Blog

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Hall of Fame

I have added a new “Hall of Fame” feature under the About section at the top of my sidebar.

It offers a convenient index to all the best pages with the most views on my web site via these quick links. It also highlight the most useful way to access anything on the web site since these have been customized for that purpose without having to scroll through all the posts to find something in the archives. Since this now provide guided access to posts and pages many different ways, it shows important information that readers might miss just skimming over the blog sequentially.

These are links available in the Hall of Fame.

I would really appreciate any comments about whether you like this or suggestions on how to make it better.

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100 Likes

Fantastic! WordPress informed me today that I now have 100 Likes on my web site. Looks like I might be on-track for my ambitious goals. Thanks for letting me know what you like. This will also be helpful when I conduct the statistics analysis assignment we just received this evening.

100 Likes

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My Blog Goals

I just started my blog on September 17, 2014 during the Blogging 101 workshop. Currently, I have created 78 posts, had 603 views by visitors to my site, there are 26 followers reading my blog updates, I have received 58 comments from them, and there have been more than 50 likes on my posts (I don’t know how to find out more about likes beyond the milestones).

I have thoroughly enjoyed this experience far more than I expected. I thought I would take the course since I had been thinking about trying a blog for a long time but never got it going. So I registered for it and decided this was the time to get started. I am really amazed how much progress I have made so far, and feel I am just beginning.

So I signed up for this follow-up Blogging 201 workshop on Branding and Growth.  In our first assignment, we were asked to think about our blog and identify three goals that we would like to achieve. Although it’s still early in my blog’s life, I have determined I would like to accomplish the following by October 31.

  1. Expand readers and traffic. This translates into these specific targets, which I should be able to measure with WordPress Site Statistics and/or Trophy Case Awards: 100 posts, 1000 views, 50 followers, 100 comments, and 100 likes.
  2. Grow blog access into social networks. Expand first into Facebook friends, then add Twitter, and finally include Pinterest or other communities.
  3. Enhance my brand and improve my writing. Increase range and diversity of my content beyond music so that there will be more travel, photo, writing, recipes, and other blog topics that will interest my readers and realize the focus described on my About page

After I finish this course, I’m looking forward to the Photography 101 workshop that will be held starting November 3rd. I have been wanting to get better with photography, and that would also be helpful for my blog. For now, I’m just trying to get my blog to the next level after getting off to a good start thanks to Blogging University and all my fellow bloggers.

I appreciate all my followers, their comments, and enjoyed reading so many great blogs. Also, it has opened new areas for me, such as composing articles, writing stories, and reading poetry. And of course, there’s still the music and I want to keep making continual improvements as I refine my blog’s brand and extend its growth and reach a wider audience.

Thank you for helping me reach my goals.

NOTE: By Nov 5 (in 15 days), I achieved all these goals set on Oct 21 (target: 10 days), and I have summarized the results in Blog Goal Achievements.

 

 

Criminal Hamsters
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Criminal Hamsters

When our sons were young, we had two cute little hamsters, Fluffy and Winston Pooh Bear. However we found out that there was a lot involved with owning them as pets. We remembered these adventures yesterday morning while retelling the stories to our grandkids, and I thought that you might enjoy hearing about them too.

Grandkid Stories

We had our three grandkids (10, 9, and 6) stay with us for the weekend. We went to the park to hike and play, and have them burn off a little energy before we took them to the local Sonic drive-in for lunch and shakes. While driving over there, Paige asked what was our favorite nocturnal animal. Kate, the youngest, responded “What’s nocturnal”? Then Jake, the animal expert, explained that they are animals active at night. Kate suggested an owl, but Paige told her that wasn’t cute enough. So Jake picked a hamster.

Memories

That brought many memories back when our grown sons were their age. I had forgotten about this until that moment, but this triggered us to remember. We told them that their dad and his brother had hamsters when they were young. Then we kept thinking of all the adventures we had during that time. As we started sharing them with the kids, we kept thinking of more incidents.

Airplane Cargo

Our move to Texas from New Jersey involved some additional experiences with our little furry friends. Since we had all our household stuff and car shipped by moving van, we took an airline flight. When making our reservations we asked about taking the hamsters with us on the plane and they said “Sure, no problem!”. Well, when we got to the airport, we found out they could not be carried on and put under the seat (Duh!). We had to purchase $80 crates for them so they could go in with the cargo. I’m not sure how cold it gets that high up, but they survived the journey.

Hotel Guests

After arriving in Dallas, we stayed at a Holiday Inn for a week or so while our new house was being finished and so our kids could start school since they were 10 and 7 at the time. The hotel didn’t allow pets so we had to sneak their cages from our car to the room under cover inside a shopping bag. However, they made some noise in the room when active, so it wasn’t the best arrangement with all of us in one room like that.

Night wheel

One time, my brother-in-law was visiting for Christmas, and was using a sleeper-sofa bed in our TV room, where the hamsters were located in the corner. In the middle of the first night he was there, he came in to tell us that he couldn’t sleep because of all the noise in his room. We went to check, and discovered our hamsters were frantically racing around the wheel they had inside their cages (nocturnal, remember). We had these elaborate cages with exercise wheel, tube mazes, climb tower, etc. So we had to relocate them to another room away from everybody so they wouldn’t disturb him.

Couch Nest

Another time when we went away for a few days, we came back and didn’t find them in their cages. We went hunting all over the house, and finally noticed a bunch of foam pieces on our living room sleeper-sofa. When we opened it up, it turned out that they had chewed it all up inside the cushion to make a nest there and even added a few small toy figures that they had retrieved. They are hoarders, and have huge cheek pouches for food storage. It was really a mess.

The Great (Closet) Escape

My grandson liked “The Great Escape” movie which he saw recently, and now wants to watch more prison movies. That brought back the time where one day we noticed that they had escaped during the night and burrowed through our carpet and under the closet door. We had to explain that to the couple that bought our house when we sold it.

Neighborhood Search

Several times they managed to get out of the cage somehow, probably when someone forgot to close the snap latch after feeding or petting them. They’re pretty quick and probably slipped out of the house via a door left open. After an extensive search, our son finally found them down the street at a neighbor in their garage.

Burial

When they died, since they only live 2-3 years, our kids wanted to have a memorial service for them before burying them in our back yard after a little ceremony for their pets. I think they were later covered over by the deck when we had a pool and hot tub put in the back yard.

Summary

They enjoyed hearing about these stories and had a few chuckles, especially since they imagined their father (and us) having these experiences. Our grandson, Jake, summarized our stories by calling them “Criminal Hamsters”. I thought it might be good subject as a blog post to share with you.

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Spotify

Based on some questions that I have received about using Spotify to listen to the music, I thought it would be helpful to include some general information here.

You can just listen with your web player using any browser at http://play.spotify.com. Spotify is completely free on mobile, tablet, or computer. On mobile, you can listen to artists, albums and playlists in shuffle mode. Or choose a ready-made playlist to suit your mood. On tablet and computer, you can play any song, any time. You can signup at http://Spotify.com/signup with either an email address or with Facebook.

Also Spotify offers Mac or Windows applications that can be downloaded at http://www.spotify.com/download. There are mobile apps available for iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, and Windows Phone via their app stores.

They don’t take up much space, and there’s really not much impact on the system at all. On my Mac, the Spotify app is 112.1 MB, and my activity monitor indicates it only takes about 2% CPU when inactive, and 4-6% CPU with about 80MB memory when playing music. I have OS X 10.10.1 (Yosemite) on a Macbook Pro (2.7 GHz Intel Core i7) with 16 GB memory. On my iPhone and iPad (iOS), the Spotify app size is 50.1 MB, and it’s currently using 183 MB including data.

Upgrading to a Premium membership (US price: $9.99/month) removes the occasional ads, improves the music quality, allows on-demand selection for a specific album or artist, and enables downloading music to mobile devices for offline listening while driving or exercising, for example.

Please provide any feedback about your Spotify experiences.

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Trophy Case

Wow! I am really surprised at my progress during the Blogging 101 workshop. I now have over 50 Posts as well as 50 Likes on both my blog and The Commons (Actually it’s higher now, but I’m not at the next award milestone yet).  Also, I have gone from 0 to 18 followers too.  Thanks everybody for making this so much fun.

Posts and Likes

Trophy Case – Posts and Likes

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Music Players

My music posts include Spotify listening links. However, you may use any of the following alternate music players which all offer a search capability to select an artist, album, or song highlighted in my posts. These links open a music player in another window so you can listen while you read or write blogs.

There are also Internet Radio stations available which just allow listening to music by station, genre, mood, or playlist without on-demand selection.

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Internet Radio

There are “Internet Radio” stations available that provide music services where you can only select by station, channel, or mood. These do not allow users on-demand selection by searching for specific artists, albums, or songs. Therefore these would not be helpful to listen to the music that I highlight in these posts. However, I have included them here in case you want to explore their features and just enjoy listening to them while you read blogs.

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Misty Lake

Blogging 101: Love Your Theme

Today’s assignment: try out at least three other themes — even if you’re happy with the one you first chose. Try one you’re drawn to, and one you would never use.

I changed my theme to Misty Lake.  It has previously been the default Twenty Ten from when I initially created my blog (but never used it until this course).

I reviewed a lot of the WordPress information about themes, widgets, and customization, and explored many different themes. I found the “Get Personality” guide very helpful to understand the features involved with theme selection.   This offered me a nice balanced blend of the main features that I wanted for my blog.  It was simple, yet elegant.  I like the subdued colors, typography, and layout.

Also as I was exploring themes, I realized my current one was not responsive to different mobile devices and it looked horrible on an iPad or iPhone (with lots of scrolling).  My apologies to readers who have had to deal with this until I made this change.  Nobody complained in comments about it, or maybe it was only used so far on Mac or PC computers.

Although the default header was nice, I thought it would be better to substitute a custom header with a real photo of a view of Lake Travis at sunset from our deck at home near Austin, Texas.  Perhaps, I will look at randomizing these after I gather and upload more local photos that I might want to include in the rotation.

Also, I added a text widget for this Blogging 101 course from WordPress Blogging University.  However, it was necessary to remove the height and width from the HTML so that it would look right; when they were included the image was squished sideways and didn’t look right at all, but now it looks like it’s should.

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Dream Reader

Blogging 101: Dream Reader

This assignment was to “publish a post for your dream reader, and include a new-to-you element in it”.

I don’t have a specific person that I would consider my “dream reader” for whom I would write this post.  However, I think in my case, I will include several examples of topics that I would like to share that I hope you will enjoy or appreciate as well.  Since we are supposed to include new elements in this post, I will embed some music, photos, and links.  And I would also like to cover some topics such as travel, nature, recipes, books, etc.

As I started to gather what I would like to share here, I realized that it might not be so good to combine a lot of different topics in a single post, since it would probably be too much anyway. Most likely, it would be better to have posts with a more specific focus.  So I have decided to use this as an introduction to what I plan to publish on a regular basis.

Anyway, I hope that you are my “dream reader”, and I would be thrilled to find that you share common interests with me.  I don’t know who you are yet, but I hope this works out and we make a connection, and that you will want to follow my blog and anticipate each new post.  I guess this experiment will determine if that’s the case or not.

Music

I love music!  And I hope you do too.  I enjoy a wide variety of styes, genres, and artists.  I thought that I should share some of my current favorites that can be listened to via the Spotify music service from my WordPress blog.  Perhaps I will introduce a new song, artist, or album that will inspire or move you in some way.  I hope you enjoy the music that I will share with you.

I’m thinking that it might be best generally to keep similar music in a post, rather than mixing it up too much, since some readers might prefer one type of music but not another.  This would allow you to choose which posts that you might want to listen to, and you can simply ignore the others that you don’t care about.  For example, someone might love solo piano, but not country (or vice versa), or maybe even both.

Another thought was to sometimes have a post with about 5 (or 10) songs included so you might selectively listened to what you want.  Other times I might share an album or playlist.  Or maybe I should just post a single song every day, and do a longer list (or album) weekly, then something like a playlist monthly, with special music during the Christmas holiday.  Or maybe a different type of music each day so that you might know what you might expect each day of the week.

In the initial post of the music series, I have included solo piano selections with an album by Kevin Kern, as well as songs from Michael Hoppe, Joe Bongiorno, and Brian Crain.  Also there is a guitar song from Will Ackerman and a choral piece from Conspirare in Austin.  I will mix it up with other styles, artists, and genres in subsequent posts.  In other posts, I will include photos, travel, recipes, books, etc.

Of course, I would love to get any feedback about whether this sounds like a good idea or not.  If you have any comments or suggestions, that would be very helpful.  It will give me some confirmation that I’m on the right track.  Let me know what you think.

Until next time …  Enjoy!