Blogging Archives - Page 9 of 14

Exhaustion and the Night Terror

March 13, 2012 TechyDad Blogging, Parenting, Sleep

Right now, as I write this blog post, I’m on my third blogging idea. Why did I ditch the last two? Because I just couldn’t think of the words. It wasn’t a fault of the topics, I fully intend on blogging about those later this week. Instead, the problem was my own brain. My brain was too exhausted to form the words.

You see, on Sunday night, before we went to sleep, JSL woke up with another night terror. For those who don’t know, a night terror is like a nightmare, but worse. JSL was shaking, incoherent (seriously, he could have been speaking Chinese for all we know), and crying. Picking him up and hugging him didn’t calm him down at all.

Finally, we brought him to the couch and I turned on a kids’ television station hoping that the familiar audio would snap him out of the dream. The combination of the lit room, our voices and the television finally worked and JSL came out of it. After sitting on the couch for a few minutes, he was calmed down (and tired) enough that he asked to go back to bed.

Later that night, at around 3:30am, I woke up to cries coming from the boys’ room. JSL had woken up again. I sat by his bed and soothed him until he fell asleep. Then, I climbed back into my bed. As I was falling asleep though, I heard a loud *KLUNK* coming from the boys’ room. Fearing that one of them fell out of bed, I rushed in… to find nothing wrong. So back to bed I went again and, as I was falling back to sleep, JSL woke up again. This time, I sat by his bed longer until I was sure he was fast asleep. Yet again, I dragged myself to bed.

This time, JSL stayed asleep until it was time for me to wake up, at around 6am. Meanwhile, the dreams I had weren’t restful at all. I don’t remember them all, but recall that one involved a mystery person pursuing me for unknown, but sinister, purposes. The end result was that I awoke exhausted.

After all of this, and a full day’s work, trying to get creative for blog posting caused my brain to lock up. Hopefully, I’ll have a good night’s sleep and my brain will function better tomorrow. Otherwise TechyDad no make words good on blog.

Disclaimer: The "Emoticons: Sleeping face" clipart above is from OpenClipArt.org.

Aloha Friday: Private Journals

January 20, 2012 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Blogging, Writing

When I was young, I kept a journal. In it, I wrote about all of the private thoughts, fears, and feelings that I felt I couldn’t tell anyone. Well, that was the general idea. By "kept a journal", I really mean I wrote in it for about a week, rediscovered it a month later, wrote in it once more and then forgot about it for another three months. I was never very good with writing things with paper and pen. My love of writing only flourished when I was first introduced to computers.

Fast forward to the present. Sometimes there things we feel the need to write about that we just can’t blog about. Perhaps family members read your blog or perhaps the issue crosses a TMI boundary. However, despite these misgivings, there might still be an urge to write about it, just not in a public manner. After all, writing is a very good way of organizing your thoughts on matters.

At one time, I considered setting up a private WordPress blog for my son for this very purpose. He could use it to express his thoughts on anything and everything. The posts would not be publicly visible. After all, he’s only 8 and doesn’t need a public blog. However, B and I would be able to read it. I actually got it all set up, but never showed him it. Perhaps when he’s older he’ll use it.

As for me, I’m thinking of setting up a private blog for some of my thoughts. They might be matters that I don’t feel comfortable shouting out to a random mix of strangers, friends and family. They might be matters that I feel don’t interest my TechyDad.com audience (or my Twitter or Google+ followers). Or perhaps it is something that has been on my mind that might be a blog post at some point, but hasn’t been fully fleshed out yet. In any event, it would be nice to have a place to record my thoughts privately and a non-public blog seems ideal.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Have you ever had a journal or a private blog to record your thoughts?

P.S. If you haven’t already, go visit FollowerHQ and let me know what you think of my Twitter application.

P.P.S. For a bit of fun, try my other Twitter Application, Rout. It’s a +F in Fun!

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #122

Disclaimer: The “Paper,Write,Pen” clipart above is from OpenClipArt.org.

Why So Spammy?

November 22, 2011 TechyDad Blogging, Spam, TechyDad.com

When blogging, it can be discouraging to post day after day and see little to no comments. Almost worse than no comments, however, are tons of comments. Tons of spam comments, that is. Since I last deleted the spam comments (on November 9th), this blog has gotten over 1,600 spam comments. That’s over 130 per day or 1 spam comment every 11 minutes! Here’s a graph of my spam comments day to day.

That big red line shows how many spam comments I got daily. The green line hugging zero? Those are my non-spam comments. If only I could transform spam comments into real comments, I’d have more comments than I could reply to. Of course, if I had that ability, I think I’d use it on all of those “Nigerian Princes” and “European Lotteries” that keep e-mailing me.

Thankfully, Akismet snags most of the spam comments. Sadly, some slip through. This means that spammy comments are visible on my blog until I take them down. I think I need to find some WordPress plugins to help reduce my spam load.

What do you do to reduce spam comments? Also, any guesses on how many spam comments this post will get?

Yom Kippur and PR Apologies

October 10, 2011 TechyDad Blogging, Holidays, Internet, Judaism, Twitter

On Thursday, I wanted to go to sleep early. I was tired and NEEDED my sleep. But I didn’t. I was too enthralled with watching the reactions from the fallout between Brand Link Communications and TheBloggess.

In case you are the single person online who hasn’t heard about it yet, TheBloggess was pitched by PR firm Brand Link Communications to run a piece about one of the Kardashians in pantyhose. Now, TheBloggess’ blog is many things, but it is not about celebrities and what they wear. This wasn’t the first bad pitch she’s gotten. In fact, she gets so many that she has a dedicated page to send them to.

Normally, PR firms will either not contact her back or will apologize and/or remove her from their lists. This time, however, they replied in a bit of a snippy manner. At this point, I’m sure TheBloggess would have just shrugged and gone on with her life. She would have, that is, had Jose from Brand Link not hit reply all and used quite a colorful phrase to describe her. From this point on, the situation spiraled out of control and not in a positive way for Brand Link Communications.

What does this have to do with Yom Kippur? On this Jewish holiday, we realize that we’re going to be judged for the things we’ve done in the past year. To make amends, we traditionally apologize to people we’ve wronged. An apology doesn’t always make everything better, but it can go a long way towards repairing all sorts of relationships. However, these apologies need to be sincere. Just saying “I’m sorry, but I’ll do it again” or “I’m sorry if you were offended” isn’t enough.

When Jose realized his mistake, his response should have been an unequivocal apology. Something along the lines of: “I’m sorry. I messed up both in my language and in the match between the original pitch and your blog’s content. I’ll look into ways to better target pitches so that you receive pitches that your readers will actually find useful.” This would have helped smooth things over and we would likely have never heard about the interaction (a good thing in hindsight).

Instead, Jose sent an “I’m sorry but…” reply. He even went so far as to blame TheBloggess for starting the mess and to tell her that she should be thankful that they send content her way. As if, without PR firms, TheBloggess would be a nobody with nothing to write about.

TheBloggess replied with soon-to-be-immortal (and hopefully emblazoned on a shirt) words: “Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy.”

What happened next was quite a demonstration. TheBloggess blogged about the situation and many of her 160,000 followers on Twitter started tweeting about it. The story was picked up on by none other than Wil Wheaton (1.8 million followers) and Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers), and Perez Hilton (3.9 million followers). Obviously, there’s likely some overlap in followers, but needless to say that this story had millions of people worldwide viewing it. It was a very public affair and very bad for Brand Link.

At one point, Jose (who has since deleted his Twitter account), tried defending his actions as trying to defend Wil Wheaton. Then he claimed his account was hacked and finally, he mentioned that he had apologized to TheBloggess.

Could this have been avoided? I was thinking about this during Yom Kippur and realized there were many times that Brand Link could have apologized and made it all go away. After the original pitch and TheBloggess’ response, they could have apologized. (And not had someone commit Reply-All-icide.) After the Reply All, Jose could have been proactive, realized what he did and quickly followed it up with an apology (and not just a “I’m sorry if you were offended, but…”).

Once TheBloggess posted her blog post, however, the quiet person-to-person apologies needed to be big public apologies. At that point, they didn’t need to satiate one angry Bloggess, but a few thousand (if not hundred thousand or million) folks. There are many lessons to be learned from what happened between TheBloggess and Brand Link Communications, one of the big ones is how *not* to apologize.

Aloha Friday: Three Years of Blogging

September 9, 2011 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Anniversary, Blogging, Social Media, TechyDad.com

Tomorrow is my Blogoversary. Since I usually don’t post on Saturdays, I’m going to celebrate it today. It’s been a wild ride since the early days. Back then, I didn’t post often. Part of it was because I hated using WordPress’ Admin panel to edit blog posts. Part of it was because I’d feel like my blog posts weren’t reaching anybody.

Over time, I found Zoundry Raven and then Windows Live Writer. This helped with the composing of posts. Suddenly, creating blog posts wasn’t a chore. Recently, I even hooked my blog up to get mobile photos from my phone. So now, instead of using TwitPic or a similar service, I can post a photo right to my blog while on the go.

As far as readership goes, I reminded myself that I couldn’t expect to open a blog and suddenly get thousands of readers. I dove into the social media community. I commented on other blogs. Of course, I also tried to put only the very best content on my blog. (It doesn’t matter how much “promoting” you do. If the content’s not good, people won’t come back.) Slowly, but surely, the number of readers to my blog increased.

I owe a lot of exposure to my wife also. She got into blogging before me (well, at least under this pseudonym) so her “social reach” was far greater than mine. When she promoted a post of mine, it went further than if I promoted it alone. I believe the gap between us has slimmed a bit, though she still has over a thousand more Twitter followers than I do.

It’s been a wild ride these past 3 years. I wonder what the next 3 years will bring.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What do you think the future of blogging/social media will look like? Where do you think we’ll be in 3 years?

Don’t forget to enter my Hot Wheels Nitro Speeders giveaway!

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #104

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