The Niche

I've always struggled with the fact that this blog is of the potpourri variety. I've written about an extremely wide variety of topics which, while fun for me is not particularly intriguing to readers, my friends excepted.

In my desire to learn and write one common theme persists- Geography. So tonight I'm announcing my new niche World Geography Blog. So far I'm pleased with its appearance and I look forward to writing and interacting about a great passion.

Cheers!

One Pavilion to Another

Blogging is fun. It requires a certain amount of dedication and time. I'd say the last post on about half the blogs out there deal with apologies from the author about how they've neglected their audience...and those posts are often a year old (I've also found this to be the case with b-list star's websites - why I know that we'll leave up to your imagination).

So I guess this is my version of that so common post. But I had a good reason (and now it sounds even more like all the rest). I don't have a desktop at home, only a laptop and one that is about 4.5 years old at that! In part due to its age and in (large) part due to the visiting of sites not suited for work and some sites that are REALLY not suited for work, my computer was rendered ultimately useless and pathetic. My old HP Pavilion served me well, but it was time to move on.

...to ANOTHER HP Pavilion. Installation was a breeze and I have a computer in good enough shape to type blog posts again. Given that, and the ever changing soap opera that is my life, you'll be hearing more from me once again.

6 weeks to Africa!

Tracking your blog readers old and new

My love for Google continues to grow. Sure they are Big Brother but when they provide the services they do, it seems worth it.

In my perusing (I MUST stop using that word so much), I come across a ton of features, widgets, add-ons and tools and when I find one I think you can't live without, I let you know.

I just started using Google Analytics which is a tool to help web developers and bloggers keep track of their visitors and their stats. I also use feedburner (Google owned- go figure) whose feed flare provides lots of stats but Google Analytics provides even more information and has it organized in an intuitive manner than only Google can pull off. A simple copy and paste of a code snippet is all you need to be tracking everything you want to know about your visitors. It's like google is letting you be big brother to all your visitors, allowing you to target your content (sound familiar).

It will even integrate with your Adords account (how convenient).

So for all you beginner and novice bloggers out there. Get a Goolge account and start using Google Analytics.

Let me know what you think.

MLK day

Well, its another 3 day weekend for me. When you get about 40 days off per year they are bound to come with relative frequency. I wasn't able to do anything too exciting this weekend so I'm really going to focus on relaxing today.

Saturday was pizza at my moms to celebrate my sisters birthday and yesterday was spent sick with Amy. She had a sore throat, I just felt queezy for the second half of the day. Since that was the case it was really nice not to have to get up and go to work this morning. In stead I get to chase after Samson all day while Amy is at work in the D.

I bought the Google Sketch up for dummies book at Barnes and Noble (BKS) yesterday. Aside from it just looking cool I would love to be proficient enough at it to use it at work. While an interest in learning as much as one can about the profession may not be a marketable quality at work, knowing how to do little things like Google SketchUp always seem to impress. Any time there is a free software or programming tools available I am tempted to learn about them. Thats why I have an HTML book (really is that easy) and a Ruby programming book (not as easy as I was expecting).

So hopefully I'll find a "Mythbusters" marathon on tv. If not I've got two full seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation to choose from!

I starter another blog where I am beginning to "collect" funny/amazing youtube videos. In addition to dropping by at my youtube blog, if you have any good videos, please share them by leaving me a comment on that blog. I hope you'll get a laugh when you go there.

Photoshop buttons

The last few days I spent some time improving the look of my blog. While blogger templates make things really easy to manipulate, it has its limitations. So I created a new header in photoshop and made a few small hacks to the html code.

In addition to the banner, color and font changes I also spent some time looking around different websites set up for bloggers and social bookmarking, all that web 2.0 stuff. I noticed that a lot of these sites used similar styling in their logos. After examining them I thought I could probably create similar things pretty easily with my limited self-taught knowledge of photoshop.

It sounded fun, so I went ahead and created, I guess I'll call it a logo, for this blog. Cool eh?



Feeling pretty good about it, I went ahead and made one for Amy's online portfolio (note work in progress). She's pretty busy with school and hasn't been able to do much with it yet. So here is the one I came up with for Amy Connor Live.




Let me know what you think. These are a little bit larger than what I'd recommend using on a blog or site, but, you get the picture. If you are interested in having me make one for your blog leave a comment. Unless I get a bunch of requests I'll even do it for free.

Bloggers Block

I started blogging about five months ago. Since then I've learned an awful lot.

One of the first things I learned about this blogging business is that just about everybody blogs about blogging. At first that didn't make any sense to me, but then I realized how many others are out there like me that constantly seek out new ways to get people to listen to what they have to say. From reading all the blogs about blogs I ascertained that there are really three types of blogs.

Personal Blogs - A persons journal or description of their experiences.
Niche Blogs - Where a blogger sticks to a topic that they are (hopefully) an expert on.
The General Blog - A multi topic, catch all.

The latter of all these is, according to the blogosphere (I've been waiting to use that word), by far the most difficult. Like an idiot I of course chose the most difficult.

Not surprisingly I was writing with about three loyal readers, myself included.

I sought out comments on my blog everywhere and anyway I could. Unfortunately since my topics vary so greatly, one person's favorite part was another person's only frustration. Lot's of people don't want to read about Michigan football, but then others want to hear about it if for no other reason than Michigan football is something I'm very passionate about.

After considering everyones advice and thinking more about what I want to do with this blog I thought back to my first post. I think I was on to something. This really is my sounding board.

I was beginning to worry too much about what to write to gain and retain readership and not enough about having fun. I was also worrying too much about toeing the line to please everyone with my opinions (although I'm getting better at speaking my mind). Really, the point of this is to get out my opinion and if you disagree, thats not a problem, its an opportunity to have intelligent conversation with occasional name calling - that stuff is fun. If there is one thing I can advise at this point in my blogging experience its just that: have fun!

So, while I risk losing a portion of what I've built in terms of readership. With this blog, WYSIWYG. I'll try and add bells and whistles that I think are cool and I'll work on the format of the site (the blogger templates can be a challenge to customize). In terms of topics though, theres gonna be a mix, and some of you aren't gonna like it. Sometimes I'm gonna post about my opinions on current events, sometimes I'm gonna talk about going out at night and hanging out with friends. I'll occasionally post the results of some of my investigations in my ongoing thirst for knowledge and sometimes I'll even get a bit political. I can't tell you how much I've been wanting to write about Michigan and Les Miles this past week. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow!

I hope you enjoy reading this stuff half as much as I enjoy writing it. I hope you digg me, stumble me, comment me and link to me from your own blogs because this blogging stuff is really fun. After all, linking is the most sincere form of flattery to a blogger.

So now that I've reaffirmed the potpourri style of this blog, I need your help to find others like me to boost my blog roll. I've searched high and low, used all sorts of blog aggregator services to find other GOOD blogs that cover at least several topics. If you know of any please let me know.

And for your viewing enjoyment, heres a picture of my cat punching me :)

Why Nicea?

As I relax on another beautiful Sunday afternoon I thought it approporiate to write about how this blog's name came to be. It's amazing how many blogs are written about how to write a blog and what to blog about. I have chosen a combination of topics, some about my life, some about my opinions and some about observations and reporting, like the piece I did on unredeemed gift card profits. I do hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.

But back to where the name came from.

The Council of Nicea (which is the modern spelling on Nicaea) was essentially a congress of Bishops from around the world in the year 325 in which crucial components of Christianity were quite literally "decided". The fact that church doctrine and canon was simply put to a vote has been interesting to me ever since I found out about the Gospel of Thomas and what was found at nag-hammadi.

I encourage you to read about the First Council of Nicea here. You also may be interested to read about what was found at http:Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

Moreso though I think of Nicea as a metaphor for opinion, which is what I give here. Therefore this blog includes lots of posts about things I have decided on for myself. Sure I include things about my day to day life, but Nicea, to me is about opinion and decision.

Experiements with ScribeFire and Blogger

I've been using firefox as my web browser for about two months and absolutely love it. With my new found interest in scripting, blogging and website development I came across ScribeFire which allows you to post to any of your blogs directly from a composition in your browser window. Its pretty cool. I am hoping to be able to integrate this with some of the connoisseur website. We're trying to figure out how to allow comments and track backs and feeds etc. etc. So this is a test of the ScribeFire system.

If you're not using firefox, you don't know what you are missing.

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