CHESSNOID

Today is my 2 month anniversary of blogging. Yippee. I didn’t miss a day in part because I love to do it. It is my creative outlet that allows me to meet new people from the comfort of my computer and discuss the things that I like. Not only that, if you take blogging seriously like I do, you go online and do research. This is much easier than going to the library and hitting the books like when I was in college. I think it is even environmentally friendly since you don’t have to take the car and consume gas to get there.

Of course, even though the internet is much lighter than a set of encyclopedias, the resources are infinite. Because of this, sometimes it gets to be overwhelming. When researching how to get more traffic to my site, it seemed more than a bazillion ways to get it. You just couldn’t determine what really would work. My head was spinning from all the reading I was doing. My best resources were actually reading other bloggers. They had the best material. On top of that, it was interactive. You write a comment and they respond. It is so awesome to get a real person to answer you and to know how you feel.

Now that my permalinks work and my viral link project succeeded, I am planning to read each of my blog entries sometime this week and re-tag them. When I first started, I didn’t know what those were and realize the importance of them. Good thing it is only 2 months worth of posts. I think that will actually be fun as it sparks some memories of what I was doing or thinking at that time I was blogging. I know I will probably get a ton more of ideas to blog about as well.

I updated my site layout just a bit. I put a 3rd page up for video games that I have enjoyed growing up. The side bar now has a language translator on top of the cluster map and visitor flags. Although, those last 2 seem redundant, I decided to keep them because I like the way they look. I put all the Blog widgets together in 1 widget: Romlets, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, WeBetUr. I really like seeing everyone’s avatar there to see who has visited. It is also a temporary link to check out their blogs too by just clicking on their picture. I think that is the coolest thing about them because it is rotating among the newest visitors. I did add a feedburner counter but the numbers it is showing doesn’t match the built in rss counter on my wordpress dashboard. I will probably take that down if I don’t see it becoming more accurate in the coming week. Another change was I reduced my recent posts from 15 down to 5. I don’t really know how often people click on them but it seemed to take alot of web real estate.

Future ideas I have will be to create another page with music I like from our personal CD collection. I plan on converting them all to mp3s and put them on an external drive so I will have access to them when I want to listen and possibly post some samples of my favorite songs.

Recently I have been getting more comments, so I might put up a recent commentator widget on the site. I think that will be another incentive to get everyone to comment. It would also create automatic links to that commenter’s site. What do you think? Comment and let me know.