blog posts that I write follow the wandering approach. The serious niche bloggers tell me that I have to pick a niche and write just about that niche. Yet being the wanderer that I am, one day I’ll write about politics, another day about Second Life, and then group psychology, technology, marketing, law, family stuff, or anything else that strikes my fancy. It’s not great for building community, but hopefully some of the posts build can build bridges. Perhaps it is part of my own hobo code or other marks to point fellow wanderers in helpful directions.

Well, I guess that’s my comments for this morning. Now, it is time to set off and wander a little bit more.

Road Trip

2008-05-13T05:54:00-04:00

In a few moments, I will hit the road on my way to Staunton, VA to pick up my middle daughter from college. It is about an eight hour drive.

On the way, I'll pass through Martinsburg, WV where I plan on stopping and doing a little get out the vote in today's West Virginia Primary.

So, I'll mostly be offline, although I hope to put up a few posts on Twitter, BrightKite, Utterz and/or Flickr and I hope to get at least limited access this evening.

Happy Mother's Day

2008-05-11T08:39:38-04:00

But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home.

I’ve always loved those lyrics, but I must admit that I don’t remember ever being so wasted that I couldn’t find my way home. Yet that image of not finding ones way home remains with me. It sometimes shows up in my dreams.

The setting was some sort of mashup of Brooklyn, where I lived when I first got out of college and some aspects of a science fictional Japan. I wander past shops, try to find a subway line that goes the right way, follow avenues and look up streets, but everything seems to take me east instead of north.

This dream recurred the other night in a sleep made light by a crick in the neck. I woke up grumpy from lack of sleep and pondering what this means.

I’ve been receiving more emails about the old house. It sounds like the foreclosure is pretty much complete. We’ve moved to a nice small house that we are renting, and the kids have been spared most of the trauma of the move and foreclosure, yet I suspect that this may have fed into my dream. The house that had been my home for fifteen years is now no longer mine.

Yet it is also Mother’s Day, which is another aspect of what makes a house a home. Memory laden objects have been brought from the old house to the new house and Kim has done a great job in turning this house into a home.

So, perhaps there is something more to this effort to find my way home. Does it have to do with my work? My career? My writing?

Yesterday morning, a wood thrush hopped around on the old mountain laurel bush outside my office. On a branch above the wind chimes, he sang his song for me. I thought of Willie in Willie was Different, a children’s book by Norman Rockwell. I grew up not far from where Rockwell painted and his paintings always evoke some sense of home for me. My mother got us a copy of the book Willie was Different which I’ve read to my children.

Is this wood thrush pointing me the way home? Is the way home paved with blog posts, chapters for books and other writings? I don’t know.

But I do know that the heart and hearth of a home is kindled by a mother. So, to Kim, to my mother, to Kim’s mother in heaven, to all the work at home, stay at home, crazy moms, Happy Mother’s Day. May you, and your loved ones find your way home.

EntreCard, Technorati and RSS feeds

2008-05-10T19:00:08-04:00

Pinay Mommy Online is looking to build out a 100 EntreCard drop list. It looks like an interesting project to build links back to her blog, as well as provide links to other blogs and find a set of blogs worth reading and dropping EntreCards on.

She says that what she is specifically looking for is “mommy bloggers, digital scrappers, money making blogs and blogs that talks about page rank and SEO”. While I read a fair amount of mommy blogs, I’m a daddy blogger. I do talk about page rank, SEO, and even making money from time to time, but I suspect I may not be her target demographic.

Nonetheless, I’m going to highlight her project, and if she, or any of her readers chose to read me regularly, that would be nice. Random Thoughts expands on this and talks about the three criteria to make this successful, an EntreCard account, a Technorati account and an RSS feed.

The idea is that you should drop cards on people’s EntreCard accounts, add them as a Technorati favorite and then subscribe to their RSS feed with your favorite feed reader.

So, my EntreCard account is here. If you use EntreCard, please drop a card on my widget on the right, add me to your favorites and if you’re interested, set up an advertisement. I generally approve most advertisements, but if the ad wouldn’t look good on my site, I might end up not approving it.

My Technorati account can be found here. It points to Orient Lodge, Twitter and a few other sites that I have. Adding me as a favorite on Technorati would be greatly appreciated.

For my RSS feed, the best feed to use is probably this. Adding it to any feed reader you have would also be greatly appreciated.

I will check out various blog that are participating, drop some cards, add some favorites, and perhaps even get into some interesting discussions.

I know that some people don’t like that I use Drupal here for my blog, which has a completely separate comment system from the big ones, and you have to register here. Yet, registering and adding a comment would be appreciated, or sending me a note at aldon dot hynes at orient dash lodge dot com would also nice.

Finally, if you join, add a link back to my blog, as well as to Pinay Mommy Online and Random Thoughts. I hope a bunch of EntreCarders participate.

Update:
Here is a list of participants:

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PEXLINKS TRIPLE LOVE PARTICIPANTS

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Pregnant Alpacas

2008-05-10T15:54:02-04:00

Baby alpacas are expected at Alpaca Hill Farm in Seymour, CT in a couple of weeks.

Alpaca Hill Farm has a small shop on their farm which we stopped at just before Christmas last year. We had a great discussion with the owners and they mentioned that they had some alpacas that were do sometime in the spring and we might want to stop by in May to see some baby alpacas.

Well, as Fiona and I were out doing errands today, we drove past the farm, and I thought, let’s stop by, see if anyone is there, and if so, if there are any new alpacas. It was a beautiful spring day, and Eileen Warner was sitting on the deck. She told us that the alpacas are due in about two weeks, so they are planning on having an open house, hopefully sometime around mid June.

As we were chatting, Tom Warner showed up with three recently shorn male alpacas in his trailer. It is striking how small a newly shorn alpaca looks. Tom and Eileen led them into the field as Fiona and I watched and patted the herd dog. The new alpacas got to know their new surroundings as they glanced warily at the dog, curiously at the ducks, and even more curiously at the alpacas they will be living with.

We look forward to a chance to see some baby alpacas in the next month or two.