Just another WordPress weblog
A blogger recently registered for one of my teleseminars, and I followed a link in her email signature back to her beautiful blog, Bird's Eye View. Elsa Kendall take breathtakingly crisp, clear photos of her life and home, like the one she posted on New Year's Day. Keep reading and you'll find yourself wanting to visit her and her funny cat in Santa Fe.
She also makes pretty amazing jewelry, which she sells at her Etsy Shop.
Check out Elsa and prepare to be wowed.
The folks over at Click to Client put up an excellent, succinct post recently about how Facebook, Linkedin and other social networking sites work – mainly, you get OUT of it what you put INTO it. I was nodding and smiling the whole way through the post, and I'm considering making it mandatory reading for any client that wants me to help them launch a social media campaign. Check it out here.
I get a lot of questions about what people should and shouldn't post on their blogs. Here are three questions, all related:
I heard a great rule of thumb a few years ago regarding these types of quandaries, and I follow that rule every single time I put up a new post or start another blog. When you're writing anything on your blog, consider what would happen if the person you'd be most horrified about reading that post would read it. The person in front of whom you'd feel embarrassed or humiliated. Or the person whose feelings would be most hurt if they found out you were writing about them. Or the person who could cause you the most legal problems.
Then decide if you can live with the consequences if that person DOES see it. Because she eventually MIGHT see it – in some cases, it's likely she will. If you can't live with the consequences, don't publish those lines of text that are leaping out of your hot little fingers onto the keyboard.
If your name is attached to it, you can safely assume that it will be found – and read – by the very people you’re writing about. People manage to find EVERYTHING, and since search engines love blogs, your “secret” blog will rise to the surface quicker than you'd think. And before anyone gets their undies in a bunch complaining that there’s no privacy on the Web, remember this – it’s the WORLD WIDE WEB. When you publish a blog, you’re publishing a web page to the world. That’s how it works, and you cannot expect to maintain any secrecy when you’re publishing publicly.
That being said, here are some options if you still want to publish your thoughts -
1. By using free, hosted services like Wordpress.com or Blogger (and blogging under an assumed name), you can take your best shot at blogging anonymously. If you do this, you will need to set up an entire account under that new name. You should also use the service’s domain name (i.e. MyAnonymousBlog.wordpress.com). If you must use your own domain name, use a proxy service with your registrar so people can’t see the domain belongs to you. I don’t recommend using paid blogging services like Typepad, because you’ve got to give the service your name for payment processing, and that’s one more way the blog can be traced back to you.
- OR -
2. Password protect your blog. Most services will either let you password protect the whole blog and/or certain pages on the blog. Give the login and password only to the people you want, thus assuring that you won’t get any eyes on the page that you don’t want. This is what I’d recommend for most people, rather than writing under an assumed name and staying up at night wondering if your fake name will be traced back to you.
So my advice is – don't put it online without password protection (under your name, anyway) unless you're okay with it becoming public. As for those rants and raves you really want to make, but you don’t want anyone you know to hear them? Pick up a pen and put ‘em in a diary. I’m a big fan of those.
Okay, I’m climbing off my soapbox now. Happy blogging!
I've been cooking more these days. Since mid-2008, I had fallen into a major fast-food, white-flour, completely blah diet rut, and my health hasn't been that great. So I decided that I'm going to learn to cook WELL, using great ingredients, being inspired by all the terrific food bloggers out there.
I really wanted to cook a fabulous soup. I love soup. So I did a quick search on one of my all-time favorite blogs, Gluten-Free Girl, to see if she had any soup recipes. And I found this post about cream of asparagus soup cooked up by her husband the chef. You simply MUST click on the link simply because the picture is so fabulous. It will make your mouth water. I mean, what soup have you ever eaten that's been THAT COLOR? Go ahead, go look. 
The Gluten-Free Girl didn't offer a recipe for that particular dish – she usually does, by the way, and every single one of the recipes I've tried from her site and her book have been INCREDIBLE – so I found one in a book and fired up the stove. And I created a big batch of the most gorgeous, luscious green soup you ever did see. I peeled and chopped and seasoned and simmered. And it was only when I was peering into the pot of finished soup, checking out the fabulous color I had created, that I paused and thought, "You know….I don't even know if I like cream of asparagus soup." I had never tasted it before. It just sounded and looked so good on Shauna's website that I had to try. But I had no idea if I'd even like it. "Well," I thought, "There's only one way to find out." And I grabbed a spooned, dipped it in green, and slurped down a big spoonful.
And my goodness, do I ever like cream of asparagus soup. There was an explosion of asparagus flavor right at the front, followed by layer after layer of cream, spices (nutmeg), a touch of garlic, and more asparagus. The flavor actually shifted in my mouth the longer I lingered. Good god, was that delicious.
So try something new today, whether in your online life or your "real" one. And don't be afraid to buy all the ingredients and do all the chopping and simmering and blending and stirring before you know what the end result will be.
Because you never know what you're gonna LOVE.
I recently had an emotionally jarring experience by reading a memoir (yes, I get pretty into books, so this is possible). The book itself was fantastic. It was written by a young woman who was raised in the foster child system in California. A string of foster parents eventually led her to a placement in South Central Los Angeles – the center of gang activity in LA. Her foster home was smack in the middle of Blood territory. The woman grew up with guns and drugs and murders and poverty and hopelessness. She had two foster brothers who ended up in jail, one of her best friends was gunned down on the street, and she was forced to care for two younger foster sisters with nothing but food stamps and her own wits.
I really love books. I plowed through this one in about two days, feeling very satisfied with the ending (the young woman managed to escape the neighborhood, went to college, and started working with an organization to end gang violence). I closed the book, breathed a mental “Ahhhhh” at the satisfaction I’d received from reading it, and then reached for Google. I wanted to look the author up, see if she had a blog, and find out more about what she’d been up to in the past year or so since the book was published.
I Googled her name and immediately found a string of articles about her:
Author Admits “Gang-Life” Memoir was All Fiction
Gang Memoir, Turning Page, is Pure Fiction
Memoir “Love and Consequences” Revealed as Fiction
I was absolutely stunned. This was a fantastic story – well told, great characters, completelely believable as far as I was concerned. Granted, I grew up with cornfields in my backyard, not crackhouses, so what did I know? Nonetheless, I sat there, completely bummed and feeling betrayed by the author I’d just followed through her meaningful, powerful “journey”. How could she?
But what it made me think about was the fact that the truth eventually does come to light. This author was about to start her book tour when HER OWN SISTER called the publisher and let them know the whole thing was made up. Someone will always know the truth, and it does catch up to you.
So when you’re writing blog posts, make sure you’re being authentic. If you’re a company, don’t write a fake blog authored by a gung-ho Walmart family that is meant strictly as a promotional tool.
If you’re an individual, don’t write as if you’re the prime minister of India, like this guy. Yes, I realize this a pardody. It still bugs me.
Either way – if you’re a business or an individual, follow common sense. Check your facts. Be yourself. For heaven’s sake, don’t lie consciously. When you find errors after you’ve already published something, print a correction (and an apology, if it’s appropriate).
In the blog world, as in the print world, you won’t be able to get away with being inauthentic for long. Someone will find you out and shut you down. And there will be a disappointed reader, sitting in her living room, looking unhappily at Google results that leave her feeling foolish and sad.
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