Scraps Of Mind

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I received quite a bit of response to my recent post on backing up your blog and I thought it might be handy for readers if I ran a series of blogging tips and related bits and pieces. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t claim to be a blogging guru by any stretch of the imagination. But I am fortunate to have my good friend Thatch and my daughter Seona who are my techie life support system. And I’ve been reading up on blogs like Yaro Starak’s and Darren Rouwse‘ who blog for a living and run blogs on the subject.

I figure most of my readers blog for different reasons; some like me do it because they enjoy the thought that people want to read their stuff, some want to provide newsletter happenings to family and friends, some use it to express their thoughts and feelings in a free and relatively unconstrained environment, some are building a place in the scrapbooking community and hope to be recognised on design teams or eventually sell their designs. Whatever the reasons, most of us have put a bit of time and effort into our blogs and, I am assuming, would have an interest in their development and in building up traffic. I have certainly found that since I started paying attention to some of these things, the hits on my blog have increased significantly.

So if you think this would be useful to you (working on the principle that no matter how much we know, there’s always something we don’t know) or if you have some blogging tips of your own that you’d like to contribute to the body of knowledge let me know or leave a comment here and we’ll see how this goes.

OK so the frst tip (well second if you count the backing-up one) is to have a look at your categories/labels or whatever you call them in your side bar.

This is the Index and Table of Contents to your blog. It is worth paying a bit of attention to.

They are one of the pieces of data that search engines look for so it is probably a good idea to ensure they clearly and concisely describe what content you have allocated to them. Besides which it gives any new readers to your blog an indication of some of the other things you blog about as well as the post that drew them to your blog in the first place.

Also it makes it easy for you to find your own way around your blog content, especially as the numbers of your posts increase. And don’t forget, you can allocate more than one category to your post. The content of the post may well apply to a number of categories, for example The Ballet - Don Quixote is allocated to four categories (ballet, scrapbook layouts, life and music) as the content of the post has relevance to them all.

So as you can see, I’m not proposing to make this an exercise in rocket science. Usually the best tips are the simplest things but often are things we hadn’t thought of. So let me know what you think of the idea and if you have any tips of your own write up a post and send it to me. I’ll post it on my blog and link it back to yours. Or even send me the tip and I’ll try to write it up myself, giving you the credit for the idea.

Other related posts:
Have you Backed-up Your Blog?
One month later…

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In a previous post, Journaling from the Heart, I recommended the haiku as a good approach to communicating an emotion or a mood for those of us who struggle with writing emotional language. Its structured form removes the ‘unnecessary’ words we often clutter up our communication with and cuts straight to the heart of the feeling we want to convey.

I received quite a bit of mail about this (although no one took up my challenge to post their efforts in the comments section. And yesterday’s DSP blog prompt put out a challenge to write a haiku. So I thought I’d provide some examples from other proponents of the haiku form to hopefully, kick start the thinking processes. And Scrapbookers, if you don’t want to write your own some of these examples might be useful for you to lift and use in your layouts.

Because a haiku ‘distils’ the words into a very concise framework it is perfect for capturing a feeling, a moment of insight or the essence of an experience. The traditional pattern of three lines set in a 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable pattern has been modified in the English speaking world as the structure our language doesn’t lend itself to the natural rhythm of that pattern as easily as the Japanese language. The important thing is to capture the essence or intent of the subject matter with an ecomomy of words. Here are a selection of examples which I hope illustrates this.

embers die
the chair where the friend sat
fills with moonlight
Cicely Hill

their laughter…
the woods filled with white trillium
and sunshine
Betty Drevniok

across the fields of stubble
flame stalks flame
David Cobb

clouds like
thrown fire
– magnolia flowers
Asuka Nomiyama

day’s end
emptying the beach
from my shoe
Pamela Miller Ness

by firelight
listening to the silence
of things we can’t see
Larry Gross

high above the city
dawn flares
from a window-washer’s pail
Cor van den Heuvel

only the stone-smell
tells of it…
summer rain
Kenneth Tanemra

first snow
the neglected yard
now perfect
Elizabeth St Jacques

the stillness!
the voice of the cicadas
sinks into the rocks
Basho

framing the space
where once she was –
my mother’s ring
Don McLeod

little boy
discovers the world –
puddle after puddle
Bertus de Jonge

ebb tide
every footprint leaves
another moon
Marikay Eldridge

And here’s one from me:

traffic throbs around me
cocooned in my car, I smile
and turn up the music

Karooch

So are you up for it?

Give it a go and post your contributions to Haiku Heaven in the comment section of this post.

Other related posts:
Scrapbooking Tips & Techniques - Journaling from the Heart

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They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning-

We will remember them.

                                                                 Lest we Forget.

The Ode comes from For the Fallen,

a poem by the English poet and writer Laurence Binyon

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